Mia Evian has to piece together the mystery of Zack Maddox, the bad boy whose life she saved, while simultaneously keeping her own crumbling life together before Zack ends up in trouble again - or worse yet, dead.
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As I discover over the next few weeks, Christmas isn't the ideal time of year for a family to be ripped apart. When I woke up the morning after Mum told Livvy and me what had happened, I thought I'd made it up. I didn't think it was a dream; it felt too real, but that maybe I'd misheard or misunderstood. That Dad hadn't been having an affair. I was wrong. I'd understood perfectly, and I still felt exactly the same. I still felt nothing. Initially, I thought I was in shock, that the reason I felt so numb to the whole thing was because I couldn't comprehend it. As the days of nothingness turned into weeks of nothingness, however, it occurred to me that perhaps there was something wrong with me, that I couldn't feel like regular people could.
The Christmas holidays are now creeping to a close, and I still feel no different. For the first few nights, Dad slept on the sofa at a friend's house, but has somehow managed to worm his way back into the family home, claiming he has nowhere else to go. He's agreed to stay out of Mum's way, that he'll give her space, and alongside the fact he has nowhere else, that he's only staying in the house because he can't bear not seeing me. I call bullshit, but whatever. I can tell that it's killing Mum to see him every day. To see him every morning and act like he hasn't destroyed every shed of her self-worth.
It's funny, really, how our parents are human. How it takes something drastic to realise that. I'm a clever enough seventeen-year-old. I'm mature, I'm inquisitive, I'm open-minded. Yet until this revelation, I was still living in the delusion that my parents are different to every other human being on earth. That they don't feel emotions like we do, that doing the right thing is instinctive to them, that they don't have their own lives and secrets. It's embarrassing, actually, how deluded I was.
Livvy's gone back to uni for good until Easter. Before everything went to shit, she was meant to be staying home for three whole weeks. Instead, she was home four days. What I did see of her over those four days makes me think I should be glad I have the emotional capacity of a table. While Livvy spent Christmas Day curled up on the sofa, refusing to speak to anyone, I spent it getting on with things easily enough. Alongside how short her visit home was, the fact she spent most of it in a sad silence means we barely got an opportunity to speak, let alone figure this whole situation out together. We've never been especially close, so I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I'd hoped this could actually bring us closer. Now I feel like this is going to drive us even further apart.
I figure I'm just going to get on with things as normal. I feel normal, so might as well act it. There's no point faking misery, although sometimes I consider it. Mum can no longer look at me without an expectant gaze in her eyes. I've not shown anything near the degree of pain Livvy has, so she's waiting for it, and I don't have the heart to tell her it's never coming. None of my friends know about what's happened either, not even Aiden. It's primarily because I've not physically seen much of anyone, but I'm not sure I'll say anything when I do, anyway. I don't think there's much point. I don't feel like I need to vent to anyone about the whole thing, and I'd rather avoid the attention.
