"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Huck said, giving her a nod, then turning and leading me confidently out through the arbor.
"I could kiss you," I declared, meaning it as light, happy, but seeing my mistake when he looked over and down at me, eyes warm. "I mean, not really. Just, you know. You were really amazing today, Huck," I told him. "That was nowhere near as terrible as it usually is. Thank you for that."
"You don't have to thank me, babe. Letting you go in there alone is like throwing a puppy in a viper den," he told me, handing me my helmet.
"He has an adrenaline fetish," I said to a couple who passed, leveling my gaze with the woman. "You know how powerful men are," I added, getting a smirk from her husband and an eye roll from the wife who knew that the most daring thing her man had ever done was go out in the summer without seventy SPF.
"Do you hate them all?" Huck asked, watching me as I adjusted the helmet.
"Hate all who?"
"Rich people."
"No, actually. I really like the rich ones. The "new money" ones. It's the old money, wealthy ones that drive me nuts. All the pomp and arrogance, all the secrets they pay a fortune to cover up. It's ugly. The rich ones are amazing. When I was sixteen, an up-and-coming pop star tossed me her keys to drive her Lamborghini around the neighborhood. If they make a mistake, it hits the news sites and shows, and they kind of own it, shrug off their flaws. I like that a lot more than the people like my grandparents who project perfection when it's all lies."
"I feel like there's a story there" Huck said, putting on his helmet. "One that might have to do with why they really hate you like they do," he said, being a lot more intuitive than I was giving him credit for.
"Does it matter?" I asked, head shaking as I struggled to keep eye-contact.
"Yeah, it matters."
"Why?"
"Because I give a shit about you," he said, shrugging it off. It wasn't a grand romantic declaration, but I felt something inside me respond to the words, knowing that men like Huck didn't tend to use flowery words, that giving a shit about you was as romantic as they got.
"Tell you what, if you get me out of here, and get me something real to eat, I will tell you it all," I told him.
I didn't tell anyone the story.
I guess as Jones got older, I did give him dribs and drabs of what actually happened all those years ago, but I had never sat anyone down and given them it all.
Hell, even my therapist didn't have all the details.
But there I was, offering it all to Huck.
I should have been analyzing what that meant, weighing the risks, trying to figure out what it meant that I not only agreed to tell him my story, but actually felt excited to, to give someone that part of me. To give him that part of me.
"Luckily, this is my old stomping ground," he said, making me look around the neighborhood with raised brows, making him chuckle. "Yeah, not here. But Miami. This is my neck of the woods. I know all the best hidden food joints."
"Well then, take me away on your steed," I said, going full geek and doing a little bow that had him chuckling as he climbed on the bike, waiting for me to get on behind him.
And this time, there was no hesitation as my legs slid against him, as my arms tightened over his chest, as my head rested on his shoulders, and the bike lurched away.
Not fifteen minutes later, we were sitting in a back corner of a pretty seedy-looking pizza shop with an entire plain pie sitting between us, gleaming with grease, still too hot to touch, let alone eat.
"Okay, babe," Huck said, passing me my soda. "Give it to me," he said, leaning back in his seat, one arm resting over the top of the back of the booth.
My heartbeat skipped faster.
My palms were sweaty.
And my stomach wobbled at the idea of doing it.
But then I opened my mouth.
And I gave him all of it.
The reason for their hatred of me.
My PTSD.
My seizures.
It all dated back to one single incident.
One single day.
The worst one of my life.
Chapter Ten
Harmon
My stomach always tensed when my step-father was the one picking me up from school. Then I felt guilty about not being excited since it always made Jones's day.
But my step-father never made it seem like he wanted me there, just took me along with him because he had to. He asked Jones about his day, about how much homework he had, about what he wanted to get for dinner. But he never asked me the same questions. So I ended up sitting right there beside him in the front seat, feeling completely ignored.
Because that was exactly what I was, what I had always been.
I had been Jones's age now—six—when my mom married a man I'd never even met before. She'd told me that I would need to call him Dad or Father. And that our lives would be changing for the better.
I was young, but old enough to know that nothing felt better after we moved into his big, cold house, where strangers did things my mom and I used to do together—folding laundry, sweeping the floors, making dinner.
My days used to be filled with laughter and music and one-on-one time with my mother. But when we moved into our new house, I spent most of my time alone, getting yelled at by my step-father when I was too noisy, when I left toys lying around, when I was upset because I had gotten hurt.
Nothing I ever did was good enough.
"He's just not used to little kids, Harmon," my mother said, giving me a tight smile as she sat down on my bed, brushing my hair out after my bath. She'd felt different those days too, with her big belly pressing into my back. "I think having the baby might help teach him about how to be a father. Which will be good for you too."
She was right and wrong.
He did learn to be a good father to Jones, spoiling him, doting over him, parading him out when there were dinner parties so everyone could see his son.
But things didn't change for me.
I got the same cold, distant treatment. When there were dinner parties, I was lectured to stay in my room, not to come down and bother anyone, even as Jones ran around, knocking over catering tables as he went.
Still, I loved Jones. When our father wasn't home, I practically had him all to myself to play with. And while he couldn't play the same way I could, he made my little life a lot less lonely.
Maybe I should have resented him more for being the golden child while I was locked away like an ugly secret. But he'd always been too lovable to hate.
As I got older, I grew to understand that Jones was more loved simply because he shared blood with our father, that I was resented because I didn't, but they still had to take care of me.
I expected that day to be like some of the others, when we were picked up, that we would go for drive-through—because Jones's favorite things in the world were hamburgers and fries—and then end up at the ice cream place. I would get none of the attention, but I would get to eat some treats, so it wasn't a total loss.
But after we left the fast food place, we didn't take the usual turn toward the ice cream place, or the park, or even the beach.
No, in fact, our father drove us somewhere I had never seen before, an area where the houses were towering buildings filled with cramped apartments, where there were a lot of boarded-up buildings and homeless people pushing carts around.
I remember my stomach getting tight when we'd parked in front of a building, and our father got out.
"You stay here. Keep an eye on your brother," he demanded, looking at me.
Then he was gone, walking into the building while looking side to side, almost as if he was worried about being seen there, being recognized.
"I want to go home," Jones whined for the third time since we'd parked, kicking his feet against the driver's seat as I tried to make a game out of naming things we could see that were blue, then green, then yellow, until I ran out of colors.
When our father final
ly emerged, he seemed even more tense than when he'd gone in, his movements oddly twitchy, foreign.
He got back in the car, saying nothing to us as he checked and re-checked his mirrors, then finally drove us out of the bad part of town.
We got our ice cream.
But Jones had been in a bad mood about having to wait, then threw a fit when they didn't have the caramel crunch ice cream he wanted, tossing the ice cream cone our father bought him onto the floor of the car.
"You fucking—" our father snapped, reaching a bit frantically into his chest pocket, producing a small plastic bag with white powder in it, tapping it onto the center console, rolling up some money, and snorting it up his nose.
At twelve, I didn't know everything there was to know about drugs, but I knew what he was doing was something I'd seen on a video about drugs at school.
I knew drugs were bad and that you were never supposed to drive if you took them.
But he was my father.
And I was young.
What was I supposed to do?
So I said nothing, did nothing.
And he got out, cleaned up the backseat, got Jones a new ice cream, then got in and started driving us home.
I remembered feeling relieved because we weren't far from home, and once we got there, I could get away from him and try to forget about the white powder, about what that meant.
But then a squirrel ran out in the middle of the road, and instead of stopping, my father jolted the wheel hard, too hard, and the car started to flip.
I remembered screaming. My father's. Jones's.
And then... nothing.
Complete blackness.
I woke up with a jackhammering pain across my entire skull, something so intense that I cried out immediately, before my eyes even opened up fully.
But when I finally could force my eyelids open, I could see the mangled car, the broken glass.
My head was slammed against the window at my side, the airbag in front of me deflated.
"Dad. Dad. Daddy!" I shrieked when I looked over, finding him similarly butted up to his window, blood trickling down his face onto the collar of his shirt. And the steering wheel, the steering wheel was pinning his legs. "Dad!" I shrieked again, reaching over, shoving his arm, but he didn't wake up.
"Jones?" I called, turning my head. Too fast. Making my vision white out as the pain shot through my head.
He wasn't in his seat, had seemed to slip under his seatbelt and was huddled on the floor.
"Jones!" I screamed, trying to reach him but my shoulder refused to move. "Jones! Daddy? Dad? Help!" I screamed. "Help!" I tried again, at the top of my lungs.
That was the only sound for what felt like an eternity.
The sound of my own voice screaming as I frantically tried to get my locked seatbelt off, slip under, get free, my chest feeling tight, not able to pull in a proper breath.
"Help," I whimpered, closing my eyes, tears coming hot and heavy.
I was only half-conscious when I was pulled out through the busted window, when I was loaded onto a stretcher and closed into an ambulance.
And when I got to the hospital, they gave me something to stop all the pain, to send me back to blissful unconsciousness.
"I woke up to the doctors telling me my mom would be right back, that she was checking on my brother," I told Huck, taking a bite of pizza.
"How was he?"
"Concussion only," I said. "thank God. My step-father had lost use of his legs. For a while, there."
"And you?"
"I had a traumatic brain injury, had needed surgery to stop a bleed."
"That's why you have the seizures," he assumed. "From the accident?"
"Yeah. They were worse back then when my brain was still healing. But yeah."
"And the car phobia, that was from being trapped in the car with your unconscious father and brother, in pain, needing help."
"Yeah," I agreed. "I know on a rational level that it is an irrational fear to have, but as many times as I've tried to get over it, I can't."
"Fuck, I don't blame you," Huck said, shaking his head. "I'm not seeing why your family treats you like shit over the accident though."
"Right," I agreed, sighing. "That would be because I told the police that my father was a coke-head. I mean, I didn't know those words at the time, but I explained about the bad neighborhood, about the white powder, about the snorting. They put the pieces together. And my family... his family... they lost their minds."
"Because you were airing their dirty laundry?"
"Yeah," I said, nodding, remembering the events following the incident with a lot more clarity than just about anything else in my life.
My grandparents at my bedside berating me, telling me to tell the police I was mistaken, that I'd lied.
But I told them I couldn't lie, that it was wrong to lie to the police, sobbing as I tried to stand up to them and their angry faces.
"You stupid, ungrateful bitch," my grandfather snapped, storming out of the room.
"He had a stroke later that night," I said, the pizza tasting a little bitter on my tongue.
"And they blamed you for that too."
"The doctors said stress can cause a stroke. They thought it was my fault he was so stressed."
"That's bullshit to put that on a little kid."
"Yeah, well, I was an easy scapegoat. Since I wasn't one of their own."
"What happened then?"
"I'm not entirely sure. They convinced Jones to say I was lying. It wasn't hard work. He was a little kid. He barely understood what was happening anyway. And then, I imagine, they hired a fixer to make it all go away. And it did. Go away. The cops even came in and told me that I was wrong about the coke, that it was my head injury making me remember things that didn't happen."
"Jesus."
"People with bottomless pockets can make a lot of things happen. For better or worse. And I got to leave that hospital with my grandfather's stroke on my shoulders, and everyone around me calling me a liar, an ingrate."
"What about your mom?"
"Honestly, I think she was so overwhelmed during that time that something in her kind of broke too. She was never the same after. Taking care of me, of Jones, of my father who couldn't take care of himself anymore. And, God, was he mean back then. Meaner than now by a million."
"Probably because he was fucking detoxing from the coke."
"Yeah, that was probably a part of it for sure."
"How did you get through that shit? Hurt, having seizures, no one believed you, everyone blamed you, having no one on your side?"
"My father's nurse," I said, feeling a warmth spread across my chest at the one bright spot in that whole disaster of a situation. "He was practically living there at the time, doing the heavy lifting that my mom couldn't do. And I think he, you know, took pity on me. Everyone else was getting so much care and attention, and I was relegated to my room like a prisoner even though I had been through something traumatic too. He knocked on my door one day and I opened it to find him standing there with a big stack of books."
I hadn't been much of a reader in those days, doing it for school but hating every minute of it, never able to stay focused on the story.
But when he'd handed me those ten books, it was like he'd given me an escape from a world that I didn't want to be in anymore.
"What? Like Harry Potter or something?" Huck asked.
"No, he gave me this big adult fantasy series. The Wheel of Life series."
"Your tattoo," Huck said, snapping me out of my memories. "On your shoulder," he said when I stared at him for a moment.
"Oh, yeah. Jones dragged me to the tattoo shop with him on his eighteenth birthday. I didn't want to be a spoilsport, so I got the wheel."
"Because the books got you through a hard time."
"The books, yeah, then the video game," I told him, watching as understanding moved across his face.
"The same game you play now? The one you film you
rself playing?"
"Yeah," I said, reaching for another slice, finding now that it was all out, I felt oddly lighter, emptier. "It's not a super popular game anymore. Back when it first came out, it was. But then people moved on to the more exciting games. But there is a really niche crowd of die-hard fans of the game or the books or both. They are how I manage to still make a living."
"What's it all about?"
"A woman on a quest. But it isn't about her goal, per se. It is about the journey itself, how she changes, who she meets along the way."
"Does she get to her goal?"
A little snort escaped me at that. "I don't know."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the author died before he finished the final book. And he didn't leave any outlines. He wasn't that kind of author. So no one knows what his plan was for the finale."
"That sucks."
"Yeah. And no. I think it kind of drives home the whole message of the series, don't you? That it is all about the journey. That nothing else really matters, nothing else is ever promised."
"Yeah, I guess. But how can you play a game that you can't win?"
"Well, the game varies a bit from the end of the books. There are hundreds of possible outcomes depending on what moves you make along the game. I've been playing since I was twelve, and I still haven't gotten all the possible outcomes. It is never predictable. And you can play the same way but make different choices depending on your maturity level, your age, your headspace that night you played. It's unpredictable, but comforting."
"I still can't fucking believe that family of yours."
"I became less shocked about it as I got older and realized how many scandals there were that got covered up. Before me, during my time at home, after I left. Someone is always fucking up. And someone else is always fixing it to protect the family name."
"So no one ever learns from their mistakes."
"Yeah, exactly," I agreed, nodding. "It really is a miracle that Jones has come out even halfway normal."
"What's with his hard feelings toward them? If he was the golden child?"
"The older he got, the more rebellious he got. I mean... Look at him," I said, shrugging. "And he got never-ending shit about it from our father who wanted Jones to grow up to be a little mini-me. And then one day, Jones came to me. I think he was sixteen, and asked me why I hated the family so much, what really happened all those years ago."
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