The Boy You Starved for Him novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: What Dexter Said
Dexter did not answer Dad for a long time.
He looked at the white phone in Dad's hand, then at his friends, then at his mother.
"Say it," Mom whispered. "Say you didn't."
"You want to know why?" Dexter said.
His voice had changed. The warmth had gone out of it, and what was left was loud.
"You want me to say it in front of everybody?"
"Yes," I said.
He turned to me, and I saw his face without the smile for the first time since the hospital.
"Not you. I'm talking to them."
He swung back toward the two ends of the table.
"Fourteen months I listened to you scream before the papers were signed. Every night one of you came to my room."
Mom's mouth opened.
"Mom, you said, what did your father say about me? Dad, you said, what did your mother tell you? I was seventeen and I was the only phone line between two people who couldn't breathe in the same room."
"Dexter," Dad said.
"And Quinn got to go to the library."
"I was in the basement of that library because I couldn't stand the house," I said.
"You got to leave! You got a dorm and a meal plan and a door that locked. I got the kitchen, and a mother who cried on me, and a father who sat in his truck outside for an hour before he could say hello."
He was crying now. He did not seem to notice.
"And when Quinn left for State, you looked at me, both of you, and said thank God for Dexter. Thank God one of them stayed."
Mom put her hand over her mouth.
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