Page 60 of Come As You Are

“And trouble. Always trouble.”

“That too. But listen—”

The ringing of my cell phone cuts him off, and we both instinctively glance over and see the call is coming from my mom. “I haven’t been able to connect with my parents for more than a text all weekend, so I should probably take this,” I say apologetically, grabbing it from my nightstand. “But we’ll talk tomorrow?”

He nods. “Yeah, okay. G’night, Skeevy.”

I answer the phone as I watch him go, but wait to speak until the door closes behind him. “Hey, Mom.”

“Evie.” She sighs, and I want to remind her that she called me, and I haven’t said nearly enough to exhaust her yet. “I’m sorry, again, that we couldn’t make it this weekend. We’re… we’re with your sister.”

“Of course you are,” I say before I can stop myself. “Of course Sierra’s the reason you’re not here. What is it now? Meeting with Principal Myers? Angry parent? Did she get another bootleg tattoo?”

There’s a long silence, and I worry that maybe I’ve gone too far, until she speaks again. “We’re in a rehab facility in Vermont, Everett. Your sister’s checking in.”

Chapter Fifteen

TURNS OUT, SLEEPING IS REALLYchallenging when you find out your sister’s popularity has been partially due to her being the school’s go-to for pills. There’s a whole legal mess my mom clearly doesn’t want to dig into and “thank God she’s a minor” comes up about a hundred times, but the tl;dr is there was a deal on the table for Sierra to attend rehab and it was now or never. Which I guess does kind of put them not attending Parents’ Weekend in perspective.

But it still feels like ass.

The worst part is that I actually want totalkto Sierra now, to find out what the hell was going through her mind, and how exactly this fit into everything she did to me. Did Craig know? Did Claire? Were either of them using with her? I would be 0 percent shocked to find out Craig’s loser gamer friends were customers.

My brain is bursting with questions and expletives andmore questions, and I break my rule again and look through Sierra’s posts, and Claire’s, and Sierra’s friends’, and I see nothing, except then I realize I do see one change, which is that I don’t see pictures of Sierra at all. Pictures I know existed on her friends’ pages are gone.Plausible deniability,I think, and I almost feel bad for her.

I don’t know what her life is going to look like when she comes back. I don’t know how she got caught in the first place—my mom didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask. There’s definitely some irony in that I took the ticket out she’s probably going to wish she had, but she has no one else to blame for that. Saving your sister from herself is strictly a Salem Grayson move, I guess.

Then again, Sabrina doesn’t know what really happened, and neither do I; maybe Sierrawassaving me from a life I shouldn’t have been living. I mean, itisbecause of her that I’m here, that I got a fresh start at romance and friendship and making a name for myself. And for once, it’s not her fault that I’m hovering somewhere around a C+ at it all.

I argue with myself for hours about whether it’s worth reaching out to someone to get some answers, watching the clock move like molasses when my eyes are on it, then way too quickly when I look away. I’m tired, but I won’t be getting any rest at all until I can get some of this off my chest. If only I kept a diary.

Then I hear it, the slight creaking above me that means either Matt or Salem is up and about. I look at the clock, and see that it’s a little past three in the morning. Probably just a quick bathroom trip. But the urge to talk to someone is sogreat, I feel it with the same desperate ache I felt wanting Salem to hug me.

It’s sad, and it’s pathetic, but I just need afriend.

I slide into my slippers—designed to look like aces of spades, naturally—and creep upstairs, not particularly worried about being caught by Hoffman at this hour. But my hopes of catching Matt or Salem in the hallway are dashed when I see their door is closed; apparently, no one left the room after all. I stand there, staring at it, willing it to open, but there’s nothing other than silence, and no way I’m knocking.

My entire body deflates as I turn to go back downstairs, and then, miraculously, I hear the knob behind me turn.

“Evie?” Salem says on a yawn.

I whirl around, and see him leaning against the doorway in a pair of black drawstring pants and… nothing. It never in a million years would’ve occurred to me that Salem Grayson sleeps shirtless, and the fact that he does and that I am staring at a wall of lean muscle is very unsettling. “Hi,” I say, because I have to say something, and also I have to look up into his eyes. His eyes, which look sleepy and soft and a little concerned, long lashes slightly fluttering, and all of this is very confusing.

It is really not a good time to be noticing any of this.

“Hi?” He scratches his chest, giving me permission to glance again. It’s not a broad chest, or a particularly defined one, and yet. The urge to feel it under my palm is obnoxiously strong. “It’s like threeA.M.”

“I know. Sorry. I just… I’ve been having a really weird night, and I was dying to talk to someone, and then I heardyou moving, so I figured I’d see if you were up. But it’s really late. You probably wanna get back to bed. This was stupid.”

“Nah, I’ve been having a weird night too, and then I heard you skulking outside. You wanna come in?” He holds open the door. “Don’t worry—once Matt’s out, he can sleep through a zombie apocalypse. I’ve stuck so many things in his nose to test this theory.”

I smother my laughter in my hand and join Salem on his bed, curling my legs up underneath me in the corner while he sets his pillow behind his back and sits up to face me. “Areyouokay?” I ask. “You know, before I dive into talking about my stupid shit for an hour.”

“Yeah, yeah. Also stupid shit, but not the kind worth talking about.”

I take him at his word, mostly because I’m about to break. “My sister’s in rehab. That’s why my parents weren’t here this weekend. They were checking her in.”

“Oh, shit.”

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