Page 69 of Limbo

I nod. “His grandparents sent him to camp the summer I turned fourteen. That’s when Trey and I met Brock—the second worst thing ever to happen to me.”

“What was the first?”

“Graham,” I say without hesitation. I take a deep breath, forcing away the threat of dwelling on him right now. “Anyway, Brock taught me to drink and smoke and how to forget the rage eating me alive on the inside. For two years, we were toxic to each other and everyone around us. We were my parents.”

A carbon copy of them, all the way down to the intense determination to destroy one another. I think we needed to hate each other to distract from other parts of our lives.

“The pictures of you as a blonde and of the crazy stuff were from when you dated Brock?”

Oh, great. He saw me as a blonde. An attempt to no longer look like Lauren, which ended up pointless since I started acting like her.

“Most of it. Trey tried to keep me relatively safe. All my friends from back then came along for a mess of self-destructive behavior. Even Pete after I dumped him.” The most like my parents I’ve ever been, dragging everyone down with me. I’ve always wondered, had they not gotten mixed up in my messes, if their lives would have turned out differently. Not that any of us headed down a path toward employment with NASA or anything, but still.

“Two years.” Jordan gnaws away at another piece of licorice. “You broke up when you were sixteen?”

“When Lauren took out a restraining order, we moved to the next town over. The high schools were combined, and without a reason to go to Sutterville anymore, Brock and I stopped seeing each other. At first, it seemed to solve a lot of problems. But my parents realized they could use the divorce to control one another. And a bad situation became so much worse. Shayna’s pictures tell you more about the next several months than I can even remember.”

He reaches over and intertwines his fingers with mine, pulling my hand over to his lap. “I shouldn’t have brought up the pictures the way I did, Callie. What I said was out of line.”

“I blindsided you, and you reacted. I’m the one who purposely used what you’d said about your parents against you. Out of everyone, I should know better, and I’m sorry.”

“Forgiven,” he says. “Moving on. Tell me what happened after the divorce.”

Grateful not to rehash everything, I smile and continue, “Connor gave me a calendar counting down to my eighteenth birthday when the custody agreement would end. It’s silly but crossing out the numbers saved me. Each day closer to freedom, the less power they held over me. I stopped partying and avoided anyone who challenged my sense of control, including my friends. I spent the summer working my ass off on Pete’s grandparents’ farm to save money. The plan was to leave for school and never go back. All the bad memories would be hours away, and Graham would just be someone I survived.”

“But now, you have a countdown calendar to nineteen and drive back on the weekends.”

“Enter Graham’s desperate need for control.” I take a deep breath to re-center. My first real test of not letting reminders of Graham send me spiraling. “Thanks to an amendment in their divorce agreement, he pays child support until we’re nineteen. In his mind, he owns us until then, but I turned eighteen and refused to see him. That’s when the stream of texts and calls started. When those didn’t work, he withheld my mail, used Cate and Connor to get to me, canceled my insurance, reported my car as stolen—”

“He reported your car as stolen?”

“Twice.” Another deep breath required. “He tried whatever he could think of until he found what worked.”

“What’s that?”

“He stopped making support payments. Not just for me, but for Cate and Connor, too. Lauren blamed me the first month her money didn’t show up. Since I caused the problem, she expected me to fix it.”

“So you agreed to visit him.”

“Every other weekend until I’m nineteen. If I deviate, he resorts to his alternatives.”

It might not even end then. He could still threaten not to pay for them. A thought I quickly push away for the sake of my sanity.

I turn onto the highway that takes us straight to Waymore, one where we might meet seven cars over the next fifty miles.

“And the Friday of my birthday,” Jordan says, “you were supposed to go to his house.”

“Everything started to domino. After I told Graham I’d be home Saturday morning, he showed up at the dorms to inform me otherwise, which pissed me off. Uncle Kev made me leave my car, and then Graham took away my phone when I got there. I felt isolated and trapped, and I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Being here with him and explaining what happened takes me right back. All the emotions settling on the surface in a muted form. Fuzzy around the edges. Scabs not yet scars—in Jordan’s words.

Not sure if my back-in-commission tear ducts will surprise me, I pull off onto the shoulder. Once I park, he pulls my hand back over and turns the music down more. I face him but keep my gaze down, not wanting to chance him looking at me like he did in my room again.

“I only remembered out-of-order pieces from that weekend,” I tell him. “Without context, everything was pretty damning, so when Brock texted and lied about something happening between us that night, I believed him. For the first time in a long time, I felt like Callista, the girl with a less-than-stellar reputation who lets the worst part of her life ruin the rest of it. I didn’t want you dealing with the fallout.”

He brings my hand to his lips. “You should have just told me.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.” I look up, needing him to know how much I regret how I handled my blackout. How I regret the way I’ve been handlingeverything. “I wasn’t ready for you to know what a mess my life is. I’m still not entirely sure I am, but I’m sick of missing out on things because of it. And it really is a disaster, Jordan. Seriously, you should run right now.” I slap at the button behind me to unlock the doors. It’s only fair to give him an opportunity to run.

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