Hometown Heartless

by Carrie Aarons

  I’ve never taken her up on it until that one time, and I knew my friends would expect this alcohol source to continue. After all, it’s not easy for high schoolers to get liquor on demand. But isn’t it funny how we always find a way?

  “Okay, we can talk about it later. Gotta run!” Rachel bulldozes over my protests.

  “But, I—”

  “Love you, Kenny!” Bianca hums my nickname.

  I clamp my lips shut, because there is no point in arguing. And it’s all teasing anyway, no harm in it.

  Unfortunately, we’re all in separate homerooms, so it’s high fives, hugs, and goodbyes for us until lunch. I’m in mostly advanced classes, as is Rachel, but Bianca decided to sprinkle her senior schedule with more electives than academic courses.

  But, we did all get put into the same lunch period, which is amazing. Finally being allowed to sit in the senior courtyard is pretty damn exclusive, if you ask me. In reality, it’s just a bunch of picnic tables right outside the cafeteria doors that only seniors are allowed to occupy. Though we treat it like the Buckingham Palace gardens.

  As I walk into homeroom though, my mind shifts to him. Of course, it does. I haven’t been able to go the last twenty-four hours since he stepped out of that truck without thinking of Everett Brock every other minute.

  I’m honestly surprised Rachel and Bianca haven’t broached the subject, but maybe they’re giving me time to come to them. After all, I had a bit of a meltdown when the military came to tell us he was dead. A meltdown is putting it lightly. I had to take almost a month’s leave from school, I could barely get it together.

  Two years ago, Everett left for basic training. He was deployed as a Marine some couple of months after that, though his letters never contained specific details because he wasn’t allowed to disclose them. I estimate that around six months into his deployment; again, I have no specifics to back this up, he was taken by the enemy as a prisoner of war. That term comes from the officers who contacted Marcia, his mother. She had told my mother this at the table in our breakfast nook, and I was eavesdropping on the stairs.

  Right then, I’d dropped to my knees and prayed on the top step. For God to bring him home. For Everett to be strong through whatever he was going through. My nightmares were things of blood and horror, thinking about what he must be enduring. For three months we hoped, held the vigils, wrote letters to the military, and tried to be positive.

  Then, the black car of death arrived, with government officials claiming to believe they had sufficient evidence proving Everett’s death. They handed his mother a folded American flag and promptly went on their way.

  I remember the day of his funeral, almost the entire town of Brentwick standing in the cemetery. It was a sea of black, sobs coming from every which direction. When they lowered the empty casket, the shots rang out—the military had arranged for a twenty-one gun salute. I jumped at every single bullet fired, as if they were all being riddled right through my heart.

  This was the boy I thought I’d marry someday. Not that we’d ever dated, or had any moments that crossed over into the territory of more than friends. It was more of a feeling. A larger sense of fate’s plan in the grand scheme of things. Everett and I had danced around each other since we were children, teetering on the edge of becoming something more for the years we were in high school together.

  I’d even been so bold as to ask him a few times, when I was tipsy and he couldn’t help but plant me in his lap at a party, why he’d never made a move. We’d sit there at the barn, our friends surrounding us, and he’d tap me on my nose while his other hand played with the hem of my shirt. Usually, he’d brush me off, say something about being friends or that I was his kid sister. Which inevitably shattered my heart and caused a mess of drunk tears by the time we arrived at one of two best friend’s basements to sleep off the alcohol.

  And then, on the last night before he shipped out to boot camp, we found ourselves in the same position. Anyone who saw the way he held me, or saw the way I looked at him … they knew it was much more than a friendly gesture. So I asked him to kiss me. To give me my first kiss, the one I’d been holding out for.

  “It’s not our time, yet, Kennedy. Plus, you’re still too young. I’m going away, and you’re going to live your life here. But when you turn eighteen, I’m going to come back for you. And I’m going to give you the kiss we’ve both dreamed about. Wait for me.”

  I always used to love that he insisted on using my full name when everyone else shortened it to Kenny.

  Of course, the sophomore me who had drunk two wine coolers that night hadn’t understood why he couldn’t just kiss me right there on the spot. It had annoyed me, frustrated me. So much so that I didn’t write to him for the first four weeks, because I was sulking at his trying to teach me patience.

  But over time, I had to admit that what Everett had proposed was poetic. He was right, in a way. I hadn’t known then what I thought I did. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t our time.

  Though, once he was captured, and eventually pronounced a casualty of war, I thought we would never have our time. I’d waited for him, and he’d died.

  Now, he’s back, and everyone in my high school is talking about it. It’s all I can think about.

  Well, that and the kiss he owes me. I just keep wondering if he’ll ever make good on his promise.

  3

  Everett

  I’m back from the dead, motherfuckers.

  Well, I guess not the dead. The seventh circle of hell is more like it, though at that point, you just wish you were dead.

  I suppose I actually am. At least that’s how everyone keeps looking at me, like they’re utterly shocked to see my skin and hair where they assumed there would be rotting bone and dead eyes. I don’t have the energy to tell them that’s how I feel on the inside.

  Do you want to break a person? Toss them in a four foot by eight foot hole for three hundred and sixty-five days, starve them, beat them within an inch of their life, and then throw away the key. That’ll get the job done.

  How do you just pick up a life that is no longer anything resembling that? Normal people leave the house, have friends, smile, enjoy aspects of the living, breathing world around them. I can no longer do those things. It’s like the enemy sliced into my chest with their box of tools and removed the part of me that can feel anything. I bet if you took a scalpel to my leg, gutted the thing wide open like the belly of a fish, I’d feel absolutely nothing.

  My mom and dad have been tiptoeing around me. Their not-so-subtle check-in’s, since I won’t come out of my room; the pretend pass by with a bit of food on a tray, the questions about taking my car out of storage, the book on PTSD they just happened to pick up for me. They’re probably elated to have their son back, after he was buried in the local cemetery, but I just can’t muster up any kind of emotion for them.

  Sure, they’re my parents. I recognize that they’re a safe place, though what that means to me anymore is completely fucked. But I can’t muster the spirit to sit at a dinner table with them. To even crack a small smile when my mother tells me how much she’s missed me. And don’t even think about asking me to detail the events of the last year of my life. If I did that, they’d be stabbing themselves in the ears to stop my words from entering them, that’s how brutal the stories I could tell are.

  No, there is only one random, annoying as hell, uncontrollable thought that keeps running through my mind.

  When I shipped out, Kennedy Dover was a sophomore who’d just gotten her braces removed. Of course, neither of those two things kept me from wanting her. Fuck, I’d wanted her even when she had the braces. Kennedy has always been gorgeous, even as the girl who used to knock my sand castle over in the park sandbox. One doesn’t need to guess why she was my first crush, and my pen pal as I sat in a fucking desert trying not to be shot at.

  Kennedy encompasses all ends of the spectrum when it comes to beauty. She has the obvious, pretty vibe with the long lashes that kiss her
cheeks when she blinks. All the swirling brown hair that you can’t help but want to touch. The button nose and pure white teeth, sans braces. Not only that, but she’s sexy as hell and has no idea, which only makes her sexier. Even back then, before I left, she was starting to fill into her curves. A petite frame with a handful of tit on each side, an ass made perkier by all the cheerleading jumps and stunts, and legs longer than the afternoon in summer. It was all I could do to stop staring at her lips before I graduated high school, so full they are, and the color of crushed cherries. Kennedy has always been beautiful, a natural kind of attractiveness that goes further than just skin deep. She’s considerate and polite, sincerely cares and gives her attention when she’s having a conversation with you. She has that spark, the one that draws people to her.

  That was before. Before I turned into a ghost of my former self. But now? Jesus fucking Christ. It took all I had in me not to tackle her like a wild animal when I stepped into my driveway and saw her standing there. She’s a goddamn knockout, all supple curves in that tight cheer uniform. She’s every guy’s wet dream come to life.

  From the moment I saw her standing across the lawn that separates our two houses, she’s been the only thing that can penetrate the fortress that is now my mind. Being by myself, in a dusty pit with not a speck of light, it trained me to focus my mind into a full meditative state. I can go weeks without having a single thought.

  But since the second I saw Kennedy Dover, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the last thing I said to her in person.

  “I’m going to give you the kiss we’ve both dreamed about. Wait for me.”

  That fucking promise I made her, the one about the kiss? It was what got me through the first few months of fighting overseas. Before I got captured, all I did was eat, sleep, shoot, and read Kennedy’s letters. We would send them back and forth so frequently, sometimes I’d get random handwritten pages that didn’t even correspond to the letter I’d just sent because she’d already sent another one.

  They were always about everything, and nothing at all. The scrawl of her penmanship kept me grounded, kept me sane even as I stared at the same orange desert landscape for hours on end. Fuck, I can still feel the grit of that sand in my eyes even now, and I was rescued over a month ago from the pit those fucking bastards left me in.

  Took the guys who are supposed to be on my side long enough to realize I was telling the truth when I said I hadn’t been turned. That I wasn’t a spy for the other team, that no one had radicalized me. When they were satisfied—after using their own methods of psychological torture because apparently I haven’t had enough—I was given a Prisoner of War medal and a Purple Heart, allowed to go into surgery for my fucked up arm and leg, and shipped home. A simple nod of their heads to thank me for my service, as if I wasn’t just tortured and dragged through hell. No talk of the benefits I’d receive, or if I’d have some kind of exit discussion. No HR rep calling my line in the past few days.

  When I turned eighteen, I did the noble thing and decided to serve my country. And now, that country was abandoning me.

  But at least I kept the one secret that no one was able to pull out of me. Maybe because they didn’t know it was there, locked tightly in my brain, where no one could unveil it. Because they would never believe an eighteen-year-old kid could pull it off.

  Shipping me back to Brentwick, a white-picket town where high school football heroes are held up as nobility, and the Christmas Eve parade is the most anticipated event on the calendar. My hometown was untouchable in my mind as a teenager. The two-story brick home my parents own, the late-night parties on the acres of farm property my best friend lives on, victory laps when the football team won … it all adds to the nostalgic charm that my northern New Jersey hometown is known for. I grew up as an only child, riding my bike down to Brentwick’s main street, Dellan Drive, and playing T-ball at the municipal fields.

  To most, my upbringing probably seems idyllic. I was lauded as a golden boy, and what did I do? Decided to follow my hero worship with an inflated ego and cocky heart right onto the battlefield. What a fucking moron I was.

  And now, I’m a twenty-year-old veteran with pins holding my ankle together after some Iraqi army general smashed it with a ball peen hammer, no job since I can’t seem to leave my room without hearing fucking helicopter blades coming for me, and no real will to live.

  Staring up at the white, wood-paneled ceiling of my childhood bedroom, I’m still truly shocked whenever I observe the space. Mom and Dad touched nothing, as if they were leaving it an intact shrine. Maybe they really did know I’d come home at some point, because nothing has changed. My little league baseball and football trophies still sit on a shelf above my desk. On that dark wood desk, where I used to hide a Playboy Magazine in the bottom drawer under old action figures, sit my senior year textbooks. The orange and white football jersey from my junior year state championship win, the one Mom had framed, hangs on the wall above my queen-sized bed. A wall of built-in bookcases covering the entire length of the wall opposite the door contains my favorite science-fiction novels, old CDs from my childhood days, wood shop projects, framed pictures of my friends, and a couple of priceless sports memorabilia I’d received as Christmas presents. I used to think the football signed by Brett Favre was the most valuable thing I own. Now, I could care less about the fucking pigskin.

  Aside from the last thing I said to Kennedy, I can think of nothing else I truly want to do. But this morning, my mom left a note on my desk before she left for work. Please go outside. Walk, or sit in the backyard, but you need some fresh air.

  If she only knew about the brutal heat I’d sat in for a little under a year, in that fucking hole in the desert, then she wouldn’t be saying it.

  But, I haven’t got anything else to do. And if I have to listen to the silence ringing in my head for one more minute, I might have a full-blown PTSD attack.

  So I drag myself from the bed, throw a pair of sneakers on, and go outside.

  4

  Kennedy

  The air smells of autumn when I step out of my car onto the driveway.

  Most people wouldn’t agree, what with it being nearly eighty degrees and my tank top and short skirt demonstrating otherwise. But, I can tell. Each September, there is a certain day where the weather gives you a clue that it’s about to change. That the leaves will change color brilliantly soon, that you’ll have to pull your sweaters out, that the pumpkin spice everything will flock to your local grocery shelves and coffee counters.

  Right now is that time, and I almost can’t wait for it. Mostly, because I love New Jersey in the fall, and partly because I’m sick of my summer wardrobe and can’t wait to break out my boots.

  Though, the fall only makes the elephant’s weight worth of pressure sitting on my shoulders that much more apparent.

  My head is not swirling with Bi and Rachel’s weekend plans. Though, not for their lack of trying. My best friends love to discuss party plans for the weekend before the present weekend is even over. And I like it enough. I’m always up for a party, to hang around, to try to relax.

  But I’m me. I have my eyes on some sort of prize, always.

  And right now, that prize is college. And that elephant on my back? He’s aware that the first signs of fall mean one step closer to applications being due.

  I’m gunning for my dream school, with my dream nursing program. I’ve known that I wanted to be a nurse since I was, oh, seven maybe? The first time I realized I didn’t get squeamish around blood, but ran to help at the sight of Rachel’s bone sticking out of her arm after a cheerleading stunt gone bad … yeah, I think that’s probably when I knew for sure. What other profession combines the complex knowledge and challenge of medicine, with the art of caring, and mental and physical toughness put on a nurse each day? It’s the perfect career for me.

  The perfect school is about two hours from here, with a top-notch, elite nursing program. Follow that with a two-year master’s program
to become a nurse practitioner, and I will have accomplished everything that is stressing me out to the max right now.

  Yes, I have a five-year plan. And a ten-year plan. And if you ask me what my twenty-year plan is, I could probably tell you that, too. Call me a psycho, that’s fine. I’m motivated and determined, which are two of the least damaging vices if you ask me.

  College essay writing hasn’t been going all that well, mainly because … I can’t dig deep enough into something to make it sound sincere. I’m a white cheerleader from an upper-middle class tri-state town, who is an only child and has never really had to compete for anything in her life. To universities, I’m just one face in a million. When I sit down to write, I’m suddenly struck by how much all the groups, clubs, charity drives, and activities I only participated in so I could put them on my college résumé … well, how much they really don’t matter. I’ve never had or done one thing in my life because I was simply following my heart.

  My eyes redirect to the second-story window of the house next to mine. The one I’ve stared at countless nights in the dark as a pre-teen girl, wondering if the boy inside was thinking about me too. Everett’s window has always faced mine, the alleyway between our homes always representing more than just a patch of lawn in distance. He was my childhood crush, the one that grew into unrequited love. When we all thought he was gone, I took those feelings and stuffed them deep down, in a dark, hidden place.