Through to You by Lauren Barnholdt

sharpness out of my voice. I don’t blame her for my dad taking off, but I do blame her for not talking about it, and for not confronting him about it, and for not leaving him years ago.
    I walk into the living room, where Braden’s zoned out in front of the TV. I can tell just by looking at him that he’s high. His eyes are all red and he’s slumped against the back of the couch. A half-eaten bag of chips is sitting in front of him on the coffee table.
    â€œYo,” he says, giving me a half salute. He gestures to the other controller. “You want to play?”
    I shrug and pick up the controller, and we sit there for a few minutes, blowing things up on the screen. It’s supposed to be mindless. And it is. I’m not thinking about Jackson, or my dad, or baseball.
    But what I can’t stop thinking about is Harper.
    But instead of getting me excited, all it does is make me angry. What the hell was I thinking, taking her on a picnic? I’m not in any shape to be taking girls on picnics, especially not girls like Harper. She’s too innocent. She works in a dance studio, for God’s sake. She wants to be a choreographer. That sounds so . . . I don’t know. Pure.
    My mind is racing, and I don’t realize I’m gripping the controller so hard, until I look down and see the indent the plastic is creating on my hand.
    â€œI need to get out of here,” I say, tossing the controller onto the couch.
    â€œAww, come on,” Braden says, shooting at my guys on the screen. “I’m just about to kill you.”
    I ignore him.
    I walk through the kitchen and out the door, and as I do, my mom doesn’t even ask me where I’m going. Instead she just waves and says, “See you later, honey!” like it’s totally normal for her seventeen-year-old son to be leaving at ten at night.
    I drive around for a while, not sure where I’m going.
    Until, eventually, I end up at the same place I always end up.
    At Sienna’s house.
    Which is no good.
    Not for me.
    Not for her.
    Not for Harper.
    Not for anyone.

Harper
    Two weeks. That’s how long it’s been since Penn kissed me. That’s how long it’s been since Penn talked to me.
    Two. Whole. Weeks.
    I never realized how long two weeks could be, and I’ve had a lot of long two weeks. Like the last two weeks of school. Or freshman year, when my mom found a weird lump in her throat and they thought maybe she had thyroid cancer, and by the time she went in for an ultrasound and got the tests results back saying she was fine, it had been two weeks and I was going absolutely crazy.
    So it’s not like I don’t know that fourteen days can be a long time.
    The problem, I think, is that this time there’s no end insight. I knew, with my mom, that we would find something out at some point. And with school ending, I knew the waiting wasn’t going to last forever.
    But this—I don’t know when (or if) it’s going to end.
    I’m acting like I don’t care. I’m acting like I’m not even thinking about it, when in actuality it’s all I can think about. The way Penn’s lips felt on mine, the way his arms encircled my waist, the way the air smelled like rain and early summer, the way he’d somehow known exactly what food to get for our picnic.
    He’s acting like nothing happened between us, acting like he doesn’t even know me, acting like he didn’t put a stupid note on my desk saying he liked my sparkle and then stalked me down at work before whisking me off on a picnic, where he kissed me without me even asking him to.
    Why? Why is he acting this way?
    Trying to figure out why a person would do something like that, while simultaneously pretending you don’t care, when it’s all you can really think about, is completely exhausting.
    â€œI just don’t know what song I should do,” Anna’s saying. “What do you