"And next semester?" I counter. "When Danica gets her dad to stop paying my tuition, I'll have to drop out of school. There's no way I can afford it on my own."
"But this semester is already covered, right?" Rowan asks, and I know she has a point. A semester at Mayfield University is more than I would have been able to hope for just a few months ago, and I know that leaving now would be a waste of all the hard work I've done over the past two months. A waste of my uncle's money. A waste of each time I bit my tongue while Danica made me earn every cent of that tuition.
But I don't want to be a burden on Rowan and Adam, or Dee and Joel, or Mike. I know they would let me stay with them for the two months left in the semester, since they're my friends, but it's because they're my friends that I don't want to let them. They didn't sign up to be donors to my charity case of a life . . . This is my problem, not theirs.
"Can't your parents help you?" Dee asks while I'm lost in thought, trying uselessly to figure another way out of leaving.
"If they could, do you think I would've spent the past two and a half months living with Danica?" I sigh and squeeze my eyes shut, already feeling the sting in my heart from saying what I need to say next. But they need to understand-they need to understand that none of this is that easy. My voice is quiet with confession when I explain, "I don't wear thrift-shop clothes because I'm eccentric . . . You two realize that, right?"
"Hailey," Rowan immediately cuts in. "First off, you're beautiful and your clothes are amazing, so shut up with that crap. And second . . ."
When she doesn't finish, I ask, "Yeah?"
"Well . . . I don't really have a second thing yet. Let me think."
The three of us stew in silence while I sit down on Mike's front porch. The cold bites through my back pockets, and in the green Ivy Tech hoodie he rescued for me the first night we met, I wrap my arms around myself.
"I'm going to research scholarships," Rowan finally decides.
"Me too," Dee agrees.
I anchor my stare on the moon, helpless as the world turns round and round and round toward tomorrow. "There's no point," I tell the two girls I've grown to consider close friends. "I've already researched them all."
"Hailey, becoming a vet is important to you . . ." Rowan starts, but I can't think of that right now. I can't because there really is no point. I can't because it hurts.
"I know, but-"
"I'm researching them anyway," Rowan insists, and Dee echoes the plan.
"Me too."
I want to tell them I'll miss them when I leave-I'll miss coffee with them at school, I'll miss their insane phone calls I can't keep up with, I'll miss Dee's crazy texts and Rowan's silly laugh.
"What does Mike say about you leaving?" Rowan asks, and I hold myself tighter against the cold.
"He thinks all this is going to blow over. Like Danica is going to grow a heart overnight or something."
"I still don't understand how he could spend so many years with her and still have no idea who she is," Dee criticizes.
"She was different around him," Rowan argues.
"He knows," I say, and silence creeps into the three-way conversation. I sigh before I continue. "I think Danica was different when he fell in love with her"-the word love feels so gross in that sentence, but I press on anyway-"and he's just been holding out hope these past few weeks that maybe she was still that same person deep down. That maybe she'd come back to life." I know the feeling, because I've felt it myself. But Danica isn't the little girl who giggled in a chicken coop with me, and she's not whoever Mike fell in love with either.
"I think you're right," Rowan says, and the understanding in her voice makes me wonder if she knows the feeling too . . . if she knows what it's like to grieve the loss of someone who's still walking, talking, breathing. "Sometimes it's hard letting go."
"But you shouldn't hold on to a mistake just because you've spent a long time making it," Dee argues, and all three of us agree.
"I'm assuming you told Mike there's no way Danica is going to change her mind about this?" Rowan asks, and I use a frizzy brown curl to cut off the circulation of my pointer finger.
"Yeah. He offered to let me stay with him to finish the semester, but . . ."
"But what?"
"He doesn't know that it's not just the apartment that Danica's family pays for. He doesn't know they pay for my tuition, my bills, my groceries-"
"Why don't you want him to know?" Rowan wonders, and I guess this is the part that I need to say out loud . . .
"Because it's embarrassing." Embarrassing. Embarrassing. I know I shouldn't feel it, but there it is. "I hate that I have to bring coffee from home. I hate that I can never buy clothes with real tags on them. Mike is this freaking rock star, and-"
"Mike doesn't care about any of that," Rowan interrupts.
"I know that, but-"
"But nothing. Do you hear me? Mike doesn't care about that stuff. Mike isn't a rock star. Mike is just Mike."
As if on cue, yellow light spills onto the porch when the door creaks open. Mike pokes his head out and sees me with my arms wrapped around myself. "Hey, sorry to interrupt, but . . . it's cold. Do you want a jacket?" He holds a black canvas jacket out for me, and my heart constricts when I accept it.
"Thanks."
"I ordered pizza," Mike says. "They didn't have banana peppers, but I got you olives."
My throat is thick when I thank him again, and when he disappears back inside, I squeeze my eyes shut tight against the sting of the air.
"I still say you should screw his brains out tonight," Dee suddenly suggests, and my nose is stuffy when I laugh. "Look," she insists, "if you really are leaving soon, I say you should go out with a bang."
Crickets.
"Get it? Bang?"
"That was so corny," Rowan scoffs, but none of us can keep from laughing. And that's why I love them-because even on my worst night, they can make me laugh. It's why I'm going to miss them, along with Mike and school and the dog shelter and everything else about this town.
Well, almost everything.
I eventually make an excuse to get off the phone, and I promise the girls I won't leave until we explore every option. I know that Rowan is going to stay up all night researching scholarships and housing solutions for me and that nothing I can possibly say will stop her from doing so. And I know that Dee's grand plan is probably to physically hold me down until she can brainwash me into marrying Mike and having a dozen of his babies, because she refuses to believe he only likes me as a friend. But I don't try to change their minds. I just let them care about me. I let them care about me because, when I inevitably have to move back to Indiana, I need to know that this mattered somehow, that all of this wasn't for nothing.
Inside the house, Mike and I sit side by side on the couch, game controllers in hand, pizza slices on paper plates beside us, beers on the table in front of us. We join a map with Kyle the PussySlayer and bomb the ever-loving hell out of him until I laugh so hard, I forget about real life. I forget about needing to leave. There is nothing but the way Mike laughs with me, the way he turns to me and smiles.
"What?" I ask sometime around 3 a.m., giggling at the expression on his face.
"I think this might just be the best night of my life."
I snort. "You've had too much to drink."
He shakes his head, that goofy smile still plastered on his face. "No, I'm serious."
"I think you mean delirious." When he just keeps grinning at me, a blush spreads across my cheeks. "You need to go to bed."
"Come with me."
That blush turns into hot, molten wildfire. "I'm not tired."
Mike sets his controller on the couch. "Come anyway."
My nose catches fire. My ears catch fire. My neck catches fire. "Why?"
"So I don't have to stay up."
"I'm pretty sure you can go to bed without me."
"Yeah," Mike says, turning a remote toward the TV and shutting it off, "but I don't want to."
Chapter 21
I'm not sure what being on drugs feels like, since I've never done any, but I imagine it must feel a lot like having Mike Madden order you to go to bed with him. Reality spins, time picks up speed, and my whole body buzzes with nervous anticipation.
It's late-really late-and I'm pacing back and forth in Mike's hallway bathroom. My fuzzy blue socks eat a line into the slate-gray tile.