SUNDAY MORNING I SAT in bed with my quilt pulled over my head like a floral cave. After the Friday night movie disaster, Saturday had been a blur of suckage I’d rather not remember. Work had kept me busy, and Paxton had taken the on-call shift and spent it at the Jackson farm repairing their leaky garage freezer. He really went above and beyond to avoid me. Which not only annoyed me on a me level, but it also validated my mom’s stance on not complicating work with romance. Or, in my case, not-romance. Elise and Midnight had offered to take me out and get me grossly drunk after work, but I had big plans to stay in and scroll through Twitter until I passed out in a puddle of my own misery. Good times.
Since the Bees chattering away had pulled me out of sleep at seven, I decided to open YouTube and see how my dinner video with Eric was doing. We’d passed half a million views. I tried to muster some kind of excitement, at the very least a Judd Nelson fist pump, but I had nothing. It was as if all those things I wanted were happening to someone else, and I was just a spectator on the outside. I was numb, underwhelmed, and uninspired. I didn’t even want to do another movie review, since my Dirty Dancing one had gotten so many thumbs-downs.
If I left the video alone, it would easily reach a million views. My golden ticket. The magic number I’d been waiting years for. But it would also send a clear message about the kind of person I’d chosen to be. About what I’d be willing to do for clickbait.
Having a video hit a million didn’t mean anything if I didn’t come by it honestly. It would never be my accomplishment. And if I couldn’t get a million views on my own with my regular content, what was the point?
If I deleted the video, my YouTube channel might suffer, my business arrangement with Eric would definitely suffer, but I’d still have my soul. That had to be worth something.
I logged on to Video Manager, and my finger hovered over the delete button. One click and it would be gone. A few more clicks and my Twitter would go with it. Gritting my teeth, I shut down the app and left my phone on my bed while I went to get ready for the day. I couldn’t delete the video. I wanted to. Just like I wanted to quit scrolling through Twitter in the middle of the night, but in the end, I couldn’t do that, either. I’d built my entire world and every plan for my future around YouTube, and I wasn’t ready to test who I’d be without it.
After I took a shower and dried my hair, I headed into the dining room. Peg and Donna were already taking swipes at each other, and no wonder. They didn’t have their usual peacekeeper to sit between them.
The three Bees looked at each other, then back at their patterns. Weird.
“She’ll be along later,” Gram said.
I didn’t stick around. They’d gotten far enough into their quilt where they wouldn’t want me peeking at it before the big show. With Mom already gone to work, I curled up on the recliner in the living room. Eric tweeted about making plans with me for next weekend (he hadn’t), and I didn’t have enough energy to do more than like it.
I closed Twitter and went into my saved photos, pulling up the one Elise had sent me of Paxton messing with Midnight last week. A tight fist wrapped around my heart and squeezed. I missed him. Not just the kissing, though that had been excellent. I missed his lopsided smile and his late-night texts and his self-deprecating sense of humor and the ridiculous way he let Gigi dress him and the way he looked when he held one of his bunnies. I missed all of him. And I couldn’t stand to go another day with all this nothingness between us.
We needed a grand gesture. The tropiest of tropes. The heart and soul of every eighties rom-com. The very thing I’m pretty sure had turned my mom into a lifelong romantic. And I had the best/worst idea on what to do.
I went down to the basement and dug out Gram’s old boom box from the 1980s, and blessed her for never throwing anything away. It probably didn’t work since it had been rotting in the basement for at least twenty years, but it didn’t matter. I had Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” already downloaded on my phone. It would have to do. I’d stand in front of Paxton’s bedroom window like Lloyd stood outside Diane’s in Say Anything, and it would be cheesy and sweet and awful enough that he would have to talk to me.
I went out the front, around the house, and cut through the woods to Paxton’s. Bumblebees hummed over wildflowers as the morning sun cast a greenish glow through the canopy of leaves. The world still rolled on peacefully, while my insides twisted worse than the summer storms that would blow our kiddie pool into the next neighborhood. This had to work. I wanted him, I missed my friend, and I was tired of waiting for him to figure out how much he missed me too. Besides, I’d already been humiliated, shamed, lost all sense of right and honesty, so it wasn’t like I had a whole lot more to lose. Like Midnight had said, sometimes you just had to go through it before you figured out what you were really made of.
I’d just reached the top of the hill, when I spotted an unfamiliar car in the driveway. Lisbeth stood on the front porch in her nursing home uniform. Loose tendrils of gray hair had come undone from her bun. Gigi was next to Lisbeth, her arm around Paxton, who kept his head down, as if waiting for the ground to swallow him up. The three of them stood before a middle-aged couple. The woman had soft brown hair, the same shade as Paxton’s, and she was crying. The man next to her frowned, and the familiar expression stirred something in me. Even though the man was years older, I’d seen the same look on Paxton’s face the night I’d told him about my arrangement with Eric. Same nose, same jawline, same downward tilt of his mouth.
A lead weight dropped in my stomach as the realization set in. I was looking at Paxton’s parents. The ones everyone assumed were dead.
A twig snapped under my foot and everyone turned to look at me standing at the edge of the property line. Paxton lifted his head, and when he caught my gaze, the fear pouring out of him nearly knocked me over. It was a million times worse than the day he’d shown up at my house when the bloggers were there. A worry line creased across Gigi’s forehead as she looked between the two of us. My palms were sweating so bad, I nearly dropped the boom box. Then I hurled the boom box into the woods, because I suddenly realized how immensely ridiculous I must’ve looked. I didn’t know what to say or what to do with my body.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I choked out. “I’m not really here. You didn’t see me. I’m so sorry.”
Without waiting for anyone to respond, I backed away and disappeared into the trees.