Free TMI by Patty Blount Page B

thorough. She was about to turn off her phone when she saw the clock display. It was after ten and she hadn’t heard from Chase. He was supposed to come over tonight to help with the game. Bailey tapped out a text message.
    Bailey: Hey, you didn’t show, so I’m guessing the happy meals didn’t work? Hope things are better tomorrow and we can sync up when you finish practice. Also, stop worrying about Meg. She gets angry a lot, but she’s not depressed or anything serious. TTYL.
    Bailey plugged the phone into its charger while the words she’d just typed brought her back to that look in Meg’s eyes. She’d assured Chase Meg wasn’t depressed, but was she right? How would she even know? It’s not like she was an expert on emotions. She twirled a curl around her finger, counting the number of times Meg fell into dark holes and brooded her way out of them. She didn’t smile often except when she saw Chase and almost never laughed. But that was just Meg on her normal setting. Whenever Meg thought about her dad, Bailey knew she’d be in her dark broody hole for days at a time, painting and…and, well, brooding. And when that stopped working, which was typical, a patented Meg Farrell Blurt could strike. It was kind of like a perfect storm where a bunch of conditions all had to be just right. Bailey had seen a blurt only a handful of times since she and Meg had become friends, and the last one had been about a year ago when Meg learned the movie theater where she worked would soon close its doors for good.
    She shivered. It wasn’t pretty.
    Meg had spiraled down into the closest thing to a panic Bailey had ever seen. Money was tight for the Farrells, Bailey knew. But until that night, she had no idea how tight. Creditors were threatening them. There was often no food in the kitchen. The cable TV had been canceled. Bailey always assumed Meg didn’t like TV—except for The Vampire Diaries , of course. She had no idea how much Pauline’s books for her night classes cost or that they’d lived upstairs last winter because they just couldn’t afford to heat the entire house. She’d never suspected that Meg’s aversion to shopping wasn’t because she didn’t like designer clothes. It was because she had to help pay the bills and couldn’t splurge on an expensive pair of jeans.
    Meg’s blurts were like hurricanes—they formed slowly, blew in, wreaked havoc on everyone and everything around them, and then faded away.
    Bailey’s jaw clenched when she thought about the way Meg had worshipped her dad. He was the cause of their problems! His death left them poor. Meg should be mad and resentful and throw tantrums and definitely not live out the stupid plan he’d taught her, but she couldn’t let it go. Even when she skipped meals, she never ever blamed—
    Wait.
    Chase asked her what Meg’s dad had done to her and said that he’d seen her stabbing a picture.
    That was it. After all these years, she’d finally cracked. Yes! Bailey pumped a fist in the air. Maybe now Meg would relax those impossibly high standards of hers and act normal. With a wry grin, Bailey figured she’d need lots of help with that. Meg didn’t know anything about acting normal.
    Her enthusiasm faded while she considered that. God, it must be awful to be angry at someone you can’t talk to anymore.
    It was awful to be angry at someone you couldn’t talk to.
    Bailey hated her own dad too. Maybe not stab-his-picture mad, but close, and the only reason for that was because she’d never seen a picture of her dad. She didn’t even know his name. Nicole had gotten pregnant with her while in her third year of high school. She was an accident.
    A mistake.
    She’d asked over and over, but Nicole refused to talk about her dad. Even Gran and Gramps wouldn’t tell her anything about him. When she was little, Bailey used to have