Left Drowning

Until now.

The next evening we go to Lani and Tim’s party. Lani hugs me so tightly that I nearly lose my breath, and it’s wonderful. James flirts, I can’t help noticing, with anyone vaguely close to his age, and the girls love it. I eat fancy hors d’oeuvres and drink one glass of champagne. I sing wretched, awful Christmas carols at the top of my lungs. I speak to my high school pal Nichole for about thirty minutes. There is no discussion of dead parents or my catatonic state during our senior year of high school, and we exchange phone numbers. Next summer, after graduation, she is pla

The night is pretty fucking magical.

I’m very aware of how well I am operating in situations that I would have been incapable of broaching even last summer. Chris, Sabin, Eric, and Estelle have rescued me, and I can’t fathom how I can ever begin to repay them.

James acts like he hates it, but I make him get into bed before midnight because when we were growing up, we were required to be in bed while it was still Christmas Eve and not one minute into Christmas. It was some weird ritual that my parents had. I did, for one minuscule second, have the thought that James and I should go to midnight mass tonight—an exception my parents occasionally made to their rule—but I dismiss it. I may be pushing it, but I actually get James to tolerate my making a big show of tucking him in and giving a mock lecture about how Christmas will be ruined if he so much as gets up to go to the bathroom. He rolls his eyes and smiles at me, which I think is fantastic, and demands to know why I am not in bed, too.

“Because I am an elf, dummy. And elves must work late into the evening and do secret … elf crap or whatever. Now go to sleep!” I hear him try to hide a giggle as I leave.

I putz around the living room some more. James’s stocking is bursting, absolutely bursting, when I finish filling it, and then I head into the laundry room to throw in another round of his laundry. The second half of the duffel’s contents that I load into the washer smell just as disgusting as one would expect a college boy’s to. I also have the gross experience of finding a box of condoms in his bag. Awesome. My little brother has had sex before I have. Should I have some kind of sex talk with him? Ick. Probably not.

But maybe.

Before I go to bed, there is one thing that I want to do. I kneel in front of the Christmas tree and snoop around. James has left me a few presents under the tree, which I find incredibly thoughtful. Actually, more than a few, I notice. Huh. Usually he gets me a shirt from his college and one or two other small things. And I have presents from Eric, Estelle, and Sabin, too. This is so much more than I need right now.

However, that does not stop me from finding the blue box with the green ribbon from Chris. I want to open this alone. I’m sure that he has not gifted me anything inappropriate that would embarrass me in front of James, but I still want to be alone for this. There is a small envelope attached to the box with a card. I hesitate to open it, which is stupid because it’s not as though Chris will have written some dramatic and romantic confession of the heart on a two-inch-by-two inch-card. And not that I want that anyway.

The card actually is a confession of sorts. It says: This belongs to you. I have no idea why. I’m weird. I laugh out loud. Inside the box is a mass of tissue paper and Bubble Wrap, and it takes a few minutes of unwrapping to find what’s inside.

I don’t know why this belongs to me either, but I agree that it does. Chris has given me a beautiful porcelain sea urchin. The main color of the shell is the palest green, nearly white, with darker green and white dots that line and texture the piece where the spines would have fallen off. They tickle my hand as I gently touch its exterior.

I love it. I love it more than anyone should love a porcelain sea urchin, and I don’t care that my adoration for this little thing doesn’t make sense. I set it on the floor in front of me, lie down on my stomach, and prop my chin in my hands. For twenty minutes I stare at it.

This is, and will always be, the most spectacular present I’ll ever receive.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Blame(less)

Christmas morning is great. I keep us moving so that there is not much time to overthink how fucked up the day is and how inexcusably awful it is that we are alone on such a major holiday. I blast music and giggle to myself when the radio station plays Michael Bublé, and we open presents and eat an enormous breakfast. James gives me presents that do not include any college sweatshirts, and I suspect that his girlfriend helped him pick out the perfume, fancy makeup, and shimmery scarf. I like her even more. He seems to really love the clothes, gift cards, overly expensive headphones, and new phone that I got for him, and it is great to see him happy.

Estelle got me an utterly gorgeous deep purple off-the-shoulder top and a designer handbag, and the gift bag from Sabin holds a beautiful silver cuff bracelet. Eric outdid himself by giving me my pretend genie wishes: a basket of small alpaca-stuffed animals, a can of whipped cream, and huge gel inserts that I could stick into my bra to achieve triple-D breasts. I have to explain the odd collection to James, who seems momentarily concerned about this new group I am hanging out with. The presents from my friends overwhelm me.

James and I watch action movies and stuff ourselves silly. It is a great goddamn day.

While my brother spends a lot of his vacation out with his high school friends, I spend a lot of time dealing with online banking and bill-paying arrangements. I want to take over all of the stuff that Lisa has been doing, something that I should have done the day that I turned twenty-one and could legally manage all of our finances. It’s a monstrous amount of paperwork and a big game of phone tag with our lawyer and accountant, but I straighten out some incredibly boring property issues and make irritatingly grown-up financial decisions. I make arrangements for the house to be maintained while James and I are back at school, and I get in touch with the property manager who has been overseeing the house in Maine and making sure it doesn’t topple into the ocean. I confirm with him that, no, I do not want to rent it out.

Every phone call sucks to all hell, but I get shit accomplished, and I feel in control.

The most important thing that I do is send an e-mail. I write A

There are frequent texts and pictures from Sabin , a video of the four of them waving and yelling hellos at me from a Hawaiian beach, and the occasional text from Chris to see how I am, but I am careful not to let myself obsess over my communication with them. This is my time to myself and time to be with James, and I’m thrilled that we’ve made it two and a half weeks without a scene.

And then we have a shitty conversation, James and I.

To be fair, it is what I thought I wanted—an honest exchange.

And it fucking hurts, and it fucking sucks.

Yet it’s necessary.

James is sitting in the corner of the sectional in the living room watching television, and he interrupts my reading. “Blythe?”