Thin Love (Thin Love, #1)(39)

Keira didn’t have the energy to argue. She didn’t care that Mark Burke was a nice guy. She didn’t care if she impressed him or not. The voice on the other end of the phone had her head throbbing at the base of her skull. The constant refrain of direction was old hat, something Keira had heard her entire life. “Pretty girls do this,” and “pretty girls don’t do that,” over and over until her mother was satisfied that she understood. She never had. She never wanted to. That voice felt like a weight around her neck. It crippled her most times, had her forgetting who she wanted to be; it made her doubt she had the stomach to walk away from this life one day. Her mother’s directives had become a fat mass in her gut and the older she got, the bigger that tumor of expectation felt.

Defeated for the moment, Keira could only offer random mumbles of “I know” and the occasional “yes, Mother” as the woman babbled on, dictated, instructed like a sergeant sending his men off to battle. And there was the threat, something dark her mother tried to hide behind sighs, behind veiled words she played off as advice. “Don’t screw this up, Keira” and “Don’t disappoint me” whispered behind each demand. There would be consequences. There were always consequences.

Keira didn’t notice the tears forming in her eyes.

She kept the phone nestled on her shoulder and leaned her head against the mattress, ignoring the instruction, and around her, Leann’s constant bustling went still. She thought her cousin may have left in the midst of Keira’s marching orders, but then a hand on her ankle had her setting down the phone on the floor when she sat up.

You okay? Leann mouthed, her cousin’s annoyance at her earlier pouting clearly gone.

“Same as always.” She frowned when an errant tear slid down her face, then rolled her eyes at herself before she rubbed her face dry and picked up the phone again. Her mother hadn’t taken a breath, had started up a stupid line of questioning about what lingerie Keira would wear. “Okay, I got it. Don’t worry.” And then she hung up the phone.

Leann crawled next to her on the floor, scooting to the end of the bed to grab Keira’s guitar before she sat next to her and handed the instrument over. Her cousin knew what she needed, knew how to ease the anger that had been simmering all day. This was more than her mother’s usual expectations. This was about the pressure of pacifying the woman, and it was about Kona. It was about shock and disappointment and the heartache she didn’t want to admit came from seeing what he’d done that morning.

Hands on the strings, Keira’s fingertips followed in the grooves, sliding on the frets and she felt calmer, like each hollow in the wood was a sedative she couldn’t do without.

She sang Leann a song. Her cousin had always been her single audience, the only person Keira knew would never tell her she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t anything but blessed. The words came to her from her childhood; something about lyric and starlight and promises her father made.

Music made her weep. She remembered the steady strum of her father’s guitar, the sweet whine of his low voice, songs he sang to himself so that she couldn’t tell if he could even carry a tune. He wrote words on brown paper bags. He collected stacks of thick, rough paper in a shoe box and they became a dozen lessons to teach her, a thousand words that sought to guide her, to show her that the world was not what her mother believed. Her father’s looping scrawls were guidelines, that box of broken dreams, his map of what she could have.

“It will be different for you,” he’d told her. She was his child and the good parts of her mother that had not been killed by greed and money and social standing. “Try to collect the stars, Keira. Put them in your pocket, send them in an envelope to another version of yourself, one that is older, one that understands your mother better. That way, when you’re older, when you know yourself a little better, that collection of stars will fill you up, remind you of the nights we sang our songs, of the days when you smiled with me.”

Those days had not lasted, became infrequent and sparse and Keira forgot about the stars. She forgot to send that letter and when he died, when her mother and all those impossible expectations got too great for him, Keira took those brown bags smudged with her father’s words and she stuffed them in the casket, underneath a tailored jacket he’d never worn before. She wanted them next to his heart.

But music still made her weep. Not every song, not every note, but when something came to her, when she heard the hint of her father in the rhyme and lyric that danced in her head, she cried. That had been his legacy; the small whisper of his hope, the bright, incredible anticipation of happiness he believed she would have some day.

Sitting with her cousin, telling her that story in each note she sang, made Keira happy, made her vanquish all the intolerable things her mother wanted her to be; the cruel way she tried to make sure Keira would become that person she wanted her to be.

When the final note vibrated into silence, Leann sighed, a contented little exhale that broke the melancholy in the room.

“Come with me and Michael to Nathan’s party. It’s off campus. We don’t have to stay long and you can have Mark meet you there.”

“Nathan Andrews?” Leann rested her head on Keira’s shoulder and she felt her nod. “Nathan Andrews who I have never spoken to in my life, ever?”

“Keira, there will be a million people there and free drinks.” She sat up, nudged her leg. “You need one night of fun, of absolute bedlam. You’re eighteen. You’re in college and you said Mark was cute.”