PAXTON’S PARENTS WERE ALIVE. I had no idea what that meant. He’d been living with Lisbeth and Gigi for nine years, wouldn’t drive, wouldn’t talk about why. Everyone in town assumed his parents had died in a car accident and he had some kind of survivor’s guilt.
Maybe his parents were drug addicts, even though they didn’t really look like it, but Eric hadn’t looked like a vampire, and Midnight certainly didn’t look like the fresh-faced farm girl I knew from school either. Looks were super-deceiving. Or maybe they were horrific abusers. The thought of that made my heart ache. Whatever had happened when Paxton was nine was bad enough that he still didn’t want to talk about it, and I’d just interrupted a very intense family meeting with my boy drama.
I flopped onto a beach recliner in the Hamptons and nearly took off my sandal to dip my feet in the water, when I remembered that Gram had had her raptor foot in there and Mom hadn’t gotten the chance to bleach the pool yet. My next movie review was due to be uploaded tomorrow, but I didn’t have anything prepared, and I didn’t care. I had no energy.
“Hey.” Paxton stood at the edge of the Hamptons, his hands in his pockets.
I nearly fell off my beach recliner. “Hi.”
We stared at each other for what felt like a full minute, not saying anything. I didn’t know if he was waiting for an invitation into the Hamptons. It’s not like I’d ever bothered to ask permission before I’d wandered into his backyard.
“You can sit down,” I said. “Don’t put your feet in the pool.”
“Okay.” He took the lawn chair I’d sat in when Gram and Peg had gotten high. “Do I want to know why you showed up at my house at eight in the morning with a boom box?”
“I was trying to be cute.” I hit play on the Peter Gabriel song on my phone and held my arms over my head where the boom box would’ve been if I hadn’t thrown it into the woods. When he cracked a smile, I shut the song off. “An important moment in cinematic history.”
“You don’t need gimmicks to be cute.” He stared at his hands. “I think you’re cute all the time, just the way you are.”
My face heated. “You do still?”
“I’m sorry.” He knotted his fingers together with his head bent low, as if in prayer. “I’ve been a complete asshole. I know you saw right through my date with Strawberry, but I still shouldn’t have brought her to movie night. Seeing you go viral triggered a lot of things for me, and seeing you embrace it is hard. But you were right. It is your life, and your decision, and my personal issues shouldn’t get in the way of the things you’re trying to do.”
All the lingering doubt I had about keeping things going with Eric vanished. I didn’t need gimmicks or the Fly Ball Girl persona. I just needed to be me. And if that wasn’t good enough for the Twitter masses and my recent subscribers, then I didn’t need their approval anyway. The people I knew, the ones I cared about, liked me just fine.
They were the only ones who mattered.
“I miss you,” I said.
Paxton’s gaze was blazing. “I miss you more than you can possibly know.”
“I’m going to do a thing, and I want you to watch.” And wow, inuendo. Judging by Paxton’s smirk, he hadn’t missed it either. I fumbled with my phone as I strived to recover from my awkward wording. “I’m shutting down the Baseball Babe stuff.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. It’s not good for my mental health.” The constant scrolling, the sleepless nights, the anxiety, the nightmares … I couldn’t do it anymore. Twitter was slowly eating me alive, and the more I engaged, the hungrier it became.
I proceeded to delete every tweet I’d sent in the last week. Next I flipped over to the Video Manager in YouTube. With only a small pang for the lost revenue, I deleted both of my Eric videos. I also deleted the Dirty Dancing video for good measure. The movie my mom had used to teach me about reproductive rights deserved better. And so did the subscribers who’d been with me before Baseball Babe.
“I’m done with all of it.” I stood and Paxton watched me with increasing intensity as I sat on his lap and wrapped my arms around his neck. “I don’t want to be the person who gives away their entire sense of self for clicks. I never wanted to be that person.”
His hand skimmed my bare thigh, which I’d taken the time to shave this morning. “Are you sure that’s what you want? If you need to play the part for YouTube, I’d understand.”
He wouldn’t like it, but he’d understand, because he understood me. The real me. “I’m very sure. Eric is going to be furious, but whatever.”
Speak of the devil and he shall appear. My phone buzzed with a series of texts and I barely glanced at it.
Eric: Macy
Eric: Macy, why are you deleting tweets???
Eric: You BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH!!!
Oops. Someone just checked YouTube.
Eric: Macy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please text me back. I want to help you. I want to give you the life you’ve always dreamed of, the life we both want.
I shut my phone off and threw it into the grass.
Paxton wrapped his arms around my waist and held me tighter. “I’m so sorry. For everything. You had to put up with so much shit this week.”
“Karma will take care of Eric. I hope he gets uncurable anal fleas and has to spend the rest of his days dragging his ass across the floor like the dog he is.”
“Wow.” Paxton’s hands roamed up my back in a gentle stroking motion, and I shivered in response. “You really are Bizzy’s granddaughter.”
I caught his mouth with my own and kissed him. His arms tightened around me, like he was afraid I’d blow away if he didn’t hold on. I nipped his bottom lip, and he tilted my head back, kissing me so deep that my entire body shuddered in response.
“It’s about damn time!” Peg hollered.
We instantly broke apart and looked at the kitchen window, where Peg, Gram, and Donna had their faces pressed against the screen. Grinning like fools, all three of them.
“Don’t you have a quilt to make?” I asked.
“We’re retired. We’ve got nothing but time,” Donna said. “Go on back to your kissing.”
“Sorry, you three ruined the moment. There will be no more kissing today.” I waved them away, and they left the window, grumbling the whole time. I glanced at Paxton and even his ears had gone red. “If you’re going to date me, you might as well get used to this. The Bees are part of the package.”
“I live with a Bee; I know how they are. I’d just prefer not to make out in front of them, if that’s okay with you.”
I laughed and hugged him, wanting that closeness, even if we weren’t kissing. “I’d rather not make out in front of them either, the old pervs. Just wait until I tell you about the conversation Peg and Gram had the other night. I will never be able to scrub it from my brain, and I’m now going to subject you to it so I don’t have to suffer alone.”
He kissed my neck. “There’s no one else I’d rather suffer with more than you.”
I pulled back, skimming my fingers over his cheek. I didn’t want to do anything to dim the light and easiness between us, but … “Do you want to talk about this morning?” I paused. “About your parents?”
“No.” He buried his face in my shoulder. “But I probably should.”
“You don’t have to.” I rubbed his arms.
“I need to.” He lifted his head. “If we’re going to do this me and you thing, I think you need to know some things about me, and decide …” He gulped. “And decide if this is something you still want to do.”
No matter what he said, I wouldn’t walk away from him. It had taken me way too much to get here in the first place. But if he needed to get it off his chest, then I’d be there for him, the way I knew he’d be there for me.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I had a sister.” He turned his head, like he couldn’t stand to look at me while he talked. “Her name was Daisy. She was five and loved art. Her fingers were always covered in chalk dust and no matter how many times my mom washed her hair, she always had streaks of paint in it.”
“She sounds really sweet,” I said. I hadn’t missed the past tense reference.
“She was, and I was her hero, even though I mostly thought she was a pain in the ass when she’d paint on my walls.” He gave a pain-laced smile at the memory, and I’d never seen anything more heartbreaking in my life. “She loved to draw me pictures. Of baseballs and bats and diamonds, and sometimes stick figures of me in uniform.”
My grip on his arm tightened a fraction. “You played baseball?”
“Little League. My dad was the coach.”
“Is that why all this fly ball stuff—”
“No.” He blew out a breath. “Baseball is a smaller trigger, one I can usually handle. Social media, especially the viral stuff, that’s what I have trouble with. And driving.”
“Okay.” I grabbed his hand, in case he needed something to hold on to.
“We had to get to a game. My dad started the car, and then remembered he’d left his wallet on the kitchen table. So he ran back inside to get it. He said he’d be right back.” He choked on the last word and I squeezed his hand.
“You don’t have to tell me any more if this is too much,” I said. Tears hovered in his eyes. Even though I wanted to know what had happened, and wanted him to feel comfortable enough with me to tell me, I would’ve done anything to keep them from falling.
“I’m okay.” He squeezed my hand back. “I just need a second.” He took several deep breaths, like it was a technique he was used to, like he’d had to calm and center himself countless times in the past. “I was restless and horsing around in the car. Normal behavior for nine-year-old boys, according to my therapist.”
“That is normal.” I’d babysat enough a few years ago to know how fidgety and energetic kids at that age could be.
“I’m not there yet. Sometimes I can look back and say I was just being a kid, but those days are few and far between. I’m trying. Therapy helps.”
I’d had no idea he was in therapy. “I’m glad it helps.”
“I found one of my mom’s cloth headbands she wore at the gym, in a cup holder.” He took another deep breath. “I thought it would make a good slingshot. I looped it over the gear shift and pulled it back, and put the car in reverse. We had a steep driveway.”
I could see him then, a nine-year-old boy in his Little League uniform, messing around in the car while his dad ran inside. The fear he must’ve felt when the car shifted into reverse and started rolling backward. He wouldn’t have understood how to stop it.
“I didn’t know.” He paused, his breath coming out faster, more panicked. The tears hovering in his eyes broke free. “I didn’t know Daisy had snuck out of the house with her chalk. That she wanted to draw a picture on the sidewalk, of me winning the game, for good luck.”
I stopped breathing. Stopped hearing sound or seeing anything around me. The pieces of what had happened that day came together. A car rolling backward on a steep drive, a five-year-old girl so caught up in her chalk drawing that she didn’t see it coming toward her. The horror of it crashed into me, and I wanted to scream a warning to that long-ago girl to run, to get out of the way, but she couldn’t hear me. She wasn’t here anymore.
I wrapped my arms around him, and he was shaking so bad. “It was an accident. A horrible, tragic accident. You were just a little boy.”
His tears soaked into my shirt as I held him, rocking from side to side, trying to calm the tremors racking his body. “I still feel it, the impact. The bump of the tires as they ran her over. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I don’t know where I am, and I think I’m back in that car, and my dad is running out of the house, but it’s too late. She’s gone. And I’m the one who killed her. I killed my baby sister, who loved me enough to draw baseballs in every room in our house. I was her hero, and she’s dead because of me.”
“It was an accident.” I held him while he sobbed, murmuring the words over and over again. It was an accident, an accident, an accident. Every beat of my heart hurt for that little boy forced to endure the kind of nightmare most adults couldn’t survive.
I had no idea how much time had passed while I rubbed his back, holding him through it until the tears on my shoulder began to dry. When he finally looked up, his face was bleak and swollen. I brushed away the last of his tears and kissed him gently.
“The days following the accident were hard on my parents.” He had a faraway look in his eyes, but his voice sounded steadier. Like he had to talk his way through the worst of it before he could face the other side. “The media had parked out on our lawn, and they still had to bury their daughter and grieve. They were dragged all over social media. It became a viral story, a cautionary tale about parental neglect. Even though it was my fault.” He stopped, breathed, and started again. “Strangers on Facebook and Twitter took hard swings at my dad for leaving me alone in a running car.”
I didn’t want to tell him that if a story like that had crossed my timeline, I probably would’ve had the same reaction. It was so easy, too easy, to judge people you didn’t know online. To see a tiny slip of their worst moment and make assumptions about them as a whole. And to deal with that while also trying to grieve a lost child … I couldn’t comprehend the toll that would take on a family.
“My parents sent me to live with my grandma and Gigi,” he said. “Just for a little bit, they said. Until the media circus calmed down. My dad was a quality control engineer down in Kansas City. He lost his job over what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. They felt like useless words, but I was at a loss.
“The boss he’d worked under for ten years told him that if he couldn’t even keep an eye on his own children, then he probably couldn’t be trusted to keep an eye on the parts in the shop. He said that to my dad three days after we buried Daisy.”
“What the fuck?” I didn’t mean to yell that out loud, but what kind of a monster would say something like that to a grieving father?
“My dad was a villain online; the hate was so strong, it spilled over onto everything. Their friends stopped talking to them because they didn’t want to be associated and catch even an ember of the heat directed my parents’ way.”
“I’m so, so sorry. None of you deserved that.”
“My dad couldn’t get another job. Every time a prospective employer googled him, it was all over. They eventually changed our family name.” That was why I hadn’t been able to find anything on him when I googled. “My parents left KC and moved to St. Louis. My dad got a job, and eventually the Internet moved on to their next scandal. They didn’t bring me home, though, and after a year or two, I stopped expecting them to.”
“Why not?” My heart broke all over again for Paxton, left alone to deal with what had happened. What it must’ve felt like to know he’d been abandoned.
“Part of it was because, with Gigi, I’d started to get better. She introduced me to raising rabbits for show, and having something small and innocent to care for, to know the rabbits depended on me, it was like a different sort of therapy. One I desperately needed. If she hadn’t done that, I would’ve taken my own life years ago.”
My hand clenched his on instinct. He always said raising rabbits saved him. I didn’t know he meant that literally. “You’re not thinking of doing that anymore, are you?”
He shook his head. “I’ve had a lot of therapy, both clinical and with the rabbits. I still have bad days, but they aren’t nearly as bad as they used to be, or nearly as often. I’m learning how to live with it. I’m learning how to live.”
“Do your parents visit often?” I hadn’t spent a ton of time over at Paxton’s house, but they couldn’t have come to visit that often if everyone in town thought they were dead.
“They don’t. I think it’s easier for them to stay away. Because part of them … even though they don’t want to admit it, part of them blames me still. And I can’t do anything about that. They love me, but it’s hard. All of it is hard for all of us.”
That even a part of them could blame him for an accident like that made a fierce anger roll within me, but I checked it for his sake. “Why did they come today?”
He turned his head away from me. “My mom is pregnant. They’re going to try to start a family again, and they wanted to tell me in person.”
“Are you okay?” I placed my hands on his cheeks. “I keep saying I’m sorry because I don’t know what else to say, but if there is anything I can do, I’ll do it.”
“You don’t have to do anything. Being here, not running from me, is more than I could’ve hoped for.” He took my hands and kissed both of them. “I’m fine with my mom’s pregnancy, or as fine as I can be, I guess. To be honest, they haven’t felt like my parents in a really long time. I’m not angry at them for shutting me out. I’m not expecting to be part of their new family. I wish them well, but my feelings for them are very distant and healed over. Like watching someone else’s life from a telescope.”
I understood why he’d tried to warn me when I first went viral, the kind of fear he felt for me. I even understood why he’d gotten so angry when I played into it. The kind of memories it dredged up for him turned my veins ice-cold. What his family had faced, what he had faced, once the wolves of the Internet had sunk their teeth in was unimaginable. They already had to live through the worst, but to have it used against them day after day was nothing short of hell. Paxton had already lived through it, knew what it had done to his family, and he saw the same thing happening to me.
For the first time since I’d gone viral, I had no desire to check Twitter.