Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [95]
I thought of the way she’d been so honest with Tash in the café. But who can view their own life with that kind of clarity?
I swallowed hard. “That’s not true, Kallie. If you’d kept your mouth shut, he’d have hurt your mom and left anyway, and you’d be telling me that you had the chance to do something, and you let her down. You’d have spent the past six years regretting your silence.”
Kallie managed the slightest nod as she turned back to the screen. “I just . . . I just want to go back and make everything right,” she said, and I couldn’t tell whether she was talking about her family or the guys onscreen.
“You have to live in the present, Kallie. Make now the best it can be,” I said, meaning every word, but hating how prophetic it felt.
Kallie didn’t speak after that, just watched me. She even summoned the infamous Kallie half smile, and it suddenly struck me that it didn’t make her look sexy, or teasing, or any of the other things I’d always thought. It made her seem uncertain, even vulnerable. In the end, the half smile was her instinctive reaction to uncomfortable situations—nothing more.
I took a deep breath and realized I didn’t feel anxious anymore, just tired. The movie had ended again, but Kallie immediately replayed it, and I could only guess at how many times she’d watched it over and over, memorizing details, struggling to make sense of it. She even pointed to the handwritten lyrics, her finger guiding me through each line so I could keep up with the song I couldn’t properly hear:
We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun
but the hills that we climbed
were just seasons out of time.
I looked back at the screen and watched the home movie of Nirvana, all off-balanced colors and amateur camerawork. There was an honesty about it, an unscripted innocence that was heartbreaking. Then the movie cut to one of Kurt’s bandmates, at the very moment his face crumpled and he sobbed, just once, as if he knew so much more than he could ever really know. I felt Kallie’s shoulders shaking gently against me, her hand gripping mine so very tightly, like she was afraid of losing me as well. And as I pulled her toward me and hugged her tightly, let her cry warm tears against me, I wondered how I’d never seen it before—how horribly broken Kallie was.
Meanwhile, the others had begun drifting back into the room, implacable exteriors intact, just business as usual. That’s when I realized with a degree of shame that of all of us, Kallie was the one who felt it the most—the raw emotion, the power of a single song to change her world. She’d never come close to Ed’s calm professionalism. She couldn’t walk the walk like Will and Tash, or talk the talk like Josh. She simply felt every lyric as if it was a message composed especially for her. Improbably Kallie needed Dumb more than anyone. So much more. And I knew that if Dumb was to have any soul, any meaning at all, it needed her too.
Just then I felt Kallie’s body stiffen, and I looked up to see Josh standing beside her. He even looked genuinely distressed to see her crying, placing a hand on her shoulder as she tried to pull away.
“I guess Piper told you you’re out, then, huh?”
CHAPTER 52
For a moment Kallie didn’t react. It was like all her energy had been focused on getting away from Josh, and luckily for me there simply wasn’t room for her to digest a bombshell like the one he’d just dropped.
I jumped up and pulled her away before Josh could say anything more, but I knew that she needed an explanation, and fast.
“Ignore him, Kallie. He’s full of crap.”
Kallie shook her head. “It’s okay, Piper. Seriously, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. You’re staying.”
Josh was beside us in a heartbeat. “What about our deal?”
“There was no deal, Josh.”
“Bullshit. Kallie’s the weak link. You said so yourself.”
I never