Keep From Falling (Markson Grove Series Book 1)

by Amy Vanessa Miller

  I take a seat at the kitchen table. “And how exactly were you planning on hiding it from me?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me why you did it.”

  I know what she will respond, or at least I know what her response should be. I can’t help but ask the question anyway if for nothing more than confirmation from her own mouth.

  “I’m losing you,” she says with a tremble in her voice and it physically hurts me. I knew the moment Evan kissed me that this would happen.

  “No, you’re not,” I assure her.

  She shakes her head as a tear rolls down her cheek. “It’s not fair for me to keep you away from something that might be right for you. You’ve never had a boyfriend. You’ve never even kissed a guy before tonight and that was all fine before because there was no one else. But you said so yourself, he makes you feel things.”

  “I don’t care what he makes me feel,” I say. “I love you.”

  “I don’t doubt that you love me. But what if you could love him too.”

  “That’s ridiculous! Of course not. You’re all I want.”

  “How can you be so sure of that if I am the only person you’ve ever been with? How can you possibly know if there is anything else out there for you?”

  “I… I just do,” I stammer.

  She shakes her head sadly. “You can’t.”

  This isn’t happening. Skylar isn’t breaking up with me. This is not happening!

  “So, what are you saying?” I finally choke out, somehow managing not to let a single tear escape my eyes.

  She doesn’t speak for a long while and the silence is petrifying. How can she even consider ending us over something so small; over a mistake I swore would never happen again?

  “I’m saying,” she finally says. “That you need to figure this out with Evan.”

  “What?” I ask in surprise. That was certainly not the response I was expecting.

  “I want you to figure out how you feel about him. I need you to figure it out, Bree.”

  “And how exactly do you want me to figure it out?” I demand, with a tinge of annoyance in my voice.

  “Get to know him,” she suggests. “And see where it goes.”

  She says this with so much certainty in her voice that I’m taken aback for a moment. But when I see the fear in her eyes, I know that it took a lot of effort for her to work up the courage to ask this of me.

  “It won’t go anywhere,” I whisper, defeated.

  She smiles sadly. “Maybe it won’t.”

  Evan

  She’s with Skylar.

  No matter how many times I say it over and over to myself it just doesn’t want to register. When Bree told me this last night, I was completely frozen with disbelief. And I just stood there like an idiot, trying to figure out the right words to say back. It was so embarrassing. How was I supposed to know she was gay? She acted the same way as other girls at school do around me…Flustered, but seemingly interested. Not that I ever paid much attention to any of them since Adrienne, but I’ve always noticed it.

  The minute I walk through the doors of the school the next morning I feel uneasy. What if I run into her and Skylar? What if she told Skylar about the kiss? How awkward would that be? I head over to Derrick and Kelsie who are both sitting in our usual morning spot on the floor in front of our lockers.

  “So?” Derrick asks when he spots me.

  I want to look indifferent about the whole thing. I want to pretend that it doesn’t bother me when I think about it, but I know my friends can see it written all over my face. There is no point in pretending I’m not disappointed, they can already tell.

  I take a seat across from them. Kelsie’s looking at me expectantly and she’s probably already figured it out. “She’s seeing someone,” I say, not wanting to beat around the bush. Tell them and move on, that’s the goal.

  Kelsie takes in a quick breath and then lets out a loud sigh, “I’m sorry Evan. I didn’t know.”

  I shrug, “It’s not your fault.”

  “Did you kiss her?” Derrick just had to ask. It’s not something I had planned on telling them, but now that the question is out there, I might as well just get it over with.

  “Yeah.”

  From the corner of my eye, I can see Kelsie’s brow rise and a little smirk emerges on her lips. I’ve made her very curious now.

  “Awesome man!” Derrick bellows.

  I look at Kelsie pointedly, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She nods, saying nothing. She knows when not to push.

  Derrick, on the other hand…

  “What? You gotta tell us,” he says so loudly that I’m sure the entire school hears him.

  This is Kelsie’s cue to escape before Derrick makes a fool of himself or worse, a fool of her. “I have to get going, I have a bio lab due in twenty minutes that I need to finish. I’ll talk to you guys later.” She gets up and gives Derrick a hurried kiss on the cheek before taking off down the hall. She spins around just before turning the corner. “And Evan,” she says, “It’s her loss.”

  Such a cliché, but coming from Kelsie, it feels good. “Thanks,” I say, forcing a smile.

  Once she’s out of sight and earshot I turn back to Derrick. “I need to talk to you about this without Kels. I don’t want her knowing just yet.”

  Derrick sits up eagerly, a smile stretched from ear to ear. “Now that’s what I’m talking about!”

  I shake my head. “You think maybe you could take this seriously for, I don’t know, like two seconds?” I ask.

  Derrick laughs. “I’ll give it an honest effort,” he lies, making a terrible attempt at a serious expression as he does so.

  “Ok,” I say, lowering my voice to a whisper. “Bree told me she’s involved with Skylar Hale.”

  “No way!” Derrick roars.

  I nod, motioning for him to relax and lower his voice. He has a tendency to get loud when people confide in him, I’m not sure why, but I’m grateful no one is standing close enough to hear him.

  “So they’re lesbians,” he says in a whisper that’s still too loud, but it’s as good as I know I’m going to get from him, so I let it go.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure what to think they are.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but in my experience with chicks, ‘involved’ means sex. Two girls having sex with each other, that’s what people call lesbians … or drunk straight chicks, like Ginny Peterson and Kendra Cartwright that one time at Brad Larson’s party, remember?”

  Seriously? How does this guy’s mind function well enough to get an education? He can’t stay focused for longer than a minute.

  “What exactly did she say?” he asks when I refuse to acknowledge his previous statement about Brad Larson’s party. Sure I remember it, everyone was talking about it for weeks. But Ginny and Kendra weren’t in a relationship, they were like he said, just two drunk straight girls. I really don’t think that’s the case with Bree and Skylar, as much as I wish that it were.

  I sigh. “She said that the kiss was a mistake because she’s involved with Skylar and that she loves her.”

  “Ouch.” Derrick takes a sharp breath between clenched teeth. “Love. Especially lady love. I don’t know, Ev, sounds like she’s pretty much off-limits.”

  “But when I asked her if I could kiss her, she said yes.”

  “You asked her if you could kiss her?” he laughs, and I give him a dirty look.

  “Yeah, but that’s not the point, the point is that she wanted me to.”

  “I mean, are you sure? Maybe she was just being polite.”

  I shoot him a condescending look, and he grins. “She wasn’t trying to be polite,” I say. “She said yes, She even kissed back. I swear to God, she was into it. And then she pushed me away and said it was a mistake.”

  Derrick scratches his head for a moment. He actually looks like he’s searching his mind for advice, which is scary in and of itself, but it
is the reason I came to him so I wait patiently for his reply. “I think you need to talk to Kels,” he says finally, looking emotionally drained from the effort it took for him to come up with it.

  I shake my head and attempt to hold back a smile. He’s terrible at serious talk, it’s no wonder I also have a girl best friend. “I already know what she’s going to say. She’s going to tell me to leave it be and not get involved.”

  “So what’s wrong with that advice?”

  “I’m already too involved. I can’t walk away now, Derrick. And even if I could, I don’t want to.”

  He sighs. “Well, if you tell Kels I told you to do this I will kill you, but I think you need to try to be her friend and see if she has the same feelings back. If it turns out that she does, then make your move.”

  I really hate to take Derrick’s advice on relationships but the alternative is to pretend I’ve never met her, and I just can’t do that. Bree Porter is what I want. She’s the first girl I’ve even considered spending time with since Adrienne completely destroyed me. How can I just walk away from that?

  I look down the hall just as Bree and Skylar turn the corner and enter into my view. Skylar has her arm draped over Bree’s shoulder and Bree is looking up at her. They are both laughing and they look happy. It sucks that they look so happy.

  I watch them silently for a few moments, trying to see if there really is something between them. Derrick does the same, however, I’m sure he’s imagining them naked and having sex.

  Bree’s eyes meet mine and she quickly looks away. Skylar runs her hand down Bree’s back and lets it linger on her ass. Bree reaches for Skylar’s hand and casually takes it away from where it’s lingering. As she does this, Skylar looks over in my direction and notices me watching. She kisses Bree on the forehead before whispering something into her ear and walking away.

  I lower my head and Derrick pats me on the back in an attempt to comfort me.

  It doesn’t work.

  Skylar

  I walk into the girl’s bathroom and lock myself in the last stall, putting the toilet lid down and sitting on it. I take in a deep and shaky breath.

  After tonight, Bree and Evan will be more than friends. She will go out with him on ‘dates’ and she will spend her spare time with him. She will fall in love with him and slip out of my life and I will lose her and her mom and dad. I will lose the only piece of normal I’ve ever known in my life. Just the thought of it makes my heart ache uncontrollably.

  I reach into the pocket of my hoodie and pull out my little plastic case of classic razors I’ve been using for cutting since I was twelve. Before that, I had always used whatever I could get my hands on, but the cuts were messy and didn’t heal nicely. With the razor blades, I was able to get a fast, clean, and virtually pain-free cut in seconds that would heal over nicely within a few days. Yesterday’s cuts with the knife and the compass are both still aching and that pain is a constant reminder that my life is spinning out of control once again.

  I hate the reminder.

  Knowing that I only have about five minute before the bell will ring for first period, I, without hesitation, take a razor blade out of the little box. I lift up my shirt and cut three times across my side from my back toward my ribcage. The blood begins to pool in the cuts as I wipe the razor off with a piece of toilet paper and shove it back into the plastic case. I look again at the cuts that are now bleeding down my side, toward the waist of my jeans and instead of wiping up the blood, I watch it slowly flow down my skin. My breathing begins to calm and I realize that my heart isn’t aching like it had been just moments before. I smile inwardly.

  But when I look at the blood again, all I can hear is his panicked voice inside my head telling me to stop, and I cringe at the uninvited memory creeping into my mind. Why won’t he get out of my head already?

  “Stop it! You’re mutilating yourself,” Parker exclaimed when he walked in on me cutting myself one night at The Misfit Mansion. Nearly six months had passed since our introduction to one another and since then, we had spent almost every weekend together in each other’s arms just talking and smoking pot.

  I looked at him with my mouth hanging open in shock. What he had just done was in violation of the Misfit rules and he knew it. We were never to voice an opinion openly about someone’s actions unless the action was directly harming someone else without his or her consent. I covered the cuts I had just made on my inner thigh with my hand and attempted to hide my embarrassment. An embarrassment I shouldn’t have even been feeling. He was very much out of line, and he knew it.

  “I could have you kicked out for that,” I said with narrowed eyes.

  “I don’t care. I can’t watch you do that to yourself anymore and not say anything.”

  “Then don’t watch,” I returned angrily. “I didn’t invite you in.”

  “Skylar—” he began, but I cut him off quickly.

  “No,” I hissed. I got up from the bed and shut the door before continuing. “You don’t have the right to call me by my name in here and make me feel like my persona isn’t ok. This is me. This is who I am and you’ve always known that.”

  “You’re destroying your body.”

  “We are all destroying our bodies in some form here, Parker!”

  He dropped down on the bed and let out an angry sigh.

  I stood in front of him in only my black panties and tank top. The cuts I had made on my inner thigh continued to bleed and roll down my leg.

  Without hesitation, he placed his hand on top of the wound to stop the bleeding and looked up at me sadly.

  I put my hand over his gently. “I’m not your responsibility,” I said to him as I removed his hand from the cut.

  “You are.” He reached for a box of tissue on the bedside table and grabbed a few sheets to hand to me. “Please.”

  I took the tissue and pressed it against the wounds as I took a seat on the bed beside him. “Why do you come here?” I asked with a sigh. “You aren’t even a Misfit, not really, not anymore. You smoke weed with me and that’s pretty much it.”

  He smirked slightly despite the seriousness of our conversation. “Did you ever think that maybe how you know me in here is the complete opposite of how I am out there? Or even how I used to be in here for that matter?”

  “I know about your misfitting days before me, you told me all about the sex rooms with your friends,” I reminded him.

  He shook his head in distaste, not wanting to remember those drug-filled nights. “Yeah well, maybe I’m an angry drug dealer out there who beats up people for fun, did you ever think of that? Maybe me taking care of you now and smoking a little bit of pot is my persona.”

  Was that a possibility? Could the guy I had spent every weekend with for the past six months really be so different out there in the real world? I suddenly realized that I don’t actually know much about Parker’s life at all.

  I turned to look him in the eye. “Is it?” I challenged.

  He shrugged. “What would you say if it is?” He lay down on the bed and placed his hands behind his head as he attempted to look indifferent, but I knew better.

  I thought the question over for a moment. I lay down next to him and turned on my side. “I’d say it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know who you are out there because out there isn’t real. In here, who we are to each other, this is real.”

  He smiled, taking my hand into his. “In here, all I want to do is take care of you.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to know everything…about who I am out there? Because I’ll tell you if you want.”

  Did I want to know? Did it really matter? We weren’t anything to each other out there. Would we ever be?

  “No.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. Who you are in here is who you want to be.”

  He licked his lower lip, looking as though he was trying to decide if he should say something to that but was unsure of how to approach it without setting me off.

 
“What?”

  He hesitated before speaking. “Is who you are in here who you want to be?”

  My eyebrows narrowed. “What are you getting at?” I demanded, feeling the anger rise in me once again.

  “Those guys you sleep with in here,” he said, “they’re using you.”

  “I’m using them.”

  “Fine,” he scoffed.

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Ok.”

  “You aren’t being fair,” I said, raising my voice. I sat up in the bed. “This is who I was when we met. And now you expect me to just change because… because what? Because you’re jealous?”

  “I’m not jealous.”

  “What are you then?”

  He shakes his head. “I just want you to stop sleeping with them. They don’t deserve you. You should be sleeping with someone who deserves you.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you think that you deserve me?”

  “I think I know you, and I care about you! I think that matters.”

  “I never asked you to take care of me! And I certainly didn’t ask you to care about me.”

  He sat up quickly. “Well, I do! God damn it, Skylar! I can’t begin to tell you how much I wish I didn’t care. But I fucking care! I care that you go around fucking all these strangers, giving your body to them like it’s nothing. Like it means nothing!

  “Oh, you should talk!” I interjected.

  “I’m not done!” he countered, jumping to his feet. “I stay there, waiting for you to come out of their rooms, praying that you’re ok, and it drives me crazy! I don’t want to care, but fucking I do!” He slammed his fist on the bedside table and the lamp sitting on top crashed to the floor.

  I bent down to pick up the broken pieces. “Parker,” I began.

  “What?” he grumbled miserably, sitting himself back down beside me.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  He took a shaky breath and reached for my hand, squeezing it tightly. “Please just say you’ll stop.”