Sebastian avoided Mercedes for a time, and by the way the conversation had ended the last time they had spoken to each other, she wouldn't have been surprised if they never talked to each other again. He had walked her to her front door, hands shoved a mile deep into his pockets, and gave a small, disappointed and fragile smile then left. That was a few weeks ago, and he had made it his mission to avoid her at all costs or make it so that they made no notice of the other's existence. None of his friends asked about her again, the incident with Quinn having spread through the group, and his life went back to normal.

He was trying to figure things out, sort through them in his own head: he loved his friends in the way that anyone loved the people they grew up with. But they were shallow, conniving, and elitist: and so was he. He knew that, but he wasn't just that. He was so many other things, and he thought that he could project that truth, show that there were more layers to him than the brand named clothing, the high society dinners and the absolute bigotry. Not that anyone cared, not that it mattered, not that he had a problem with the haughty image. He had a problem that someone, someone so miniscule, someone so insignificant, had seen him as the object of her affections, even a decade ago, and now, surely, saw him as some type of pubescent, sex-hungry, impulsive dork trying to get off and then a holier-than-thou asshole and finally, at the end of the night: a teary-eyed basket case that needed to explain himself to her. He was upset. Upset that someone like her, a no-name, had made him question himself repeatedly in the course of a week. The first fucking week of school. So, he avoided her. He pushed her so far out of his mind that the shame and humiliation of her ever seeing what he tried so hard to hide was almost palpable. He had tried to prove himself to someone whose opinion didn't matter. It didn't fucking matter.

He kept telling himself that.

Friday morning during the third week of school, he got called out of class and sent to the office. He saw his mother, a stern and worried look on her face. She checked the boy out of school and walked out of the office without saying a word. The two made it to the parking lot before Sebastian stopped. His mother continued walking, her heels making loud, intentional contact with the pavement. She turned around after a few steps, clutching her purse and looking at her son, wearily.

"We don't have time for this, Sebastian."

"Why are you here?' he asked.

"I'll talk to you in the car."

"Is it dad?' he began, air rising in the back of his throat. His mother shook her head and placed a hand over her mouth, the sunlight hitting her red fingernails. She took a few steps closer to the boy.

Sebastian sighed, his mind wandering. He knew or had an inkling. "I drove. I'll meet you wherever, but you need to tell me what's going on. I will walk back into that building right now if you don't."

"Sebastian,' his mother sighed, heavily. She looked up towards the sky, to the God she rarely spoke to. She gave a quick prayer, but no tears settled in her eyes. She had never cried in front of her children; she had never even cried for them. "It's your sister. I don't know what happened, but she's in a hospital outside of Columbus. I'm sure it was drugs or,' the woman flexed her hand, the veins spreading into her fingers were visible and blue. "Alcohol. I don't know."

He let go of the breath he had been holding and looked past the woman.

On the car ride, he thought about his sister and how much they resembled each other. He thought about her long brown hair and how in the summer, some of it lightened to red and auburn shades. He thought about how she liked to talk about their Irish ancestry, and he thought about all the postcards she had handed him when she got back from her year studying abroad in Dublin. She had pointed to one postcard, stamped in Belfast, that had brown stains of liquid over the crispy, white paper. She told him about having her first Guinness there and all of the college-aged students she had met in the area. Ireland was in the middle of a 'social war', as she kept referring to it, and her parents had been worried sick the entire time she was gone. Even as a child, Sebastian knew that was probably why she had gone: to make their parents upset. For as long as he could remember, he had resented Savannah. The resentment was born out of how much stress and worry she had caused their parents when he was a child, and though his idolization for his parents had more than cooled, he found that the bridge between him and his sister had long since been burned. He only heard from her during the holidays or whenever his mother took to the bottle and began to complain loudly about where they went wrong with Savannah. The two weren't close, and he had suspected that this time would come, sooner or later. The Smythe family was full of alcoholics, and some were better at hiding it than others. Emmett and Tierney were private or social drinkers. The most dramatic behaviors of either could be attributed to bourbon or chardonnay, but these outbursts were infrequent. As for Savannah, she had been the apple of her parents' eyes for so long. She was beautiful, stunning even and extremely intelligent. She was still smart, she would always be smart. But college had turned her into something Emmett and Tierney couldn't have imagined: a well-spoken, well-read indignant. She was still prim, still proper, but extremely upset about everything that her parents had afforded her, which, to her, seemed like everything they had taken away. She was upset that she couldn't relate to her peers, couldn't live without manicured nails, couldn't understand the protests she took place in. It was one thing to spew all the horrible facts that you were blind to as a child, she knew them. It was something entirely different to understand them and believe what you were saying. She blamed their parents for her lack of humanity— for the paper thin wall that stood between her and everything she wanted to be.

Sebastian couldn't imagine that: hating their parents for giving them the world. He didn't want her to die though. He didn't want to see her waste away in misery, blaming their parents for everything that she was too drunk to fix on her own. She had her J.D. and still couldn't keep it together. She was the scourge of the family and rarely referred to unless it was a small brag about having a daughter that taught law at Ohio State. No one ever talked about how she was doing, because what she was doing just sounded better.

"She won't speak to me,' his father said immediately at Sebastian and his mother. The man, still clad in business suit and sleek hair, had been obviously flustered before the rest of his family entered the hospital. The drive was a little longer than an hour and three-quarters, but Sebastian could tell his father had been there for some time. The former usually sped everywhere he drove, ducking in and out of traffic, but he was in no rush to sit beside Savannah in silence and indignation. He hated being in awkward situations, hated uncomfortable silence, hated hospitals and loathed being anywhere with his entire family, ignoring the elephant in the room which was, unironically, everything and everywhere.

"If she won't speak to you then she won't speak to me,' his mother responded, sitting down, deflated, in a plastic chair along the corridor. No one asked how Savannah was doing.

Emmett looked at his son, his hands on his waist, a beeper placed strategically on his hip. He sighed. "Sebastian, go talk to your sister."

"What makes you think she'll speak to me?' he responded quickly, taking a step back after realizing the tone he had taken. There was always something to unpack within the family, but he didn't want the wrath of his father to couple with what he assumed was the overdose of his sister. Without waiting for his father to respond, he found a nurse and asked for Savannah Smythe's room. He considered it damage control before the damage had gotten the chance to sink in.

Savannah was curled with her legs to her chest in the middle of the bed when Sebastian walked in. He stepped lightly into the room. The blinds were pressed shut, and he could see a pan marked by throw up beside the bed. Savannah curled further into herself as Sebastian closed the door behind him, her brown hair disheveled across her face. He pulled a chair into place on the opposite of the bed, facing her back and sat down for a few minutes, neither saying anything. After a time, ten or fifteen minutes, he began to hear light sobs coming from Savannah, the blanket wrapped around her shook. Sebastian didn't know what he could say, so he placed a hand on her back and held her gently. The sobbing got louder before it stopped completely, a few sharp breaths emptying out into silence again. When she finally spoke, her voice was raspy and weak.

"This is so fucking pathetic. I will never live this down,' she groaned. "That's not even the most I've ever drank, I don't know what happened, Sebastian. I told my roommate that if anything ever happened to me,' she began crying again. "Not to call them. No matter what you do, do not call my parents, and that's the first fucking thing she did… Dad comes in here screaming, fucking screaming, and the headache I have right now, you wouldn't fucking believe it. And he comes in here yelling, and, what was I supposed to do? I told him to get the fuck out, and when I looked at him, oh, God,' she groaned, moved her hands toward her stomach and crawled further into herself. "He was so through with me, Sebastian. I felt it."

"Savannah,' he sighed. "They love you. For all the shit that you put them through and all the weird, nude photography you've forced them to look at at your friends' galleries, they still see you as their daughter. They just don't know what to do with you."

"I'm not something to be done with, Sebastian,' she said quickly, turning to him, the blanket wrapping with her body. She pushed her hair out of her face, and Sebastian could see her pale skin and ruddy cheeks. She looked hollow.

"They just don't fucking get it, you don't fucking get it,' Savannah continued, painfully. She wouldn't look at him, not in his eyes. She watched him crack his fingers and move his hands restlessly over his pants.

"What I am, I was always going to be. They just hate that it was me, they hate that it had to be their daughter. I hate that I had to be their daughter. They deserve something much, much worse. They deserve something that they couldn't have ruined on their own, because the damage they did to me and you,' she shook her head, eventually burying it into the pillow. "Irrevocable,' she muttered into the cotton, barely audible.

Sebastian sat in the chair for some time, staring at Savannah's thin body. By the breathing exiting her, he could tell she was asleep and finally at some peace. He thought for a time about their parents, about his childhood and about all the irreversible damage Savannah could have meant. A cut-throat lawyer father with an excellent ability to expose and humiliate, an affinity for dark liquors and a totalitarian streak married an emotionally void, exceptionally shallow and prejudiced capitalist. They both decided abusing alcohol was better than facing their evils, and they were filthy rich. The two lived alone for a time before deciding to pour all of their hatred, arrogance and addictive behavior into a living, breathing toy. Toy was the right word, and they'd had such fun making the first one, that they even had a second. Had Tierney not complained so much about how childbirth ruined her figure, there probably would have been twenty of them running around, wreaking havoc on the world and blaming everyone but themselves for their problems.

"Someone told me recently that you have to take responsibility for yourself,' Sebastian began. He wasn't speaking to Savannah particularly, he didn't even know if she was cognizant enough to respond, but he wanted the opportunity to say his thoughts out loud. "I don't know. For the first time, I'm realizing that there's something to be responsible for,' he bit his bottom lip. He lifted one of his hands up in defeat, in question. "You're alive for so long, and no one reprimands you. No one even suggests that you could be better. A better person."

"That's where it starts,' Savannah muttered, her head barely peeking from its spot in the down. "You're not perfect, none of us are. It starts with realizing the only reason your life has been easy is because no one has been brave enough to rebuke you… I took three steps into the real world, and I was obliterated. You can have all of the right words, but if people won't even look at you, won't even consider you… it means nothing. No one cared that I did equestrian camp in Paris for five summers. — The only thing mom and dad taught me was how to swallow everything and smile through it, and that,' she laughed, wryly. "That has been such a gift."

No one talked about Savannah's overdose again. They all drove home that night, the sun already sunken, and thought about how they would move past it. Of course, Emmett and Tierney would act as though it never happened, but Sebastian could feel everything inside of him changing. No one on the planet knew what was going on inside of his head, that was the plan, but Savannah could understand the most. They had gone through almost everything in the same exact way. Sebastian, at times, felt like he was their parents chance at having a child and doing it the right way. He kept seeing her sick, brown eyes when he blinked. He felt the loose grip of her hand as she touched him when he left. He sighed heavily and thought about how he had to go to school the next Monday.

Walking into his house, he was surprised not to see his mother or father's car present yet. When they finally arrived, he saw his mother carrying a brown, paper bag.

"We got dinner,' she mumbled, the wine radiating on her cheeks. "I brought you my leftover lasagna. I know you like lasagna."

Sebastian didn't move from where he was standing. He watched his mother wobble out of her high heels and his father shake the rain drops from his coat as he placed it on the coat rack. Without looking at Sebastian, he started.

"If you missed practice to go to Columbus today, you need to go in the morning. There should be a court open. Play with one of the women out there. They should be able to keep up."

Emmett passed by Sebastian, patted him on the shoulder and trudged up the stairs. Tierney did the same, kissing Sebastian on the cheek (she was only affectionate when drunk) as she walked by him. Left alone, he looked at the brown paper bag pathetically, rummaged through the leftovers and threw them away, dissatisfied. He didn't see how they could eat.

He practiced for most of the day on Saturday, lucky to have something else to think about. He started the morning playing with a few retired women before some young, working adults came out as the sun began to rise. He played until he was dizzy and needed time to cool down, and then started again. Around that time, the courts were primarily empty. The sun was at its highest point in the sky, and no one wanted to be struck down by heat stroke. Sebastian practiced his power, hitting the bright green tennis balls as hard as he could, most of them ricocheting back and soaring well over the fence. He could see the look of scorn on some of the attendees' faces, but none of them said anything. He wasn't even sure if they were allowed to say anything. By the end of the day, he had probably lost a pound in sweat, and his knees were weak. His arms burned from all of the motion of the day, and the last game he played was against a small boy who didn't want to burden his parents. Next to the able-bodied and energetic thirty-somethings, Sebastian looked like a beginner. Even the boy, less than seven-years-old, looked professional. He shook Sebastian's hand when the match was over and patted him on the back. The parents thanked him, but he was tired and could only afford them a half-hearted salute. It wasn't until he got back into his car that he remembered the previous day's events. He didn't know how to react, so he didn't. He wasn't mad or sad or frustrated, or maybe he was all of those things: he couldn't tell. Sebastian knew he couldn't talk about it, and that was the worst part. He wasn't allowed to explore his emotions, because he wasn't supposed to have any. He wasn't supposed to talk about what happened with Savannah, because it didn't happen.

For the first time in days, he thought about Mercedes.