I can’t.

So instead I tuck my own hand into the pocket of my hoodie, leaving only the left one, the one farthest away from her free to hold my smoke.

We sit there in silence for a few minutes, watching as the streetlights start to blink on as the darkness finally arrives, covering the neighborhood. I hear Star’s intake of breath beside me, and I know she’s about to speak, about to talk about what happened. And I’m just not ready for that yet, so I spit out the first thing that comes to my head.

“How’s your hand?”

She kind of blinks at me for a second, as though she has no idea what I’m talking about, but then she looks down and tugs up the sleeve, and I can see the stark white of the gauze against the black fabric of her hoodie. It’s tinged a little with blood. I shove my smoke back between my lips, and reach out for her hand. “Let me see.”

“It’s fine,” she says, but holds out her arm, anyway, sitting quietly as I turn it this way and that. It’s only bleeding in that one spot, and by the looks of it, it’s slowed way down. So that’s good. When she’d first cut it, I’d been worried she’d snagged an artery or something, or that she’d need stitches, it had been bleeding so bad. She’d stood there, wincing and swearing as I held her hand under the running water of the tap—thank god that hadn’t been turned off like the power had been, otherwise I’m not sure what I would have done. When I’d been certain it was clean, I’d pulled it away to examine it, only to have the blood just well right back up again.

I had grabbed a stack of paper napkins out of the package we’d left on the kitchen counter, and pressed them against the cut, telling her to hold it there good and tight, as I went rooting around for the first-aid kid we’d found earlier and had thrown . . . somewhere. I finally found it in the dining room, sitting on one of the tucked-in chairs like it was a guest at some fucked-up dinner party. I’d gone a little overboard with the gauze when I began wrapping her up, but it wasn’t like I had any stellar first-aid skills. Plus, I figured that too much was better than not enough. At least it looks like the bleeding has stopped.

I tell her so, and she kind of smiles at me, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and pulls her hand back.

“Is it still hurting?” I ask, and she shakes her head.

“It’s a little sore,” she says, picking a little at the edge of the gauze. “But I’ll be fine. It’s my pride that has taken a beating more than anything.”

I can believe that. She’s always been so cool and collected. Having me see her like that must really be messing with her head.

She lets out a sigh. “I’m really sorry, by the way. About what happened in there.”

I take a long drag on my cigarette and reach over to tap the ash into the little empty soup can that Star gave me when we couldn’t find a single goddamn ashtray in the house. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” I tell her. And it’s the truth. “It’s those assholes who should be sorry for talking about your mom like that.”

“Yeah,” she says, and turns away from me to look out at the street. It’s quiet right now, not that this block ever really bustles with activity. I suppose people pay a premium to live in a neighborhood like this. Not that the one I grew up in was so different. The houses were a little smaller, the cars a little older. But overall, not so different. “But the worst part about it is that they were right.”

I turn to look at her. She lets out a breath and tugs the sleeves of her hoodie back down over her hands, covering them completely this time. She wraps her arms around herself, and pulls her legs up, planting her feet on the step directly in front of her. She leans forward, and it almost looks like she’s curling herself into a ball. God, she was really affected by that shit.

“I loved my mother. I really did. It’s just…when I was little, things were great,” she says. But she’s chewing at her lower lip, and staring off into space, like just the act of remembering is wearing on her. “But then my dad died and…my mom, she just stopped, you know?”

“Stopped?”

She sighs and reaches up to tug at the end of a lock of hair. It’s distracting, all long and half-curled. I keep wanting to bury my hands in it, to see what it feels like for myself. “Stopped being a mom,” she says. “I mean, she was there. She didn’t abandon me or anything. I was still fed and clothed and dropped off at school on time. But it was like she’d just checked out, you know? She was there, but at the same time she wasn’t.” She drops her hand back down, and her fingers curl into fists. “That’s when she started bringing home the stuff.”

Shit. It had been her dad’s death that had set her mom off. That made sense. She’d lost not only the guy she’d loved, she’d also lost the one person who would have actually been able to stop her from bringing all this shit into the house in the first place.

“And at first it was great,” she says. “I had all these new toys to play with, and all this new star stuff. I loved it. But . . . ”

“But then it didn’t stop,” I say, because that’s what happened. It just kept coming and coming, burying Star and her mom alive.

She nods. “And soon it didn’t matter that I had the newest toys, because there was nowhere to play with them. There were these paths through the piles, and my mom tried to pretend it was a game, like we were living in a maze or something. And that was fine at first, too, but eventually people noticed. And then she had to choose between having me and keeping her things and, well . . . ” She’s still staring off into space, and I can’t help but wonder what she’s seeing, if that day is playing over and over in her mind in full color. “Well,” she says after a moment, seemingly shaking it off, “you know the rest.”

I can’t help it. I reach out and wrap an arm around her shoulders and tug her just a little bit closer. “That blows,” I tell her, and take another pull on my cigarette before I can say anything else.

I can feel her nod against my shoulder, lean into me, just a little. “Yeah,” she says. “It really does. It’s just . . . She was a shitty mom. I know that. She chose her stuff over her daughter, over me. But . . . ”

“But she was still your mom,” I say. And I get it. I do. Because even after they kicked me to the curb, my parents will always be my parents, and I don’t think there’s anything they could do that I wouldn’t forgive them for, at least a little bit. They’re the reason I’m here.

Star shifts against me, and I’m doing everything I can to not pull her closer. “Yeah, but it’s more like she was a person, and people keep forgetting that. They just keep talking about her like she wasn’t. Like all she was was this,” She reaches a hand out and kind of waves it around us, gesturing to the house, the car, all the stuff. Everything.

“Look,” I say. “Screw them. Seriously. Those people? The ones from earlier and anyone else who says that shit? They don’t matter. Not to you and not to me.” I take one last puff of my smoke and finish it off, dropping the butt into the soup can.

Only you matter, I want to say, but I keep my mouth fucking shut. She doesn’t need my problems, not right now.

We sit in silence for a minute, just breathing in the night air, until finally Star turns to me. “Come on,” she says, pulling out of my embrace and getting to her feet. “We missed dinner and I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

I don’t even think. I just follow her inside.

I’m pretty sure I’d follow that girl anywhere.

***

Now that we have the power back on, dinners are less of the college food experience extravaganza and a bit closer to the look at me, I’m a grown-up kind of thing. The meals aren’t fancy, but they are tasty. Spaghetti and meat sauce, tacos, chicken and potatoes. Simple stuff, really. But considering I have no clue what I’m doing in the kitchen, I still think it’s pretty damn good. I’m even starting to reconsider my stance on vegetables. When Star adds them to stuff, they taste good. I’m starting to think that it’s not veggies I hate, but my parents’ cooking. After all the drama we’ve been through lately, it feels good to just sit down with Star and eat. And she was right. I was ravenous.