Damaged Goods

by Nicole Williams

  I didn’t need greatness. I just needed a different life from the one I’d grown up knowing, and tonight, all I needed was the mental stamina to cram as much as I could into my brain before ten o’clock.

  After unlocking the front door to my apartment building, I jogged up the stairs as I wrestled my long mop of hair into a messy bun. I couldn’t study with my hair down for some reason—one of the many quirks that made me the enigma I was today. As I started down the hall, I heard a familiar grunting coming from the end of the hall, where Blake’s and my apartment was. Either he was up early and doing his morning routine, or he was still up and taking a study break to get the blood pumping.

  Blake was meticulous about his schedule. Well, he was meticulous about just about everything, including going through the fridge at the same time each week to toss out whatever might have expired. Blake’s morning routine consisted of hopping out of bed—yes, he was a morning person. Yuck—hitting the deck, and doing a hundred one-armed push-ups on each arm before doing twice as many sit-ups. The upside to him sometimes waking me with his labored breaths and grunts was that I got to enjoy the side effects of all of those push-ups and sit-ups. Sometimes right after he was through which, really, wasn’t a bad way to wake up—if a girl had to wake up at six in the morning.

  I was just sliding my key in the lock when another sound tangled with Blake’s grunts. Moaning. Soft, breathless sighs paired with heavy, panting moans. My heart stopped as a pit opened in my stomach. For a moment, I let myself mourn what had been. Then I pulled myself up, checked my emotions, and put on the brave face I’d mastered years ago. From devastated to determined in two point two seconds.

  The next thing I felt was something I’d never expected I’d feel when I was literally moments away from walking in on my boyfriend with another woman—relief.

  This day had been coming—I’d known that the first time Blake had looked into my eyes for a fleeting moment and issued a robotic I love you. I’d never said those words back, and finally, he’d stopped saying them because he knew what I knew—Blake didn’t love me any more than I loved him. We liked each other; we were friends who occupied the same space and slept together when our schedules allowed. But I had never planned to spend the rest of my life with Blake Matthews. This day was inevitable, and that reminder was what triggered my hand to turn the key and shove open the door. Rip the Band-Aid off and be done with it.

  I imagine if I hadn’t heard the noises, the sight before me would have taken a few moments to register. Seeing the man I’d been with for a while with his pants around his ankles as he moved inside a naked woman spread over our dining room table probably redefined surreal. Good thing for me I’d known what I was walking into. Instead of my mouth falling open and my eyes going wide with disbelief before I crumbled to the ground in a shattered mess, I took a couple steps inside.

  My brave facade nearly broke when my eyes fell on a photo of Blake and me just inside the door. I closed my eyes, set my jaw, and inhaled a long breath. By the time my eyes opened, I’d recomposed myself. I might have made it seem easy—putting on an unaffected facade when disaster was staring me in the face—but it was only because I’d had more experience navigating tragedy than a grief counselor.

  From the constipated, flushed expression on Blake’s face, I knew he was close to climaxing. I suppose if I were a better person, I could have let him finish before announcing myself, but I wasn’t up to the task of being a better person right now. Both of them were too wrapped up in their porn-worthy performance to notice me, so I slammed the door and slid the photo of Blake and me, taken on our one-year anniversary, off the hall table. I don’t know if it was the slam or the shatter, but at least I had their attention.

  Blake cursed the exact word of the act he’d just been enjoying, grabbed for his pants, and started to untangle his limbs and other pieces of anatomy from Porn Star Barbie.

  What were the first words out of my mouth when I found my boyfriend humping some bimbo with fake boobs, lips, and hair on the dining room table I’d purchased since he thought a dining room table was superfluous when the apartment came with a breakfast counter already installed? “Looks like you finally warmed up to the dining room table.”

  Such a gem.

  Blake’s expression of shock transformed into something I guessed mine should have been—disbelief. When the lucky lady started to shift away, I grabbed my backpack on the floor and headed for the table. Blake winced, probably expecting a slap, and the girl slid her hair behind her shoulders, probably worried I’d go for her hair. Extension repair wasn’t cheap.

  “If I could interrupt for just a minute, and then you two can get back to your Wednesday-night-slash-Thursday-morning activities? I need to study, and your ass is occupying my notes.” I glanced at the mess of textbooks and folders and pages of notes strewn all around the table and floor. I didn’t want to imagine what body parts and fluids had come in contact with my anatomy book. The fact that I could find the humor and irony in my anatomy book being exposed to so many actual parts of it was an indication of how devastated I wasn’t. Or at least, how devastated I wasn’t letting myself show.

  “Liv?” Blake was expressing the emotional response I should have been.

  “Blake.” I met his stare and lifted an eyebrow. “Move.”

  “Come again?” He’d gotten his pants up, but that was as much composure as he’d managed.

  “Move. Anywhere. Your pick. The couch is a good option. The sofa table is also a possibility since we’ve already tested it out.” I motioned around the room, growing more and more frantic to get that bronzed ass off of my study materials. “Hell, you even have my permission to go into our bedroom and fuck her on our bed. Just get up and move away from my notes.”

  Blake’s mouth dropped open, but I didn’t understand why. If mouths were going to drop open around there, it should have been mine. Or, I suppose, Miss Fake Lips’s. She had gotten them installed for a reason, and it wasn’t to keep her mouth closed. Or her knees obviously.

  “I’ve got finals in the morning,” I added.

  Blake’s face went up one more notch in the shock department. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be as soon as you two move aside so I can get my stuff and get out of here. I’m wasting study time here, Blake.” I crossed my arms and aimed a glare at him.

  It might not have been enough to intimidate Blake into moving, but it was enough to get Ass of Bronze slithering off the table. Finally. My stuff was free and ready for the grabbing. Curling my nose, I shuffled everything into a somewhat orderly pile before stuffing it all inside my backpack.

  Blake and his “date” watched me like the freak show had come to town and I was the main attraction. Why was I the freak because I wasn’t melting down over my boyfriend cheating on me? Why was I the abnormality because I wasn’t letting some guy ruin the future I’d been working my ass off for? Why was I the strange one for just wanting to get my stuff, study the rest of the night, and ace my finals? My past had been created for me thanks to shitty circumstances; I wasn’t going to let my future be decided the same way.

  I had just zipped my bag when Blake grabbed my arm and spun me around. “Stop, Liv. Say something, dammit.”

  I was done, already checked-out of the relationship. It was in the rearview, and I wasn’t glancing back. Looking over Blake’s shoulder, I scanned the still-naked girl scrambling for her clothes. “I guess you decided you weren’t tired of the typical L.A. girls after all.” Saying good-bye with a half-hearted shrug, I shouldered my bag and pulled out of his grasp.

  If my reaction to what had just transpired wasn’t an indication of what Blake’s and my relationship had meant to the two of us, his lack of apology or muffled footsteps following me was. He’d known we were nothing more than a hiccup along life’s path. A stopover, a stepping stone, a convenience. That it was over was as much a relief to him as it was to me, and the silver lining to finding him with his pants around his ankles was that it provided
a clean and instant break. No drawing out the inevitable, no long sit-down chats about how it was time we parted ways but promised to keep in touch because we would always be friends. Really, a friend wouldn’t have betrayed me the way Blake had, so we weren’t even friends. Probably never had been.

  A clean break, a wiped slate, time to move on.

  Since I’d slammed it closed coming in, I decided I might as well slam it going out. If it were up to me, I’d never enter that apartment again, but since my name was on the lease with Blake’s and everything I owned was stowed away inside it, I’d have to face it again. But not now. I had finals to conquer. Then I’d face conquering the apartment.

  Once I’d stormed out of the apartment, I felt that pit in my stomach try to open again. If I let that pit tear open and I had to feel every emotion bubbling inside it, I’d collapse into an overwhelmed mess, so I concentrated all my attention on keeping that pit closed and moving forward.

  The hallway was silent, like the silence before a storm, but given what had just gone down, I supposed it was the silence after a storm. I was at the stairway when my phone chimed. If it hadn’t been so late and so few people had my cell phone number, I wouldn’t have checked it. I would have let it go to voice mail and waited to check it until tomorrow afternoon, once I’d finished my second final.

  But when I saw the number coming in and realized it was three o’clock on a school night, I slumped onto the top step before answering the call. I braced myself for the next storm, because I knew for my little sister to call me at this hour meant nothing short of a Category 5 storm. “Reese?”

  A hundred scenarios ran through my mind. Had Mom finally overdosed, like we all knew she was heading for one day? Had Paige, the five-foot-two ball of fire and fury, gotten suspended from school? Again? Had Reese gone and fallen in “love” with some hometown loser who’d promised her the sun, moon, and stars, only to disappear when he found out she was pregnant? One phone call from my sister conjured up dozens of possibilities, all of them bad. I didn’t have normal, just-checking-in conversations with my family. If there was a fire, they called me to put it out. If there was a problem, they called me to fix it. I’d become an answer in an endless stream of problems.

  “I’m sorry I’m calling so late, Liv. Did I wake you?” My sister’s voice was small and trembling.

  My heart stopped. “No, I just got off work. What’s the matter?”

  “I didn’t wake Blake, did I?”

  Leave it to Reese to make sure she hadn’t hurt, offended, or woken someone in the middle of the night during an emergency. I’d always joked that Reese could hack her hand off with a paper cutter in class then raise her hand and wait to be excused. She was just that thoughtful of a kid.

  “No, Blake was already awake. Wide awake.” Fucking some girl on my dining room table and notes.

  “Oh, good. Tell him hi for me.”

  The next time I saw Blake, I’d tell him something, but hi wouldn’t be any part of it. “Reese. Stop. What’s the matter?” Sometimes the only way to shake it out of my sister was to keep my sentences short and to the point. “Is it Mom?”

  “Well, no . . . and yes.”

  I exhaled and prayed for an extra dose of patience. “Explain. Please,” I added, because if there was a downside to a person being too thoughtful, it was the sensitivity that came along with it. If I so much as looked at Reese wrong, she’d break into tears.

  “I called you about Paige”—my heart stopped again at the mention of my youngest sister—“but I suppose part of Paige’s problem has to do with Mom.”

  All three of us girls’ problems had to do with Mom.

  “What’s Paige’s problem?” God, the more time that passed, the more scenarios ran through my mind. I couldn’t attempt to fix whatever it was until I knew what needed fixing. The not knowing was the hardest part.

  “She’s sick, Liv. Real sick. I don’t know what’s the matter, but she’s had a temperature for three days, and it keeps going up. She’s so weak today that she won’t leave her bed, and I can barely get her to drink some water. I’ve been giving her some cold medicine I found in Mom’s medicine cabinet, but it doesn’t seem to be working. She’s missed three days of school, and someone called and left a message asking why Paige has been absent. I don’t know what to do, Liv.” Reese paused to take a breath, so I burst in.

  “Calm down, Reese. It’s going to be okay. Get Mom to take Paige to the clinic first thing in the morning. She’s probably got something that requires antibiotics. Once they’re finished at the clinic, make sure Mom fills the prescription, picks it up, and then you make sure Paige gets her meds when she needs them, okay?” That I had to make a seventeen-year-old responsible for a fifteen-year-old told just how unfit a mother we’d been born to. Unfit was really the watered-down, tame version of how qualified our mother was. “Then make sure she calls the school and explains that Paige has been sick. You’ll have to pick up her homework from her different classes so she doesn’t get too far behind. She’ll probably miss a couple more days if she’s got some sort of infection, but just make sure she gets lots of rest and fluids, takes her medication, and try to get Mom to smoke outside as much as you can.”

  If she wasn’t smoking meth, Mom was smoking cigarettes. She’d been smoking for twenty years, which meant the trailer had two decades of nicotine build-up crusting the walls and drapes and everything else inside it. You would have thought finding out her youngest child had severe asthma as a toddler would have scared her into quitting, or at least taking it outside, but no. She’d gone through a whole pack that afternoon when we’d gotten back from Paige’s doctor, while Paige coughed and wheezed in the corner.

  “Reese? Are you getting all of this?” She’d been so silent that I checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t lost the call.

  “Yeah, I am, but there’s a problem . . .” I could almost feel Reese wincing.

  I swallowed. “What problem?”

  “Well . . . with Mom.” Reese’s voice was so quiet that it was a whisper. “She’s gone, Liv. She’s gone.”

  My eyes closed as I stopped breathing. All of the emotions and physical responses I should have had back in the apartment with Blake were streaming out now. Nothing like family to unleash a flood of emotions. “How long?” It wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared, but gauging from Reese’s tone, this disappearing act had been longer than the rest.

  “Um, well . . . Almost two weeks now.”

  My eyes flashed open as fire flashed through my bloodstream. “Two weeks, Reese? Kitty’s been gone for two weeks, and this is the first you’ve let me know of it?” I had to bite back the other words and phrases that came to mind. I wasn’t mad at Reese; I was mad—more like furious—at Kitty. There was no need to take it out on my little sister when I knew, whatever her reasons for not telling me were, they were good ones in her eyes.

  “I didn’t want to worry you. You’re busy with school and work, and this isn’t exactly the first time Mom’s up and disappeared.” Now that she’d gotten the worst part out of the way, Reese’s voice was a bit louder.

  “Yeah, she’s gone missing for a night or a long weekend, but two weeks? You should have let me know sooner. I might be busy, but I’m never too busy for you and Paige.” Even as I said that, I knew it was a half truth. If I weren’t too busy for them, I would have shown up with balloons and cake on their birthdays. I would have made it to their dance recitals and called just to say hey more often. I might have stuffed money in an envelope every couple of weeks and provided crisis management when the situation arose, but I’d never proven they were the number-one priority in my life—because they hadn’t been. My number-one priority had been escaping my old life and living a different one.

  A part of me felt guilty acknowledging that, and another part knew that I’d done what I’d needed to to survive. I would have been no help to Reese or Paige if I’d never left that trailer in Death Valley.

  “I’m sorry, Liv. I know I s
hould have told you, but you’ve got a life too. You can’t put yours on hold to help us every time Mom goes and does something like this.”

  While Reese paused, I rubbed my temples. Too much to process for one night. My head was about ready to explode.

  “What should I do, Liv? I can’t find our state insurance cards anywhere. They’re probably in Mom’s purse—wherever the hell that is—and I don’t have enough money left from what you sent us a couple weeks ago to pay out-of-pocket for a doctor visit, not to mention they’re going to wonder why a minor is bringing another minor to the clinic in the first place. Not to mention what I’m going to say to the school as to why Paige and I have been absent—”

  “Reese, stop. Just stop.” The harder I rubbed my temples, the more my head throbbed. “I’ll get it all taken care of. Calm down, put a cold cloth on Paige’s head, and make sure she gets some fluids. Monitor her temperature, and if it goes above one-oh-three, call 911 and get an ambulance to take her to the hospital.” I forced myself to stand, and I took a deep breath. “I’m coming. I’ll be there by tomorrow night, and I’ll get this all sorted out. You and Paige will be okay.”

  “What? No, Liv, don’t. We’ll be fine. Paige and I will be okay.” Reese’s words were more relived-sounding than anything.

  “I know you will. I’ll see you soon.”

  LIV—MY NAME had felt like a curse from the time I learned what verb it sounded like—live. That’s what I’d done the first twenty-two years of my life. I’d lived. Sustained. Carried on. It wasn’t until I left the only life I’d ever known that I realized live meant something else too—survival. I’d survived the beginning of my life and was leaving to really live it. I would live life the way I’d never even thought to dream it. I was Liv, ready to fulfill the promise of that name.