by Sarwah Creed
She shrugged, “Who knows? He hasn’t said that he would, heck I haven’t even seen him, let alone spoken to him for days. I don’t even know if he’ll help me out in college, let alone support me.”
I couldn’t even reassure her, because I knew nothing about what Hawk’s endgame was. I didn’t even know that he had a daughter till a couple of weeks ago.
“I hope that it works out for you,” I said, trying to break the silence.
“I thought that Uncle G would be a household name and that she would have money from him and leave me alone.”
“That’s right—the rapper. I don’t think that they make as much money as they used to do. But I don’t know much about the business. Never had a real interest, and the stars that I do know are not the typical ones.”
“What do you mean?” She asked.
I stretched out my hand to pull her up so that we would start heading towards the class.
“We’re going to be late. There’s some stars who think that because they’re on the big screen, everyone should be at their feet, but they’ve got as much money as the average Joe because most of it’s been smoked or sniffed up their noses. Or they just don’t make much because they can’t make as much money as they used to do because of their shitty attitude so they star in shitty movies or don’t get called out to gigs, because no one wants to work with them. Get it?”
She nodded, “Think I do. But it makes no difference to me. I just want her out of my life, and Graham doesn’t call me anymore. He’s always on the road.”
“Next time, just don’t pick up the phone.”
We picked up our bags and were heading to the door, ready to leave. She said, “You don’t need to tell me twice. Once bitten twice shy.”
Chapter Fourteen
I spent the next few hours in class, trying to figure out a way to confess to Vicki that we were more alike than she knew. There was a taunting voice in the back of my mind telling me that from the moment I did, the moment the words left my mouth, then I would be going down a rocky road. One that I wasn’t sure I was ready to go down. Well, not yet.
I was standing next to my locker, debating about cutting the last class of the day. I shook my head at the stupidity of it. I needed to get my head in the fucking game, and that started right now. Tonight, we’d go back to the suite, and I would tell Vicki everything. I would let her know that she wasn’t alone in her darkness, and I shared it too. Okay, my mom wasn’t dead, but she may as well have been. I remember friends of Mom telling me that before she met Dad, she didn’t even drink. She had an uncle that died of kidney disease, and after watching him go through all of that pain, some family members, including my mom, who was very close to him, vowed not to touch a drop.
Something, or rather someone, changed her because I don’t remember one day when she didn’t have a glass or even a bottle in her hand. I used to wonder if she was drunk throughout her pregnancy with James and I, because that would explain our obsession with whiskey or even vodka if that was all I could find. Or maybe it was just bad genes?
No! That wasn’t exactly true either.
Since, Vicki had been staying in the suite, I hadn't even touched a drop, I didn’t even feel the urge to have a drink.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Claire purred as she put a finger on my shoulder to trace it from one side to the other.
“Claire. I’m…I need to…What?”
I barked at her, she was making me feel nervous, and I hated the fact that she interrupted my train of thought even if it wasn’t a great one.
“Jamie’s not returning my calls. Do you know why? Has he gone for good?”
We were standing by my locker and just staring at each other. The idea of her calling my brother annoyed me even more. Everything was falling apart in front of my eyes, and I didn’t know how to repair it. I just knew that I couldn’t do it with someone like Claire in our lives, only with Vicki. She had the same pain that we had, even if she didn’t know it. That was a conversation that I wanted both of us, James and me, to have with her, but I had a feeling that as Claire had said, James was gone, and the only way that I was going to feel like I belonged to anything again, was with him.
I shut the locker and ignored Claire as she continued to call out my name. She was the girl that James and I used to want so badly. Now, we had her; we didn’t want her anymore. I hesitated as I went to class. Maybe I wasn’t the only one that that had lost interest in her. Maybe James had to and, like me, he didn’t have the guts to tell her. He just wanted her to figure it out on her own.
***
After our final class, it was time for us to go back to the suite. I couldn’t believe that Vicki and I were holding hands as if we were a couple as we walked back to the suite. I didn’t say anything to her about what was bugging me today. I decided that I needed to talk to her, even if James wasn’t around.
“You seem so serious today,” she whispered as we stopped at the door of the suite. I didn’t respond as I fished for my keys, which would usually be in my hand as soon as I walked to the door, but everything was spinning in my mind out of control at the moment.
“Did I do something wrong?”
I shook my head as I finally opened the door. I motioned for her to walk in, and she hesitated as she did it. I wasn’t surprised by her reaction. After all, I wasn’t the best company at the moment.
“I need to talk to you.”
She didn’t say a word as she dropped her bag and sat on a stool. The same one that she sat in this morning as we ate our pancakes.
“It’s just that…” I was trying to find the words; I wasn’t used to trying to express how I felt; emotions, true feelings, were things that I just bottled up, and I wasn’t a poet. Fuck, poems didn’t make any sense to me at the best of times.
“You want me to leave?”
“Can you just give me a minute?” I blurted out in a way that came out much harsher than I meant it to, and I could see the fright in her eyes.
“Sorry, I just need to tell you something. It’s been playing on my mind ever since you told me about that night with your stepdad and him running away with your mom’s money. I should have told you that I understand your pain, and the reason why I understand that pain? Well…”
She nodded for me to continue, but I was sweating like a pig, and my heart was fucking racing out of control. She sat like a zombie on the stool. Probably too scared to say something or worried about what she may hear.
Tonight, was one of the times that I needed a drink so that I could calm the fuck down.
“My dad. At least yours was your stepdad. He did something to us. So bad that no matter what, I hate the idea of his fucking blood running through my veins. He’s fucking evil in so many fucking ways.”
She whispered, “What did he do? Did he try to kill your mom?”
I shook my head, “No. He tried to kill mom, James and I.”
This was the first time that I’d told someone the truth about our past. I felt a sense of relief talking about that night. I woke up to us escaping and then Mom going into the hospital. For a while, she was clean. The tragedy of what happened in the past, helped make her whole in some fucked up scenario and her attempt to be completely happy led her to fall in love with Hawk.
“When Hawk married Mom, and we moved into the Hawk household, a lot of the rumors and whispers stopped, but every now and then, someone at school would figure it out, and then it would start all over again. James and I ignored the whispers because we’d learned that eventually they would die out on their own without any fuel to add to the fire. We didn’t want to repeat the past, because for some reason it would mean that it was real. We didn’t want it to be real, but it was. We just learned to deal with it and the only way we knew how was not to talk about it.”
I continued to tell her about the darkness that grew inside of me and the reason why. I asked her to sit back down, and I was surprised to find that I didn’t feel afraid to tell her that she wasn’t alone anym
ore. A demon had appeared to her and taken the one person that she loved more than anyone else. Another had nearly done the same to me, but my mom may as well be dead. I thought that when Mom met Hawk that he had rescued her because he was the first man that had stopped her from being a drunk. He’d made her into something much worse, though, in the end.
“Mom has been in rehab more times than I care to remember, not only for alcohol but substance abuse too. She may be alive; she may still be my mom, but I don’t speak to her, not anymore.”
Vicki said, “But you could if you wanted to?”
I choked, “I could if I knew where she lived. She doesn’t pick up the phone or anything when I do call her, so what can I do?”
“How long has it been?”
I said, “Five years. Five long years since she left and she didn’t even tell us that she was going, Hawk just sat both of us down and said that she was gone. She didn’t even bother to tell us.”
She gasped, “That’s horrible.”
I nodded my head, with agreement as I thought about the last set of pictures of Mom on her social media page with her vacant eyes. I knew that no sooner than she was out of rehab, that she’d go right back in again..
At least Vicki had something that we never had, a mom that loved her dearly. That had to count for something surely.
I watched her eyes fill with tears that quickly spilled down her cheeks, and I had so much more to tell her and I could have gone into detail about Carlton, but I wasn’t in the mood. Talking about that horrific night was bad enough. Any more than that, and she would know too much. I wanted her closer, but not too close. That was too much for me to handle right now.
Chapter Fifteen
I was in bed with my eyes half open when I heard my phone chime. It was weird because it was an email. I sent most of the spam ones automatically to the junk folder. But this one made a strange sound; curiosity got the better of me, so I opened my eyes and tried to figure out who’d sent me an email at this time of morning.
I stretched out and then managed to touch my phone. I knew that I put it on the side table; the question was, which part of the side table? I found it and then pulled it in front of me. I sat up quickly when I saw what was on my screen. I didn’t have a random email from a stranger; it was from James.
From: [email protected] (Jamie)
To: [email protected] (Theotherhalf)
Subject: Let’s Move on…
Dear Trent,
The last few weeks, especially since that night with Vicki, have been kind of crazy. You and I have always done everything together. I thought that part of the reason that we thought that we were unstoppable was because of him.
Our dad.
This is the reason that I went to see him. To see if there was any part of me that could forgive him. You see, we blame Hawk for everything that’s gone wrong in our lives. But he fucking saved us, and you and I both know the truth.
He wasn’t the one that tried to burn down the house with us in it for insurance money to pay his gambling debts. Getting money was more important to our biological father than his own fucking family.
Our flesh and blood did that, and Mom was at the lowest point of her life before she met Hawk. For a while she seemed to calm down, to stop drinking, but then she went right back down the same old path again. Having two boys didn’t seem like motivation enough for her to stop. We haven’t seen her in years. We can’t blame Hawk for that, can we? No. But what we can do, bro, is stick together.
I’ve never written an email to you before in my life. Forwarding emails sure, but to sit and write one? Just the idea of writing one to you feels kind of nuts. We’re twins. The untouchable kings of Hawk Academy. We built walls together with that status, shields to stop others from hurting us like our parents did.
I want us to change.
Fuck!
I’m not saying that he should be our best friend. But I want to stop being angry, bro, at everybody. I want us to be civil to each other and others for once.
Life’s too short to be this fucked up.
I’ll be back tonight around 8; maybe we can be alone in our suite and talk it out.
James
I read the email over and over again. James was right, he had never sent me an email. Not ever. Text. Phone calls, sure. But an email? Never. I knew what he meant when he said that we should be alone when we talked tomorrow. He meant without Vicki. He didn’t want her around, which made me even more nervous. The idea of us being alone again felt raw. He’d been gone for three weeks, but it felt so much fucking longer.
James was the only real member of my family that was still around. Mom was either on some tropical island on the other side of the world or locked up in some chalet not too far away, but too far to even call us. As for our dad? Well, I knew exactly where he was and he could fucking well stay there He was in a federal prison, much worse than the one that he’d been sent to in Maine when he was first charged with attempted murder and arson on the day he was caught by the police. It took them three months to find him, and when they did find him it was only because Mom hired a PI to help them with their search.
Damn, the police should have given her, her money back after she had to hire a PI to do their fucking job. He’d gone so far as to make a down payment on an island with a new fake identity. He’d already planned his new life, thinking that we were dead. The bad news for him was that not only were we alive and kicking, but I had witnessed what he had done and given a statement to the police. He was now locked up behind bars, and he wouldn’t get a penny from Mom’s inheritance or our trust fund. He deserved the death penalty, because behind bars was too good for a monster like him.
Once James knew the real Vicki like I had come to know her over the last few weeks, he’d see sense, I was really confident of that. He would see that Claire was our past and Vicki was our future.
I smiled at her as we went to and from classes. I had to tell her about the email that I received from James. She had to rush to class earlier, before I could tell her this morning and as the day went on, I grew more tense. His email implied he didn’t want her there. Kind of bluntly implied it, actually. But as the day drew to an end, I realized that I didn’t have to say anything to her.
“I found out that Hawk’s back, and my God, I really need to speak to him, Trent. There's so many questions I have for him, and I don't know if he’s going to disappear on me again. I don’t understand why he’s been away for so long. I don’t care. I just need answers. You know that right?” she whispered as we stood by the lockers.
I was just plucking up the courage to tell her that tonight, things would change, and she would have to go back to her room. Blood was thicker than water, and I had to make amends with my brother even if it meant talking to the one man that I despised more than anyone in the world, Rick our dad.
“It means that I need to go back to my room. I have to see him. He could disappear again; I don’t even understand how he could be running the Academy and just disappear like this for weeks. This could be my only opportunity to get answers. You understand, right, Trent?”
I nodded, “Yeah, don’t worry. I get it. Don’t worry about me. You just go see him. Ask him as many fucking questions as possible. Don’t hold back.”
I reassured her, and I could tell that it was doing the trick, because the tension that was on her face soon disappeared. What she didn’t know was that Hawk had saved me the trouble of having an awkward conversation with her, because I was going to tell her to go to her room tonight.
“Yeah. I need to talk to him,” she held my hand and avoided my stare. “I need to find out why…fuck, I don’t even know where to start. There are so many questions. Too many.”
I held on to her shoulders and said, “Look write them down. All of them and then attack him with them. As I said, no holding back.”
“I’m so fucking nervous.”
She held on to me tightly as she wrapped her arms around me and said, “Thank you,
Trent. I was so worried about telling you. I thought that you would be mad.”
I laughed, “Why would I be mad about you wanting to talk to him and finding out the truth? What kind of guy would I be?”
She pushed back with a grin and said, “A stupid one, not the type of guy that I’m falling for at all.”
I had no words to give her; there was something about her that kept me going back for more, and I wasn’t willing to give her up, no way. Not without a fight. I didn’t know if it was love or not. The last few days without him had been easy to bear with her around, but I knew that it would come to an end, and one day, James would have to come home, and that day was now.
“I’ll see you tomorrow in class. James is coming home tonight, and we have to talk,” I kissed her on the cheek as I pushed her away and shut my locker. It was a shitty thing to do. She wanted some reassurance that I felt the same way as her and I didn’t give it to her. I didn’t hear what she said after I left her standing at the lockers. I had to find a way not to be so stubborn and think about the one that had made me forget about my loneliness every night, Vicki.
After all the shit I’d been through, it should have been fucking easy to walk away and pretend that she hadn’t helped me, but it was hard. Tonight, I wouldn’t eat a thing. I didn’t feel hungry anyway. I couldn’t be distracted, not tonight, not when I had to talk to James.
Chapter Sixteen
Once, I got back to the suite, I scrolled through my phone, looking at my contacts wondering who to call and I ended up with a big fuck zero. So, I scrolled through social media, but it didn’t take long for me to get bored with scrolling through all the selfies. I was in my room feeling restless and lonely. It was pathetic, because I had only been in my room for a couple of hours, yet it felt like a couple of years. I could have studied, made sure that I was up to date, but my mind was too occupied to concentrate on that or anything that I should have been doing at the moment.