Chapter One

Relentless Addiction

MOM IS TOO TIRED TO play hide-and-seek. Her stomach hurts so she took some medicine to make it feel better. I don’t like it when she’s sick. Grandma Patty doesn’t know about Mom’s stomachaches and I haven’t seen Grandma in a few weeks, but I’m starting to think I should tell her.

Mom is asleep on the sofa; at least, I think she’s asleep. I can’t really tell the difference anymore. Sometimes, when I think she’s sleeping, I’ll try to sneak some cookies out of the cupboard. She usually hears me and yells at me to get out of the kitchen. Sometimes, she sleeps with her eyes half-open so I wave my hands in front of her eyes and make silly faces at her. She never wakes up and I always get bored after a couple of minutes. It’s no fun teasing someone unless there’s someone else around to laugh, and it’s just Mom and me in this house.

Her skinny arm is stretched out over the edge of the sofa cushion and I stare at the bandage. It’s too small to cover that big sore. One of those things she calls an abscess opened last night while she was making me a grilled cheese sandwich. Some thick, brown stuff oozed out of her arm. It reminded me of the glaze on maple donuts, but it didn’t smell anything like a maple donut. The whole kitchen smelled like stinky feet when she put her arm under the water in the sink. Then she wrapped a billion paper towels around her arm and I had to eat a burnt sandwich.

She didn’t want to go to the doctor. She said that if she goes to the emergency room and shows them her arm the doctors might make her stay in the hospital for a long time. Then I’ll have to live with people I don’t know, people who might hurt me, until she gets better. My mom loves me a lot. She doesn’t want anybody to hurt me the way she was hurt when she was nine.

Mom teaches me a lot. She isn’t just my mom; she’s my teacher. When she isn’t sick, she teaches me math and spelling, but my favorite subject is science. I love learning about the planets the most. I want to be an astronomer when I grow up. Mom said that I can be anything I want to be if I just keep reading and learning. So that’s what I do when she’s sick. I read.

She’s been asleep for a long time today. I’ve already read two chapters in my science book. Maybe I should try to wake her up. I’m hungry. I can make myself some cereal—I am seven—but Mom promised she’d make me spaghetti today.

I slide off the recliner and land on the mashed beige carpet that Mom always says is too dirty for me to sit on. I take two steps until I’m standing just a few inches away from her face. Her skin looks weird, sort of grayish-blue.

“Mom?” I whisper. “I’m hungry.”

Something smells like a toilet and I wonder if it’s the stinky abscess on her arm. I shake her shoulder a little and her head falls sideways. A glob of thick, white liquid spills from the corner of her mouth.

The memory dissolves as someone calls my name.

“Claire?”

The cash register comes into focus as the rich aroma of espresso replaces the acrid stench in my memory. I’ve done it again. For the third time this week, I’ve spaced out while taking someone’s order. The last two customers were understanding, but this guy in his Tap Out T-shirt and veins bulging out of his smooth bald head looks like he’s ready to jump over the counter and either strangle me or get his own coffee.

“Sorry, about that. What was your order?”

“Wake the fuck up, blondie. I asked for an Americano with two Splendas. Jesus fucking Christ. There are people with serious jobs who need to get to work.”

I take a deep breath, my fingers trembling, as I punch the order in on the touchscreen. “Will that be all?”

Baldy rolls his eyes at me. “Yes, that’s all. Come on, come on. I gotta get the fuck out of here.”

“Hey, take it easy. She’s just trying to take your order,” says a voice. I don’t look up, but I can hear it came from the back of the line of customers.

“I already gave her my order three fucking times,” Baldy barks over his shoulder. “Mind your own fucking business.”

Linda comes up from behind me, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder as she sets the guy’s Americano on the counter next to the bag holding his multigrain scone. She doesn’t say anything, but the nasty look she casts in his direction could make an ultimate fighting champion piss his pants. Linda is the best boss in the world and one of the many reasons I still work at Beachcombers Café. All the other reasons I still work at one of the tiniest cafés in Wrightsville Beach have to do mostly with my desire to disappear after dropping out of UNC Chapel Hill ten months ago. But that’s a whole other story.

Baldy peels the lid off his coffee, rolling his eyes as he peers into the cup. “I said I wanted room for cream. Are you all fucking retarded?”

Before I could reach for the cup, a guy in a suit steps out of line, grabs the cup off the counter, and dumps the entire contents into Baldy’s scone bag. A loud collective gasp echoes through the café.

“Now you’ve got plenty of room for cream,” the guy says.

I clap my hand over my mouth to stifle a laugh as Linda scrambles to get some paper towels.

The rage in Baldy’s eyes is terrifying. “You motherfucker!” he roars as my white knight grins.

And what a sexy white knight he is. Even in his pressed shirt and slacks, he can’t be more than twenty-two. He has an easygoing vibe about him, as if he’d rather be surfing than wearing a suit at seven in the morning. With his sun-kissed brown hair and the devious gleam in his green eyes, he reminds me of Leonardo DiCaprio in one of my favorite movies, Titanic.

Baldy charges my Jack Dawson, but Jack swiftly steps aside at the last moment. Baldy trips spectacularly over a waist high display of mugs and coffee beans. All six people in the café are now standing silent as Baldy spits curses at the cracked mugs and spilled beans underneath him.

I look at my white knight and he’s smiling at me, a sneaky half-smile, and I know what he’s about to do.

Before Baldy can get to his feet, Jack drops a few hundred-dollar bills on the counter. “For the damages.”

He winks at me as he steps on Baldy’s back then hurries toward the exit with no coffee, just a huge grin that makes everybody laugh and cheer. He gives us a quick bow, showing his appreciation to the crowd, and slips through the door as Baldy lumbers to his feet.

My gaze follows Jack as he slides into his truck, one of the newer models that looks like something conceived in the wet dreams of a roughneck and a Star Wars geek. He pulls out of the parking lot and disappears down Lumina Avenue.

I have a strong urge to whisper, “I’ll never let go, Jack,” but I’m pretty good at keeping my urges to mutter lines from Titanic to myself; especially when there’s a six-foot-two ‘roided out freak staring me down. Something snaps inside me as I remember what started this whole fiasco.

I step aside so Linda can take over and I skitter away through the swinging door into the stockroom. I unfold a metal chair and sit down next to a small desk where Linda does the scheduling. Pulling my legs up, I sit cross-legged on the chair, place my hands on my knees, and close my eyes. I take a long, deep breath, focusing on nothing but the oxygen as it enters my lungs. I let the breath out slowly. A few more deep breaths and the whole incident in the café never happened.

Some people are addicted to heroin. Others are addicted to coffee. I’m addicted to meditation. No, not medication. Meditation.

Meditation doesn’t just relax me; it helps me forget. It’s like a friend you can count on to say just the right thing at the right time when that thing you want them to say is nothing. Meditation is the friend who intervenes when you’re about to say or do something very stupid. Like three months ago, when meditation saved me from taking my own life after I realized I had become my mother.

Chapter Two

Relentless Memories

I HAVEN’T BEEN TO A party with my best friend Yesenia Navarro in ten months. The last time was the Halloween bash at Joey Nassau’s house where I got stuck talking to Joey’s thirty-something cousin who spent three hours attempting to convince me to go back to school. I want to go to tonight’s party at Annabelle Mezza’s house about as much as I want to eat a spoonful of cinnamon. Tonight’s party will be packed with all the people I have been successfully avoiding for ten months.

“I’ll be velcroed to your side the whole night,” Senia assures me as I gather my purse and a bottle of water from the kitchen counter.

Senia thinks I’m a freak because I never leave the house without at least one bottle of water. I’ve spent enough time avoiding the various other substances my mother abused. She could hardly call an addiction to water and meditating a bad thing. This doesn’t stop her from trying. And true to best friend form, every day when she comes home from work she still brings me a six-pack of my drug of choice. To say that I love living with my best friend would be a huge understatement.

“Whatever,” I mutter. “It’s just down the street. I’ll walk home if things get too uncomfortable.”

“Speaking of uncomfortable.” Senia cocks an eyebrow as she examines my outfit: faded skinny jeans, a plain white tank top, a green hoodie that’s three sizes too big, and a five-year-old pair of black Converse. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

Senia could be a supermodel with her perfectly tanned skin, dark tousled hair, and spot-on fashion sense. At five-ten, she towers over my five-foot-six frame in her four-inch heels. She has the perfect button nose and full lips that I’ve always dreamed of having. My blonde hair is too thin, my nose is too small, and my upper lip is too big. Senia says it gives me a sexy pout, but she only says that to make me feel better. I’m average and I’ve learned to not only accept it, I embrace it.

“Don’t make me say it,” I reply as I unscrew the cap on the bottle of water and take a swig.

She holds up her hand to stop me. “Please don’t. And, by the way, that has to be the worst motto ever adopted by any person ever in the history of all mankind.”

I pull my keys out of my purse to lock the front door as we make our way out of the apartment. “You might be exaggerating just a little bit.”

Her heels click against the pavement and I inhale a huge breath of briny ocean breeze as we walk to the covered parking spot where Senia keeps her new black Ford Focus. She isn’t rolling in cash, but her parents make pretty good money with the real-estate company where their entire family works. She works in one of their satellite offices in Wilmington while the rest of the family works at the main office in Raleigh. Her parents pay her half of the rent on our apartment, her entire UNC tuition, and she gets a new car every two years on her birthday. Nothing fancy, but new.

“I get it,” Senia says as she deactivates her car alarm and we slide into our seats. “You don’t want to be a shallow, vacuous piece of shit like Joanie Tipton. But that doesn’t mean that you have to dress for a party like you’re going to work on a fucking construction site.”

“Hey, I resent that. I left my tool belt at home this time,” I tease her and she rolls her eyes as she turns on the stereo to her favorite EDM station.

An Ellie Goulding dance mix blasts through the speakers and Senia immediately begins bobbing her head as she pulls the car out of the parking space. She maneuvers her car around the moving truck that’s half-blocking the exit out of the complex. Cora, our eighty-six-year-old landlord, must have finally found a tenant for the upstairs apartment.

“Claire!” Senia shouts as she pulls onto Lumina. “You need to renew your driver’s license!”

“Senia! I live four hundred feet from where I work and I don’t have a car. I don’t need a driver’s license just so I can be your designated driver.”

I sold my car when I moved to Wrightsville Beach two and a half months ago to pay for the first and last month’s rent on my apartment. Senia moved in three weeks later, once the semester ended. She claimed she did it so we could spend the summer together on the hottest surf beach on the East Coast, but I know it’s so she can help me with the rent for a few months. The summer is halfway over now and she’ll be moving back in with her parents in a month to go back to UNC. If I don’t find another roommate or convince Linda to give me more hours at the café, I may be homeless in six months—for the third time in my life.