When We Collided(41)

“She called me last week for our new address,” my mom is saying. I don’t want to open this in front of her because I have no idea what it might say. “I was so glad to hear you guys are back to normal. She said you hadn’t been in touch with her at all.”

I told my mom that Ruby and Amala wouldn’t speak to me after what happened in March. Which would have been true—I’m sure of it. So I didn’t give them a chance. Amala didn’t try, but Ruby called and texted and knocked on my front door. I never opened it.

“Chickie?” my mom asks quietly. “Ruby knows, right? About the bipolar disorder?”

My silence serves as an obvious answer, especially since I can’t meet her eyes.

I feel my mom draw away from me. “Vivian! Ruby is your oldest friend. How could you not tell her? After everything that happened?”

“I don’t have to tell her everything! And I don’t have to tell you everything either!” Before she can protest, I cut her off. “You won’t even tell me who my dad is. So I don’t think I need to provide you with the status of all my relationships.”

“That,” she says darkly, “is entirely different. I am protecting you until you are old enough to deal with certain . . . realities.”

“Maybe I’m protecting you.” If she only knew. I mean, she knows a little—the tattoo, the outrageous money I spent on clothes and presents. She doesn’t know exactly what happened at Ruby’s sixteenth-birthday party last March. What I did.

“I know you’ve been asking to stay in Verona Cove. And I’ve told you that I’ll consider it. And I will, if it is genuinely what is best for you.” Her eyes narrow, the smugness of someone who is revealing the ace up her sleeve. “I will not consider staying here if you’re just hiding.”

She says this as if the two things are mutually exclusive.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Viv. You have an illness—”

“STOP. You are obsessed with this.” Tears fill my eyes, and I feel my hands clench, bending the card. “It’s my birthday—God, Mom!”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I shouldn’t have . . . I just worry, and . . . well. Come downstairs if you want more breakfast. I got everything for German pancakes.”

I open the envelope after she’s gone and find a handmade card—of course. I’ve admired Ruby’s cut-paper art for years, the intricacy and detail. She can slice a National Geographic photo of an oil spill into a tiny leather jacket, a cotton-blossom pattern into puffy clouds, trim strips of chevron and polka dots for a hot air balloon.

This card is more sentimental than Ruby’s usual work, and the paper girl staring out her bedroom window is Ruby herself. Her jet bangs feathered on her forehead, her trademark fuchsia lips and black leggings. Floral for her comforter, birch for the window frame, stripes for her little boatneck shirt.

But her heart is pasted on the outside of her chest, as hot pink as her mouth. Beyond the window, instead of blue sky, is a square of paper from a map. A tiny red heart at the top of California.

My tears make it hard to see the inside. Oh, Roo. Break my actual beating heart, why don’t you? In her calligraphy script: Happy birthday, Viv. Miss you. Nothing more, nothing less. No demands for an explanation, no accusations, no hint about if Amala hates me as viciously as I’m sure she must.

Fingers pinching the top of the card, I’m tempted to rip it to scrap paper. But Ruby would never create something to make me feel guilty. Only to feel loved. Still, the guilt pushes through my veins, roiling and acidic and spreading, spreading.

After last March, I knew I didn’t deserve friends like that—I didn’t deserve friends at all, when all I did was betray them.

But now, I allow myself one text. Line after line of her attempts to contact me, most of which I never even read, and I finally type three words that I’ve felt for months and months. Miss you too.



I push these thoughts away at the Daniels residence because I’m busy turning a little girl into a plume-tailed bird.

“Spin,” I tell Leah. She obeys. “Yep—you are the most magnificent child-peacock there ever was.”

Jonah isn’t home because he’s already at the restaurant working on my party dinner, but Silas, Bekah, and Isaac all agree on Leah’s magnificence, from her shiny blue leotard to the fanned-out feather tail to the way I rimmed her eyes in white and black face paint. She dances around, as giddy about my party as I am. The other three refuse to tell me their costume selections, on Jonah’s order.

“All right,” I announce. “I have to go home to get dressed.”

Originally, I considered dressing up as a dolphin as an homage to my soul’s former vessel, but you’d be surprised how difficult it is—even for someone as talented as me—to create a dolphin costume for an almost-seventeen-year-old human girl.

Besides, I want wings because, well, don’t we all? Sometimes I bend my arms behind my back and feel the protruding shoulder blades—technically the scapula, but they feel like broken-off wings. Everyone thinks we evolved from apes, but I’m not totally convinced that we didn’t once have wings, at least some of us.

For one night, I want my wings back. But not the wings of a mighty bird, beating powerfully enough to make noise against the air. I want to drift dreamily in the breeze, to let the wind direct me. I know, I know: butterflies are used in bad metaphors about metamorphosis, about bursting forth from a cocoon, born again and in flight. But I’m not dressing as a butterfly to prove that my caterpillar days are behind me—no. No symbolism. It is enough to choose things for their beauty.