Read The One That Got Away for Free Online Page B

knock at the door and felt like puking.
    Oh, God.
    This was it.
    Ever since the first moment she’d realized other kids had one dad and one mom or two dads or two moms or a houseful of moms and aunts and whoever else to care for them, she’d desperately wanted to meet her own father.
    Well, she’d wanted to and she hadn’t wanted to. Her mom had told her stuff. She’d said he wouldn’t be a good dad. That he wasn’t that kind of guy.
    And now he was here, coming to take her off for their own little summer getting-to-know-you party. Why had she even suggested it?
    But if he wasn’t a dad kind of guy, then what? Should she even go?
    She couldn’t do it. She didn’t know this guy. He didn’t know her.
    This whole meeting thing was a terrible idea. Why had she phoned him?
    She stood up, walked across the room and locked her door.
    Then she went into her bathroom and cried.
    She buried her face in Nina’s thick gray towels to drown out the noise of her pathetic sobbing, she had a moment of totally hating that she was messing up her carefully applied eye makeup, but she kept right on crying.
    She hated the guy downstairs for not having stuck around when she was born to get to know her, to find out what a great person she was. He’d just disappeared. He’d been sure he wouldn’t love her and he’d taken off.
    He was a loser.
    Well, maybe that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t known about her, so she couldn’t really blame him for not sticking around.
    And she hated her mom for dying. This was the thing she’d never said aloud in her own head before. It was an ugly dark cloud that had been lurking in the back of her brain, waiting for the right moment to move in and make everything even more screwed up.
    Izzy sank onto the floor, taking the towel with her. Her chest was doing this weird heaving, shuddering thing, and she needed to blow her nose, and she was drooling.
    Not pretty.
    She heard someone knocking on the bedroom door and calling for her to come out. It was Nina.
    “Izzy? Are you in there? Can you open up, please?”
    She didn’t have anything against her. Nina was her godmother and her mom’s friend, and she’d been nice to Izzy. Too nice, even. Since she didn’t have any kids of her own, Nina didn’t know what to do with a teenager who’d just landed in her house, motherless and devastated. So she had bought Izzy stuff and tried to soothe her by taking her out to fancy restaurants. She’d even suggested the two of them take a trip to Hawaii or Paris or wherever Izzy wanted to go.
    But it was weird. Izzy didn’t want anything, and she didn’t want to go anywhere. She barely wanted to get out of bed in the morning, but she didn’t think about her mother much, either. Whenever a memory of her mom slipped into Izzy’s head uninvited, she’d force herself to think about something happy, like her dog, Lulu, when she was a puppy and so small she could fit in Izzy’s palm.
    Right now Lulu was downstairs in a pet carrier next to her suitcase, waiting to be taken on the trip. Izzy wished she hadn’t corralled her in that stupid carrier already. She’d have felt a little better if Lulu was in her lap now, staring up at her with her brown cow eyes.
    Why had she freaked out like this? Especially now, after all the other stuff that had happened.
    Izzy figured that once a kid’s worst fear comes true and her only parent dies, and she survives the pain of it, or at least is pretty sure she’s surviving, she starts to think nothing can shake her. She starts thinking maybe she’s invincible, like some starry-eyed superhero.
    But maybe the opposite happens. Maybe when the worst of it is already over, that’s when a person falls apart.
    Izzy swiped at the drool on her chin with the towel. Her breathing was coming out all shuddery, and she was pretty sure her face looked so puffy it would take her an hour to get it back to semi-normal.
    “Izzy…honey…please open up!”
    The “honey” part of Nina’s plea