CHAPTER

30

I’m on the couch reading a comic, which is where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing for the past week since getting home from the hospital. I’ve got a blanket tucked around my legs, a big old bowl full of buttery popcorn on the end table, and absolutely no pudding in sight. Even better, this comic isn’t about kissing at all. It’s not about romance or crushes or anything awful like that. It’s about a bunch of kids on the run from their villainous parents.

Which means, it’s basically the perfect story.

Kate keeps pacing around the house, shooting me all these worried looks. I don’t know why, though. I’ve basically turned into a couch potato and I’m not asking her to do anything like surf the treacherous Atlantic or dye my hair some other wild color. In fact, I plan on asking Dave to take my surfboard to the dump and seeing if Kate will help me dye my hair back to black.

So, Kate should be happy. Kate should be ecstatic. I’m all safe and sound, tucked away in my little cocoon. True, I’ve barely said a word in the past week. Like, yes and no and that’s about it. It’s hard to talk when you’re in a cocoon. But that’s better than being in the big wide world that just wants to stomp all over me.

Still, Kate’s constantly got that wrinkle between her eyes that means she wants to talk and probably talk about Lena.

Well, no thanks. Lena’s called and texted about a billion times since I was at her house—her house, where she actually lives with Janesh and has for the past eight weeks—but I always ignore her.

She hasn’t texted at all today. Maybe she’s finally given up on me, which is fine by me. She has Samaira. She has Janesh. No wonder she took so long to come back and find me. She doesn’t even need me anymore.

I rub my chest right where my scar splits me in two, which feels achy all the time lately.

“Sunny?” Kate says.

I keep my nose buried in the comic.

She lifts my feet and sits down on the end of the couch, setting my legs in her lap. I glance up long enough to confirm the telltale wrinkle and then look back down at my comic.

She sits there for a second, rubbing my feet. Behind us, the window is open, letting in the balmy air of a truly magnificent summer day. The air is warm but not stifling, and the sky is a perfect cloudless blue, the sun bright. I breathe in the salty air. I breathe it in real deep, because I also haven’t been outside since getting home from the hospital. Not even onto the porch.

Apparently this, along with me not talking all that much and never asking to do anything fun ever, is doing the exact opposite of making Kate happy.

“Do you want to go have a picnic on the beach?” she asks.

“No thanks.”

“How about a movie?” she asks. “We could drive into Port Hope and go to the theater. There’s that new Pixar out. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

“No.”

“Sunny. Sweetheart.”

“I just want to read, okay?”

She sighs. “Sunny, I know this is hard—”

“Nothing is hard. Everything is fine.”

“Sweetie, you love Lena. I know you do. I know it hurts that she didn’t tell you the truth about her family. I wish she’d told you too, but you have to understand that her disease is complicated.”

I sigh and let my book drop in my lap. A bunch of words crowd into my mouth and I let them loose. “I’m so tired of complicated. Grown-ups are always saying stuff like that, like kids can’t handle anything, but really, you’re the ones who can’t handle it. You’re the ones who are scared.”

It’s more than I’ve said in days and it leaves me all out of breath.

Kate sighs. “Yeah. You’re probably right about that.”

I stare at her and she stares at me.

“But we’re all trying here,” she says. “I worry that you—”

But whatever she was going to say is cut off by the doorbell. My whole body goes tense, just like it has every time my phone has buzzed in the past two days, because it’s always Lena.

Kate gets up to answer the door and I throw the blanket off my legs, ready to bolt to my room and lock myself inside. I’m halfway to the hallway when I see a flash of purple.

Lavender, to be exact.

I freeze and look back toward the front entryway.

“Hi, Quinn, how are you?” Kate says.

“I’m okay, Kate, thanks.” Quinn shifts from foot to foot. She’s got on a gray tank top with little rainbows all over it, and a cute navy blue bag with a big aquamarine whale on it hangs from her shoulder. “Is it okay that I’m here?”

“Of course, honey.”

Quinn smiles and nods. “Is Sunny here?”

I mean to tiptoe all the way to my room and then pretend to be asleep, but my feet won’t move. For real, they’re glued to the hardwood.

“She is. She’s just on the—”

Kate sees the empty couch and looks around. I’m not hard to spot, because, as I said, I’m cemented to the floor right near the hallway. Quinn sees me at the same time and does this awkward finger-wiggling wave thing.

“Hi,” she says.

I blink at her.

Her shoulders slump.

Kate looks back and forth between the two of us and then clears her throat. “Well… I’ll be in my room if you need me, okay?” She squeezes my shoulder and then kisses the top of my head before starting toward her bedroom.

I want to grab on to her and make her stay, but I don’t. I just stand there, my heart pounding and my eyes already aching from tears building up. I didn’t think it would feel like this to see Quinn again, but it’s terrible. Awful. I’m mortified and I’m pretty sure my cheeks are bright red and I’m so, so tired of feeling like this.

Of feeling wrong and weird and like I’ll never be good enough for anyone.

“What’re you doing here?” I ask. It comes out sharper than I meant it to, but then again, maybe it comes out exactly the way it should.

Quinn takes a couple more steps into the living room. “I heard you were in the hospital. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“I heard about Lena too. That she, well, you know…”

“Has a whole new family?”

Quinn winces and looks at me all sad. I hate it.

“How did you hear that?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Small town, I guess.”

“Great. That’s just great.”

“That must’ve been hard. Finding out that she—”

“Look, I really don’t want to talk about this.” And I really, really don’t want to talk about it with a girl I tried to kiss. My cheeks go all warm just thinking about it. I want to dive under my bedcovers and never come out.

Quinn frowns but nods. “I came by because I wanted to show you something. Is that okay?”

“I guess.”

She walks over to the couch and sits down, setting her bag at her feet. I don’t budge. Instead, I lean against the doorframe, still halfway in the hall. She watches me for a couple of seconds, but then I guess she figures out that I’m not moving.

“Okay, well…” she says, and opens up her bag. “I just… I wanted to show you…” She gulps some more air and stares into her bag. “Look, I’m really nervous. I’m worried you’ll be mad and I know I already messed everything up.”

Her voice is all trembly and soft and it makes me take a tiny step closer. Just a little one.

“Anyway,” she says. “Okay, here goes.” Then she digs into her bag and pulls out a clear soda bottle with a cork stuffed into the top.

It has a piece of rolled-up paper inside.

My heart just about pops out the top of my head. Before I can think, I’m across the room and on the couch, sitting right next to her. I take the bottle in my hands and turn it this way and that. I can see my handwriting peeking through a corner on the paper inside, written in dark purple ink.

It’s my thank-you poem to my heart donor, the one I sent out into the ocean my first day back on the beach.

“What… where did you find this?” I ask.

“On the beach down by our cottage.”

“When?”

“The day after we met.”

“Did you… did you read it?”

She smiles a little and nods. “Yeah. I figured, it’s a message in a bottle and it’s supposed to be read, right? I’ve never found one and I thought it was amazing. So, yeah, I read it. I didn’t know it was you, though. I promise, I didn’t.”

“How do you know it’s me now?”

She swallows so hard I hear the gulp. “After I found out about your heart transplant, I wondered, because of what the poem talks about. But then… well, I found another one.”

My eyes go wide. “You did?”

She dips back into her bag and pulls out a piece of paper. It has writing on it. Familiar writing. So familiar it makes my heart swell into my throat like a balloon. I take it from her and smooth it over my lap.

I woke up smiling

because I fell asleep

with your voice in my ear…

It’s the poem I wrote about Quinn after we talked on the phone all night along. At the time, I was just writing about my new best friend, but now, after I tried to kiss her and know that I like like her, my words make my palms sweat.

“I found it that day we went to the pool,” Quinn says. My stomach flip-flops, just thinking about being with her under that waterfall. “After you left,” she goes on, “I walked around the pier and ended up by that humpback whale statue.”

“And you just… took it?”

She winces. “I’m sorry. I was climbing up on the whale and I saw a piece of paper sticking out of its mouth. I remembered you’d been standing over there when I got to the pool, so it made me wonder, you know? So I took it out and read it. I figured, if you put it there, you must not mind if someone reads it, right?”

I don’t say anything, because, yeah, that’s exactly why I put it there. Except I never imagined someone would turn out to be Quinn.

“Anyway,” she says. “When I got home, I compared it with the poem from the bottle and the handwriting looked the same.”

I glue my eyes to the poem, speechless.

“I wanted you to know I found them,” she goes on. “Because… because I wanted you to know that someone read them. And someone loved them. A lot.”

I glance up at her and she’s staring right at me. Her eyes are kind of shiny and I try not to feel about her the way I felt about her a few days ago, but I can’t help it. It’s all still there, swirling in my chest and my gut.

“Okay,” I say, and look away from her. Then I scoot away from her a little too.

“There’s a couple more,” she says, as she pulls out a few more sheets of paper. I spy my handwriting again, scrawled over the ripped-out notebook paper, the poems I wrote after Kate said I couldn’t see Lena for a while.

I wish I was a mermaid.

If I lived in the sea, I’d never get out…

“And… and this one,” Quinn says, her voice so soft I barely hear her.

“Are you serious?”

She doesn’t answer, but dips back into her bag and brings out—

Oh god.

—a bright blue flyer advertising the Fourth of July bonfire tomorrow night.

“I came by your house that morning after we dyed our hair,” Quinn says. “I wanted to… I don’t know… talk, I guess, but no one was here. Now I know you were in the hospital, but I waited on your porch for a while and I saw something blue stuck in a low branch of that big oak in your front yard. The other ones were in your bushes.” She talks really quiet, like she’s afraid I might explode.

And I just might.

I take the papers from her, but all I see is that bright blue flyer, my messy handwriting filling up the whole back. I remember writing it—panicked, scared, sad, mad—right after I tried to kiss Quinn and she left.

She left me sitting there all alone.

And then after that, everything else fell apart and now I’m still alone and scared and sad and mad.

“Just go,” I manage to say. My fingers tighten on the paper and I’m trying not to lose it. I really am. That would just be the cherry on top, wouldn’t it? To start bawling right there in front of the girl I tried to kiss and scared away who’s now trying to tell me, all sweet and soft and stuff, that she doesn’t like me like that. That she never did, that she never could.

It’s too hard to love a broken heart. Lena proved that.

“Sunny,” Quinn says. “Please, just let me—”

“Just go!” I yell it this time and silence settles between us. Quinn’s breathing hard, but she doesn’t move. I wait… wait… and sure enough, Kate pops her head out of her room.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

I take a deep breath to try to get a grip. Then I nod, even though, no, everything is not okay. Everything is falling apart. Everything keeps falling apart.

Kate doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t go back in her room either. Instead, she wanders into the kitchen and starts getting stuff out to make tea.

Quinn is frozen next to me. I steal a glance at her and her cheeks are wet. I look away.

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she says quietly, and finally, finally stands up and pulls her bag over her shoulder. I sit there, staring at all the papers left on the couch. I can’t look at her. I won’t.

“I’m really sorry,” she says again. Then she puts a new piece of paper I don’t recognize on the coffee table in front of me. It’s folded up into a neat square, just like that first note she gave to Dave inviting me to go on the boat with her and her mom. There’s nothing but a little drawing of a bright yellow sun on the front.

After that, she leaves and I can finally cry and cry and cry.