Twelve Steps to Normal(10)

Lin sighs. “Look, I’m sorry. I know it sucks.”

“Nobody was going to tell me?” I wonder how long they’ve been together without me knowing. Does he hold her hand in the dark movie theater and make tiny circles on the inside of her palm? Do they send each other good night texts? Have they made out? Or worse—

I swallow. No. I can’t think about that.

“It’s not like you told us anything, either.” Lin folds her arms. “After you left, you pretty much dropped off the face of the earth. You never replied to our texts or answered our calls or anything. It was like you were suddenly too cool for us.”

Hurt creases Lin’s features. She’s not wrong. I did stop replying, but only because it hurt me too much to see them moving on without me.

I’d sulked alone in my misery when Lin texted me details from homecoming. The pictures that Raegan and Whitney would send from dance practice made me physically ache. The “we miss you” group texts that came through when they got together at the mall on weekends made me seethe with jealousy. I wanted to be there so badly, and I thought distancing myself would make the pain easier to deal with. Turns out, it just made me a crappy friend.

“I’m sorry,” I say softly.

Lin shrugs. She won’t look at me.

“I am. I never thought I was too cool for you guys. It was just hard seeing you have fun without me. I didn’t know how to deal.”

Lin picks at her light-pink nail polish. “I guess I understand that. The whole situation with your dad… it sucked.”

Lin was with me the morning I got the call from the police station. We’d been in the kitchen making cinnamon rolls per our usual tradition when she spent the night. My dad wasn’t home, but I didn’t think twice about it. He’d been drinking less the last two weeks, which was why I asked Lin to spend the night in the first place. I assumed he was on a coffee run.

When the officer told me to come down to the station, I panicked. My anxiety levels skyrocketed, and I couldn’t process anything else he was saying. But Lin gently took the phone from me and when she hung up, she told me we needed to go. All I could think was please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead. I’d already lost Grams. I couldn’t imagine losing anyone else.

I don’t know what I would have done if Lin hadn’t been with me. She took me up to my room and threw me a pair of clean jeans as I changed out of my Muppet pajamas. Then she called Jay. I heard her explain that his mom was on her way. She would take me to the station.

Don’t worry, she kept repeating.

How could I not?

Jay’s mom didn’t pry as she drove. When I got in she leaned over and squeezed my arm.

“It’ll be okay, sugar.”

I realized these are things people said when there was nothing left to say because they think lies are better than silence.

Even though the entire situation was awful and shameful, I was thankful Jay’s mom stayed to talk to the police with me. My dad had been found standing in the middle of the McCarthy and Jettison intersection—a congested area that was always clogged with traffic as cars merged onto the highway. He was drunk, they told me. Mumbling nonsense. Stumbling to stay upright.

The officer said someone had called in for help. They saw a dog in his arms, a tiny poodle. She was shaking, clawing at my dad’s arms as vehicles whizzed past. That’s the part that sank the knife deep in my heart. I knew the poodle was Millie, who belonged to Mrs. Jenkins next door. But that wasn’t what broke me. It was that this innocent dog couldn’t escape. She must have been so scared—terrified—and the only person she could depend on for her safety was the person who’d carried her into danger in the first place.

The cops had to block the intersection for a few minutes to get my dad and Millie safely to the sidewalk. They’d arrested him for being drunk and disorderly in public. My dad tried to tell them he found Millie in our yard that morning. He was certain he was only trying to return her back to Mrs. Jenkins’s house.

He was two miles from home.

They questioned me about his drinking habits, but I was too shocked by this situation to answer. The last several months I’d told myself that he wasn’t that bad, that it only seemed bad on the outside because no one understood the pain he was going through after losing his mother.

Jay’s mom had sat me down in the two empty chairs in the station’s lobby. “Honey,” she started. “I’ve arranged for you to talk with a social worker. She’ll be here in a few hours.” Her concerned expression was the first of many pitying looks I received after that. “If you want, I can stay with you until she arrives.”

I shook my head. “That’s okay, but thank you.”

She nodded. But before she went home, she gave me a long hug.

Margaret, my social worker, contacted Aunt June once my dad was released. My aunt flew out the next day, but I didn’t go home after I left the station. Lin let me sleep in her room on her trundle bed. She didn’t pressure me with questions. Instead she took my mind off it by talking about Harry Styles and showing me funny YouTube videos.

Even after months of me ignoring her texts, she’s still here for me. She still picked me up with no questions asked.

There’s a hard lump in my throat. I didn’t think it was possible to feel so lousy this early in the morning.