Page 41 of Tell Me Softly

Chapter Twenty-Six

Kami

The next day, when I went downstairs for breakfast, the house seemed oddly silent. Dad was making scrambled eggs, and my brother was sitting at the kitchen table.

“Good morning,” I said, pulling my hair back out of my face. “Where’s Mom?”

“She left,” Dad said. “She’s spending the week at a spa resort.” I could tell by his voice he was angry.

“A spa resort? I thought we were…?”

“It was already paid for,” he said. “She told me what happened yesterday in the car.”

I felt embarrassed that I’d almost called her a slut, but then it was her fault, blaming Taylor and Thiago for everything that was happening when she was the one who had screwed up their lives.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sitting across from him at the kitchen island.

“Don’t you dare even suggest anything like that again, you hear me?” he said.

I nodded, and Dad seemed to decide that was enough.

“Shall we put on some music?” he asked. He wiped his hands on the flower-print apron wrapped around his waist and pulled out the tablet that was mounted to the wall.

It controlled everything in the house, even the lights in my room.

My brother and father both smiled when Dad played his favorite song, the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” and the three of us started singing loudly as we put the finishing touches on breakfast.

For a moment, I forgot all our problems and enjoyed being there with them.

We had toast and bacon with our eggs. I squeezed orange juice; my brother set the table.

It was so nice to see Cameron smiling. The night before, when he came to my room, I’d noticed his eyes were red from crying.

I told myself I needed to pay closer attention to him.

Everything at home was affecting him more than the rest of us.

Because it was Sunday, Dad said we could go to the park when we were done. But before we left, Dad and Cameron said they had a surprise for me.

“Close your eyes, OK?” Dad said as I walked out on the porch, and he disappeared inside to do whatever it was he had planned.

“All right… Three, two…”

“One!” Cameron finished impatiently.

I opened my eyes to see what they’d both been hiding: a white bicycle with a wicker basket painted with daisies. It was shiny and new and just waiting for someone to take it out.

I smiled. “Is that for me?” I asked.

“It sure is!” Cameron said. “Now we can go racing, Kami! A bike’s way more fun than a car!”

My father smiled at me, but his eyes were sad.

“I love it, Dad,” I said, and gave him a big hug.

“We’ll get you your car back, I promise,” he said softly.

“I don’t even need it. With the bike, at least I’ll get some exercise!”

Dad smiled. Around three, we rode to the park: Dad on the giant mountain bike he often took out on Sundays and Cameron on his tiny one covered in a million stickers.

We spent the whole day out, just being together, eating our sandwiches on the banks of Lake Carsville.

It was perfect. My mother had no idea what she was missing.

She was so frivolous, she had never understood what really mattered.

I didn’t miss her the entire week she was gone.

I didn’t miss my friends, either. For some reason, they were upset with me.

I didn’t understand, and honestly, I couldn’t worry about it.

It was getting to be that time of year when I shut down and spent whole days all by myself drawing and lost in thought.

There were times when I couldn’t help beating myself up.

Times when every single detail of the past few days came back to me.

I was sure Mom had left because she didn’t want to be in Carsville on that date, especially not with the Di Biancos back.

It happened every year: one time she needed to visit our grandparents, another time it was a spa, another time it was a vacation with the women from the tennis club…

In the days following the competition, Ellie tried to talk to me, to ask me why I was standoffish with the girls and why I hadn’t shown up to cheerleading practice.

She told me they all wished I’d be captain again, but they didn’t want to say it aloud because they were scared of how Kate would react.

Scared of how Kate would react… I kept repeating those words in my head, trying to figure out what they could possibly mean. Since when was a friend someone who inspired fear?

“Please, Kami… Come back to us,” she insisted, sitting down by me one day in the cafeteria at a table by the window on the far end of the room, where the rest of the team couldn’t hear us.

“Ellie, I just don’t see it right now. I’m sorry,” I said, picking away at my food. She was sad, but I could tell she was frustrated with me too.

“Oh, but you don’t have any problem hanging out with Taylor, right? You can spend all day with him. Is that what you are now, one of those girls who abandons all her friends for her boyfriend?”

My boyfriend? Was Taylor my boyfriend?

Speak of the devil… There he was.

“What’s up, Ellie?” he asked with a friendly smile. That smile that transmitted infinite calm.

Instead of saying anything, she looked back and forth at us and walked away to rejoin our friends.

“Is she still pissed off?” Taylor asked, tossing an apple up in the air and catching it.

I shrugged. “She doesn’t understand that I just need some distance from everyone right now.”

Taylor grabbed my hand to stop me from playing with my food.

“Hey, Kami…are you going to tell me what’s going on or what?”

For some strange reason, I didn’t want to.

Maybe it was just looking out for Dad, but I couldn’t stand anyone knowing that he was practically bankrupt.

It was enough having to listen to him arguing with his lawyers and clients.

He’d been working from home lately. He’d closed his office in downtown Carsville and had even put our beach house up for sale.

I knew none of that mattered, it was just stuff, but still.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Dad. Everything he’d achieved in life was crumbling, and my mother wouldn’t even lend him a hand or be there to support him.

I’d had to step up, and there I was walking around the house pretending everything was OK, smiling even though I was torn apart inside so my father and brother could feel that things were still normal.

“It’s home stuff. And I don’t really want to talk about it right now.

” I felt so guilty. He was the one who ought to have been upset these days: it was the anniversary of the time his father got caught cheating on his mother with mine.

I should have been there for him , not him for me.

But I couldn’t help it because it had been a terrible time for me too.

“Hey,” he said after we had changed the subject and talked a while about our biology project on sexuality. “I won’t be in class tomorrow. I’m not sure if I can see you this weekend, either.”

I nodded but didn’t look him in the face until he grabbed my chin and forced my face upward.

“Stop blaming yourself, please,” he insisted, pressing his forehead into mine. “Are you going to be OK?”

“Taylor, how can you be the one asking me if I’m OK?”

He almost scowled. “Kami, do you not understand that I care about you? That there’s probably nothing else I care about more? What can I do to get you to grasp that?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.” I felt sad, and I tried to make myself angry to cover up that sorrow. “I need to go,” I said, and stood up.

Taylor watched me, unsure what was going on with me.

I wasn’t sure myself. I knew he didn’t deserve that.

Not with that generous heart of his: it almost seemed he had forgotten what my mother had done, what running my mouth about it had done to his family.

But him being so sweet to me––there was something about it I couldn’t take just then! It only made me feel worse.

I stopped, bent over, and kissed him on the lips.

“I love you…and I’m sorry.” I walked out. And everyone in the cafeteria watched me go. Everyone waited for something to happen. Because…

Kamila Hamilton was no longer a cheerleader.

Kamila Hamilton no longer hung out with the cool kids.

Kamila Hamilton no longer drove a convertible to school.

And Kamila Hamilton was no longer the girl everyone wanted to be.

***

That afternoon, on the way to the library—after a few hours I’d actually had to myself now that I’d quit the team—I wished I could skip detention and just go home.

It was Thursday, and having to see Thiago the three days before had been torture.

Everyone sitting in that room seemed to have something to say to me, some reproach—even Julian because I’d been avoiding him since the day we watched that movie together.

He hadn’t done anything wrong, but there was just too much on my mind.

I sat at my usual desk and noticed that Thiago was looking sad. Very sad. His downcast eyes were like a knife to my heart.

It’s your fault he’s like this. Everything is your fault.

I looked down at the white piece of paper in front of me.

I looked down and started to draw.

I barely realized it as I traced a line here, a line there, cross-hatched shadows, retouched the features until they were perfect. I’d had that image in my head a long time. The four of them looking at the camera, smiling, happy, calm before everything went to shit.

I spent all two hours of detention working on that portrait. And when I finally allowed myself to look at it, simply to look at it and take it in… My God. I could feel the tears come to my eyes, and two seconds later, a shadow fell over the drawing and over me.

I looked up and saw Thiago standing there.

I saw something in him––pain at first, I thought, pain so deep that only someone who had lived through what he’d lived through could understand it. But then rage eclipsed it, covering him like armor that kept me from seeing his heart.