Letters to Nowhere(91)

“He always let me get dessert when my mom wasn’t there.”

“They made a mistake,” Blair said. “And you have to live with it, and I’m so sorry about that. But I came here to Chicago to see you prove to Nina Jones and Coach Cordes that they were so wrong about you. We need you to kick some ass for our sake. Stacey and Bentley need you to kick some ass. Stevie, too.”

“Do you want it?” Jordan asked. “Do you want to make the Pan Am team and maybe go to Worlds?”

And that was when I broke down again, not out of anger this time but because unfortunately that anger was beginning to fade, and now I was truly feeling how badly I missed them and how much I’d lost.

My head was in Blair’s lap, and she let me cry for a long time. “I don’t know where to put them.”

Jordan knelt down in front of the bed and brushed the hair off my face. “I thought maybe you were using that anger to keep you from facing everything. It’s easier if you hate them, right?”

I sniffled and nodded. “It’s a lot easier. I just wish I could see them again for a few minutes, or imagine them somewhere great in my head. It feels so incomplete. And it feels wrong to go against what we decided, the plan for me to go to UCLA in June, but not accepting that they’re gone, being angry with them, it made doing what I want easier.” I covered my face with one hand. “It’s so selfish to want this, isn’t it?”

“Karen,” Blair said. “Your mom worried about you so much. She talked to my mom about it all the time. Your mom was so proud of you, but she worried constantly that she’d led you into this big pile of disappointment and that when you were older you’d hate her for letting you throw your childhood away.”

“But you don’t feel that way, do you?” Jordan asked.

I sat up and took another tissue from him. “No, but I could never find a way to convince her that I only wanted to put everything into gymnastics, regardless of the outcome.”

“She thought it was her job to see into the future, to make sure that you were making the best choices in the long run,” he said.

Blair gripped my arm and forced me to look right at her. “She wasn’t wrong to worry. But she was wrong about what you were meant to do and so was Coach Cordes. I finally get what Stevie was trying to tell us that day after Cordes’s visit. You need to prove yourself right tomorrow. You have to. If there’s a way that your parents can see you, I just think it might fill some of the void that you have from losing them,” Blair said.

I reached out and hugged Blair, both of us holding on tight. I could feel her crying into my shoulder and found myself doing the same.

“I just want you to win so bad,” Blair said. “I can’t explain it, but it’s…it’s…”

“Completely legal satisfaction, compared to actually murdering Nina Jones?” Jordan suggested.

Both of us started laughing so hard we were crying again. We finally let go of each other and Blair stood up, wiping her entire face with the bottom of her shirt. The two of us could teach an anti–etiquette course.

“I’m going to talk to Stevie and Ellen in their room,” she said. “I probably won’t come back until morning.”

I glanced at Jordan and he just shrugged like they hadn’t planned this far into their intervention. He sat beside me in silence while Blair gathered up some stuff and left us alone.

In a hotel room. Holy crap.

Jordan kept his hands in his lap but turned his head to look at me. “Do you feel any better? Tell me the truth.”

“I feel messy,” I said, laughing a little at the state of my face and probably my hair. “But yes and no. Like you said, being angry blocks out a lot of feelings, but maybe Blair’s right. Maybe there’s a way they can see me.”

Jordan’s eyes widened and he pointed a finger toward the ceiling. “Like right now? They can see us right now? Because I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”

I laughed even harder, feeling lighter than I had in months. “Maybe not right now.”

“The past few days have sucked majorly,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know how to help you, and I thought that’s why you liked me, and it almost seemed easier to back away a little in case you didn’t want—”

I cut him off by wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing the skin below his ear. “You’ve helped me so much. You have no idea. I was so crazy for a while there and I thought maybe it was too much for you and understandably so.”

He pulled back a little and touched his forehead to mine. “Let’s not do that anymore. The thing where we think stuff and we don’t say it, okay?”

“Okay.” I kissed him then and put seven days of not kissing him into it, enjoying the feel of his hands in my hair, on my back, moving down my sides. Eventually, he nudged me until I was lying back sideways across the bed and he was half on top of me.

“In that case,” he said, breathless and adorable, “I have two confessions to make.”

“You don’t have more of my underwear, do you? Because a purple pair has gone missing.”

He shook his head. “No, I haven’t swiped any more panties. But I really, really don’t want to go to prom—”

“They why did you—”