Come See About Me by C. K. Kelly Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

other friends, and
that you say you’re not going back to school in the fall.”
    I wondered if
Yunhee had told my mother about my grades too. Thank God I’d never confided in
her about being fired.
    “I’m not,” I
whispered. My mother would know sooner or later anyway; I’d just hoped it would
be later. “I need a break. I can’t…” I squeezed my eyelids together and thought
of Bastien. I’d made him tomato soup last November when he’d had a vicious cold
that made it impossible to breathe through his nose. He said everything tasted
bland but that at least the hot soup felt good on his throat. The congestion
had made his voice deeper. I kind of liked the way it sounded—like a version of
him I’d never met before, an alternate universe Bastien. “I can’t just go on
like nothing’s changed.”
    My mother shook
her head, a tiny bead of sweat on her chin from standing over the hot stove.
“No one expects that. But you have to keep moving forward with your life. It
doesn’t stop because he’s gone.”
    I smiled
bitterly.
    It had stopped.
For me, it had. This wasn’t real life anymore. It couldn’t be real life without
him.
    “I don’t want to
pretend for you,” I admitted, my fingers curving around the counter behind me.
“I don’t want to pretend that I feel better than I do and that I’m like some
battery operated toy that keeps doing what it was designed to do no matter
what. Maybe that’s how you think life should be—this nonstop marathon where we
all keep walking despite the people we love dropping next to us—but that’s not
how I feel.”
    “Honey.” My
mother’s face was long. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. You don’t have to pretend .
I know you miss him. But you can’t push people away. We all care about you—your
father and I and your friends. That hasn’t changed. We still want to be part of
your life.”
    “Mom…” I
stopped, no words left on my tongue to protest.
    “I hate to think
of you so far from us—thousands of miles away—living on your own this way, and
now thinking of not returning to school in September. It doesn’t have to be
this way. Come back home with me, Leah .” Her eyes were so earnest that
the old Leah would’ve been swayed by them and gotten on the plane with her. “We
can pack up your things, take what we can carry with us and have the rest of
them shipped.”
    “No.” My voice
was flat. “I’m not leaving. This is where we lived together. This is where he’d
be if he was still alive.”
    “And he’s not,
Leah,” she said. “Don’t you think he’d want you to be somewhere that you had a
proper support system? Do you think he’d want you holed up in this apartment
alone? Because that doesn’t sound like Bastien to me.”
    “Right,” I
snapped. “Because you knew him so well. You never wanted me living with him in
the first place—no wonder you don’t get it.” I clasped the counter tighter. “By
support system you mean, what? Therapy? Drugs? Something to make me smile ?”
I tore into the word like it was profane.
    “You’re not
thinking clearly,” my mother countered. “No one’s saying you have to forget,
but…” She dragged her fingers wearily into her hairline. “It doesn’t have to be
this hard either, Leah. You can let people make it easier. There’s nothing
wrong with that. Being with other people, talking to someone about your
feelings, that doesn’t make the love you have for Bastien any less.”
    I shook my head
like she didn’t know what she was talking about. “I’m going back to bed,” I
muttered. “Forget the soup. Or eat it yourself, whatever.”
    She followed me
out of the kitchen and along the hall to the bedroom. “Listen,” she began. “I
don’t want to—”
    But I didn’t let
her finish. I swung on my heel and said, “I’m not going home with you. If
that’s why you’re here, to try to talk me into it, you might as well fly back
now because it’s not going to