Page 84 of Our Secrets and Scars

“It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow. No one should be alone over the holidays, especially in this kind of condition.”

She sniffs the stale air and grimaces. I pretend not to notice.

“Got nowhere to go.”

She rolls her eyes. “Liar. Your mom’s been texting all week, asking if you’re coming home.”

“How would you know?”

“I checked your phone.”

“When?”

“Irrelevant. But you should probably know she’s expecting you for dinner tonight.”

“Sorry, what?” I blink at her.

“I texted her, pretending to be you, and said you’d be home for Christmas.”

My knee-jerk reaction is anger. It dissolves into my blood, poisoning me. And I let myself feel it. In fact, I welcome it. Even though my wrath is unmerited, and Isla is certainly undeserving of it, considering how she’s looked after me since I found out about Holden’s betrayal last week, I cling to the sensation and let it take over me.

Anger is an easier emotion than heartbreak.

“What the fuck?” I seethe, throwing the bedsheets off me and getting out of bed to pace the length of the room. “You can’t do shit like that, Isla.”

She doesn’t react. She just watches me with a blank face as I pick up my hairbrush from the side and hurl it at the wall. It hits it with a small crack and falls anticlimactic into a heap of dirty laundry on the floor.

“My parents.” I shake my head in disbelief. “You could have chosen any other aspect of my life to interfere with if you were that desperate to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, but you went with my fucking parents?”

“I wasn’t doing it to be a bitch, Kinsley. But it’s Christmas and honestly, you have a lot of shit that you need to talk about with them.”

I scoff. “How the fuck would you know?”

“How about the fact that you haven’t answered a text from your mom since October? Or, I don’t know, that you still haven’t told them you made the Dean’s list? You’ve convinced yourself so much that you’re not good enough that you’re sabotaging your relationship with them.”

I rear back like she’s slapped me.

“That’s not true.”

Her eyes are soft, and her voice gentle when she says, “Yeah, babe, it is. You did the same thing with Holden.”

“You’re kidding, right? He killed my sister, Isla.”

She sighs, tugging on my hand to make me sit beside her. “That’s not what I mean. Back at the beginning, when he warned you to stay away from him, you instantly assumed that he was rejecting you because you thought he saw your scars. Hell, you changed your name to Violet because you wanted to be a different person. I know it’s hard to hear, but girl, surely you see where I’m coming from.”

A shameful vulnerability saturates my anger, though I try desperately to claw it back. I need the rage to protect me from feeling so exposed, so unguarded. So naked.

I hate this, being analyzed like a psych patient. It’s why I only went to therapy for a few months after the accident because there’s nothing worse than feeling like a rat in a science lab. Something to look at, something to study.

“I just think it might help if you talked to them about it,” Isla says quietly. “If you tell them how they’ve made you feel, maybe things will get better.”

My eyes shift to look out the window at the graying skies and snow-stained streets. It’s freezing out, but the ice in my heart is colder, and the barrenness of the trees is nothing in comparison to the emptiness of my soul that I’ve felt since Holden’s betrayal.

I stare motionless out at the December afternoon, refusing to acknowledge Isla’s words. Because if I did, if I actually took in what she was saying, I might realize that she’s right. And I’m not ready for that yet.

“Kinsley, are you even listening?”

I look back at her with an expression of total vacancy, and she sighs in resignation.

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