CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO | DANA POLK

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          The morning after is always the hardest part.

          As though the massive, debilitating hangover I've been plagued with isn't big enough of a punishment, Xavier is home. When I wake up, I can hear his footsteps downstairs—for a moment, my heartbeat races with the possibility of it not being him, but then I also hear Sidney's paws following him, which she wouldn't do for anyone else—and I know I'll have to face the music at some point.

          I let out a quiet groan as I attempt to sit up on my bed, pressing my palms against the mattress to support my weight. Though the blinds are closed, it's still far too bright for my poor little tired eyes, so I can safely assume it's a sunny day outside—not at all what I expected from early November in Alaska.

          My eyes get used to the sudden harsh brightness eventually, but I allow myself a few moments in bed to suspend my disbelief, like Julie said last night. If I stay in the comfort of this bed—it's seen enough of me to be called mine by now—I can maybe successfully fool myself into ignoring everything that has happened this past week, particularly last night's events.

          I'm no stranger to publicly embarrassing myself. My life in Alaska has been nothing but that, with me failing to behave adequately while surrounded by other people, and I know I stand out while being painfully average at the same time. Whether it's the Final Girl status or being new in town—a large city, at that—there's something about me flashing like a neon sign.

          It washes over me, completely nullifying everything I used to be, and I'm still not sure whether to welcome it or disapprove of it. I don't like the attention, but I was promised a new start, like there's any way of erasing the past; a fresh start presumes something changes, but I cling desperately to a version of myself that no longer exists, so all of this has been for nothing.

          The fact that I look virtually the same as I did before only makes matters so much more uncomfortable for me. My hair has grown back, albeit not to the same length, and color and structure has returned to my face and body thanks to Xavier's cooking, which has left me better nourished than ever before. Physically, I'm fine; I have more energy now, and can focus better. This room, so previously foreign, smells like me—clean and citrusy from my shampoo, traces of dusted flowers from my perfume—and there are several of my personal belongings scattered around.

          This is home. This is my other home away from Chicago.

          I inhale, staring at my ajar bedroom door. Sidney has also grown from the small puppy she was when Mom came home, right in front of my eyes; she takes up more space now, nearly pushing me out of the bed and leaving the door almost wide open as she comes and goes, but she's still my baby. I convince myself she grows alongside me, growing in size as I grow as a person, but sometimes it feels like I'm moving backward and losing progress.

          The floorboards on the hallway outside my bedroom creak. Shortly after, Sidney happily barges into the room like a hurricane, tongue hanging out from the side of her mouth when she stops at the end of my bed. She waits patiently for me to get my shit together, oblivious to the fact that it's borderline impossible, and I know she'll never understand how badly I missed her last night.

          I could've stayed in. I should've stayed in. Instead, I went to that stupid Halloween party, nearly destroyed my body to clear my head, to prove to people I don't care, but failed to notice it's they who don't care. They can't care less about what I do or don't do. Claudia doesn't care about whether I attended the rest of those meetings or not; she cares that I stopped talking to her, that I froze her out, that I pretended she didn't exist long before she started reciprocating it.

          I sit up straighter when the sound of the footsteps gets louder and closer, unable to forget about the first nights, when I couldn't bear to hear the slightest noise in the house after the sun went down.

          With the sun setting earlier and the nights getting colder and windier, I know I should start getting used to louder noises and harsher gusts of wind, but I'm startled every time. At least we moved the ugly floor lamps and we have yet to trip on them again, but the entire house shakes now that it's fall, and I often jolt awake in the middle of the night. With my heart beating as hard, as fast as it does then, I'm amazed as to how I'm still alive.

          Maybe that's the whole point—it does that to remind me I'm alive, to remind me I still have a chance.

          I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror across the room. Attempt a smile. Even with my vision and perception of self being hazy from my hangover and consequent headache, I can still discern how fake it looks, like the corners of my mouth are being pulled up by strings like a puppet. I can't even do that right, fake a convincing smile; it's no wonder I looked like an idiot in front of Julie last night, acting all high and mighty.

          Alcohol didn't make me braver. It made me stupider.

          The door opens the slightest bit more. In the cracks of light, I see Xavier lingering outside, waiting to see if I'm awake, and my instinctive first reaction is to hold my breath. Unlike Sidney, I don't want to take up extra space; shrinking away from sight has always been the easiest, safest choice.

          "I'm going out," he tells me, once he sees me sitting up. My mouth is sewn shut, so no words come out; all I can do is pathetically stare back at him. "I'm going on a grocery run. Do you need anything?"

          I gulp, clear my throat, hope I won't slur my words. "We're out of oat milk."

          He stiffly nods. I wonder if the air in this house truly is as thick as it feels, or if it's my paranoia and anxiety turning it that way. "Clara and I are going out for dinner tonight, to survey the competition and all that. It's not a date, mind you," he adds, before I can even form a coherent thought or even process what he has just said. "There's this new bar downtown a few streets away from mine, and word has it that they're ripping off our menu. Clara and I spent countless nights working to perfect the menu, so we obviously need to look into it."

          "I'm certain that's not the only thing the two have spent sleepless nights doing."

          He glares at me. "Stop it. I don't get involved in your personal life."

          I know he means well, he means it jokingly, but also as a request to stop prying. It still makes me wish he'd get involved in my personal life, a sign he cares and is not just doing this because I'm family, but I don't want to dare to ask for too much. Begging for mercy from Jake was humiliating enough.

          He was awake when Odette dropped me off last night, unable to walk in a straight line, and it's a miracle I even made it past the front door without tripping over my own feet and falling. He and Sidney were in the living room, with Odette apologizing profoundly for barging into the house past one in the morning and me being too dazed to care.

          Xavier never asked any questions, knowing where I'd been that night, and I wanted to believe that having been in Odette's company comforted him somewhat, even if most of the attendees were strangers to me. Odette being there didn't stop me from making terrible decisions, one after the other, and I don't think he needs or even wants to know about Julie. Hell, for all I know, he'll care more about what happened to her than he ever did about what happened to me.

          So, all I say is, "Sorry."

          I know no words that come out of my mouth will ever properly convey everything I want to tell him or return my world to its axis after everything has fallen out of place.

          Sorry is all I can muster, regardless of how many times we've apologized to one another for things an apology can't fix, and it won't ever be good enough. Trying hardly works when you keep making mistakes, so desperate to fix everything, so desperate to regain the control that was taken away from you.

          The horror of never leaving a wild goose chase, searching for unattainable control dawns on me every day. Control means stability, means normalcy, and Doctor Albott has to yet again remind me I'm fighting a winless battle against the past. The past isn't tangible, making it a non-viable opponent, and the odds will always favor it instead of me.

          How any of this is Xavier's fault, objectively, is behind me, but it's easier and more comfortable to blame him for not having been present for my friends' funeral and for leaving Chicago years before that than to try to come up with a valid excuse. Whatever theory I come up with is never good enough, like it's my business to decide the validity of his feelings or lack thereof, so I'm unsure I'll be able to handle the real one.

          Whenever he tells me I don't know the whole story, it pisses me off; I don't need to know the full story behind his absence to be upset over it. I'll feel guilty as all hell once I finally get some closure—if I ever find the courage to dig deeper into what happened—but even that guilt feels dismissive of everything I was put through.

          Xavier lingers by the doorway, like he, too, wants to say something else, something more, but I know better than to expect an elaboration. What he gives me is all I'll ever get, and I need to make peace with that.

          "Okay," he says. It sounds as empty as my apology, which I'm certain he's aware of. Our brains are wired similarly—or used to be, at least. "You should get up, though. Odette is downstairs. She wanted to talk to you."

          My stomach drops. "Did she say what about?"

          He shrugs. "No. I told her she was free to wait downstairs."

          I groan, burying my face in my hands again. I don't feel prepared to face Odette, not right after having the most awkward of conversations with Xavier, where we both pretend we don't resent each other.

          "Can I shower first?"

          "Wendy, you can do whatever the hell you want. Not involved, remember?"

          He doesn't wait for an answer and I wait to hear the sound of his footsteps echo in the distance as he crosses the hallway towards his bedroom. Sidney has since found her usual spot on the bed, next to my feet, and looks up at me with big, pleading eyes.

          "Yeah," I mutter, tossing the bed covers aside. "I remember."

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          Betty knows Odette is here.

          I'm not shocked by this; even if she didn't text me as soon as I got out of the shower, mentioning she could see Odette's car parked outside and asking me if I need assistance, I expect her to always know what's going on. It's the typical Betty thing to do—she knows things, she gets involved. This time, it warms me up inside to know that.

          The bitter side of my brain almost adds unlike Xavier to the end of my monologue, but I shake off those negative thoughts as I blow dry my hair. The noise echoes in my bathroom, loud enough to block everything else, including intrusive thoughts, and I begin to wonder if I should do this more often whenever I'm in the middle of a crisis. I'm certain it's not therapeutically approved, but not everything has to be so to be effective, right?

          I thank Betty, but assure her I already know about Odette and won't need any help. The latter isn't necessarily true, but Betty doesn't know this, and wasn't present at the Halloween party last night; I don't have either the time or the patience to fill her in on everything that went down, so she'll have to forgive me for making her miss out on precious context. She'll find out eventually, I'm sure, but there are things I need to keep to myself.

          For now.

          I catch my breath once I take the final step down the stairs and risk a peek into the living room. Odette is sitting on a couch with a leg beneath her, munching on a scone she must have brought herself (Xavier hates nothing more than scones, for whatever reason), and doesn't notice me at first. She notices Sidney, though, who rushes to join her, nose up in the air to get a good sniff of the golden scone she's holding. Naturally, where Sidney goes, I go, and vice-versa, so I know she's aware of my presence.

          Straightening my shoulders, I take in a deep breath for the millionth time this morning, and make my way towards her. Her lips curve into a small smile as I close the gap and she informs me she did, indeed, bring scones as a peace offering, but that Xavier had mysteriously disappeared the second he found out about that. I crack a smile in response, explain to her that's a very characteristic Xavier thing to do and hope she's not offended.

          She's not, but she's still worried about me, which she has no qualms about informing me of.

          "I got home fine," I insist, wiping my palms on my jeans. Now that Odette is no longer eating, Sidney has returned to my side, lying on the floor so she can be closer to the fireplace. "You drove me."

         "Yeah, but . . . you know. Like I told you, you had a lot to drink. You kept going for refills. I asked Maeve, and she told me she'd assumed you were only going to have one drink, so she didn't even think about keeping an eye on you."

          I let out a sigh, massaging the bridge of my nose. "I don't need people to keep an eye on me. I was okay."

          "No one has that much to drink in such a short period of time while being okay."

          I don't want to argue with her and make things between us even shakier than they already are, but I really need people to stop assuming they know what's best for me or that I don't have even the vaguest sense of what I'm doing. I was lucid enough to back away from the crowd when the walls began closing in on me, and I was smart enough to stop drinking when I got too nauseous.

          So, I shake my head, try to deflect the worry. "It was stupid of me to do that, but I'm okay. Won't be doing it again anytime soon."

          Odette leans forward, reaching out for one of my hands. "That's good, but it's not the most important thing here. Not to me, at least. My point is that I can sense there's something going on, something serious, and I'm scared you're not going about it in the healthiest of ways. I look at you and think it's getting better, you're getting better, but then all of a sudden you'll just . . . lock yourself up in your little bubble and push everyone away. Of course, it's well within your right to do that, but I worry we won't get you back."

          Something inside me burns, bubbles up in my bloodstream, and I carve my nails into my thighs, through the fabric of my jeans, so I won't say something I'll regret. Ever since coming here, I've been snappy, said ugly, mean things to people I care about and that I can't ever take back—all my arguments with Xavier are clear proof of that.

          Still, there's a part of me that I can't ignore as it screams that what's going on with me is none of her business—it's no one else's but mine and, by extension, Doctor Albott's—and she's just looking for something else to fix, a charity project of her own, which was my original impression of Claudia. It insists she just hates this dynamic because I won't let her in, because I won't let her offer the solutions she thinks are universal because it's the only way she'll regain some sense of control—and it shows we're not that different after all.

          That would be mean. That wouldn't accomplish a single thing.

          "What I'm trying to say is that I don't want things to be awkward between us," Odette continues, like I haven't spent the past few moments in inner anguish. "I've been thinking about what you said that day, all those weeks ago. I'm sorry I wasn't more welcoming; I really hope I didn't make you feel like I don't want you here. I was . . . I don't know. I guess I was a bit scared of you."

          I can't help but laugh. "Scared of me?"

          She shoots me a shy smile this time. "Scared of how to act around you. Betty gave me the heads up that morning, told me she was bringing you along, and of course, you know Betty. She wanted things to be perfect, didn't want anyone to do or say the wrong thing and scare you off. It came so out of the blue that I didn't have time to prepare, and I'm always more comfortable when I know what to expect from situations and from people. You were a blank slate. I didn't know which version of myself I should introduce myself as, and then time went on and you were clinging to Betty, so I felt like trying to change that version would only make things confusing. Like I needed you to choose between us."

          I squeeze her fingers, feeling as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. She's much warmer than me. "I thought the same thing. I was scared you thought I was trying to steal Betty away from you." She shakes her head, allowing her hair to fall in front of her face, instead of being so perfectly composed. It's different with Betty and me, though, and I still don't know how to feel about that, or if I can even allow myself to think about it. "I've always liked every version of you. You can be a bit intimidating, but I don't think I've ever disliked you."

          She exhales, shoulders relaxing significantly. "Okay. I'm glad to hear that. And, for the record, I spoke to Callum about the nickname thing last night after we left you and Julie. He understood."

          "He's not that bad."

          She wrinkles her nose. "I know. Now go tell that to Betty."

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pain and suffering <3 but at least the girlies are getting along, right? RIGHT?