RACHEL CALLS THE NEXT MORNING JUST AS I’M getting out of the shower.
“Hi, Rach.” I pull my bathrobe tighter around me and sit on my bed, wondering if she’s going to start in on her upcoming visit with Mom and if I’ve changed my mind about going with her. It’s too early in the morning for that.
But all she says is “Hey, Morgan. I just emailed you my flight itinerary for next week. I’ll be getting in at eight twenty p.m. on the nineteenth. You and Dad can pick me up at the airport, right?”
“Uh, sure,” I say.
“Great. And I know you guys live off greasy fast food, but can you maybe stock the fridge with some fruits and vegetables before I come?” She pauses. “Actually, never mind. I’ll just go shopping when I get there. Did I tell you I can cook now? Amir taught me. I mean, I don’t get as gourmet as Mom did, but I’m pretty good. Remember that chicken Kiev she used to make? Man, that was yummy. I should get her recipe.”
I do remember the Kiev, and all the other complex meals she used to create. She always said cooking relaxed her. The kitchen was her turf, and sometimes when I think of her, I see her standing at the counter, dark hair falling in her face as she chops vegetables and hums along with the radio.
“Remember the first time she made it? For Dad’s birthday dinner?” Rachel asks, laughter in her voice. “He didn’t end up getting off work until, like, eight, so you and I were dying of hunger. We drove her crazy with our whining.”
I smile a bit as the memory comes back to me. That must have been about six or seven years ago. “And she finally let us have some crackers so we’d stay out of the kitchen.”
“But then we ate the entire box, so when we finally sat down to eat, we were too full to have more than a few bites.”
Now I’m laughing too. “And when you cut into your chicken, butter squirted out and hit you in the face.”
She gasps. “Oh my God! I almost forgot about that. The butter was hot too. It left a big red mark on my chin. I remember you laughing your head off at me. Jerk.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No,” she says with a sigh. “I guess it was pretty funny.”
“Yeah.” My laughter fades, along with the memory, and I’m overcome with this odd sense of homesickness, even though I’m sitting in my bedroom. Rachel has this way of reminding me of the past, of home and how things used to be. I miss her, miss our unbroken family, in a pervasive, deep-down way that’s hard to express in words.
“How are things there?” she asks when I don’t say anything else. “Dad mentioned that he met your new boyfriend. Will I get to meet him too? Maybe we can all go out for dinner one night.”
I stand up, letting the wet towel fall from my hair, and move over to my dresser to dig out a clean bra. “Maybe,” I say, distracted by the sight of the striped bikini that I stole so many weeks ago, still nestled among my underwear. I barely notice it anymore, but sometimes, like now, it’s all I can see. I slide one of the string ties between my fingers until I reach the turquoise bead on the end, remembering the way it dug into my skin. “Rach?”
“Yeah?”
I drop the string, tuck it back into the padded cups. “How did you stop?”
“How did I stop what?”
“The drinking and the pot and all that,” I say, shutting the drawer without taking anything out. “How did you stop?”
She doesn’t answer right away and I squeeze my eyes shut, instantly regretting the question. Maybe it was different for her. She probably didn’t drink to fill a void, or to get relief. A lot of people have vices they’re ashamed of, but stealing isn’t like smoking or drinking or gambling or any other thing that’s vilified but still generally accepted. Stealing is a selfish crime that hurts other people. I know this, but knowing it doesn’t seem to matter.
“I told you this already, Morgan,” she says, and I can almost see her tilting her head, like she does when she’s concerned. “I realized how stupid I was being, so I stopped. That’s basically it. Why?”
I sit back down on my bed. “What if you realize how stupid you’re being and it’s still not enough to make you want to stop? What then?”
Another pause. “Why are you asking me this? What’s going on?”
The confusion in her voice makes me want to suck the words back in. Not even she understands. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“You’re not—please tell me you’re not still shoplifting. Even after getting caught. Please tell me you learned your lesson and won’t ever do that again.”
I wind the bedsheet around my finger, unsure how to respond. I haven’t stolen from a store since the sunglasses, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to, constantly. Every time I’m buying something—milk or tampons or even a pack of gum—I imagine slipping something into my bag. I don’t do it, but the urge is always there, in the background, in my fingers, in the part of my brain that craves the rush of release.
The theft education class talked about identifying feelings and behaviors and challenging automatic thoughts and finding alternative emotional outlets, but I have no idea where to even start. For the past year, shoplifting has been my only outlet. If I stop, what will happen when all this anger builds up and has nowhere to go?
I’ll implode.
“Morgan,” Rachel says when I don’t respond. “Exactly how long have you been doing this? When you got caught . . . that wasn’t the first time you shoplifted, was it?”
I should have known she’d catch on; she can usually figure out what it is I’m not saying. “I have to go,” I tell her, then hang up before she can ask any more questions. Maybe she’s not the one I should be talking to about this. I don’t know who is, but I do know one thing: I don’t want to implode, and I need to start looking for a new method to prevent it. Something that can fill the void for good.
I know the moment I walk in the door after work that Rachel voiced her suspicions to Dad while I was gone. He’s sitting on the couch and staring at nothing, just like the day we got the diversion letter.
“Morgan, sit down,” he says without looking at me. His face is flushed, his nostrils flared. I haven’t seen him this pissed since he picked me up from the mall security office.
“I’m leaving to meet Eli in a half hour. Can it wait?”
“No.” He gestures to the chair.
Great. What is wrong with Rachel lately? We never used to tattle on each other to our parents. She kept my secrets, I kept hers. I guess the rules changed without my knowledge.
I sit down. “Dad, I don’t know what Rachel told you, but I’m not still shoplifting. I swear.” I figure the metal penguin doesn’t count as shoplifting, since I didn’t steal it from a store. Though in a lot of ways, what I did was even worse. I stole it from someone’s house, and I feel more shame over that damn penguin than anything I’ve taken so far. But admitting that to Dad isn’t going to help anything.
“I really hope you’re telling me the truth,” he says, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “I need to be able to trust you, Morgan. I can’t be constantly worrying about you and wondering if you’re going to steal something again.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. Or wonder. I promise, I have not shoplifted since the sunglasses.”
“The sunglasses,” he echoes, finally looking at me. His piercing gaze makes me want to squirm. “And that’s the first thing you ever stole, right? Like you told the police officer? Like you told me?”
Shit. My mind scrambles for something to say that won’t make him enraged, but there’s nothing. “I . . .” At a loss for words, I clamp my mouth shut and swallow.
“The truth,” he says when I don’t finish my sentence. “You’ve done enough lying already.”
He’s right; my first instinct was to lie. Sometimes, with me, lies feel almost automatic. But as the video said, I need to change my automatic thinking, replace my lie and steal impulses with something else. So for the first time in a long time, I try the complete truth.
“The sunglasses weren’t the first time. I’ve shoplifted before.” I address my confession to the floor, unable to look at my father’s face as the words sink in.
“How many times?”
I glance up at him. He’s gazing at the floor too, his forehead creased with stress and disappointment. I can’t believe I keep doing this to him, over and over again. Shame floods through me and my eyes fill with tears.
“I don’t know the exact number,” I say quietly. “It was a lot.”
“A lot,” he mutters. He leans back, shaking his head. “So this is what you’ve been up to while I’ve been busy trying to keep a roof over our heads. Stealing anything you can get your hands on. Great. What else have you been doing?”
I blink the tears away and meet his eyes. “What?”
“What else have you been doing that I don’t know about? Drinking? Drugs?”
“No,” I say emphatically. “I don’t drink or do drugs.” That was Rachel, I almost say, but decide against it. There’s no need to bring her into this. “There’s nothing else. You know everything there is to know, I promise.”
“And how do you expect me to believe anything you say after this, huh?” He springs off the couch and starts walking away, then pauses at the threshold to the living room. He turns to face me again, his expression stony. “I thought I was doing the right thing, letting you stay here with me,” he says in a low voice. “But maybe you would have been better off living with your mother.”
His words sting like a slap. He’s never said anything like that to me before. Maybe he’s thought it, but he’s never made me feel like he didn’t want me. You’re no better than her, he seems to be saying. You two deserve each other.
Maybe he’s right.
I stand up. “Dad—”
“I’m going for a walk.”
He turns and heads for the hallway, leaving me to stand there alone. The door closes behind him with a gentle click, but I flinch as if he’s slammed it shut instead.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be grounded, but Dad’s not around to tell me one way or the other, so I head out to meet Eli as planned.
I’m fifteen minutes late getting to Donovan Lake, where we agreed to meet up at eight thirty. We intended to go for a walk along the wooded trail that borders the water, but now it’s starting to get dark, which will make seeing the path in front of us a little tricky. At this point, it doesn’t really matter to me what we do. Honestly, I don’t feel like doing much of anything, not even with Eli. But I don’t want to be at home either, so here I am.
Eli is waiting in his Jeep in the parking lot. He gets out as I’m pulling into the space next to him.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say as I climb out and meet his gaze across the car’s roof. I try to keep my voice and expression light, even though my chest feels like something heavy has taken up residence on it. Eli was nice enough to let me cry on him the other night; I don’t want to make a habit of it.
“It’s fine,” he says, frowning slightly as he studies me. I must not be hiding my distress as well as I thought.
Determined to put the past hour behind me, I circle around to where he’s standing and take his hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”
He doesn’t budge. “Have you been crying?”
The whole way here. “No,” I say; then I remember about the automatic lies and change my mind. “Yes. But I’m good now. Just a fight with my dad.”
“What was it about? Your mom?”
I shake my head and look away, toward the lake. The air is turning cooler as the sun sets and the only person left in the water is a kayaker, gliding across the surface.
“You can tell me,” Eli says, squeezing my hand. “You can tell me anything.”
Can I? I look back at his face, shadowed in the growing darkness. My family drama didn’t drive him away, but my secret might. Though if I hadn’t shoplifted in the first place, I never would have ended up at Rita’s Reruns, and we wouldn’t be standing here together right now, hands linked. But knowing this doesn’t erase the fact that I’ve been basically lying to him from the start.
“Thanks,” I say, reaching up to kiss him. Maybe I really can tell him anything, but right now, that’s as much as I’m willing to say.