Beautiful Monster 2 (Beautiful Monster #2)(40)
Author: Bella Forrest

“Yep,” I said, although there wasn’t much hope in my voice.

We sat in silence in the waiting room for at least half an hour to be called.

My father turned to me. “You’re so much like your mother, you know that?”

“Uh…” I was about to call him out on how this really wasn’t the best time to be telling me that, but he continued.

“You look just like her, you know that? In the wrong light, I think I’m seeing ghosts.”

“Do you think ghosts are real?” I asked him, my breath catching in my throat.

He looked at me a long while, and then looked around, at the ceiling, at the floor, at anything to distract him. “I don’t know, Amy. I’ve seen some strange things in my time.”

“Did you…” I took a deep breath. “Did you see the end of the Sites episode?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, and it surprised me. My father was always a rational man, a logical man. Everything was calm and collected and everything had an explanation. “You saw her too?”

I felt like a whole weight had been lifted from my body.

“I didn’t know what to think, Dad. I mean, I never…” My voice caught and tears began to stream down my face.

He wrapped his arms around me, drawing me close. The emotions that had been pent up all came flowing out, anger and sadness, grief and fear. It had been such a hard few weeks, and I regretted not going to him sooner with the way I felt. I cried until I felt that I was dry, and my head ached and my ears pounded and I could barely see. All the time, he held me, stroking my hair and making soothing noises. Eventually, he spoke.

“It just means that she’s watching over you, Amy. It means that she’s proud of you. And she would be so proud of you. Your mother once fancied being an actress, did you know that?”

“What?” I pulled away from him to meet his eyes. “Really?”

“Sure. But I mean, no more than every young girl did. But when we were first dating, we would go to see theater shows all the time, sometimes two in one day. We didn’t have very much money, but she always knew how to get the cheap seats. She had all these tips and tricks, and we’d line up for hours for rush seats with a hundred coupons.”

“So she must have been so happy when you got a job at the Academy,” I replied.

He snorted. “She was just like you. She wanted to come to work with me every day. I think that she might have tried to be a student there if she was just a little bit younger.”

“I never knew,” I said.

He shrugged. “Adults don’t often talk about dreams that never were, Amy. You’re so lucky, you know that? You’re living you’re dream. And you’ve turned out exactly the way your mother and I wanted you to.”

“I thought you said acting was just silly and not stable.”

“I did say that,” he replied. “But really, I just wanted you to have a future, to protect you and keep you safe. But you seem to be doing that just fine these days. You don’t need me anymore, Amy.”

“Ah, Daddy, I always need you.”

I wouldn’t say that it was a nice day I spent with my father, because how nice can it be when you are at a hospital? But with him by my side, the day didn’t seem so long, the tests didn’t hurt as much, and the cafeteria food seemed a bit more passable.

“Where is Liam? He’s normally glued to your side.”

I took a deep breath. I had been waiting for this question all day.

“Dad, Liam and I aren’t together anymore.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “That was fast.”

“Well, it was about a year,” I said, blushing when he looked surprised. It’s not like we came out and told him right away.

“Are you alright?” he asked immediately.

I nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. It helps that Sarah is here.”

“And how is Sarah?” His opinion of Sarah hadn’t risen too much since her hospitalization and the police report. He didn’t know the whole story, but the times he met me for lunch and saw Sarah and Connor sucking face, he could probably figure some of it out.

“She’s better.” I looked at my watch. “We should go back up. They will probably be calling us soon.”

We were taken into Dr. Martin’s office just as it closed, being ushered in as the secretary locked the door.

I could see him through the door, paging through my test results and entering notes into the computer. I swung my feet against the bed and my father smiled.

“You used to do that when you were a little kid, remember? Only a lot louder. The whole office could hear you and I used to have to buy you a lollipop to get you to stop.”

“Did it work?” I asked, curious.

My father grinned. “Nope.”

After not too long, Dr. Martin came in with my file and a stack of papers. He did not look happy and I knew that all my suspicions were true.

“Well?” I asked, eager to get this over with.

He sighed. “Well, Amy, your T cell count is low and your blood tests show the disease has progressed. It looks like we are in the early stages now, so no need to worry too much. There’s a lot we can do to…”

I let him drone on and on, but I wasn’t listening. It didn’t matter what medications he had to offer, or what the statistics said nowadays, or what I could or couldn’t do.

The truth of the matter was right in front of me: I had AIDS.

The car ride home was silent, except in the middle, when Father asked where I wanted to sleep. I asked to be taken to his house and he agreed.

From there, I went straight up to my childhood bedroom, where I lay with my phone in my hand for quite a few minutes before rolling over and texting Sarah.

It’s bad.

She responded immediately. I love you. Remember that.

I smiled, and we went back and forth for about 45 minutes, never once hearing each other’s voices. This was the way it used to be, Sarah and me, before all this complexity came in. Before Liam, and school and relationships, it was just Sarah and me, our personalities coming through the texts, as we shared every detail of our day through our phones. All the awkwardness and anger of the previous weeks melted away.

I knew I should text Liam, but I didn’t want to. How was it his business anymore? Of course, I still loved and cared about him, but he had made it clear that he was in a different place in his life right now, and there was no room for me in it. So instead, I scrolled down my contacts and texted Drago.