Page 50 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
Oliver pulled his little brother into a hug. “Because I knew it was essential toyou.”
Two days later, they stopped running. At least for a little while.
Oliver snuck out and bought a postcard for Chloe. He didn’t know what to say, so he wrote out her address first and stuck a stamp on it.
Dear Chloe,
My mom got a new job at the last minute and she had to start right away, so…
He knew it was a lie that didn’t make sense, but he couldn’t tell her what had really happened. He hardly knew himself. It would be another year before he fully unraveled what she had done, before he realized his mom had been part of a timeshare resale scam based overseas that had cost not only his family’s home but the money of a lot of the other people in their town. And the Feds had gotten involved, because a lot of those timeshare cons could be traced back to drug cartels. She’d been betting a dangerous hand and lost it all, for all of them.
For now, though, Oliver was a sixteen-year-old boy whose loyalty between his family and his best friend—and the love of his young life—was being tested.
But even from this far away, he could hear the hurt squeak Chloe would make, the quiver in her voice when she said,So you just left? Without saying goodbye?
Oliver squeezed his eyes shut, leaning hard on the pen.
Suddenly, a hand clamped on his shoulder. Oliver froze.
“What do you think you’re doing?” his mom hissed.
Oliver swallowed hard.
She snatched the pen from his hand.
He grabbed the postcard and ran. The big blue mailbox was right across the street.
“Get back here!”
A car careened around the corner, headlights momentarily blinding him. Oliver jumped in the road anyway. The driver slammed on his horn, tires screeching, and Oliver barely dodged it.
Oliver sprinted into the mailbox at full force. The impact knocked the wind out of him. But behind him, Jennifer was screaming and getting close. He yanked open the deposit slot, but before he could throw the postcard in, Jennifer slammed into him from behind, seized him by the hair, and jerked him around. She snatched the postcard and tore it in half, then in half again and again until it was just trash.
She threw the pieces into the street and they scattered. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one,” she snarled. “And then you go and try to send a letter that will have a location postmark stamped on it?”
“I didn’t sign it!”
She slapped him hard across the face. Oliver felt his lip split, the salt of blood spilling onto his tongue.
“Fuck you, Jennifer.”
“I am your mother. You don’t call me by my first name.”
“Fuck. You,” Oliver said. If he couldn’t call her Jennifer, he wouldn’t call her anything at all. Hell if he was addressing her as Mom.
And that was why Oliver never reached out to Chloe in the months that followed, because from then on, Jennifer watched him with hawk eyes.
But what would he say to Chloe anyway? He couldn’t lie to her. Clover had been a single unit; they’d known everything about each other. Lying to Chloe was like jamming a knife into who they were and slicing to shreds all he had loved.
And even if he could have gotten himself to a pay phone or written a letter, he couldn’t tell her the truth—that his family skipped from homeless shelter to homeless shelter under false names, that he had to homeschool his brother the rest of the school year because Jennifer wouldn’t let them stay in one place for too long, that Oliver had to steal study guides from the library in order to keep up with what would have been his own classes.
It was more than two years of life like that, and by the time his family truly stopped running, Oliver felt it was too late for him and Chloe. It was halfway through senior year and he had taken the GED, unable to step footon a regular high school campus again because he was too different from the other kids there, with their normal parents and normal lives. Whereas he had been open and warm with Chloe, he was now closed, a fortress of one against others. Because when your own mother betrays you, you no longer know who else in the world you can trust.
He never forgot about Chloe; it was impossible to erase someone who had been your other half for the vast majority of your life. But Oliver hopedshehad forgottenhim, because the alternative was even more unbearable: that she remembered how he had kissed her and told her they were forever, then abandoned her the next day without even a goodbye.
All he’d left her with was a lie.
Chloe
