Page 32 of The Best Worst Mistake (Off-Limits #2)

When I woke up this morning, I knew that I’d be seeing my old house today, but nothing could have prepared me for seeing her, too.

She pats a few of the passengers on the back as they make their way out, calling niceties over their shoulders, along with what I imagine to be a few inside jokes, too.

“See you tomorrow, Miss Candi!” an elderly man in a bowler hat says brightly, as he steps off the stairs. He rushes past me, bumping into me gently as he does.

And when the crowd has cleared, I’m left with only the sound of my heart drumming loudly in my chest.

Blood coursing through my hands and fingertips.

I feel every inch of my body pulsing when I look up at this woman. I stare up into her eyes, feeling just like I did at seven years old, about to ride around town with the only friend I had in the whole world.

Miss Candi smiles down at me, as if about to welcome some new faces onboard.

“Miss Candice?” I say, barely above a whisper, hoping she remembers.

Hoping, against all odds, that she shares the same fond memories from my childhood, the ones I’ve tucked away in some last part of my mind reserved for happier things from this particular era of my life.

Things I know I experienced as a child, in her presence, that were everything a kid should have.

Kindness.

Warmth.

Love. Or at least something that felt a lot like love to me, or as close as I ever got to it, anyway. Something — I realize now — that felt a lot like someone caring for me.

I see the exact moment that my face, though much older now, registers in Miss Candi’s memory — when her face suddenly drains of all its color.

It’s then that I finally smile, letting her know that it’s okay. I understand why she did what she did.

Tears sting my eyes, so quickly that I have to blink them away.

Her forehead wrinkles into a tight little V beneath the rim of the hat as if she’s staring straight into the past, the ghost of the girl she’d once helped.

Helped, Miss Candi. You helped me. And I understand that. I didn’t. But I do, now.

The words won’t come out.

“Honey?” she says, a whisper. It sounds like a memory. “Abby, honey, is that you? What on earth are you doing here?”

Her eyes shift toward my house.

“They don’t live there anymore, do they?” I ask, confirming what I already know.

She shakes her head.

Dax clears his throat a few inches behind me. I don’t have the words to explain any of this to him right now. I will. But I can barely take the shock of running into her, unplanned like this, myself.

I stare, afraid to blink. Afraid that if my lids close, even for one second, this impossible mirage will disappear.

She looks more weathered than the last time I saw her, sitting in that very same seat, at this very same bus stop right outside my front door.

Smaller, somehow. Like either she must have shrunk, or I must have grown.

Of course, it’s me that’s grown, but the memory of her is one of the few I’ve grasped hold of with an iron fist, and it’s hard to change the image of someone you once loved so dearly as now just a human, not a superhero.

Scars, wrinkles, exhausted eyes and all.

“I . . . I wasn’t expecting to see you,” I stammer. “I just came back to see this old street.”

She shoves the gear on the dash into park and rushes down the stairs, folding me into the tightest embrace.

Every single thing comes flooding back.

Sitting alone in the front seat of bus one eighteen.

Riding right behind Miss Candi like I did most afternoons.

Passing the hours of her bus route together, probably boring her with all the smallest details of my day, reveling in how wonderfully well she’d listen to me.

How Rowan Sanderson always seemed to have the prettiest hair-dos in class, each with a bow that matched another new outfit that day, a never-ending collection, I’d tell her.

How I wished my mother would wash and brush my hair like Rowan’s mother must have done.

How I wished my mother would look at me at all.

Did you fall asleep during your lessons again, honey?

What’d you have for lunch today?

You hungry?

She’d pass a Kudos bar back to me from the box she kept hidden beneath her seat, usually before I’d pass out somewhere along the route, usually just after we passed through Collier Drive.

Some days, I didn’t just pretend that Miss Candi was my real mom, spending time with me every afternoon after school like I always wanted — I’d started fantasizing about asking her to be my mother, for real.

To take me home with her, so I’d never have to go back to that little gray-yellow house again.

The last time I saw Miss Candi, I’d been standing at the bus stop waiting for her to come pick me up like I would on any other day.

With a picture I’d drawn for her, rolled carefully and held softly in my fist so it wouldn’t be at all creased when I climbed up the stairs and unrolled it for her.

The drawing was of the bus. Our bus. But I’d made it look more like a house than a city vehicle, permanently parked in front of a sea of purple flowers with Miss Candi and me standing in the front of it, holding hands.

Smiling.

I’d been planning to ask if she could be my mom that day.

Maybe I could just stay on the bus with her that night.

Get donuts in the morning, or go to that milkshake place I always dreamed of going, the one with the black-and-white checkered floor and the waitresses who dressed like they worked at a fifties diner.

The one we always passed on her route, and I’d beg her to pull over just one time.

Miss Candi had driven up like usual that afternoon, and after all the familiar passengers tumbled out, I started unrolling the sheet of paper so I could board the bus with it outstretched in front of me, imagining the joy crossing her face when I asked the question I’d never been brave enough to ask her before.

But when I looked up, beaming, with my drawing unraveled across my chest, two suited passengers — a man and a woman — exited the bus. They stopped me when I tried to go up the steps.

“Are you Abby? Which house is yours?”

“We heard from Miss Candice that you might need some help.”

“Are your mom and dad home now, by chance?”

I tried explaining to them that I lived in that little gray-yellow house behind me, but that I needed to get on the bus like I did every other afternoon. They stepped in front of me, blocking the way up.

Miss Candice and I have plans.

I have an important question to ask her.

“It’s that one, there,” I said, pointing.

Their eyes followed my finger.

And for the first time, I saw it all through someone else’s perspective.

The overgrown exterior with the broken chain-link fence in the front, two men — who I didn’t know but had seen on my porch more than once — passed out in the old, rusty lawn chairs.

Mom and Dad probably inside like that, too.

Flies buzzing in the empty kitchen. Stale scraps of tomato paste crust and beer cans, powders and packages I wouldn’t understand until later in life. But otherwise empty.

Always empty.

“We just have a few questions for you, Abby,” the woman said. “Could you walk down to the house with us for a little bit?”

I looked up the stairs to Miss Candi for help.

Why are these strangers — strangers who know my name — coming out of our bus?

But Miss Candi already had tears rolling down her cheeks.

“I had to, baby.” The last words she ever said to me back then. “I’m so sorry. You’re going to live a better life than this.”

I tried to push past them, tried to show her my drawing anyway. Unrolling it again as they held my shoulders back.

But of course, I never got up the stairs.

She just nodded, looking pained when they asked her to continue on down the road. Get on with her route.

“It’ll be easier this way,” the man said. “Once she can’t see you anymore, she might not fight us as much.”

Within the week, I’d been placed with an aunt and uncle I didn’t know I had out in New York.

And until now, I had never seen Miss Candi’s face again.