He stared at me. I’d shocked the hell out of him, I could tell. We’d never talked about her before, not like this. It was probably a good thing that I’d caught him off guard. Maybe he’d tell the truth.
If he said yes, it was over. If he said yes, I would give her up. I could live with that. If it were anyone but Conrad, I’d have tried anyway. I’d have given it one last shot.
Instead of answering the question, he said, “Do you?”
I could feel myself turn red. “I’m not the one who took her to the freaking prom.”
Conrad thought that over and then said, “I only took her because she asked me to.”
“Con. Do you like her or not, man?” I hesitated for about two seconds, and then I just went for it. “Because I do. I like her. I really like her. Do you?”
He didn’t blink, didn’t even hesitate. “No.”
It really pissed me off.
He was full of shit. He liked her. He more than liked her. But he couldn’t admit it, wouldn’t man up. Conrad would never be that guy, the kind of guy Belly needed. Someone who would be there for her, someone she could count on. I could. If she’d let me, I could be that guy.
I was pissed at him, but I had to admit I was relieved, too. No matter how many times he hurt her, I knew that if he wanted her back, she was his. She always had been.
But maybe now that Conrad wasn’t standing in the way, she’d see me there too.
Chapter thirty-three
july 5
“Belly.”
I tried to roll over, but then I heard it again, louder.
“Belly!” Someone was shaking me awake.
I opened my eyes. It was my mother. She had dark circles around her eyes and her mouth had all but disappeared into a thin line. She was wearing her house sweats, the ones she never left the house in, not even to go to the gym. What in the world was she doing at the summer house?
There was a beeping sound that at first I thought was the alarm clock, but then I realized that I had knocked the phone over, and it was the busy signal I was hearing. And then I remembered. I’d drunk-dialed my mother. I’d brought her here.
I sat up, my head pounding so hard it felt like my heart was hammering inside it. So this was what a hangover felt like. I’d left my contacts in and my eyes were burning. There was sand all over the bed and some was stuck on my feet.
My mother stood up; she was one big blur. “You have five minutes to pack up your stuff.”
“Wait . . . what?”
“We’re leaving.”
“But I can’t leave yet. I still have to—”
It was like she couldn’t hear me, like I was on mute. She started picking my things up off the floor, throwing Taylor’s sandals and shorts into my overnight bag.
“Mom, stop! Just stop for a minute.”
“We’re leaving in five minutes,” she repeated, looking around the room.
“Just listen to me for a second. I had to come. Jeremiah and Conrad needed me.”
The look on my mother’s face made me stop short. I’d never seen her angry like this before.
“And you didn’t feel the need to tell me about it? Beck asked me to look after her boys. How can I do that when I don’t even know they need my help? If they were in trouble, you should have told me. Instead you chose to lie to me. You lied .”
“I didn’t want to lie to you—,” I started to say.
She kept on going. “You’ve been here doing God knows what . . .”
I stared at her. I couldn’t believe she’d just said that. “What does that mean, ‘God knows what’?”
My mother whirled around, her eyes all wild. “What am I supposed to think? You snuck out here with Conrad before and you spent the night! So you tell me. What are you doing here with him? Because it looks to me like you lied to me so you could come here and get drunk and fool around with your boyfriend.”
I hated her. I hated her so much.
“He’s not my boyfriend! You don’t know anything!”
The vein in my mother’s forehead was pulsing. “You call me at four in the morning, drunk. I call your cell phone and it goes straight to voice mail. I call the house phone and all I get is a busy signal. I drive all night, worried out of my mind, and I get here and the house is a wreck. Beer cans everywhere, trash all over the place. What the hell do you think you’re doing, Isabel? Or do you even know?”
The walls in the house were really thin. Everyone could probably hear everything.
I said, “We were going to clean it up. This was our last night here. Don’t you get it? Mr. Fisher is selling the house. Don’t you care?”
She shook her head, her jaw tight. “Do you really think you’ve helped matters by meddling? This isn’t our business. How many times do I have to explain that to you?”
“It is so our business. Susannah would have wanted us to save this house!”
“Don’t talk to me about what Susannah would have wanted,” my mother snapped. “Now put your clothes on and get your things. We’re leaving.”
“No.” I pulled the covers up to my shoulders.
“What?”
“I said no. I’m not going!” I stared up at my mother as defiantly as I could, but I could feel my chin trembling.
She marched over to the bed and ripped the sheets right off of me. She grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the bed and toward the door, and I twisted away from her.
“You can’t make me go,” I sobbed. “You can’t tell me anything. You don’t have the right.”
My tears did not move my mother. They only made her angrier. She said, “You’re acting like a spoiled brat. Can’t you look beyond your own grief and think about someone else? It’s not all about you. We all lost Beck. Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t helping anything.”
Her words stung me so badly I wanted to hurt her back a million times worse. So I said the thing I knew would hurt her most. I said, “I wish Susannah was my mother and not you.”
How many times had I thought it, wished for it secretly? When I was little, Susannah was the one I ran to, not her. I used to wonder what it would be like, to have a mom like Susannah who loved me for me and wasn’t disappointed in all the ways that I didn’t measure up.
I was breathing hard as I waited for my mother to respond. To cry, to scream at me.
She didn’t do either of those things. Instead she said, “How unfortunate for you.”
Even when I tried my hardest, I couldn’t get the reaction I wanted from my mother. She was impenetrable.
