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When Lexi Howard is eleven-and-three-quarters years old (already too quiet, too serious, too everything her sister is not), her grandmother pulls her aside at a barbecue.
Her mother has drank too much again. Her father is looking around, embarrassed at his wife but unwilling to say anything to her in front of their friends. Her sister is being fawned over by men much too old to be leering at her the way they are.
And Lexi is alone.
She is beginning to get good at that.
Being alone.
When her grandmother comes to sit next to her in the kitchen (away from the loud voices and pawing hands) she is already one drink past what is socially acceptable for two o’clock in the afternoon. Lexi realizes in that moment where her mother must have inherited that particular trait.
Lexi doesn’t see her grandmother very much. There is always talk of plans to be made, but they are never followed through. There is always an excuse. Gran is busy, Mom can’t drive us, Dad made dinner. Always something.
So her grandmother stumbles into the kitchen of their small home and sits down next to her, clutching a glass of wine.
And when she opens her mouth to speak, Lexi cements her plans for the rest of her life.
“Lexi, honey,” her grandmother slurs, “you’re getting big enough now that I think I need to tell you something.”
And Lexi leans forward, eyes big and waiting. Lexi is not used to being part of serious conversations, at least not ones that mattered. It seems like she is always hearing things second and third hand.
“Every family needs someone who takes care of everyone. When your mom was growing up, her daddy did that for us.” Her grandmother smiles wistfully. Lexi has never met her grandfather, but when her mother talks about him she does so fondly.
“Your mother is the type of person who needs to be taken care of. And God love her, it seems like your sister is turning out to be that way too. And, pardon my language, your father sure as shit isn’t going to do it.”
And as much as that hurts to hear, eleven-and-three-quarters-year-old Lexi Howard knows that her grandmother is right. She loves her dad more than almost anything in the world. But he is not the caretaking type. Her dad blossoms with attention and affection from others. He is there when he needs to be but not always when Lexi wants him to be. And the way her parents fight, it feels like only a matter of time until her parents split up like she hears her friends talk about in school and Lexi and Cassie are splitting time between two parents, two homes, two families. Two selves.
“Sweetie,” her grandmother continues, “you have always had such a good head on your shoulders. Even when you were a baby, you never cried, did you know that? Always so good.”
And Lexi does know that. Her mother likes to tell her that when Lexi gets upset. Maybe her mother thinks it will make her feel better, stronger, but all it really does is make Lexi less likely to cry around her mother. After all, she doesn’t want to upset her.
“You’re going to have to be the one to take care of your mom, Lexi.” This is perhaps the most serious Lexi has ever seen her grandmother. She even puts down her wine glass to take one of Lexi’s small hands, the nails covered in chipped pale pink polish Cassie had begged her to let her put on. Lexi stares at it now, for some reason unable to look her grandmother in the eye.
“You’re so smart. You’re smarter now at ten than I think I’ve ever been. So it’s going to have to be you.” They sit there for a beat, then Lexi nods her head. She’s still staring at the faded pink on her nails. Her grandmother sets her hand down, pats it once, and then grabs her wine glass again. She gets up and leaves the kitchen, leaves the house, leaves Lexi. Lexi watches her go. She feels a knot tighten in her stomach at the sight.
She sits in silence for a few minutes more before her mother stumbles in, trying to find her. “Come on, Lex, we’re leaving,” she hears. Her mother’s face is red and she is unsteady on her feet.
Lexi’s first assignment as caretaker of her family is to take her mother by the hand and help her out to their car. She doesn’t want her to fall.
—
Gus Howard leaves them six months later. Gran was right , Lexi thinks as she holds Cassie’s hand in the driveway, the two of them watching their father pull away in his car. It’s not going to be him .
So Lexi tugs on her sister’s hand, leads her back inside, and guides Cassie up the stairs to their shared bedroom. As soon as they hit the doorway Cassie starts crying, so Lexi grabs a bottle of nail polish and sits her sister down on the floor between their beds. She puts on music, something soft and slow in the background, and begins to paint her big sister’s nails.
Pale pink.
The same color her nails were when her grandmother sets her life’s mission into motion.
Take care of them .
And she does.
When her mother drinks too much, which happens more and more now, she takes the empty wine glass out of her hand where she sleeps on the couch.
She fills a glass with water from the tap and leaves it on the side table, hoping her mother will reach for it when she wakes.
She sets alarms for the days her mother has to go to work.
She turns on the car when it hasn’t been driven in a few days, makes sure there is enough gas in the tank to get to work, school, the grocery store.
When Cassie gets her first high school boyfriend, Lexi makes sure there are condoms in their shared bathroom.
(She’s only twelve. She’s not ready to take care of a baby yet.)
She helps Cassie pick out outfits for school.
When she decides she wants to sneak out with her new best friend Maddy Perez, Lexi covers for her. But she keeps an eye on her location on Find My Friends.
Lexi watches until the dot representing her sister arrives at Maddy’s house, her boyfriend’s house, or their own house. Only then does she let herself sleep.
When Cassie’s boyfriend sleeps with her and leaves her a week later, Lexi picks up the pieces of her sister’s shattered heart. They share a bed, something they haven’t done since their dad left. Lexi smooths down Cassie’s hair while she cries, lets her shirt get soaked with Cassie’s tears.
And when they wake up in the morning and Cassie bounces out of bed like nothing happened, Lexi lets her go.
But she makes sure to shoulder check her sister’s brand new ex-boyfriend in the school hallway when she makes it to the high school the next year.
—
Her grandmother dies a week before Lexi’s fourteenth birthday.
Her mother is inconsolable for a week, drinking herself into a sobbing stupor, passing out, and waking up in the morning and doing it again.
“They say her liver failed,” she hears her mother say on the phone one night. “Drank herself to death.”
And Lexi flips through a tableau of memories in her mind. Every image she has of her grandmother is accompanied by a red wine stain on her mouth, a glass in her hand.
(The memories of her mother are starting to look the same, although she pushes those away.)
And a grim feeling washes over almost fourteen year old Lexi Howard. The knot in her stomach that has been there since their talk tightens again. She is the only one left to take care of her family, now that her grandmother is gone. She steels herself against the shock, pushes back the tears she will not let fall, and asks her mother how she can help with the funeral.
And on the morning of the service, she paints her own nails pale pink.
—
Rue Bennett is the one person in Lexi’s life that will not allow herself to be taken care of.
Lexi tries. She tries so hard it’s probably embarrassing.
She invites Rue to hang out, asks her to go ride bikes.
She follows Rue to the handsome drug dealer’s store, waits outside and watches through the door while she buys (“it’s just weed, Lexi, chill”).
She gets high at that handsome boy’s house and doesn’t cry when she wakes up with a sharpie beard on her face, no matter how much she wants to.
She knows her friend is not well, knows that if she doesn’t step in something bad would happen.
And she tries once. To step in.
But she backs down.
If Lexi oversteps and Rue cuts her out of her life then she can’t do anything at all to help her.
And Lexi can’t let that happen.
When her mother comes into her bedroom to tell her Rue has overdosed, she gives herself five minutes to fall apart. It’s my fault, she thinks as she sobs into her mother’s shoulder. My fault.
But after those five minutes are up, she pulls back and wipes at her face. She assures her mother that she is okay, that she needs to go to bed so she can work on her summer reading tomorrow.
And then she curls up under the covers in the dark, feeling like an imposter in her own skin. The knot in her stomach grows impossibly tight, to the point where she feels like she might throw up. “It’s going to have to be you,” she hears her grandmother’s voice in her head. And she begins planning for when she sees Rue again.
To this day, that is her biggest failure.
—
When Lexi Howard is seventeen years old, she falls in love.
It came when she was absolutely least expecting it. She is fretting about her sister, who she stupidly let out of the car in the middle of nowhere. She barely even pays attention to who she is sitting next on the dingy couch until he begins speaking.
“Yo, you Rue’s friend, right?”
And she is gone for him.
Down bad, as Maddy would say.
She spends every day texting him, calling him, seeing him.
They hold hands for the first time on the same couch she got high on, crying after watching Stand By Me .
They kiss for the first time in his car, down the street from her house where he drops her off. She looks at his lips for just a moment too long, blushing when he smiles at her. He reaches over gently, places a hand on her cheek. He just holds it there for a moment when she decides, Fuck it , and leans over to press their lips together.
It lasts just a few seconds, but she feels her world explode.
When she pulls away from him and opens the car door, she notices she has on pale pink nail polish.
And of course, their relationship is not always perfect. She knows that no relationship is. But she loves him, and he loves her.
Their biggest obstacle is his line of work.
It’s not even the drugs, really. It’s the danger. She hates watching him leave, knowing she can’t follow him. Not knowing when he’ll come back or if he’ll be hurt when he does.
(She can’t take care of him if he doesn’t let her.)
But they compromise. He promises to text her when he leaves and when he returns.
And he always does.
Maybe it’s his way of taking care of her too.
She doesn’t ask questions about the details. On the rare occasion he comes home hurt, she patches him up and kisses his head, his cheek, his mouth. They lose their worries in each other’s bodies and whispered “I love you”s.
She helps keep the house clean. Cooks them dinner. Lends Ashtray books to read and recommends movies that she thinks he would like. She wins him over slowly.
They are two more people on her list to take care of, but she doesn’t mind these two.
She is at his house one night, several months into their relationship. They are curled up on the couch together, watching a movie Lexi picked out. They normally let her choose the movie, claiming she probably knew more about them than they did. Ashtray is on the floor in front of them, eating a brownie she had baked earlier in the week.
She has never felt more at peace.
And then her phone rings.
It jolts her out of the lull she was in and she fumbles for it, flipping up the crochet blanket covering her and Fez. When she finally finds it, her stomach drops.
Cassie is calling her.
Lexi has not heard from her sister in weeks, not since Cassie called her pathetic and left to go live with Nate Jacobs. They’ve passed each other in the hallways, both turning their heads to the side to avoid eye contact.
Every time she sees Cassie look a little bit more like Maddy, the knot in her stomach gets a little tighter and she feels a little more hopeless.
“It’s going to have to be you,” she hears again in her mind.
“I’ll be right back,” she says quietly, brushing her hand across her boyfriend’s shoulder and walking into his bedroom.
She shuts the door.
She doesn’t know what she might say, and if she wants Fez to hear it.
Fez knows she has a tendency to worry. More than once she has declined an offer to come over, telling him that she has to keep an eye on her mom. She has spent sleepless nights tearing up in his bed, telling him that she doesn’t know how to help Cassie, or Rue, or her mother. In her darkest moments, she speaks about how she failed her father. How she watched him go and didn’t stop him.
Fez knows all that.
But there’s a difference between hearing about it and seeing it.
So she shuts the door.
“Cassie?” she answers the phone. “Are you okay?”
She is answered with sobs on the other end. Through the cries, she manages to make out, “Nate broke up with me.”
Fuck.
“Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m outside his house,” Cassie cries. “He gave me, like, five minutes to pack all my stuff and then he kicked me out.” She devolves into tears again, and Lexi sighs.
“I’ll be right there, okay, Cassie?” she speaks a little louder, so hopefully her sister will hear her over her cries. “I need you to stay where you are and I’ll be right there.”
“Okay,” Cassie whines pitifully. Lexi hangs up the phone, takes a moment to collect herself, and opens the bedroom door.
It’s obvious she caught her boys trying to figure out what was going on. Their heads are leaned together and they are whispering furiously, stopping abruptly when she enters the living room, the movie on the TV long forgotten.
Fez looks at Ashtray one more time before turning his head towards her, a furrow between his eyebrows. “Everythin’ okay?” he asks, and those two words in his slow, easy drawl loosen the knot in her stomach just a little.
“I need a favor,” she says. Borrowing her boyfriend’s car is the quickest way to get to her sister, the easiest way to get there without issue. “Cassie called me. Nate kicked her out and she needs me to come get her.”
Before she has even finished her sentence, he is up off the couch and grabbing his keys. “Put yo shoes on, let’s go,” he says, busying himself with his own shoes and jacket.
“You don’t have to come, I was just going to ask if I could borrow your car,” Lexi says quickly. This is her family, her responsibility. Fez shouldn’t be dragged into it.
He looks at her for a second, not saying anything. Then he says again, “Put yo shoes on.”
And she does.
They get in the car with little conversation. Ashtray stays home, saying he doesn’t want to be anywhere near the Jacobs house.
Fez keeps glancing over at her as he drives, only speaking to ask for directions. After a few minutes in the car, he reaches over to grab her hand. She tries to keep herself from holding it too tightly, but it feels like it might be the only thing keeping her in the car.
And with a death grip on her boyfriend’s hand, they pull up to the curb of Nate Fucking Jacobs’ house to see her sister looking like a kicked puppy crying on the sidewalk.
Lexi is out of the car before it has come to a complete stop, making her way to her sister.
They had ended things poorly, but this was still her big sister.
And it is Lexi’s job to take care of her.
Cassie reaches for her blindly, holding her so tight that Lexi’s ribs scream in pain. Cassie cries in her arms, neck bent at an awkward angle so she could bury her head into the joint between Lexi’s neck and shoulder.
In her peripheral vision, she sees Fez grabbing Cassie’s bags and putting them into the trunk of the old Cadillac.
She rocks them back and forth for a moment, stroking Cassie’s hair like she has done so many times before.
Their dad leaving, Cassie’s boyfriend taking what he wanted and going, their grandma dying.
Lexi is all too familiar with this position.
“Let’s get in the car, Cassie,” Lexi murmurs into her ear. “We need to go.”
Cassie is pliable, following Lexi wherever she leads. She deposits her still-sobbing sister in the backseat, only hesitating a moment before following her in. She meets Fez’s eyes in the rearview mirror, apology in her eyes.
The car ride back to the Howard house is quick and quiet, only occupied by the muffled sound of Cassie crying.
Even that, though, trails off as they approach their home. Cassie begins to sniffle rather than sob, wiping at her face and pulling herself together. And when they pull up to the driveway, Cassie opens her door without even a glance toward her sister.
Lexi gets out too, and so does Fez. He makes his way to the back of the car, shooting worried glances at her the whole way.
Once Cassie’s bags are in her hands, she begins walking up to their front door. She stops about halfway there and turns around, and Lexi holds her breath. “Thanks for the ride. You can get back to whatever you were doing.”
And then her big sister, the person she would do anything for (and has dropped everything for) walks to their front door and opens it without looking back.
And the knot tightens.
And snaps.
She is almost in a daze when she gets back in Fez’s car, closing the door on autopilot. He gets in right after her, but he doesn’t put the car into gear and drive away. Instead he turns his body to face her.
“You alright, Lex?” he asks softly. He is studying her face like it holds the answers to the universe and it makes her want to cry. Makes her want to curl up in the backseat and let him hold her while she does. Makes her want to be the one being taken care of.
“I feel like I should follow her inside.”
A shadow passes over his face, then: “You don’t owe that girl nothin.’”
“I -” she begins, and he cuts her off.
“She asked you to come get her ass, and you did. You picked her up from playboy’s house and fuckin’ held her while she cried all over you. And then she was nasty to you. You don’t owe her nothin.’”
“She’s my sister,” Lexi protested quietly.
“And you spent your whole life takin’ care of her. And your mom, and Rue, and the rest of yo friends. Hell, even me and Ash.” He takes her hand in his, rubbing his thumb back and forth across her knuckles.
She watches it move, avoiding his eyes.
He takes his other hand and nudges her chin with it, forcing her to look up at him.
“You know it don’t always have to be you.”
Her eyes well up with tears then, and she rearranges their hands so their fingers are intertwined. She squeezes his fingers and hopes that is enough to tell him everything she wants to say and cannot.
Thank you.
I love you.
You make me feel seen.
I think you’re the first person I haven’t felt responsible for.
I don’t know who I am if I’m not taking care of people.
But you make me want to find out.
But for now she squeezes his hand and he starts his car.
In her mind, she hears his voice tell her again, “It don’t always have to be you.”
And she starts to believe him.
Her nail polish is blue today.
She always liked blue better than pink.