An old friend?
I loved you.
An old friend?
You changed me.
An old friend?
I miss you so fucking much.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
Dan stepped closer to Alyssa with narrowed eyes. His hand sat on her shoulder in a protective manner, and for a split second I thought about slugging him for touching her. For placing his hand on my girl, but then I remembered.
She wasn’t mine.
She hadn’t been in years.
She shrugged his hand off of her.
I looked away.
“I’m gonna get going,” I laughed, but nothing was funny. I snapped the band on my wrist, walked down the steps, and listened to Alyssa call after me.
I ignored her.
I ignored the burning inside my soul, too.
The world never made promises, but I was certain it was always going to screw me over.
I sat up at the billboard, looking up at the stars shining in the sky. My eyelids were heavy, but I couldn’t go back to Kellan’s place. I couldn’t see him. I needed sleep, and for a while I’d considered just staying up high in the sky and taking a nap until the sun woke me up. But whenever I closed my eyes, I remembered a few hours earlier when TJ reinforced the worst news of my life.
My heart hurt more than hearts should’ve been allowed to.
He’s my brother…
I couldn’t imagine him not being there. And I hated myself in that moment. I hated myself because such a big part of me wanted to run away and find drugs. A big part of me wanted to pull out my cell phone and dial the numbers to the people I never needed to see again, to hook me up with some shit. A big part of me wanted to fall into the rabbit hole, because down that rabbit hole, feelings didn’t exist. Nothing was real when a person was in the rabbit hole, so the pain of reality never surfaced.
My legs bent, and I wrapped my arms around my knees.
I didn’t pray. I didn’t believe in God. But for a split moment, I considered being the hypocrite that began to that night.
My eyes closed, and I tilted my head up toward the sky.
The footsteps were quiet at first. Then the metal ladder began to slightly rock back and forth as she made her way to the top.
She was carrying a plastic bag, those tight jeans and the tank top, and the worry in her eyes remained.
She shrugged a little, no words needed, but me knowing that she was asking permission to join me. I shrugged back, and she knew it was a yes. As her footsteps grew closer, I felt my eyes stinging and my heart pounding. She sat on the left side of me, bent her legs, and wrapped her arms around her knees, just as I did. Our heads turned toward each other where our eyes met.
The plastic bag opened, and she pulled out a package of Oreos, a plastic basket of raspberries, a gallon of 2% milk, and two red Solo cups.
I listened to the crinkling of the package as she pulled back the seal on the cookies, revealing a small part of our past.
I untwisted the milk top, then poured two cups.
She untwisted a cookie, placed a raspberry inside, then put it back together, handing it my way.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had a raspberry Oreo.
Her lips turned into a half smile and she nodded once. I nodded once in reply.
“You’re okay, Logan Francis Silverstone,” she said.
“I’m okay, Alyssa Marie Walters,” I replied.
We turned away from each other, ate two entire sleeves of raspberry cookies, and stared at the fire-lit sky.
When she felt cold, I gave her my hoodie.
When my heart broke, she held my hand.
26
Alyssa
“Hey, wake up.” I felt a light poke in my side as I rubbed my hands against my eyes. Slowly opening them, I was flooded with the bright sun in my face, along with Logan standing over me. “Hey, get up.”
“Geez…what time is it?” I asked, yawning. I had no plans to fall asleep that night. I meant to go home and climb back into my warm bed and pretend that Logan didn’t exist in my world anymore, but he looked so broken last night.
“It’s time for you to go,” he hissed. I sat up a bit, confused about his attitude. He tossed all of the items I bought back into the plastic bag, and shoved them toward me. “Don’t come back here, all right?”
“Why are you being so rude?”
“Because I don’t want you here. And give me my hoodie.”
“Fine,” I grumbled, standing up and tossing his hoodie at him. My heart was racing as I walked toward the ladder to leave. Yet instead of climbing down, I swung back around at Logan. “I didn’t do anything wrong. You came to me last night. Not the other way around.”
“I didn’t ask you to come up here. I didn’t tell you to bring cookies and shit, like the old days. Newsflash, we aren’t the same people we were. Jesus. Did your boyfriend even know where you were last night?”
I snickered, shocked. “So this is about me having a boyfriend? Logan. Dan isn’t—”
He rolled his eyes. “I could give two shits about you having a boyfriend. But I think it says a lot about you that you’re so fucking comfortable with the idea of spending the night with another man. Does he even know where you are right now? I mean geez, Alyssa. It makes you look like a real slu—”
I cut him off, stepping in front of him, holding my hand up in front of his mouth before he could say the word. “I get that you’re hurting. I get that you’re scared and you’re taking it out on me because I’m an easy target. That’s fine. I’ll be your target. Toss all of your hate at me. Tell me to never come back here, to the one place that reminds me of you. Tell me to fuck off. But you do not get to talk to me like that, Logan Francis Silverstone. I am not the girl you get to belittle because I tried to be there for you. I am not the girl you call a slut.”
His face dropped for a moment, slight guilt in his eyes before he huffed in annoyance. “I’m going to be in town for a while, okay? So can we just do our best to avoid each other? It was my fault for ever coming to your house to begin with, but that’s over. There’s no reason for us to communicate, really. Obviously, we have nothing to say to one another anymore.”
“I’m sorry if I made any of this harder for you. I’ll stay out of your way. But if you need me, I’ll be there, too. Okay? Just let me know. And for the record, Dan isn’t my boyfriend. Never has been, never will be. He’s just a friend who’s helping me look into getting a property. He drank a little too much and ended up crashing on my sofa. I’m not in a relationship. I haven’t been in a long time. None of my past relationships have been a good match. And I get it now, why they didn’t work out.” I took a deep inhale, and shut my eyes. “Because I’d been waiting all this time for a boy who I believed once loved me.”
“God-dammit, Alyssa, I don’t care! I don’t care about the stuff happening in your life. And you need to realize something: You and I are never getting back together. We are not a happy ending.” His words cut deep as he turned his back on me.
“Do you ever think about us? Do you ever think about me?” I whispered, running my fingers across my neck. “Do you ever think about the baby?”
He didn’t turn back to stare my way, but his shoulders drooped. He didn’t move another inch. Say something! Say anything!
“Just go, Alyssa. And don’t come back.”
I swallowed hard, my throat dry.
Say anything but that.
27
Logan
A few weeks had passed since I’d come home to be with Kellan. He’d been through two rounds of chemotherapy and seemed to be himself, although maybe a bit moody. He tended to grow a little annoyed with how Erika helped him with his medicine and checked in with him every second of every day. She was breathing down his neck, and if I were honest, I’d say that I was thankful for it. I knew it annoyed him, her nonstop nagging, but it made me feel some level of peace, knowing he had such good care.
The wedding was supposed to happen last weekend, but they put it off until the coming month. I wondered how often it’d be moved and rearranged. I knew Kellan was the one pushing it off, because of his reservations about his illness.
On Thursday, he gave me money to go buy Ma some groceries. When I went to her house, I brought cleaning supplies with me. The house was trashed. Ma was passed out on the sofa, and I didn’t bother to wake her. If she was sleeping, she wasn’t using.
It was crazy to me how angelic she looked while she slept. It was as if the demons of her mind went to rest, and her true self came out. I stocked the refrigerator and cabinets with food that wouldn’t spoil quickly. I wasn’t certain how much she’d be eating, but that way she could pick at things without it going bad too fast.
I also made her a lasagna. One of my favorite memories of her was when she decided she wanted to get clean, and she asked me to make her a celebratory dinner before she checked herself into rehab. We laughed, we ate, and we had a moment of what our lives could’ve been, if we both were clean.
When she left the house, she ran into my Dad, and rehab became a distant memory for her.
I cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, even getting on my knees to scrub the carpet. I walked all of her clothes down to the laundromat, and while they washed, I went back to her apartment and cleaned some more.
She didn’t wake until I was back at the apartment, folding her clean clothes while sitting on the floor. As she sat up, she yawned. “I thought it was a dream that you were here the other day.”
I gave her half a smile. She gave me the other half as she rubbed her slim arms.
“You cleaned the place?”
“Yeah. I got some food and washed your clothes, too.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she kept smiling. “You look good, boy.” She nodded over and over again, tears falling down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe the tears away, allowing them to fall against her chin. “You look so good.” Guilt took over as she scratched at her skin. “I knew you could do it, Logan. I knew you could get clean. Sometimes I wish…” Her words faded off.
“It’s not too late, you know, Ma. We can get you into a program. We can get you clean, too.” I didn’t know it still existed in me—that spark of hope I always held for her. I wanted her to get away from all of this world. There was still a small part of my soul that wanted to get us both a house, away from the place that created so much horror for us both.
For a second, it looked like she was considering it, too. But then she blinked, and started scratching herself again. “I’m old, Logan. I’m old. Come here.” I walked over, and sat on the couch beside her. She took my hands into hers and smiled. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Ma. Are you hungry?”
“Yeah,” she said. I was somewhat surprised.
I tossed the lasagna into the oven, and when it finished we sat at the dining room table, eating it straight out of the pan. I wished I could’ve locked this moment into my heart and never let it leave.
As she ate, tears kept falling down her face.
“You’re crying,” I said.
“Am I?” She wiped at her face. She gave me another smile. But it was such a broken grin. “How’s Kellan?” she asked.
“Did you know about the…”
She nodded.
“He’s okay. He asked me to come to a therapy meeting with him next week. He’s going to beat this, ya know. He’s tough.”
“Yeah,” she murmured, eating more than I’d seen her eat in a long time. “Yeah. He’s strong. He’s strong.” The tears started falling faster down her cheeks, and I wiped them away. “It’s my fault though, you know. I did this to him… I was a shit mother. I wasn’t there for you boys.”
“Ma. Come on.” I wasn’t sure what to say, how to make her stop the tears.
“It’s true. You know it. I messed up. I did this.”
“You didn’t give him cancer.”
“But, I didn’t make your lives easy. You went to rehab, Logan. Rehab. I sat with you on your sixteen birthday and we did lines of coke. I fed you my addiction…” She shook her head back and forth. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She was so broken. She was so lost. Truth was, she’d been wandering around lost in her mind for as long as I could remember. For so long, I’d been so angry at her. I held so much bitterness for the choices she made, but it wasn’t her fault. She was just running round and round on her own hamster wheel, unable to stop repeating all of her same mistakes.
“We’re all going to be okay, Ma. Don’t worry.” I took her hand in mine, and held on tight.
Just then, the front door flew open and Ricky came barging in.
It was amazing how much my hatred for him still existed the moment I saw him.
“Julie, what the fuck?” he hissed. He looked much different than when I last saw him five years ago, though. He seemed…broken down? Old. Tired. His fancy suits that he used to wear were replaced with sweatpants and T-shirts. His fancy shoes were now sneakers. His once-buff arms weren’t as strong and defined as they’d been before.
I wondered if he was using the stuff he sold.
“You owe me fifty dollars,” he hollered, and paused when he saw me. His head tilted to the left, bewilderment in his stare. “Did a ghost just cross my path?” My chest tightened the same way it always did whenever he came across my path. It only took a moment before his confusion turned into a sinister smirk. He seemed pleased by my return, almost as if he knew I’d be back.
“You know,” he walked toward me, his chest pushed out. “There were rumors going around saying you were back, but I figured it was just bullshit. Now that you’re back, you can come join me in the family business.”
“I’m never going to do that. I’m never going down that road again.”
His eyes narrowed and I watched his serious inhales and exhales. Then he laughed. “I love that. I love that you honestly think that you’re strong enough to stay clean.” He came nose to nose with me, and instead of backing down, I stood tall. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. I couldn’t be afraid. He pushed my chest with his, trying to make me back down. “But I know you, Logan. I see in your eyes the same weak bitch that resides in your mother. There’s no way you’ll ever manage to keep away.”
I watched tears form in Ma’s eyes as he said that. It had to feel like a dagger to her soul, because all her life all she ever did was love him. She wasted so many years loving a man who loved to control and belittle her.
“Don’t talk about my mom,” I said, standing up for her because she hadn’t a clue how to stand up for herself.
He snickered. “I love your mom. Julie, don’t I love you? She’s my one and only. You’re it for me, baby.”
Mom kind of smiled, as if she believed him.
Something I’d never understand.
He made me sick. “You don’t love her. You love controlling her because it hides the fact that you yourself are nothing but a fucking rat.”
I flinched when I felt his fist contact my eye. “This fucking rat can still kick your ass, little boy. I’m not going to waste any more time on you, though. Julie. Give me my money.”
Her voice shook with fear. “Ricky, I don’t have it right now. I’ll get it though. I just have to…” He went to hit her, and I stepped in front of him, this time blocking his hit.
“So what, you went off to some fancy rehab place and come back thinking you can just step back into this place, Logan?” he asked, annoyed. “Trust me, you don’t want me as your enemy.”
I reached into my pocket and grabbed my wallet, counting out fifty bucks. “Here. Take it and go.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Did I say fifty? I meant seventy.”
Asshole. I pulled out another twenty, and shoved it at him. He willingly accepted the bills, stuffing it into his pocket. He bent down in front of the lasagna. “You make this, son?” he asked, knowing that calling me son would get under my skin. He took a spoonful of the fo
od, then spit it out, back into the pan, ruining the whole thing. “Tastes like ass.”
“Ricky,” Ma said, going to defend me, but he shot her a look that shut her up.
He stole her voice so long ago, and she had no clue how to find it. “You act like I don’t take care of you, Julie. That’s really offensive. Don’t forget who was there for you when this boy walked out and left you. And you wonder why it’s so hard for me to love you. You betray me every second you get.”
Her head lowered.
“And this? Him bringing you food and groceries? That doesn’t mean he cares about you, Julie.” He opened the cabinets and the refrigerator, grabbing all of the food I bought for Ma, opening each item, and dumping them into a pile on the floor. I wanted to stop him, but Ma told me to stay quiet. He opened a box of cereal, locked eyes with me, and slowly poured it on top of everything on the ground, before opening a gallon of milk and doing the same exact thing.
He then walked over it with his sneakers, and headed to the front door. “I’m going to handle some business,” he said with a smirk. “And Julie?”
“Yeah?” she whispered, a tremble in her body.
“Clean that shit up before I get back home.”
When the door slammed, my heartrate started to go back to normal. “Are you okay, Ma?”
Her body was tense, and she wouldn’t look at me. “You did this.”
“What?”
“He’s right. You left me, and he was there for me. You’re the reason he made this mess. You weren’t there for me. He took care of me.”
“Ma…”
“Get out!” she shouted, tears falling down her cheeks. She started toward me, hitting me, just like she used to when I was young. Blaming me because the devil didn’t love her. “Get out! Get out! It’s all your fault. It’s your fault that he doesn’t love me. It’s your fault that this mess is here. It’s your fault that Kellan’s dying. You walked away from us. You left us. You left us. Now leave, Logan. Leave. Leave. Leave!” she shouted, pounding against my chest, her words confusing me, hurting me, burning me. She was hysterical, reminding me too much of the Ma I once knew and hated. Her words were echoing in my mind.
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