Chapter 1

It was close to midnight and I was sitting in the living room of one of my two best friends, Hanna Philips, the first friend I’d made moving to town, with her and Katherine Moore, who was ... complicated. We were huddled up under a big blanket together on Hanna’s couch, watching the commentator kill time while they waited for the countdown to midnight. Hanna had just gotten back from her skiing vacation and the three of us had spent all day together, just catching up. Our parents thought we were being overdramatic, since two weeks wasn’t that long for most people to be apart, but I don’t think they really understood what we meant to each other.

Until four months ago I’d lived my life in an RV traveling up and down the east coast as my dad went from gig to gig. It wasn’t until his drunk ass accidentally killed another man in a bar fight that Mom and I settled down in one place. I’d hated it at first, since I’d gone from us being on our own and seeing new places all the time to being on our own in one place. Then I got into a fight to help this little kid that turned out to be Hanna’s cousin. Hanna and I became friends and she showed me all the stuff I’d been missing, growing up on the road.

It turned out Hanna had needed someone too. She’d been in a depressive spiral since she was sexually assaulted the previous year, and had cut herself off from anyone else. I don’t know why she decided to open up to me, but it had saved both of us.

Kat was a different story altogether. Where Hanna and I had just been cut off from others, Kat had an actual disorder with a capital D. Her dad had refused to get her help, but the doctor I got her to talk to before Christmas diagnosed her with something called Dependent Personality Disorder, which basically meant she was incapable of standing up to anyone or even saying no. The worst kid in school had figured out she was vulnerable and had been taking advantage of her in every way imaginable. She’d been forced to do stuff she didn’t want to do, and without treatment, there seemed no way out.

That was about when I figured out a loophole, based on a warning the psychologist had given me. It turns out if she found someone she trusted, there was a danger she’d latch on to them, and start seeing them as the final authority over her, kind of like a small kid does with a parent. He’d warned me because it would make later treatment harder and told me to be very careful with how I acted with her to make sure that didn’t happen. Since her dad refused to even get her looked at, let alone treated, it didn’t look like she’d be getting that therapy anytime soon.

That was around the time Aaron stepped things up, using her to actively hurt other people. Kat recognized what she was doing was wrong but was powerless to go against him, and she was starting to spiral all on her own. The loophole was doing exactly what the doctor had warned me against, and convincing Kat that I should be the person she listened to. I’m sure when she finally got to see a psychologist for real, this would become a problem, but for the last month she hadn’t had to do anything she didn’t want to do, and it showed.

She’d stopped being so soft-spoken and even given her opinions several times. We were still on training wheels, but she was making progress, at least in how it affected her day-to-day life. She seemed really happy for the first time since I’d met her, so that was something.

Hanna and Kat had spent a bunch of time together recently, before Hanna went on vacation, and had become friends. Besides me, Hanna was the only other person who knew Kat’s diagnosis, and she’d been making an effort to get Kat to start being more independent, which was good. I’d worried that everything I did just pushed her more into giving up her own autonomy, since it was easier for Kat to do than deal with the panic attacks and physical symptoms of her disorder. Hanna didn’t have that kind of relationship with Kat.

So here we were; three broken people each using the other two to find a way back to normal. If I explained it to someone, they’d probably see us as some kind of sad story, but I was probably the happiest I’d been in my life, just sitting here with my girls.

“I still can’t believe you went snowboarding,” Kat said.

“Why? It’s a rush. It kind of feels like flying, especially if you go over one of the jumps. I didn’t go on any of the real slopes, but I swear next time we go, I’m just going to snowboard. Skiing is fun and all, but you don’t just let go like you do on a board, you know?” Hanna said.

“I’d be worried I’d fall down and break my neck.”

“Nah, I wasn’t going that fast. I fell down lots of times, but I was wearing a helmet and so many clothes I just kind of slid. Besides, of the three of us, I’m the least athletic. You two would do great.”

“Maybe Charlie, but not me. Swimming may be a good workout, but it doesn’t do anything for your balance. Heck, I think all that time with my head underwater would probably make it worse.”

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “After breaking my foot, I’ve got a new respect for how fragile my bones are. I like being on firm ground, thank you very much.”

“How was the show tonight?” Hanna asked.

Chef had decided on a big New Year’s Eve show, which he hadn’t done before. When I’d first gotten to the Blue Ridge, Willie Johnson and his band played there on weekend nights. He was an old blues player and they’d had good size crowds, but mostly of older folks from Wellville and the surrounding farming communities and some tourists who’d been passing by on I-26 heading up into the Shenandoah or down towards South Carolina and Georgia.

Willie had heard me play when Hanna first brought me to the Blue Ridge and taken me under his wing. Eventually, they’d given me a shot at playing on my own, or at least being the frontman for Willie’s band, doing pop and rock music instead of blues. We’d worked it out so that we split up each weekend night where I’d play a set for the younger crowd and then Willie’d play a set for the people who still wanted to come in for blues. Things had taken off from there.

“It wasn’t as full as Chef had hoped. It wasn’t dead, but we’d had busier nights. I think with the holiday, people were able to go down to the clubs in Asheville, so we lost a lot there.”

“That sucks.”

“Nah, it’s all right. Chef had been making noise that maybe I should do both sets and play till midnight, since it’s still a holiday, but when he saw the crowds he said I could knock off after the first set. Which means I get to be here with you two.”

“You know I would have come down to the Blue Ridge if you were still playing?”

“It’s okay, you’ll be forced to hear me play a lot more before you leave for college, so maybe it’s good that you’re getting a break. Kat showed up and gave me a ride home, so it all worked out.”

“You know I love your music, so stop with the whole ‘forced to hear me’ BS,” Hanna said before looking across me at Kat. “How did you manage to stay out so late? Doesn’t your dad always make you get home by like nine or whatever?”

“He’s out of town on work, so I’m on my own until Thursday. He called to check on me, so I had to stay home till then and only heard the last half of Charlie playing, but it means I can stay out and watch the ball drop.”

We fell into silence again, looking at the TV. Kat’s dad was a subject of some contention. I was still fairly certain he was in some way responsible for Kat’s condition, and his unreasonable demands on where she went didn’t help those suspicions. I’m all for parents wanting to know where their kids are, but having a nine o’clock curfew on a teenager, even on weekends, was strange. That with his unwillingness to get help for Kat’s condition and the fact that no one I knew had ever met the man just added to the growing list of things I disliked about him.

“What’s your plan for the rest of the year?” I asked Hanna, breaking the silence.

“Just make it through, I guess. I sent off my last applications by the middle of December, so now we’re just waiting for decision letters to see what my choices of schools are. We should start getting acceptance and rejection letters in the mail any time now.”

“Have you thought about which school you prefer, if they all accept you?” Kat asked.

“No. When we started sending out applications at the end of the summer, all I wanted was to be really far from here, so my original list was all west coast, Florida and New York, with a few Texas schools. Mom made me expand that and apply to most of the major universities in the state, and some other ones closer, like Virginia Tech. If you’d asked me four months ago where I wanted to go, I’d have said USC, just to get as far away as possible, but now ... I don’t know.”

“Don’t let us affect your decision,” I said.

She’d made a few comments since the end of last semester about how much happier she was now that she had real friends again, and how she’d miss us once she left for college. She’d said it enough times now that it felt almost like she was building herself up for choosing somewhere close, so that she didn’t have to go that far away.

“While you know we’d love to have you nearby, please don’t choose something just because we’re within driving distance. Where you go to college will be a big factor in setting you up for everything else in life. You have to think really selfishly on this.”

“I know, but I’m not sure it really matters as long as it’s a halfway decent school. Hell, I don’t even have a clue what I want to major in, so I can’t really judge any schools by specific programs.”

“You don’t have any idea?” Kat asked.

Kat’s dad had her whole life planned out for her, so uncertainty about what to go to school for was probably completely alien to her.

“No. When I was a freshman and sophomore, I was so sure I had it all planned out. I’d major in primary education and a minor in history, since I always preferred social studies when I was a kid, and join a sorority. Now, I can’t even remember why I’d wanted to be a school teacher. I don’t have some big jones for kids or education or whatever. I think it was because that was what all the other girls I knew wanted to do.”

“I think it’s okay to start in something more general like a basic liberal arts degree or a business degree,” I said. “You can always switch programs when you find the thing you like. Hell, I have no idea what I want to do either, although I still have a year and a half before I need to start applying, so I guess it’s not quite the same.”

“I know, and that’s probably what I’ll do. I’m just ... I don’t know, everything’s different, and I’m still trying to figure it out.”

“You know we’ll support you no matter what you go with.”

“I know,” Hanna said, leaning into me as we watched the countdown to midnight finally start.

Monday, we were back in school. It felt strange coming back after some time away, and I wondered if everyone had that feeling. Since this was my first year with actual public education, it was all new to me. I was sure once things got rolling I’d fall back into the same patterns as before and it would become routine but at the moment, just walking in, I couldn’t shake how the place seemed a little smaller than it had before we left for winter break.