Sunshine (31 page)

“I’ll let you guys talk,” Myles says to me, smiling slightly as he leaves.
Jade nods at Myles, mirroring his smile. Myles shuts the door behind him, heading up the stairs.
“That boy will not leave your side,” Jade says, setting the plate down on my nightstand. My nostrils fill with the smell of turkey and stuffing and cookies.
My brother sits at the foot of my bed, kicking off his shoes and folding his legs under him. He’s wearing an obnoxious Christmas sweater. The kind your grandma knits for you.
“What’s going on up there?” I whisper to him.
He smiles, picking off of the plate I’m guessing he brought for me. He notices me watching him with my stomach growling, and he hands over the plate, placing it in my lap, and actually wrapping my fingers around the fork. “I can feed myself, Jade,” I tell him.
He lets go, “So you’re feeling okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, distracted by whether I should eat the cookies or the turkey first. I decide on turkey.
“You know, it figures. You’re the only one that gets hurt out of Myles, Alex, and Adrienne.”
I laugh with him. I’m still a very good liar. “Well Myles gashed his wrist open, but other than that, I’m the only one who got hurt.”
Easy, but time to change the subject. “So what’s going on up there?”
“You’re missing out on quite a party,” he says smiling. “And the weird thing is,” he leans in like he’s telling me a secret. “Everyone is getting along. I mean,
really
getting along. No one is acting fake with Mom or anything.”
If I hadn’t already swallowed my food, I’m pretty sure I would be choking on it. “What?”
“Yeah, she’s even cooking and baking and laughing and joking. Like a regular step ford wife.”
“Whoa,” I say with a mouth full of stuffing.
He nods in agreement. “It’s weird, but I kind of like it. I think she feels really bad,” he pauses. “Which is good. It’s about time she starts feeling bad about the shit she’s done to you.”
Swallow my food, I give him a small grin. How can I hide so much from people who obviously care so much about me? Well not anymore. That has to stop. At least with my own secrets that I can freely share.
“So,” he says after a pause. He raises his eyebrows up and down at me. “You and Myles, huh?”
I nod. “Yeah.” And it feels like a weight is lifted from my gut, it’s not so bad letting him know.
“When did that happen?”
I shrug, “It just kind of happened."
“I knew it.” A goofy smirk appears on Jade’s face. “Are you guys like, in love?”
I set down my fork. What the hell? “Yeah, I think we are.”
He rests a hand on mine. “I’m really happy for you guys. He treats you well, and you’re happy?” “Yes. I’m really happy.”
“And,” he leans in close, like we’re sharing a secret. “You
really
love him?”
With everything that’s happened these past few months, I feel like I should be a few years older than I am. I never thought this could happen. Me. Myles. Love. The things songs are made out of.
“Yeah,” I say with as much of a voice I can find. “I really do.”

Epilogue

I miss the rest of the school year, going to physical therapy four times a week instead. A tutor comes once a week to give me work, which Boo, Trei, and my
boyfriend,
Myles, help me with. I don’t mind missing school. Not one bit. Doing all this work from my bed with my friends makes the whole thing almost manageable.
So on the day we’re supposed to graduate, I feel like I deserve to go. I can walk normally now; the staples and stitches have all come out, the casts sawed off. No one would even know about the “accident” if word hadn’t gone around school. I get up like everyone else does. I shower; I get throw on a sundress: green and white, spaghetti strapped, short, to the knee.
I should care about the scars. The ones on my back, covered by my wings, the pink, puffy, line of a scar forming a trail down my chest. Most of them can even be seen from a distance.
I should care that my mom is going to be sitting in the bleachers inside the high school gym. That she’s acting like nothing bad has ever happened between us, and that I’ve made her the proudest parent on Earth.
And I should care that everyone will be staring at me, talking about me, trying to come up with their own story concerning me and why I wasn’t in school the whole year.
But I don’t care about any of these things.
All I care about is sitting near my friends, being a part of the entire thing, being a normal girl graduating. Sure a girl with a vampire boyfriend, so what? Like that even matters.
And for the first time in a long time, I feel it. It’s not something that I question, or that I know is only going to last so long before it’s taken away. I just am.
Normal.
Normal for me, anyway.
We meet back at my house after the ceremony. Myles takes my hand under the sleeve of my trench coat as we walk into my apartment. Everything is already being packed into boxes, getting ready for the next phase in my life.
Stevie and Jade help me fold clothes into bins, wrap breakables with newspaper. They’re happy for me; everyone seems to be. They all notice the shift inside me, and I don’t hate it.
Boo and Trei crank music from the stereo in the living room. Myles helps me move boxes around so we can all sit and eat pizza. And this feeling is good. New. Exciting. Awesome.
We leave for New York in less than three days.
That’s where my life will begin to be a little less normal. We’ll be living like rock stars, making a living doing what we love, in a half vampire, half human world.
And I should care that the feeling I worked so long and hard for, this normalcy, will be taken away.
But I don’t.
Being normal isn’t so important when love is involved.