by Anna Bloom
The Other Side of Blue
The Other Side of Us #1
Anna Bloom
Copyright © 2020 by Anna Bloom
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
*Please note, all views, practices and events in this book are a work of fiction, the creation of the author alone and not based on real events or people.
For my family, my lockdown inmates.
Thank you.
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Thank You
Acknowledgments
Also by Anna Bloom
It's sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.
Henry Rollins
Preface
I don’t know when he became Blue to me. Maybe the day Grams painted the yard fence the same color as the sky, and then turned, her lips set into a grim line of determination as she declared, ‘There’, as though painting the fence sky-blue could stop us hearing what went on across the other side.
Maybe the time he knocked on my window, his face an indigo that bruised my heart. I allowed him in, welcomed him in, despite the pain I knew it would bring.
Maybe the day we said goodbye and he stole my soul as he fled into the night. From that point on I knew my life would be a shade of blue that would never feel whole again.
Blue. A desperate and dark ache. An emptiness like the midnight sky, with no studded stars to light a path. Blue. Deep and endless. An ocean without end, no sand on which to place my feet.
Blue. Wildflowers swaying in the wind, crushed with summer storms or the flaring sweep of fire.
Blue.
Jack ‘Blue’ Cross.
Blue, the only color I could see.
Chapter One
Lyra ~ Six Years Ago
The house rattled its familiar bang as Luca crashed through the back door; the hinges a little too loose, the pull a little too hard. Luca managed to make the act of shutting a door insolent; one of his most successful life skills.
Kicking my legs as I lay on my tummy and stretched across my bed, I turned the page of my book, staring at the black lines of text as I listened to the sounds in the house below.
The party finished early, and from what it sounded like, Luca had come home alone.
I snorted and flicked another page, my eyes word blind to the text on the paper. He’d be in a foul mood tomorrow if he hadn’t got any. Luca’s moods were determined by how much he got laid. Boys were simply disgusting.
From outside the window a trashcan lid echoed as it closed and the skin along my spine prickled, the hairs on the back of my arms bristling in the cool air from the inch my window sat ajar.
Blue must have been home too.
I strained my hearing for any sound of a girl, any giggle or whimpered sigh, but nothing reached my ears.
I breathed out a sigh big enough to hollow my chest. No sound... and breathe. As I did all too many times, I imagined Blue padding through his house, where he might skip a step, double check his foot placing so as to not make a sound.
I’d never been in Blue’s house. Of course I hadn’t.
As Luca’s sister, my role evolved around being the annoying hanger-on they had to watch during summer while they rode up and down the road on their bikes. Watch Lyra while I go to the store… the hairdressers… the anywhere other than here.
As soon as they could, the two of them tailed out of there and left me alone on the porch wondering what they were giggling about.
Sure that Blue had now got through the house, I rolled off my purple comforter and peeped around the edge of my drapes.
Blue’s room sat directly opposite mine, matching rectangles of glass facing one another.
His navy drapes were half pulled, the light not on yet; the naked bulb blank where it would normally illuminate a circle of light in the center of the room.
Luca stumbled on our stairs, his muffled curse filling the silent night. I waited for Mom to tell him to keep it down, but she didn’t stir, asleep or avoiding. Who the hell knew? Hell, she might not even be home herself.
I dove for my bed with the knock on my door, flattening myself on the mattress just as Luca cracked a gap between the hall and my room. “Hey, Ly, you still awake?”
Yes, waiting for you and Blue to come home… Of course, I didn’t say that. I wasn’t stupid. Instead, I motioned to the book and the dog-eared pages. “Riveting read,” I winced the lie. Truth was, I would have been asleep by now, but Luca stayed out late and part of me needed to know he… they… were home safe, more than I needed my own sleep.
I could sleep during trig tomorrow, would possibly make it more exciting.
“Good party?” I asked, rolling onto my back and hooking my hands beneath my head, feigning an innocence my heart pounding on the inside didn’t want to be part of.
Go away Luca so I can look out the window.
Luca shrugged, his shoulders rising and then falling, but his lips curved with a smile that made my stomach turn into Jell-o. Please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.
But I did... desperately.
What Luca did, Blue did.
Inseparable from three years old, where one friend went, the other never walked far behind.
“Cate was gunning for Jack.” Luca smirked at a memory.
I nodded slowly. “Was he playing?” I swirled a strand of hair between my fingers, wrapping it index finger tight to make a ringlet of my loose curls.
Luca didn’t think I knew what him and Blue did. Of course, I did. I had ears and eyes, normally superglued to the boy in the house next door.
Blue was Jack.
Jack to everyone else. Jack Cross, bad boy green-eyed terror of the neighborhood.
To me, he would always be simply Blue.
It’s the color I’d paint his soul if it were ever mine to own.
But then at twelve it seemed I’d given into whimsical fancies that I could sense the color of his soul.
Blue and Luca were eighteen.
I snapped my book shut. “Do you need anything?” I narrowed my gaze.
“Feisty. Is it the monthlies?”
I threw a pillow at Luca, mainly because he’d said something so antiquated as monthlies. That’s Grams’ words there.
Grams. The grownup in the house.
“Night, Lyra.” He waved his fingers at me, his smile taunting, and as soon as he turned, I launched for the door, clicking it shut with the weight of my back.
From the spot by the door I could see straight into Blue’s room.
The globe of the naked lightbulb
illuminated the room and he leaned against his windowsill, his eyes direct on my window.
My heart caught, racing, my tongue dry and tingling as I fought to move air through my lungs.
His dark gaze kept me pinned and immobilized.
Then it came: the shout, the crash, the scream. The symphony our small neighborhood heard all too often while turning deaf ears in its direction.
It must have been the bin; he woke him up.
I lifted my hand in a small wave and Blue’s face shadowed. I watched as he moved toward the window and lifted the sign that I read more than I’d like. Play for me.
He nodded, a smile so tragic and perfectly crooked brightening his face for a split moment. Across the small gap between our houses I could make out the muscles in his arms flex under his T-shirt. My heart beat a wild beat.
I turned and picked up my violin from my desk, running my thumb across the strings to check it still held its tune. Cheap and from the thrift store, it didn’t like to stay in tune for longer than two hours. I pushed its allowance to the max, but I didn’t want to stop to retune in case Blue switched off his light and left darkness between us. Satisfied, I picked up my bow and tucked the violin under my chin, balancing the bow on the strings and stepping toward the window.
Blue sat on his window seat, his arms looped around his knees, his head resting on his arms, his eyes on me as I played above the shouts and cries of his parents ringing through the night below us.
I played until my fingers were numb and he slipped away, switching off the globe of light. I put my violin back on my desk and dived under the covers, locking my memories of that beautifully broken smile of the evening into my memory box, just in case I never got to see it again.
Chapter Two
Lyra ~ Present Day
The room sat largely empty, five cardboard boxes balanced on the single bed, my suitcase unzipped on the floor.
Funny that now I could see the walls were tired; the paint a peach a younger version of myself chose. It was faded around where my posters used to hang, round oil marks from the tac that held them up.
The floorboard on the landing squeaked. “You ready, kid?” I groaned at Luca and his use of the nickname ‘kid’, blocking the resurgent memories it dragged up from the deep dark swamp of things I’d rather forget. Luca pushed his hair out of his eyes. “You want me to help you carry the boxes to the car?”
I graced him with a low-key eyeroll. “You don’t have to drive me all the way across the country. I already told you that like a million times. I can get the Greyhound.”
“With all these boxes? They’d charge you freight.” Luca shot me his winning smile; bringing down the opposite sex since 2015. “I know you told me, but I’ve got to go and mark your boundary, so no boys come near you while you’re there.”
“Are you going to scent the doorway to my room?” Somehow, he always managed to make a small smile crack on my face no matter how much I didn’t want it to. One of his true-life skills, but also one of the major disappointments in my own, that he got the easy charm while I got all the ease of a robot in need of some oil. I was the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz to his brave and inquisitive Dorothy. He just needed some pigtails and a blue gingham dress and he’d be off.
Fucking annoying considering the integral flaw of him being a male of the species made him ninety-five percent douchebag.
“We need to go if we stand any chance of getting there before dark, tomorrow. And anyway, I want to get out of dodge. I broke up with Lauren last night. Class A hanger-on.”
I groaned. “Lauren? I thought Rachel was Shag du Jour?”
“Rachel? Get with it, Lyra.” He shot me a look of pure exasperation and leaned down to grab a box, his arms flexing with the weight of the books jammed inside. “Jesus, Ly, you aren’t going to have any friends if you turn up looking like a geek.”
“Hey, hey. Geek is my badge and I wear it proud.”
Luca gave me a sad shake of his head, the same shake of his head he’d been giving me since he realized I was the absolute opposite to him, then he headed back down the stairs. “You say goodbye to Grams and I’ll load the boxes.”
My stomach rolled, my throat tightening. Goodbyes weren’t my thing. I preferred things left unsaid, a never-ending string of words that could have been expressed but never were.
I slipped down the dark carpet of the stairs, along the worn pattern of yellow flowers faded in places where Luca and I had run up and down them with thudding feet our entire lives.
The tired state of the carpet symbolized the entire house... The family, really.
“Grams,” I called, barreling into the wood paneled living room. The air stuck heavy in my throat, filtered sunlight steaming the room from behind thick mismatched velvet drapes. “It’s like a sauna in here. Shall I open a window?”
I stepped for the drapes, but Grams croaked out, “No, I’ll forget to close it and be murdered in my sleep.”
“You are so dramatic.” I smiled fondly at the woman with the grey frizz, strands of her tight curls stood up like she’d been electrocuted. Her floral dress, a burned orange, had been in her possession since nineteen seventy-five. I knew, because she’d told me more than once. She didn’t give in to new things, preferring everything at least three decades old. In many ways, I mirrored her. The dress however, she had no plans to give up.
Leaning down, I kissed her cheek, marveling at how smooth it seemed when the rest of her seemed to be in a state of decay. She wasn’t that old, not really, but life hadn’t treated her all that kind. “You’re gonna miss my kind of drama when you’re at your snooty school, Lyra Bird.”
My stomach plummeted at her nickname for me, so much worse that Luca’s taunting ‘kid’. It made my palms sweat. A curl clung to the back of my neck, but I quickly schooled my features.
Lyra Bird. The name used to make me want to fly.
“You’ll remember your medicine?” I prompted, fussing around her table.
Clucking her tongue, she waved at me with her fingers like I was a pesky fly and pushed her hands down onto the handles of her armchair to get up. “Shoo you, don’t ya be fussing now, bad enough I’ve got that dolt of a brother of yours hanging ’round and eatin’ me out of house ’n home.”
“Heard that,” Luca said, popping his head around the doorway, another of my boxes in his arms.
“You were meant to,” she called after his retreating back. “My eyes might be failing, but I still got my sense of hearing.”
All at once a rushing bubble of regret welled up inside my chest and I struggled to breathe around it.
My chest squeezed so tight, punishingly intense around my ribcage; the edge of my vision danced with faint stars.
I couldn’t leave.
I’d been stupid to think I could.
Grams, always knowing, reached for my hand. “Lyra. You do us proud, Boo.”
“I will,” I said, but my voice tightened, a string too close to snapping.
“First Lennox on a full scholarship, you should be proud.” Her warm hands clasped mine, dry and soft all at once. The feel of them against my own skin settled over me like my old blankie I’d lost at the park the summer I turned five. “I know, I am.”
“Thanks, Grams. I’ll be home for Christmas.” I already knew I wouldn’t be able to afford to come home before. I’d done the sums over and over late at night as I’d mulled over whether I should go. I’d be looking for waitressing work, bar work, any work, as soon as I hit Boston.
My full ride to Berklee might get my tutoring and board but it wouldn’t keep food in my mouth and it sure as hell wouldn’t enable me to help Grams back here.
Again, she read me, reconfirming my lifelong suspicion that she was a witch. Growing up in the poorer areas of New Orleans, believing in the supernatural never took a huge stretch of the imagination. There were witch doctors and Shamans on every corner. Twenty bucks and they’d tell you anything you wanted to hear.
“Now, don’t you g
o worrying about me, or Luca.”
I held in my snort, not keen to be on the receiving end of her quick and concise tongue during our last moments together. Luca needed worrying about more than anyone, but I knew now I had to let him stand on his own two feet.
“Or your momma.” Grams stared at me hard.
Mom’s absence for our stilted goodbye spoke volumes. The sort of conversations I liked actually, nonexistent. Definitely a good thing. Goodbyes really weren’t my thing.
Clutching in a breath of Grams flavored air—my last until Christmas—violet water and cinnamon—I leaned down and gave her a squeeze, her shoulders frail beneath my own slender arms. “Love you,” I whispered into her wiry hair.
She clutched me for a moment, hard and fast. “Fly, Lyra Bird.” And then she pushed me away and turned back for her chair.
Conversation over.
And we were done. Swallowing, I turned back for the green carpeted stairs and paced up them two at a time.
The room empty, Luca stood below on the street, his car idling, vibrating the air in the sticky heat.
For a long moment I stared through the window into the room opposite, imagining that Blue watched me from the other side once again.
Five years ago
“Hey, kid?” A bounce of a ball followed the call, but I studiously ignored it as I continued walking down the road towards the house. Fall had crisped the air, curling the leaves slightly at the edges, but the sun still baked the earth a hard terracotta. The clack of cicadas made the bushes hum.