PRESENT DAY
I’m encased by thorns as the last piece of her story wilts away. Flipping the pages, there’s nothing left. The grave of the tin-can telephone sits empty, and this is it. After all this, she’s standing alone on that stage. She lost the love, lost her home, lost it all except the dream that wasn’t enough for her anymore.
“Mia . . .” Britt starts.
I shake my head, the pages crumple slightly, and that just makes me want to cry more because I ruin everything I touch, I . . . can’t stop the sobs.
“This is it ?” I wave the pages and Britt gently pulls them from my grasp, wrapping her arms around me. “Where’s my dad? Where’s her dream? Where’s that surety?”
“Here.” She places her hand over my heart, but her tone wavers. “There’s got to be more. Maybe we didn’t find all of it. There’s no purpose to this being the end.”
I cry into her shoulder, and it all comes out. There’s no purpose to this ending. Tori Rose was taken too soon, she shined too bright, and every word on those last pages makes me think she really did wish she hadn’t shot so high.
How is this it? After that last chapter where it seemed so clear she was desperate to have it all, how could she end up with nothing? How could she point me this way all this time just to sweep my revelations away with reality?
As Britt holds me, I wrap my arms around her too, trying to stay here. I try not to let it all spiral down and lose my breath and my heart and everything just like my mother did. When I can breathe again, Britt and I search the garden, the grounds, every envelope within my purse. There is nothing, nothing to fix this, nothing to show what she meant.
She did all this for me, and I ruined that too because I was so sure, so convinced I knew her message. I was so confident that I figured it out beneath the rose-tainted spotlight in the theater yesterday. Everything felt right with Britt, with Lost Girls, with the music, everything. But it felt right to Tori Rose too. Maybe dreams are always meant to fade, maybe we fall for their illusion and that’s just what it is—an illusion, bright and bursting and never meant to be held.
The words blur again, the envelopes melt together before my eyes. And everything makes more or less sense as I stare at them lined up along the gravel path and note the pattern.
Regret You.
It’s where her career led, where her music led, where her hunt for me led. Hell, even the poster one of the entries was hidden behind was from that album. The message couldn’t have been clearer if it slapped me in the face.
“She . . .” I cover my mouth. I’m going to throw up. “I thought I knew. I thought I figured this out. I thought she was telling me to go and do this.”
We’ve reached the front again, and we fall onto the porch swing. Those initials she carved into it taunt me. TR + DS were here. What does she want me to get from that—from any of this?
I love Britt, I love the music, I love this band, but my mom is telling me that’ll just make it harder when I inevitably lose them all.
I race to the railing, and everything inside of me comes out over those perfect pink roses.
“I don’t think that’s the ending.” Britt shakes her head, holding back my hair as I heave. She rubs my back softly, close to tears herself. I hate that I make her cry with me; I hate that I make her hurt. I hate myself for every moment I’ve caused her pain and every grief-stricken spell I’ve ever cast across the people I love by being and looking like Tori Rose.
Maybe I was right all along and none of this changes that. Maybe it’s good for her to lose me. Maybe she’s better off that way. Maybe I’ll just keep hurting her.
Britt continues. “When you think of the effort she had to put into this hunt, why would this be the ending she chose? Especially when . . .”
She doesn’t have to finish. I know her well enough—and I know this town’s favorite tragic tale of stardom well enough—to know what she was going to say. Especially when this was the only ending she got to choose.
“What if this was it, though?” My fingers dig into my arms as if I can wake myself up to a world where my mom is here and takes this back. Each inhale stabs, each exhale sets the tears loose again. “What if she’s trying to show me everything she regrets? She was so eager to leave. What if she regrets it all? What if she regrets the journey?”
“Mia.”
“What if she regrets Patrick and David or whoever my dad is?”
“Mia.”
“What if she regrets the dream?”
“Mia.” Britt’s voice cracks, and she wipes my tears with her thumbs, kisses the spots they left their marks. “Please, Mia. Babe, just breathe.”
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. “What if she regrets me?”
Britt’s silence in response to this question tells me to look her way. “You’re not your mom, Mia. You’re not.” It should be a relief, it should be an insult, I should know how to feel about that.
But my entire life, I’ve been shown how I am or am not her. My entire existence is a Venn diagram between me and Tori Rose. Maybe I got too much of the bad, too much of her tragedy, too much of the music’s curse.
I thought I was finally finding the truth. Maybe I just had. I guess, if these clues say anything, maybe the truth just wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“What if that’s us?” I whisper my fears as Britt rests her arm around my shoulders. I just want her to say we’ll be okay. I just want her to promise that we won’t fall apart. I’ve never been more scared to lose her, to lose everything—what’s the difference?—to the open road. “What if we regret it too?”
Britt shakes her head. “Mia, I’ve seen you this week. I’ve seen you for years as you come into the music and refuse it. She doesn’t own it. Her story doesn’t own you.”
“Neither of us know her. Not really.”
“I know you.”
“I don’t know me.” Sobs choke me again, and I’m so fucking lost.
I remember when Britt told me how the band decided on the name Lost Girls. “To love the music is to never grow up, right?” And I knew then and there that to love a girl was to know that you had to, sometimes without her.
I say, “I thought I’d finally decided who I am, but I don’t know. I don’t want to pick the wrong plan. Britt, what if this is the wrong plan?”
Another beat of silence passes.
Her words are too careful, too measured like my question sliced too deep. “Mia, just focus on this.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ve told you I can’t stay,” Britt says. She scoots away from me—the distance between us is earthshaking, groundbreaking. Her eyes speak sorrows, but body language speaks distance. “I have to leave in two days. I’m not questioning the plan now.”
“Why not?” I whisper for the first time. Why won’t she save herself ?
She doesn’t meet my eyes—I’ve finally ruined this thing between us. I can tell from the curve of her lips and dimness in her gaze at the question. Last night we found each other, and now I’ve already lost us again. “You don’t get to ask me that. Even if you’re not, I’m sure about this, and your mom’s ending doesn’t change that. It doesn’t have to change if you’re sure either.”
“I thought I was.” My mother’s absence hits harder than it ever has—because the goodbye I had before, which was nothing, was nowhere near as painful as this, and I didn’t think that was possible.
“And now you’re not?” Britt says.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m sure about you, Britt. That won’t change. But if she’s trying to tell me—”
And I break her too. “Mia, I can’t do this. I love you. I want you there, but I can’t watch you hurt yourself like this. I’m done watching you be scared. Do you love the music?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s find the answers together,” she says. “Let’s not do this. Not again. Take a second and tell me what your dreams are saying to you, not what your mother is—your own dreams.”
The pause is heavier, and the weight comes back, threatens to crush me for good.
“My dreams don’t speak to me,” I lie, and her eyes call me on it, but her lips don’t.
Britt’s expression closes, too neutral and all guarded. “Then that’s your first mistake.” She starts to walk away.
“Britt, I’m sorry.”
Britt shakes her head, walks backward along the drive, wiping furiously at her eyes. “Stop just saying that. If you’re sorry for everything, what’s the point? What’s the point of this, any of it, if you refuse to do something and mean it? I know how much you want to know her, but you know her enough that you can’t honestly tell me she’d want you to stay here and play it safe. All you do is play it safe.”
“I . . .”
Britt takes another step back. “Mia. I can’t do this. I’m not staying. I’m not questioning my dream. I’m not doing this.” This time I know she’s done with me, and the two goodbyes before me tangle together and hit me with the force of a riptide. She turns on her heel without another word.
“Britt, I’m so sorry.” I stop right behind her on the sidewalk.
She pauses at her car, back to me, arms still crossed. “Do you need a ride home?”
“No, I need you,” I say, and it aches harder when the words leave than when I hold them inside.
“I need to go,” she says, and without looking at me again, she slips into her car. “I’ll say goodbye now to make it easier for us both.”
I stand there, on the cracked sidewalk beneath the summer sun and know this thing between us is finally mine to lose, and I did. She drives away, and I’m left with a crumpled, hopeless diary entry in my hand, envelopes and lyrics behind me, and nothing to show for it.