Page 67 of Landon & Shay: Part One

“Since now.”

She bit her bottom lip and shrugged. “No one has a perfect life. Some people are just better at keeping their secrets hidden. You said I’m all rainbows, but you do know you can’t get the rainbow without the rain, right? My life isn’t easy—far from it, really. I’ve just been really good at wearing a mask at school.”

I smiled. “And you say you’re not a good actor. You’ve had me fooled.”

“Well, good. I think…I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could let people in so my mind didn’t have to spin all by itself. Just to have someone to say, ‘That sucks and I’m sorry. Here’s a hug.’ You know what I mean? I don’t need anyone to try to fix me or anything—I’m strong enough to fix myself. I just wish I had someone to get comfort from every now and then. But I’m okay. Really, I’m good. Overall, my life is good.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I promised.

“Do what?”

“Say you’re okay when you’re not.”

Her head lowered and shook back and forth. “People don’t like me when I’m sad.”

“How do you know? You never let them close enough to see your tears.”

Her lips parted, but no words came out. For the first time in my life, I saw Shay. I saw the girl behind the mask, the one who felt so much and hid those feelings from the world because she felt as if they were too much of a burden to impose on others. I saw her cracks, and they were so beautiful that it almost made my frozen heart beat again.

I’d never known sadness could be so hauntingly beautiful.

“Tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine,” I whispered her way, the words rolling from my tongue and piercing her ears. She shut her eyes for a second, and when she reopened them, they were flooded with emotions, but she didn’t dare let a tear fall down her cheek.

It was still too much to let someone in that close.

“My dad’s a liar. He’s been that way as long as I can remember, and tonight my grandmother called him out on his lies again. I went home after rehearsal and heard the shouting in my house, so I left and went to my cousin’s. That’s where you picked me up from.”

“That sucks. I’m really sorry.” I hoped she believed me, too.

“My mom will just keep allowing his lies, too. She loves him too much. He could tell her the sun is purple and she wouldn’t even ask him for any proof. She’d just blindly believe him.”

“Maybe this time will be different.”

“Maybe. Probably not.” She glanced down at the car’s manual stick and trailed her finger up and down it in a slow motion. Then she made small circles, round and round against the metal rod. “You ever feel like you’re running in circles? You have your past behind you, and you’re trying to beat it, to be better than it, but then situations keep coming and tossing you backward. Every step you take forward, you fall two steps back. It feels like no matter how much you fight for your future, your past keeps pulling you under.”

“I know that feeling all too well.”

“I want my parents to do something different, even if it’s just for a day. I want them to stop this cycle. I want Dad to quit with the lies for good. I want Mom to leave him if he doesn’t change his ways. I want her to know her worth. I want something to stick. I want the change to really matter. I want to stop living in a house that suffocates me and leaves me jaded.” She didn’t give me time to respond to her comment. She palmed the hair out of her face as she sat up and crossed her legs in the passenger seat. “So, tell me your secret,” she said, and I didn’t even try to keep it to myself. I wanted to know all of her secrets, and I wanted to tell her all of mine. Why though? Why did I feel such a pull to a girl I’d spent so much time hating?

“You know how you have down days like today?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s every day for me.”

I’d never told anyone that before. I’d never confessed how heavy my heart sat in my chest, how hard it was to breathe every single day, but she had opened up to me in the middle of the night, and I figured why the hell not open up to her, too. That night we were on an even playing field. She was sad, and I was, too.

I was suffering partly from insomnia, partly from too much loneliness, and mostly from keeping it all to myself. I’d never thought Shay would be the one I’d be opening up to, yet there I was—opening up to her and asking her not to judge.

She didn’t, though. You could see when a person was judging you, could see their disapproving stares, but Shay was there with only honesty in her eyes. I hadn’t known how much I craved her honesty until she gave it so willingly.

“What makes you feel down?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I confessed, and the words echoed in my head. I sounded a lot more like my uncle than I wanted to. So often I thought some of his dark shadows had embedded themselves inside of me. Maybe it ran in my genes—the sad trait.

Either way, I felt as if I was fighting a daily battle against depression.

Depression.

---