Page 15 of Choosing Her

saylor

“Are your parents coming to family day?” Poppy asked.

I bit down hard on my lip to stop myself from saying my automatic answer— of course not, they couldn’t care less about family day —and waited for Lilah to speak first. I tried to act extremely focused on painting Poppy’s nails, so she wouldn’t question my silence.

“Of course,” Lilah said. She was lying on the extra bed in my room—since I was supposed to have a roommate but didn’t, the bed sat empty there—which we had named The Couch , and was typing rapidly on her phone as she spoke. “And, of course, all my siblings are coming, too.”

Poppy looked at her over her shoulder. “Well, that’ll be fun, right? It’s hard for all four of you to get together.”

“Yeah,” Lilah said, but she sounded distracted. She let out a yell of frustration and dropped her phone on the bed. Through gritted teeth, she added, “I’m just trying to convince Jude not to invite the entire band.”

“I’m guessing it’s not going well,” I said, watching as she picked the phone up again and continued typing, this time eve more aggressively. It was a little funny to watch her type so hard on a touch-screen phone.

“Ivy mentioned that they were thinking of trying to get all the boys to come,” Poppy said. “I’m not sure Zach was for it, though, if that helps.”

Zach was Poppy's sister’s boyfriend who was in the same band as Lilah's brother, Jude.

I guess Jude thought that two of them were coming anyway, all five of them might as well.

But with them being part of the biggest boyband in the world right now, all of them showing up would probably cause mass chaos.

Lilah sighed and fell on her back, the mattress bouncing a little under her weight. “If the whole band comes, we’re not going to get to see any of them. They’ll just be surrounded all day.”

I wanted to tell her that if that happened, then she could hang out with me instead because I was going to be entirely alone all day, but saying that would bring attention to me and my sad predicament, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

I didn't really have any plans for what I was going to do while everyone else was spending time with their families. Studying would be impossible with so many people milling about and talking. And I couldn’t just sit around, being all pathetic.

But Naomi would be off with her friends or her new boyfriend, pretending she was a part of their family instead of mine.

She never seemed to mind sticking to people like that, but I hated to do it.

I didn’t want to be that person who acted like a leech on someone’s side, taking away the limited time they had with their parents.

Just because mine didn’t want to visit me didn’t mean I should take away from the fun day everyone else was getting.

“Are you almost done with Poppy’s nails?” Lilah asked, pulling me out of my concerns. She held her hands and wiggled her fingers. “I want you to do mine next.”

“Just need thirty seconds to put the finishing touches,” I said.

I was on the last nail now, just doing the final touches.

Poppy had asked for purple nail polish to replace her old pink one, because she wanted to be wearing Hartwell’s colors at the family day this weekend.

It worked out that purple was my favorite color so I always had it in stock.

“Done!” I said, pulling away. “But please don’t smudge them.”

Poppy laughed and awkwardly stood up without using her hands, then began flapping her arms in the air to help the paint dry. She looked a little silly, but hey, if it worked, it worked.

“All right, Lilah,” I said in an announcer’s voice. “You may come down to my nail salon.”

Lilah grinned at me as she hopped off The Couch and laid down on her stomach in front of me, placing her hands on the same newspapers Poppy had been using to protect my carpet from unintentional nail polish spills.

“I assume you just want purple as well?” I asked.

“Because I do also have silver. And a bit of blue but…” I held up the bottle and grimaced.

It was old and was covered in various colors of dried nail polish, like they’d all spilled on it when I threw them in a bag to bring them up here.

It was almost empty, anyway, and even if I could get it open, I was sure it was actually usable anymore.

“Let’s do silver on the thumbs and purple on the rest. Don’t want us to be too matchy-matchy,” she added to Poppy, sticking out her tongue.

Poppy sighed dramatically. “And here I thought we could wear the same clothes and have the same nails and you would dye your hair to?—”

“Why do I have to be the one to dye my hair?” Lilah demanded, cutting her off.

“It’s easier to dye hair brown than blonde,” Poppy said. She ran a hand over her brown waves. “I’d have to bleach mine and you know how damaging that is.”

“Don’t ruin your nails,” I warned her, eyeing how close they were to running through her hair.

It would be so easy for her to get distracted and get her hair stuck to the nails, both smudging them and get polish in her hair that she would need to wash out.

She immediately heeded the warning and dropped her hands, then sat down on the edge of The Couch, sitting as still as a statue.

“So, what about your parents, Saylor?” Lilah asked as I begin painting on the silver polish.

“What about them?” I muttered, hoping I was misunderstanding the question somehow.

As if she would ask about my parents for any other reason than wondering if they were coming to family day.

There was a reason I’d gotten away with telling my friends almost nothing about my parents—at boarding school, it just didn’t come up in conversation.

Nobody came over to my house, meaning nobody wondered why they weren’t there.

If the topic of families did come up, it was easy to pretend I was just homesick and talking about it made it worse.

And being so far away from them meant that it wasn’t noticeable that I never mentioned spending time with them or included them in any stories.

“Are they coming to family day?” Lilah asked, sealing my fate. Maybe I should have just pretended I didn’t hear her. But no, that probably would have made it even more obvious that I was lying. She would have asked again and it would have been awkward.

I let out a long breath, trying to figure out the best way to word it like my parents wanted to come but couldn’t, so they wouldn’t be concerned.

“They’re still travelling in Europe,” I said.

As far as excuses went, it was a god one.

Better than saying they had to work or had another function to go to.

Even though nobody ever argued those excuses, I did always see the sideways glances and questions in people’s eyes— this is the one time they might see you this month and they couldn’t prioritize it?

It would have been easier to fight if they visited at other times or if I went home to see them, but as it was, all my friends were very aware of how often—or infrequently—I saw my family.

“That’s too bad,” Lilah said. She sounded sympathetic, but I did wonder if she was also thinking I was a little lucky for not having to deal with siblings like she was right now.

I knew Lilah loved her siblings, but it was also obvious that as one of four—three of whom were incredibly close in age—she could get sick of them sometimes too.

“But they’ll be back from Europe soon, right? So they can come to the next ones.”

These family days happened once a month and my parents were only in Europe until the end of November, so they could feasibly come to the one in December or any of the ones next semester.

I forced a grin and nodded at Lilah, even though I knew it wasn’t a question of whether they could come, it was a matter of whether they wanted to—and they never did.