Chelsea Fine - Best Kind of Broken

“No.”

“Spill it.”

“No.” I throw my two items in the washing machine and cross my arms. I’m an impenetrable wall. I’m a fortress of silence. I’m—

“Does this have something to do with Levi?”

“Yes.”

Damn. I suck at being a fortress.

“Want to talk about it?” Ellen leans against the doorway and drapes her dark hair over her shoulder.

“No. I don’t want to talk about it. I want Levi to talk about it. I want him to look at me and stop seeing Charity and all the sadness and I want him to let himself love me again.” I’m totally talking about it, but now I can’t stop. “I mean, what the hell? He and Charity were my best friends. They were my whole life, and then Charity died and Levi just… just left me! And now it’s like we’re totally different people.” I say this loudly and realize I’m about to cry. “We’re not the same anymore. We’re not Levi and Pixie, Transformer and Barbie. We’re not the Three Musketeers with dreams and futures. Charity is dead and my heart is lost and Levi is a mess and I don’t… I don’t… I don’t…”

I start crying and Ellen pulls me into a hug, stroking my hair in a way my own mother would never have done. “I don’t know how to love him anymore,” I say into Ellen’s soft shirt as tears spill from my eyes.

She squeezes me. “Sure you do. Love doesn’t just stop, Pixie. It’s always there.”

I pull away and wipe at my face, frustrated for crying. “But he feels so far away from me. I just want him back. But I’m so…” I search for the word. “I’m so angry with him. For abandoning me. For letting me hurt without him. For forgetting me.”

She shakes her head. “He didn’t forget you.”

“He did.”

“No. He was just hurting, Pix. Levi lost a lot after the accident. He lost Charity, and then he lost his parents—”

“But he didn’t lose me.” My voice cracks.

Ellen bites her lip and waits a beat. “Maybe he doesn’t know that.” She pauses. “Maybe you should tell him that.”

“I can’t.” I shake my head, and a wild blonde curl falls into my eyes. “I can’t. We’re so messed up. I don’t think it would even matter if I did. We’re just too broken.”

Ellen tilts her head and looks me over sympathetically. She tucks the loose curl behind my ear and lightly brushes my cheek with her finger. Then she smiles softly. “There’s no such thing as too broken. Anything can heal.” She kisses my forehead and wraps her arms around me. “Especially you.”

I need to move.

I can’t sleep one door away from Pixie anymore—especially after feeling her up in the shower yesterday. I just can’t do it.

Last night, I stared at my ceiling all night long, telling myself that if I ever tried to touch Pixie again, I was going to kill myself. And then I spent the next few hours staring at the ceiling, thinking of whether or not I actually could kill myself, and came to the conclusion that, no, I couldn’t, because then Pixie would be at the mercy of douche bags like Daren and dirty old men like Earl and I was not cool leaving her in a world where Darens and Earls could look at her without the threat of me.

And then I stared at the ceiling and thought of all the ways I would hurt Daren and Earl if they ever tried to touch Pixie, which led to a very dark train of thought involving plastic bags and bleach.

So obviously, I need to move.

I shake myself as I walk downstairs and into the lobby. Enough thinking about Pixie.

Looking out the front windows of the inn, I see a familiar car pull into the parking lot, and my hands go numb.

Sandra Marshall.

Pixie’s mother, Ellen’s sister, and hater of me.

I watch Sandra exit the car and head for the front doors.

This is not good.

A quiet knock on my door has me leaping out of bed, thinking maybe it’s Levi. We haven’t spoken since our couples shower yesterday, and my nerves are pretty much shot from the silence.

But when I open my door, I see Ellen.

“Hey.” I smile at her and try not to look disappointed.

“Hey…” Her facial expression goes crooked for a moment, and I know—I just know—my mother is here.

“Oh, no.” I beg her with my eyes, Save me.

She makes a face of helplessness, and we both cringe when my mother’s voice drifts up the stairs from the lobby.

“Why, Haley, how are you?” Oh God. My mother hates Haley. She hates Haley with a passion. Run, poor woman. Run for your life.

“Hello, Sandra.” Haley’s voice is polite and friendly.

“Fell off the diet again, I see?” my mom says. “Well, at least curvy suits you. You’ve never been one for the lean look.”

“Mom!” I holler down the stairs, moving from my room, not caring that I’m still wearing my hideous pajamas from the day before. I need to spare Haley any further abuse.

When I see the woman who gave birth to me, I plaster on a smile so fake I think it might crack my face open.

“Hi there!” I say.

“Hello, darling.” She gives me a fake smile as well. “I have a box of your old things at the house. You should come pick it up before I throw it away.” She lifts one overplucked eyebrow. “What are you wearing?”

I look down. “Pajamas.”

“Ellen!” my mother yells at my aunt, who has followed me down the stairs and is now standing behind me. “Is this how you let your employees dress?”

Always so casual with my mother, Ellen shrugs. “She’s not on the clock yet, Sandy. She woke up five minutes ago.”

Mom looks at me and frowns. “Go put real clothes on before some pervert sees you in your sleepwear and gets bad ideas.”

I make a face. “I’m wearing oversized pants and a disgusting shirt, Mom. No pervert is going to—”

“Hush. Go change.”

“She doesn’t need to change,” Ellen says sharply.

“It’s fine,” I say to Ellen as I turn around to head back to my room. I don’t want to fight. It’s not worth it. And I don’t want Ellen to have to defend me. She’s already done enough of that throughout my life.

A nervous twitch starts behind my left eye as I climb the stairs and hear Ellen snap at my mother about being kind to me.

I was thirteen the first time Ellen tried to get me to move in with her. She’d witnessed my mother’s severe dislike for me throughout my childhood, and she’d tried to temper it for years—without success. Sandra Marshall was unhappy about her life and clung to her bitterness like it was a drug and she was an addict.

My mom was the head cheerleader in high school while my father—some guy named Greg—was the star basketball player, and they were this adolescent power couple or whatever. Until my mom got pregnant. She was seventeen.

I was young and beautiful and skinny, until you came along and ruined everything, she used to say to me. As if I were somehow responsible for my own conception.

Good ol’ Greg couldn’t handle the idea of his thin little girlfriend gaining weight and being sick and emotional all the time, so he spent more time bedding the rest of the cheerleading squad than he did hanging out with my mom during her pregnancy. Which broke my mom’s heart.

But she refused to dump him because she didn’t want to raise a baby on her own. Plus, she had plans to move to California with him, where they were both going to attend UCLA so she could become a news anchor. So she let her scumbag boyfriend cheat on her while she suffered through morning sickness and took on the body of a whale.

And then I was born.

Suddenly the baby thing got real, and life got hard. My mom and Greg were broke high school seniors who had no parental help, and Greg decided he didn’t feel like being a daddy anymore. He skipped town when I was four months old.

My mother dropped out of high school, waved good-bye to her future as a news anchor, and got a job at a local diner, where she let her broken heart fester until it was black. With Greg out of the picture, the only person left to blame for her miserable life was the baby girl who had ruined her body and driven away the only man who would ever love her—that was her reasoning.

So I never had a chance.

Ellen, who was a few years older than my mother, jumped right in to help out with baby me. But Sandra Marshall was determined to be miserable. And with every year that passed without providing Sandra a way out of town or a handsome man to sweep her off her feet, she grew more intolerant of me.

Ellen’s attempts at tempering Sandra’s behavior failed. So as a last resort, she offered up her home—a place just a few miles from the inn—and asked me to consider living with her indefinitely. My mother wasn’t horribly against the idea, but she was wicked cruel to Ellen for suggesting it. Because if Ellen took little Pixie away from Sandra, then whomever would Sandra have to blame for her unhappy existence?

I declined Ellen’s offer under the guise of not wanting to move out to the middle of nowhere and live far away from my friends. But really, I just didn’t want Ellen to have to take more heat than necessary from my mom and deal with whatever temper tantrums she decided to throw throughout my remaining years.