Hopeless (Hopeless #1)(16)

“You okay?” Jack asks. “It must have been a pretty good fall to get that shiner.”

I reach up to my eye and grimace. I’d completely forgotten about the black eye. “That’s not from fainting. Six elbowed me. Twice.”

I expect one of them to at least ask Six why she attacked me, but they don’t. This just goes to show how much they love her. They wouldn’t even care if she beat me up, they’d tell me I probably deserved it.

“Doesn’t that annoy you, having a number for a name?” Jack asks her. “I never understood that. It’s like when a parent names their child after one of the days of the week.” He pauses with his fork mid-air and looks at Karen. “When we have a baby, we aren’t doing that to them. Anything you can find on a calendar is off limits.”

Karen stares at him with a stone cold expression. If I had to guess by her reaction, this is the first time Jack has mentioned babies. If I had to guess based on the look on her face, babies aren’t something she’s anticipating in her future. Ever.

Jack refocuses his attention back to Six. “Isn’t your real name like Seven or Thirteen or something like that? I don’t get why you picked Six. It’s possibly the worst number you could pick.”

“I’m going to accept your insults for what they are,” Six says. “Just your way of burying your devastation over my impending absence.”

Jack laughs. “Bury my insults wherever you want. There’ll be more to come when you get back in six months.”

After Jack and Six leave, I help Karen in the kitchen with the dishes. Since the second Jack brought up babies, she’s been unusually quiet.

“Why did that freak you out so bad?” I ask her, handing her the plate to rinse.

“What?”

“His comment about having a baby with you. You’re in your thirties. People have babies at your age all the time.”

“Was it that noticeable?”

“It was to me.”

She grabs another plate from me to rinse, then lets out a sigh. “I love Jack. I just love me and you, too. I like our arrangement and I don’t know if I’m ready to change it, much less bring another baby into the picture. But Jack is so intent on moving forward.”

I turn the water off and wipe my hands on the hand-towel. “I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks, Mom. As much as you want our arrangement to stay the same…it won’t. I’ll be off at college after next semester and you’ll be living here alone. It might not hurt to entertain the idea of at least letting him move in.”

She smiles at me, but it’s a pained smile just like it always is when I bring up college. “I have been entertaining the idea, Sky. Believe me. It’s just a huge step that can’t be undone once it’s taken.”

“What if it’s a step you don’t want undone, though? What if it’s a step that just makes you want to take another step, and another step, until you’re full-on sprinting?”

She laughs. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

I wipe off the counter and rinse the rag off in the sink. “I don’t understand you, sometimes.”

“And I don’t understand you, either,” she says, nudging my shoulder. “I’ll never for the life of me understand why you wanted to go to public school so bad. I know you said it was fun, but tell me how you really feel.”

I shrug. “It was good,” I lie. My stubbornness wins every time. There’s no way I’m telling her how much I hated school today, despite the fact that she would never say, “I told you so.”

She dries her hands and smiles at me. “Happy to hear it. Now maybe when I ask you again tomorrow, you’ll tell me the truth.”

I grab the book Breckin gave me out of my backpack and plop down on my bed. I get through all of two pages when Six crawls through my window.

“School first, then present,” she says. She scoots in on the bed next to me and I put the book down on my nightstand.

“School sucked ass. Thanks to you and your inability to just say no to guys, I’ve inherited your terrible reputation. But by divine intervention, I was rescued by Breckin, the adopted g*y Mormon who can’t sing or act but loves to read and is my new very bestest friend ever in the whole wide world.”

Six pouts. “I’m not even out the door yet and you’ve already replaced me? Vicious. And for the record, I don’t have an inability to say no to guys. I have an inability to grasp the moral ramifications of premarital sex. Lots and lots of premarital sex.”

She places a box in my lap. An unwrapped box.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “And you should know by now that my lack of wrapping doesn’t reflect how I feel about you. I’m just lazy.”

I pick the box up and shake it. “You’re the one leaving, you know. I should be the one getting you a gift.”

“Yes, you should be. But you suck at gift giving and I don’t expect you to change on my account.”

She’s right. I’m a horrible gift giver, but mostly because I hate receiving gifts so much. It’s almost as awkward as people crying. I turn the box and find the flap, then untuck it and open it. I pull out the tissue paper and a cell phone drops into my hand.

“Six,” I say. “You know I can’t…”