Chapter Text
There’s an angry little girl in Abby’s chest, burrowed in amongst her organs and leeching off the nutrients and love in her body like a parasite. Sometimes, Abby wants to crack her ribcage open, reach inside, and pull that little girl out, just so she can watch the malice fade from the girl’s eyes as Abby chokes the life out of her.
She’s been there as long as Abby can remember. As a child, she had been that little girl. Chris had gotten the worst of it, any pain she inflicted on her little sister, even by accident, was returned by Abby with a vengeance. Eye for an eye, shove for a shove, bite for a bite.
She’d learned to control her temper the older she became. Grown a skinsuit around the little girl as she’d aged, constructed of layers of patience and gentleness and softness and self-control, until that little girl was nothing more than a living corpse inside the adult that Abby had built herself to be.
But, as hard as Abby tried, as many therapists as she saw for anger management, as many hobbies she took up to try and work out the fury, as much as she matured into a functional adult who did functional adult things, the little girl was still there.
A ball and chain.
A constant presence.
An eternal flame of rage that could only be contained, never extinguished.
And that was fine. The therapy and hobbies had given her coping mechanisms to deal with the anger, to make sure it didn’t get out of hand.
But she was still there.
And Abby had spent her entire adult life terrified that one day, that angry little girl will claw her way up out of Abby’s body and sink her fangs into the delicate throat of someone that she can’t afford to lose.
The ride back is silent.
The park where Abby had found Lee and Riley was only about a 15 minute drive from their apartment, despite how long it had taken her to find it. When Zoey had finally picked up the phone, she’d just barely managed to stutter out that the two of them had gone out to talk about some things, and provide a general direction, before Abby had hung up and started driving.
She’ll probably feel bad about that later.
For now though, Abby is still in her work clothes from yesterday. She’d had to stumble through a very important presentation to a room full of men who called her ‘sweetheart’ instead of Ms Brooks, running on a bag of chips and two hours of sleep, all the while without being able to stop thinking about Lee’s frail body in the bathtub.
By the time she’d been allowed to leave, it was several hours later than expected, and she’d had to take the bus home to find that Lee hadn’t even returned from the hospital yet, which had immediately set her on edge. Too anxious to eat, she’d sat around for a while before deciding to take a shower, forgetting in the moment that their apartment only had one bathroom, the one she’d found her best friend’s limp fucking body in just that morning.
The sight of the dried blood coating the bottom of the bathtub, and her own bloody handprints on the cabinet doors from where she’d desperately tried to find something to stop the bleeding, had been the final straw.
Abby had dropped to her knees on the floor just outside of the bathroom door, rested her forehead on the ground, and proceeded to bawl her fucking eyes out for over an hour. When she finally ran out of tears, she’d stayed right where she was, eyes fixed on the ground, mind eerily blank.
She wasn’t sure how long she stayed there, on the floor, dissociating. The sound of her phone ringing had been what finally brought her out of it. Abby had glanced down at the screen and realized, absently, that it was already morning.
She’d answered the phone to a nervous-sounding Suzie, who’d started rambling on about not having heard from her or Lee after she’d dropped him off yesterday.
It had registered to her, finally, that it was morning. That it was morning, and Lee wasn’t home yet.
And Abby. Stopped. Breathing.
In what was admittedly not her best moment, Abby had hung up on Suzie mid-sentence and called Lee, scrambling to her feet. She’d stumbled, vision going fuzzy for a moment, her legs aching from how long she’d spent curled up on the floor.
Lee didn’t pick up.
Abby had dialed a second time, and started racing through the small apartment, flinging open random doors and praying he’d gotten home late and was in their apartment somewhere, even though she knew he’d never leave her collapsed on the ground like that.
Lee hadn’t picked up the second time either. Or the third. Or the sixth.
She’d sent a “where are you?” text around the eighth call. By the time she hit the tenth, it’s been marked as read, which calms her racing heart, if only a bit.
When he hadn’t picked up by the twelfth call, and the text had gone unanswered, something shifted. A little dial in the back of Abby’s mind had been twisted from terrified towards furious and stopped right in the middle.
Then there had been a text from Riley, that just read “lee’s fine”. Then no more responses, despite the barrage of texts and calls Abby had bombarded them with, and the dial spun all the way past furious and stopped right at absolutely enraged.
So she’d called Zoey, instead, and it took a while, long enough for Abby to grab her keys and blow past two stop signs on her way towards Triangle, but finally, she’d gotten an answer, and after a bit of driving around, she’d spotted two familiar figures standing outside a small playground.
In summary, Abby probably owes apologies to most of her friends at this point, but she is also far, far too angry to be able to even think about that at the moment.
Lee doesn’t say anything the whole ride home. Doesn’t look at her either, just sits there, still as a statue. He probably doesn’t want to piss her off more, but all he’s doing is reminding Abby of how she’d found him yesterday morning, silent and cold and covered in his own blood, so it’s really not helping.
Despite the fact that she’s so angry she can barely think straight, she manages to get them back to the apartment in one piece, slamming the door a bit harder than she meant to as she climbs out. Lee follows suit, shutting the door far more gently, then standing there as if he’s not sure of what to do next.
Abby doesn’t look at him as she marches through the snow towards the building. After a few seconds she stops, until she can hear his hesitant footsteps following behind her.
He continues to follow her, a near-silent shadow, into the building, then the elevator, then down the hallway and into their apartment. Abby unlocks the door and kicks her boots off, one of them hitting the wall with a muffled thump. Behind her, she can hear Lee twitch.
Abby still can’t manage to look at him yet. She’s trying really hard not to blow up the way she had in the hospital, and if she looks at his face right now there’s a chance he might set her off all over again.
“Go sit down.” She manages. It comes off evenly enough, but they’re both well aware of the fury barely concealed in her tone.
Abby hears him walk over towards their couch, shoes still on. She doesn’t even think he’s taken off his coat. It’s like he’s planning on bolting out the door the moment she stops paying attention. Her eye twitches. She rubs a shaking hand over her face in an attempt to calm it.
Abby marches into the kitchen and grabs a banana off the counter, peeling it and taking slow, careful bites. When she’s finished, she grabs a second one and eats it the same way.
She hasn’t eaten since those chips from the vending machine yesterday, and she wouldn’t put it past Lee to take advantage of her passing out from a calorie deficiency as a way to get out of this conversation.
It also gives Abby a moment to calm herself down a bit. The kitchen and living room are separated by a wall of cabinets, so she gets a moment to breathe without his eyes on her, while still being able to comfort herself with the fact that he’s in the next room, and can’t run off and do something self-destructive without her hearing.
The mind-numbing rage she’s been in for the past several hours finally begins to fade now that he’s home, and she takes another few minutes to just let herself breathe.
Abby walks back into the living room, head held high, intending on a mature, adult conversation with her best friend about ‘asking for help’ and ‘not ghosting your loved ones’ and stops short.
Lee’s sitting on the couch, spine ramrod straight, hands tucked under his thighs, clearly fighting the urge to curl up into a ball and hide from her. She’d appreciate the effort if it weren’t for the dead-silent tears making their way down his horribly pale face.
She’s only seen Lee cry once. A couple of months ago, Abby's grandmother had died, and in the aftermath he’d pitied her enough to not deflect when she asked about his family. It hadn’t been much, just a quiet admission that his dad had abandoned him, that he’d shoved his mom over in an argument and then ran off, and then he’d been homeless until he’d woken up in the C&A basement. A single tear had slid down the side of his face and Abby had decided not to pry any further.
This feels different, somehow. The conversation she’d wanted to have vanishes from her mind, and all she can do is look at him.
Surprisingly, it’s Lee who breaks the silence. “Are you still mad at me?”
His voice is quieter than she thinks she’s ever heard it. His eyes stay trained on the coffee table in front of him. The embers of Abby’s anger start to fade, and all she can really do is sigh, and lean up against the bookshelf. All of a sudden, she feels exhausted.
“...I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.” She answers, looking at the ground.
“Do you want to, like, hit me? Or something?”
The question is so absurd, so out of left field, that it takes a moment for it to register in Abby’s tired brain. When it does, her blood turns to ice in her veins, and the dregs of her anger fizzle out in an instant.
She looks up at him. Slowly. Carefully. “What?”
Lee shrugs. He’s still not looking at her. “You punch stuff sometimes. When you’re pissed off. You can hit me a couple times, if it’ll make you feel better. I don’t really care.”
Abby doesn’t respond. She doesn’t think she can.
The thing is, he’s not wrong. Abby has a history. When she was a kid, and had even less control of her temper, her blows had usually been directed at Chris, who was two years older and feral enough to enjoy punching back. She’d left a dent in the wall of Grant’s place a while back, the one time she’d made the mistake of challenging Sam to a game of Mario Kart. She’s only managed to avoid putting any dents in the walls of her and Lee’s apartment due to the punching bag that now stands ominously in the corner of their living room.
Lee finally tears his eyes away from the coffee table and looks at her. Abby isn’t sure what expression she’s wearing, but she can assume it’s the wrong one, because Lee somehow gets even more tense, his breaths growing shallow.
“Or-or you can just stay mad at me.” Lee chokes out. “That’s fine too. Or punch a wall. Or scream at me. Just, please don’t leave. Don’t make me leave. I-I don’t…”
He’s hyperventilating by the end of it and this, at least, Abby is familiar with.
Lee flinches, violently, as she starts forward, breaths coming in desperate gasps for air, so she slows, despite the fact that she wants nothing more than to wrap herself around him. She crouches in front of him so she can see his eyes from underneath his bangs. They’re glazed over. He’s staring at his left hand like there’s something grotesque about it only he can see.
Abby takes a deep breath and speaks calmly. “I’m not going to leave. I’m not going to make you leave either. And I am never going to hit you out of anger.”
Lee doesn’t react. He doesn’t really seem to hear her at all.
She tries again. “Can I see your hands?”
Lee flinches again, and he thrusts both his hands towards her as if terrified of the consequences of not doing what she asks. Something in Abby’s heart shatters.
Still, she takes him carefully by the hands, mindful of the bandages peeking out from under the sleeves of his coat, and ever-so-gently, pulls him to his feet.
He’s shaking like a newborn dear, and stumbles as Abby carefully guides him towards the open door of his bedroom. She stares at the backs of his hands as she walks backwards. They’re thin, and boney, and delicate, covered in scars he’s never told her the origins of.
She’s starting to have her suspicions, though.
Once they’re inside, Abby nudges the door closed behind them. Lee’s room is bathed in a gentle glow from the rotating star lamp on his bedside table, a gift from Riley for his first birthday after they’d all gotten out. He’d acted irritated at the time, telling them he wasn’t a baby who was scared of the dark, but Abby’s pretty sure he hasn’t turned it off since he set it up.
She’s careful not to jostle Lee as she guides him to lay down on his back on the plush carpet of his room. After a second of hesitation, she lays down next to him. Close enough that he’ll feel her presence, but not close enough to touch.
Abby pulls her phone from her pocket, scrolling through her playlist until she finds one of instrumental music and hits play. She sets the phone down between the two of them and lays back, watching the stars drift across the ceiling, listening to the sound of Lee’s breathing.
She loses track of time. She doesn’t care enough to check her phone. All that matters is the way that Lee’s breaths gradually even out next to her, until he no longer sounds like he did on the night that they’d escaped.
It’s only when she’s absolutely certain that he’s calmed down that Abby speaks. “I’m sorry.”
She hears him shift beside her, but keeps her eyes trained on the ceiling, to offer him that bit of privacy.
“For yelling at you, in the hospital.” She clarifies. “And for making you feel unsafe here. I never wanted that.”
Lee doesn’t say anything. She wasn’t expecting him to.
“You really scared me.” Abby whispers, trying to fight back her own tears. “I woke up from another nightmare about you dying. I came to find you so I could remind myself that you were still alive, and instead I found you bleeding out in our bathtub.”
Abby clutches at the carpet to ground herself, so she doesn’t make the mistake of reaching for Lee and freaking him out again, and she loses her fight against the tears. Her next words come out wet.
“And then I found out you were gonna be okay, so I could be mad instead of being scared, and then you just wandered off and stopped answering your phone. I thought you were done with the whole running away thing.”
Her voice breaks at the end, and she sniffles, taking a second to compose herself before continuing.
“You’re my best friend, Lee.” Abby whispers. This is selfish, and she’s terrified it’s going to send him running again, but she needs him to know at least a fraction of what she feels. “You make my life so much better just by being in it, and I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you for good.”
For a long moment, her words sit between them like an offering. She assumes he’s going to ignore it.
Then, slowly, in increments, she feels him move. His willowy fingers slide underneath her palm, forcing her to relax her white-knuckled grip on the carpet.
Her hand slips into Lee’s like they were always meant to fit together. Abby takes it as an invitation to close her hand around his in a gentle squeeze. She feels his thumb rub softly over her knuckles as he lets out a deep shuddering breath.
“I don’t really have a good track record with best friends.” Lee’s voice is quiet, a bit raspy from his panic attack. Abby would offer to get him water if she didn’t think leaving would make him clam up again.
“Want to tell me about it?” She offers. She won’t push if she says no.
He’s quiet for a while. Long enough she starts to worry that he’s fallen asleep.
“Her name was Leah.”
Abby hardly dares to breathe, worried that any suddenness would send him running for the hills.
“I met them in the basement. She shared a cell with Doug, got there maybe a month before I did. She was…stubborn. And funny. And too friendly for their own good. Got me talking to the others, and made everything just…less awful.”
His voice is distant. Abby chances a glance over him. He’s staring up at the stars.
“She told me, at some point, how she ended up there. Got too close to the truth, so the execs orchestrated a meeting with a ‘whistleblower’ in a random back alley and nabbed her before she could expose them. They were always so proud of that.”
“They sound like a badass.”
Lee lets out a startled bark of laughter. “She was a freak.”
Abby giggles.
It’s quiet for a moment.
“It was my fault that she died.”
Abby, very intentionally, doesn’t tense. Doesn’t gasp. “What happened?”
Lee is quiet for a while, and Abby starts to wonder if she’s crossed some invisible line.
“I’ve never told you how I ended up down there.”
It’s not a question. As far as she’s aware, none of them know how Lee, a random homeless teenager, had managed to piss off a company executive enough to get himself locked in the basement with the rest of them. He’s always managed to dodge that question, as well as pretty much everything else they’ve ever asked about his life before the basement. “No, you haven’t.”
“I was there that night.”
Abby glances up at him in confusion. He’s still gazing up at the false stars. “What?”
“It was January…maybe February at that point. I think I’d only been homeless for around a month or so. I was trying to fall asleep in an alley behind a dumpster. Then this…girl wanders in. She didn’t see me, so I stayed quiet.”
Lee’s voice is shaking. Abby thinks she knows where this is going.
“There was a bigger guy that followed behind her a few minutes later. It looked like she was expecting him, but when he got to her, he grabbed her arm and pressed something against her face. A couple of other guys showed up to help get her into his car. One of them almost dropped her, and he saw me. I panicked and ran off, and I kept running until I couldn't hear them chasing me.”
Lee finally moves, rolling over so he’s facing her and curling his knees towards his chest, eyes squeezed tightly shut.
“I heard what she called the first guy. I saw all of their faces. I could’ve picked them out of a lineup. But I was too fucking selfish, too scared that if I went to the cops they’d arrest me for what I did to my mom, or worse, send me back to her.”
Another tear leaks out despite his best efforts and Abby resists the urge to wipe it away with her free hand. He finally opens his eyes to look at her, and there’s something broken in his gaze. When he speaks, his voice is hollow.
“It didn’t matter anyways. That guy saw me too, and it only took them two weeks to track me down and put me in the cell next to her. She made herself my best friend without my input. We spent the next year pressed up as close to each other as we could get when we weren’t being tortured. Then the scientists experimented with something they shouldn’t have, and I watched them be electrocuted to death in front of me. And now I have to live with the fact that everything that happened after that night in the alley; the torture, Leah, Doug, Zoey, Riley, you…it all happened because I’m a coward.”
Abby swallows. “Suzie and Riley both tried to go to the police. Even if you had, it probably-”
“You don’t know that.” Lee snaps.
He’s right. She needs a different angle if she wants him to listen.
“Is that why you…?” Abby asks, voice small.
Lee blinks at her in confusion for a moment before he realizes what she’s talking about and scoffs. “No. That’s why you shouldn’t want to be my best friend.”
Abby mulls that around in her brain for a moment.
“...If I blamed you for not stopping them before they did it to me, I’d have to blame Grant for making the original design. Or Suzie for not telling the right people. Or Riley for handing away a pile of evidence.” She offers, finally. “I don’t think there’s any point in blaming you guys when there were people a lot stronger than you who actively wanted us to get hurt.”
Lee stares at her for a moment, before rolling his eyes. “You forgive people too easily.”
He doesn’t believe her. That’s okay. They’ve got time. Abby is going to make sure they have time.
“Can you tell me what happened yesterday?” She asks softly.
Lee stiffens up again. There’s a war going on behind his eyes that he looks too exhausted to fight. He exhales slowly and grabs her phone from the floor, pausing the music. “Do you have Facebook?”
Abby blinks at the sudden topic change. “...Yeah, but I don’t use it.”
Lee opens her phone. She’s not sure how he knows the passcode. She doesn’t think she wants to know. He finds the Facebook app and types something before clicking on a random profile and handing the phone back to her.
It’s a fairly normal-looking page belonging to a 40-something Asian woman. Most of the photos are of her and her husband, a stern-looking man with a buzz cut and a beer belly, but there’s plenty of their toddler as well, a happy-looking boy with messy dark brown hair and a crooked grin.
It’s that grin that tips her off.
Lee has a very distinctive, unnerving grin when he’s trying his best to be a little shit, and the closer she looks, the more Lee she sees. In the wife’s hair and build, the father’s nose and ears. Then she sees the name Anara Mateo at the top of her screen and things start to click into place.
“Is this you?” Abby asks, clicking on a picture of the little boy with a backpack on, standing in front of a school bus.
Lee snorts. “No. You’d have to scroll for a while if you wanted to find pictures of me on there.”
The name Felix jumps out at her from the caption under the photo and Abby blinks in surprise. She can’t help but feel a little hurt. “You never told me you had a little brother.”
“I didn’t know.”
Abby looks back at him. He’s staring down at the photo. There’s a thousand emotions swirling in his eyes. Resentment. Guilt. Jealousy. Longing. But the one she can see most clearly reflected in the lines of his face, the hunch of his spine, the tremor in his hands, is plain, simple grief.
He inhales sharply. “Not until a few weeks ago, at least. You asked about my family, back at your grandmother’s funeral, and I realized the only thing I really knew about them was that my mom was still alive and reported me as a missing person. Nobody ever showed up for me while I was in the hospital, and I’d never bothered to look for them. But then you asked, and for months I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about it.”
Abby remembers the hospital. How Grant and Riley and Zoey and her had been practically smothered by their families once they’d been allowed visitors. How Suzie and Lee, though they’d never said anything about it, had both busied themselves in unoccupied corners of the room before visiting hours had even started, because they’d known better than to expect anyone.
Abby hadn’t pried. Even when Lee got discharged, and she had to practically drag him to come live with her and Chris until they were allowed to move back into Abby's old apartment again, despite the fact that he had literally nowhere else to go, she hadn’t pried.
She was starting to regret that now.
“I finally bit the bullet and looked her up a few weeks ago.” Lee continues. His voice goes quieter the longer he speaks, until she nearly has to strain to hear it. “Apparently she and my dad got back together after I ran away. Ended up having another kid. His name’s Felix. He just started preschool.”
“He’s cute.” Abby whispers. It earns her the brief ghost of a smile on Lee’s face before he continues.
“I kind of...figured she wouldn’t want anything to do with me after what I did to her. But I-I wanted to meet the kid. Just…I don’t know. To see if he was anything like me, I guess. So I messaged her, just to ask if I could come over and meet him sometime. And she told me–she told me…”
His breathing starts to pick up again, and this time Abby doesn’t hesitate.
She places the phone face down on the ground and slowly, telegraphing every movement, leans forward and wraps her arms loosely around Lee’s chest, making sure not to restrict his arms. He tenses at first, as she expected, but slowly, in increments, he relaxes, wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in her shoulder. Lee, she’s found, has an easier time telling her things when he doesn’t have to see her face.
It takes him another minute to get his breathing under control, but when he does, he speaks in the same flat, monotone voice he’d used when he’d offered to let her hit him.
“She told me that her firstborn son is dead.” Lee’s grip on her tightens. “That I’m nothing more than the demon who corrupted her first baby and turned him into an abusive, perverted crossdresser who preys on real women, and she doesn’t want that demon anywhere near her new son. Then she blocked me.”
The last few words are practically forced out of him, choked with emotion. It takes a minute for Abby to process them.
When she does, though, the anger floods back in with the strength of a landslide. It's as if Lee's words had pierced the dam she’d put up to protect him from it.
Abby wants to track down Lee’s mom and hit her with a car. Abby wants to tear into that awful woman’s chest with her bare fingers, rip her beating heart out with nothing but her teeth, and drop it at Lee’s feet like any guard dog would do with a trespassing pest who's gotten far too close to what’s hers.
Abby really, desperately, more than anything else, wants to hit something.
Abby cannot, under any circumstances, hit anything until Lee is unconscious, or out of the apartment, or otherwise unable to hear the violence that he still fears she might turn on him if he makes her angry enough.
She’s not sure how long it takes her to tamp down all the vengeful, furious reactions she desperately wants to express, but Lee doesn’t offer an out. Doesn’t say anything, or move from where he’s wrapped around her on the floor of their bedroom. He’s shaking.
“Lee-” Abby starts, with no idea what she’s about to say.
Lee interrupts her with a strangled, terrifying whisper. “She’s right.”
Abby’s stomach drops. “Lee-”
Lee’s breathing starts to pick up again and he squeezes her tighter. It’s like he doesn’t even hear her. “She was always right, about everything. I can’t stop hurting the people around me. I can’t do anything right, I can’t even kill myself right. You and Leah and Doug and Zoey and Suzie, you’d all be better off if I’d never existed in the first place. I’m too pathetic to be a real man, but I’m too much of a man to stop hurting all the women willing to put up with me. You should’ve let Abel kill me and saved yourselves the trouble-”
Something in Abby snaps.
She detangles herself from their embrace and uses her legs to flip both of them so that Lee’s on his back, Abby seated on his stomach to keep him in place. Before he can push her off, she leans down, wrapping her hands around his biceps and pinning him fully to the ground.
Lee stares up at her in confusion, something fractured in his eyes. It only serves to make her more furious.
She leans down further, until they’re nose to nose. She can feel his soft breaths against her face. He smells like peppermint.
“I need you to listen to me.” Abby whispers. Her voice trembles. She’s sure if she tries to speak louder, it’ll come out as a scream.
Lee offers a tiny nod. His eyes are fixed on hers, only inches apart.
“Yesterday, when I wasn’t sure if you were going to make it, the thought that the closest I’d ever be able to get to you again was a grave, made me want to follow you there.”
With how close they are, she can feel him tense beneath her. “Don’t say that.”
“I mean it, Lee.” Abby breathes. “You are the reason I come home in the evenings instead of going to the bar and getting blackout drunk to forget how lonely I feel. The past year of my life has been amazing, despite everything that’s happened to us. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who looks at me and really sees me, without even trying. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel completely invisible, or like nothing I do matters.”
Abby takes a deep, shuddering breath.
“I can’t go back to the way things were before, and you can’t make me. I don’t care where you go, whether it’s some random park by Riley’s place, or Canada, or the fucking morgue. I will fucking find you, and I will make sure you’re okay.”
For a moment, Lee can do nothing but stare up at her, eyes wide and shocked. Abby knows him well enough to know that he’s searching her face for any hint of dishonesty. And Lee knows her well enough to be able to tell that there aren’t any.
“You’re crazy.” He mumbles after a while.
Abby offers him a small smile. “Maybe a little.”
“Codependency is supposed to be a bad thing, I think.”
That’s what this is, isn’t it? Codependency.
Well. Abby’s had worse dating experiences than a bit of codependency.
“After what we’ve been through? I think we’ve earned it.”
It’s quiet for a moment. All she can do is look at him.
Then Lee scoffs, closing his eyes and tipping his head back.
“I think…” He starts, then hesitates.
Abby decides to take a chance. She settles her body down on top of Lee’s, relaxing her legs on either side of his, sliding her hands down his biceps to hold his hands again, and resting her head on his collarbone.
Lee jumps, but relaxes into it after a moment, the same way he does when he falls asleep on the couch and she covers him with a weighted blanket.
“I think…being Leeroy Mateo is killing me.” He confesses, softly.
Abby tilts her head so her chin is resting on their sternum, and she can look up to where he’s still staring at the ceiling.
“You don’t have to be Leeroy.” She offers. “You don’t even have to be a Mateo, if you don’t want to be.”
Abby’s eyes catch on the pale expanse of his neck, at the tantalizing bob of his Adam's apple as Lee swallows nervously, and she thinks not the time.
“If I was a girl,” Lee finally whispers, “My mom always said they would’ve named me Lilly.”
It’s stated as a fact. Abby hears it as a confession.
“Wow.” She jokes. “50/50 chances, and they still got it wrong. Your parents must’ve been really bad at naming things.”
Lilly lets out a startled cackle and, for some reason, Abby thinks she’ll be okay.
The angry little girl that Abby had always hoped to outgrow had had this habit, back in elementary school, of finding sad little girls and protecting them from the mean boys who called them names and pulled their pigtails and stole their soccer balls on the playground.
She wonders, absently, if the angry little girl in her had seen the sad little girl in Lee and decided, without her input, that she needed protecting.
If that’s true, she thinks, then maybe the angry little girl had earned the right to stay right where she was.