The Accidental Book Club by Jennifer Scott Page B

said.
    Why? Why would she listen to anyone? Nobody ever listened to her. Not ever.
    Here’s a rule for you: Don’t drink and drive.
    Here’s another: Don’t abandon your daughter and leave her to live with someone who doesn’t have the first clue about rule #1.
    Oh, and here’s a good one: If you do, don’t expect her to think you’re the World’s Greatest Dad or anything.
    Eventually, she gave up. He was shipping her off, and if nothing else, at least now she didn’t have to keep pretending she was “doing something productive”—her dad’s newest catchphrase. And it wasn’t like her grandmother was going to be too hard to fool. The woman sat in the same room with her for, like, thirty minutes before she ever looked up.
    Although. She was the only one who ever did look up. There was at least that.
    But she didn’t say anything about seeing her. Bailey was still trying to figure that one out.
    He left. Said he was just running out real quick to get some supplies for the road trip to Kansas City. But it was good for him to be gone, even for that amount of time. She wanted him away from her. She was so angry with him, her eyeballs hurt.
    She lay back on his bed, as she’d done many afternoons when she’d skipped school to come home and nap. He’d spared no expense in buying his new bachelor pad duds, and the bed was ten times fluffier and more comfortable than the one she had at home, or the garage sale furniture he had for her here.
    She clutched her rescued, but beat-up,
Anne of Green Gables
to her chest, flipping one corner of the pages over and over again for the satisfying
brrr
sound, and stared at the ceiling fan until she could swear it began to move on its own accord under her watery gaze. What did it matter, anyway? What was there for her here? What was left of her life? Where had those days gone, the ones where her mom would make peppermint cookies and play music on the stereo, and they would dance around, laughing, maybe dusting or vacuuming, making the house smell good and fresh? Where were those nights snuggled up to her mom’s chest, listening to that story about the bunny who needed a home? God, she had made her mom read that book so many times. She was in love with the story, but she was more in love with the moment. The tenor of her mom’s voice, the smell of her perfume, the way her toes looked smushed up in her work panty hose—the memories hurt so much, but she couldn’t stop thinking about them. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about them since her mom started being too drunk at night to take off her panty hose at all.
    She dropped the paperback on the floor beside the bed, brought her hand up to her mouth, and poked a cigarette—filched from the gym teacher’s desk drawer on the last day of school—between her lips. Then with a shaky hand, realizing that she was now embarking on a whole new level of messing with the system, she brought a lighter—stolen from the same desk—to the cigarette and thumbed it on.
    The smoke burned a thousand times worse than she thought it would. She thought it would be like the wood smoke that drifted off her mom’s fire pit on Sangria Sundays, but instead it felt like hot liquid pouring down into her lungs, and she coughed and wretched until she felt like her eyes would pop out, curling up onto one side and pressing her cheek against her dad’s superfirm pillow, clutching her stomach with her free arm.
    This. This was good. Physical pain to blot out the emotional pain. Bailey knew that was a dangerous game to play, but she couldn’t help it. The pain made her feel alive, made her feel
there
. It had been so long since she’d been present, she sometimes wondered whether maybe she wasn’t a figment of someone’s imagination.
    But the pain passed and then came the light-headedness; it felt so good to be weightless and out of contact with the world, so she pulled on the cigarette again and coughed again, but less. So she took another drag