Page 114 of Totally Wrecked
Everyone looks at him blankly.
“Oops, I meanA Comedy of Errors.Shakespeare. I think I knew she wasn’t Brooke straight away,” he declares.
“Shut up, you did not,” Gray throws a twig at him.
Leander is hilarious, but seriously, it was only me and Harvey who had actually met the “real” Brooke. “I will admit, it didn’t take long for me to realize Daisy was not her sister. Might have been something to do with the lack of muscles,” I wink at her.
“Hey,” she says, throwing a piece of seaweed at me, but I’m glad to see she is laughing. It’s the first time this subject has come up between us all, and I like that it’s lighthearted.
Huh! I just realized, we never found out why Daisy agreed to the swap with Brooke in the first place!
That’ll be my next question, but first I try to be a good person and include Harvey. “I can’t believe you didn’t realize. I was sure you were going to guess.”
Harvey’s eyes are crossing drunkenly, and I can’t quite make out his mumble.
“What was that?”
“Oh, I said I was suspicious on the boat, but she didn’t fool me for long. Not with all the following chain of events, but when I heard little Key call her Daisy, I knew my intuition had not failed me. Obviously, I knew Brooke’s sister was called Daisy. Yeah, I knew pretty quickly.”
“A Daisy Chain of events!” shouts Leander, and we all laugh. Then Leander is back singing school songs with Harvey. Keyara goes over to Rex and cuddles up on his knee, maybe having some kind of story. I look over to Gray and when we lock eyes both of us grin.
Then we both look at Daisy, expecting her to be drunkenly singing or happily grinning. But she’s not. She’s sitting alone in the dusk with an absolute look of horror on her face.
Like ants drawn to our queen, we scurry over to her immediately.
“Daisy? What’s wrong?” I pick up her hand. She’s trembling.
“Daisy, talk to us…” says Gray.
She shakes her head mutedly, looking around at where Leander and Harvey are laughing and singing. My state of drunkenness sloughs off me. It’s almost pitch black now, but the moon is nearly full.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I suggest. Gray nods, and bends down to swoop her up in his arms.
She doesn’t respond, just buries herself in his chest. The others don’t notice as we take off down the beach. We sit at the edge of the water mark, the sand soft and damp beneath our feet. Gray and I flank Daisy like two royal guards, then both take a hand.
“OK, macushla, talk to us. My Gran had a cross-stitch on her wall that said, ‘Drunkenness and anger, 'tis said tell the truth,’ and well, we all are a little drunk.”
“But what if the best way to protect us all, protect what we are building here, is to sacrifice just a little bit of…truth?” she whispers.
“You know,” Gray says in his gruff voice, “Meemaw had a saying which was, ‘peace without truth is poison’. She’d say it to me and Rex if we were refusing to share our worries. You can think you are OK, but if you hide from the truth it will only hurt you. I don’t know if that helps with what’s bothering you, but Killian and I are here for you, now and always.”
I think that is the longest I’ve ever heard Gray talk. And what he says is spot on. It also makes me smile to hear about Meemaw’s sayings.
“Sounds like your Gran and Rex’s Meemaw could be best of friends,” Daisy replies. She says it quietly, but with so much love in her voice that my heart melts.
“Macushla?”
She grips both our hands. “I’m afraid to tell you something, because I’m worried about the repercussions, but also, I hate having a secret from you.”
“Do you trust us?” asks Gray.
“Of course.”
“So then you can tell us anything. We are here for you, whatever it is you have to say.”
“Argh!” she suddenly yells. “I’m so angry!”
“Good!” I tell her. “Be angry if you want. What are you angry about?”
