HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1)

by Lexie Ray

  Each of my sketches had meant to calm me, but this one reflected the true nature of the situation. As placid as I could remain on the surface, there were many, many things going on beneath.

  It was awfully hard to “Blue as the sea,” as the page promised, if my name wasn’t even Blue.

  Chapter Two

  I only became Blue when I first started working at Mama’s nightclub. Before that, I was Sandra Webber, Midwestern girl wonder.

  Of course, no one ever really called me that, either.

  Kids in high school loved to call me “Webbed Feet” thanks to how far out into the Tennessee hills my family hailed from. To them, living in rural areas automatically denoted incest.

  Before any of my classmates could wrap their minds around the ideas of incest, though, I was simply “Weirdo.” I liked to dress myself in strangeness, brightness and nonconformity more important to me than whether pieces actually looked good together. I had no problem donning teal leggings beneath a Tennessee Titans jersey so big on me that it hung off my shoulder, and finishing off the look with a long, faux-pearl necklace and a pair of pumps pilfered from my mother’s closet. Other looks included wearing sneakers with formal dresses, elaborate costume jewelry with a sweat suit, or showing up in my father’s three-piece suit, complete with tie and cufflinks, that he only wore to weddings and funerals.

  Later in my high school career, I went to a party just for the hell of it. That was the reason I did most everything I did—just for the hell of it. I collected experiences like most everyone else collected baseball cards or bottle caps. I hadn’t been invited to the party, of course. I didn’t run in the right circle of friends to be actually invited to parties. But everyone had been talking about it and it was a small town. I knew when to show up and at what time.

  During that party, which had featured pilfered beer and liquor bottles, I’d gotten drunk for the first time and kissed several people, including one of the school’s star basketball players. It didn’t bother me that she was a girl, and she seemed to be into it at the time, as well.

  But the next day at school, she said I’d forced myself on her. “Dyke” was scrawled across my locker in marker. And that was what kids called me until we all graduated. Dyke. It was just a word. I absorbed it and went on with life. What else was there to do? I didn’t have any allies among the school administration. I had to deal with it myself.

  My parents were always either passed out cold or already at work at one of the many jobs they held onto tenuously during my childhood.

  Being the eldest out of five, I found myself responsible for my younger siblings even when I didn’t have the time. I juggled bowls of cereal and dirty diapers, the thought of finishing my own homework laughable when I was instead tasked with bedtime stories and showers.

  The youngest of us, the one still in diapers, I took to high school with me. The school had a day care on the campus for teen mothers, and I never heard the end of it for taking that sweet baby there. My family couldn’t afford proper care, and I didn’t trust any of the neighbors in our trailer park to watch my own flesh and blood.

  Knowing full well that it was my sister I was taking to day care every day, kids still hollered whether I knew the father of my latest mistake or why didn’t I simply punch myself in the stomach after I’d gotten knocked up by my whoring around. Others expressed surprise that I’d hooked up with a guy at all, given my dyke status.

  I let the words slide off of me like water from a duck’s back. None of these people mattered. What mattered that I was good to my younger brothers and sisters—and that the baby was left in the best care available.

  Without parental guidance, I was left to my own devices—fending for myself and my siblings while doling out discipline according to whatever morals and values I considered most worthy. Being kind to one another was a given. Helping around the house was another.

  I intercepted most correspondence between the school and my parents, reading and then getting rid of them.

  “We’re happy that Sandra is expressing her different identities at school,” read one, penned in hand by the high school counselor. “I only wonder if it might be more prudent to talk to her about the importance of fitting in at a time when teens are identifying themselves more within their circle of friends than outside it.”

  My mouth had quirked up at that letter, more so when it was crumbled in the garbage. I didn’t have a circle of friends. I didn’t even have one friend. And I didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought about my clothing. It was for my amusement and my amusement alone.

  Going in costume was the only reason I could get myself to go at all.

  I excelled in art classes but nearly flunked everything else. The art teacher, who exhorted us to call her Miranda, and not Ms. St. John, became something of a second mother to me—or more like a real one. She took me under her wing from the first day of classes when I finished a still life that should’ve taken all period in just ten minutes and vastly better than any of my peers.

  “You have a gift, Sandra,” she told me, clutching at one of my charcoal drawings I’d done of a little sibling. “You’re the most talented student I’ve ever come across in my entire career.”

  Never mind that her career was in its first year at my high school. Miranda knew how to make a student feel special—me, in particular, who had never felt special in my whole life. Under Miranda’s tutelage, I won a number of art awards, stashing the ribbons and plastic trophies in the bottom of my closet. They might make me feel good about myself, but I knew that they weren’t putting food on the table for my brothers and sisters, or making my parents be actual parents.

  When I expressed this view to Miranda, after handing her a painting I’d only half-heartedly completed, she shook her head vehemently.

  “You’re wrong,” she said, her voice breaking with sincerity. “Art can take you many places. You’re so good at it, Sandra, and you’ve hardly had any training. It comes naturally to you. Maybe you’ll find yourself displaying your artwork at a gallery someday. Or maybe you’ll be a teacher, as well.”

  It was Miranda who helped me develop a portfolio of works I’d done throughout high school and send it around to several colleges. It was Miranda who had waited just as breathlessly as I did for a response. And it was Miranda with whom I celebrated when the scholarship offers started coming in.

  “This is what your talent is doing for you,” she said, giving me back the letter I’d shown her. “You’re going to get to go to art school for pennies. You’ll get the training you need to go to the next level. You can do whatever you want, Sandra. The world is your oyster.”

  For a while, I believed her. It was easier than ever absorbing the insults of my peers when I carried around my scholarship offers in my satchel. They were like bulletproof vests. Every time someone sneered a nasty name at me, I remembered that I was going to go to art school. The letters in my satchel proved that.

  I was talented, just like Miranda said. I was going places.

  “Art school?” my mother said, her voice bleary with alcohol and exhaustion, thrusting the letter I’d shown her back at me without so much as glancing at it. “What are you going to do at art school?”

  She balanced a smoking ashtray on her lap and was fending off my baby sister with one of her hands. The baby cried to be picked up, so I did it, jiggling her on my hip.

  “I’m going to art school to make something of myself,” I said proudly, parroting everything that Miranda had been telling me for the past four years. “I’ll be able to do whatever I want afterward. I’m talented.”

  “I don’t know what planet you think you live on,” my mother said, “but you’re not going to art school. Not by a long shot. It’s a waste of time and money.”

  “I got scholarships,” I protested, waving the paper in her face. “People want me to go to their schools. I could be an artist. Or an art teacher. Or lots of different things. This is my chance.”

  “I don’t know who
’s been filling your head with these lies,” my mother said. “Nobody goes to school to become an artist. And nobody makes a living doing art. All of those paintings that sell for thousands of dollars? They’re by dead guys. You’ll be poor your whole life.”

  “We have been poor our whole lives,” I said, disbelieving. “This is an opportunity to actually do something about it.”

  “I don’t think you’re getting it,” my mother said, blowing her cigarette smoke angrily in my direction. I turned to the side, trying to shield the baby from the fumes. “You’re never going to be anything. You’re a failure. They’re only letting you graduate because they don’t want to deal with you another year.”

  I scowled, realizing one of my other teachers or perhaps a school administrator had gotten a hold of my parents somehow to tell them about my otherwise dismal grades. Maybe by phone. Had they really said they were only passing me out of pity?

  “I’m gifted in art,” I said loftily. “The art teacher at school says so. And these scholarship offers are proof of it. All I have to pay is room and board—”

  “All you have to pay,” my mother huffed. “All we have to pay, you mean. That’s how they get you, girl. They say you’re going to get something for free, but then you have to pay for something else after all.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said, feeling more hopeless by the minute. Why weren’t my bulletproof scholarship letters protecting me from my mother’s barbs? Were they losing their power? “I can take out student loans. I can apply for additional aid. I can work while I’m up there at school.”

  “Up where at school?” she asked, peering at me for the first time. She flicked some ash in the ceramic dish on her knee and sucked furiously on the cigarette.

  “In New York City,” I said, the words sounding ludicrous to even me. Why did Miranda tell me I could do this? I couldn’t. I just wasn’t good enough. Maybe if I had different parents, a different family, a different life.

  My mother laughing at me was much more painful than all the combined venom of the kids who went to my school.

  “Let me get this straight,” my mother said, hooting and wiping her eyes, the cigarette smoke wafting around her like foul incense. “You, Sandra Webber, who is barely going to finish high school, think you can go to college in New York City? They’ll eat you alive up there, you little fool.”

  Her laughter followed me as I fled to my room, slamming the door behind me. The baby touched the tears running down my face wonderingly. I took such great care to never let my siblings see me upset that she was fascinated by the salt water leaking from my eyes. I set her up with some broken crayons and paper Miranda had let me spirit away from the art room before burying my face in my pillow.

  I couldn’t understand why my mother would stomp on my dreams like that. I needed her to sign some forms for me, knowing that I had no hope of actually having her help me fill them out.

  Why didn’t she just let me go to New York for college, whether I failed or succeeded? I knew it had nothing to do with any attempt at parenting.

  When my father arrived home, later that night, my mother was already blitzed. I’d made sure all of my siblings were in my room, tucked into my bed, clean and fed. I didn’t trust either of my parents around them.

  I cracked the door so I could listen in on my parents’ conversation. It was how I could try to keep a couple steps in front of them, or arrange my schedule to care for my siblings if they were going to be absent.

  “Can you believe it?” my mother said, her words slurring. “She actually thought she was going to go to college—art school, of all things—in New York City?”

  “Who put that fool thought in her empty head?” my father said, his voice hardly more than a growl as I heard the faucet turn on. I imagined him washing the oil and dirt from his hands after working at an automotive shop all day.

  “Probably some bleeding heart teacher,” my mother said. “Good for nothing.”

  “Still, getting her out of here would be one less mouth to feed,” my father speculated. “We’re up to our necks in brats.”

  “True,” my mother said. “Then again, having her here would get us more money.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “We make her get a job, get her to pay rent,” my mother said. “We can still claim her as a dependent.”

  My father laughed. “Besides that sweet ass of yours, this is why I married you,” he said. “You have a good head on your shoulders.”

  The wet sounds of their kissing, and a moan from my mother, made me close the door in disgust. So that was it. My mother was hoping to get money out of me in exchange for me not going to New York. Well. I’d show her. I’d forge her signatures, get Miranda to help me with the forms, and go have my life in New York. I would be successful, just to spite my mother.

  The sounds of passion increased from outside, permeating into my room, and the baby stirred. She was a light sleeper, like me, and I didn’t want her to wake up. I turned my simple clock radio up a little louder. Classical music flooded the air, drowning out my parents in a symphony of violins and flutes.

  I looked down at my siblings, their limbs akimbo, mouths open in slumber. What was I thinking?

  I couldn’t leave them here, alone with my parents. My brothers and sisters needed me. I couldn’t go to New York, even with all the proper forms and signatures. I didn’t want to think about the future they’d have without me, most of all because there wouldn’t be one. I was the only one who cared for them. The next youngest sibling was only nine years old. The responsibility couldn’t fall to her.

  I knew what I had to do. Reaching in to my satchel, I tore up the offers from the colleges. I added the shreds of the application to the college in New York to the pile. I couldn’t leave my brothers and sisters to fend for themselves. They needed me. I climbed onto the foot of the bed, counting four little pairs of feet, as I did every night, over and over again to help me get to sleep.

  Miranda hounded me as the deadline came and went to turn the application in, but I always had some excuse, some lie that I was working on it or that my mother was looking something over or getting such-and-such document. Finally, there was nothing to do but tell her the truth.

  “I’m not going to college,” I said bluntly, crossing my arms.

  “Why?” she asked, blatantly shocked. “This is an opportunity you can’t let pass you by, Sandra.”

  There were so many things I could’ve answered. Because I’m not good enough. Because my parents are assholes. Because I’m afraid. Because they won’t help me.

  Instead, I answered with the truest thing I could say, the thing that had to get Miranda off my back.

  “Because I can’t leave my brothers and sisters alone,” I said. “My parents aren’t good parents. My siblings need me. They wouldn’t get fed. They’d start slipping in their classes. No one would be at the trailer to watch them.”

  I could see Miranda’s face caving in even as she made a concerted effort to stay calm and supportive. I knew that I was her hope—that even such a poor student as I was could be saved through her beloved art. I hated disappointing her, but I didn’t know what else I could do. My brothers and sisters really did need me. My parents weren’t fit to raise them. They wouldn’t even try.

  “You’re a good girl, Sandra,” Miranda said finally. “I know that you think you have to stay with your siblings to take care of them, but I hope that you someday realize that you need to take care of yourself, too.”

  And that was it, the end of my relationship with Miranda. I graduated, walking across the stage alone, not a soul there to cheer me on. Summer came and left, and school started up again. I saw my siblings off, my mother berated me about getting a job so I could “help this family for once,” and I went on existing, a shell of myself. I couldn’t even bring myself to sketch, thinking about a room full of my potential classmates in New York, gleaning knowledge that I would never be able to obtain.

  “I’m goin
g to issue you an ultimatum, girl,” my mother said one day after I’d been moping on the couch, watching my siblings. “You get a job or you leave. You’ve been a weight on this family for too long.”

  Her statement made my blood boil.

  “I was going to go to art school,” I said as calmly as I could for the benefit of my brothers and sisters. “Then, I would’ve made this family proud.”

  My mother scoffed. “You were never going to art school,” she said. “That ship has sailed.”

  It had sailed because my mother and father had refused to support me in it. It had sailed because my brothers and sisters had needed me. If I was being perfectly honest with myself, it had sailed because I had let it, afraid that New York City would swallow a simple Tennessee girl like me whole. I couldn’t drag ass back home a failure when everyone had been so certain of it happening.

  “Who’s going to watch the kids if I get a job?” I asked as my mother mixed herself a white Russian. I knew her drinks by sight, smell, and the time of day she had them.

  She took a sip of the cocktail and shuddered. “Miki will do it,” she said, waving her hand toward my nine-year-old sister, who was patiently sharing a doll with the baby. The boys were back in my room, jumping on the bed, from the sound of it. Miki looked up at me, a question in her eyes.

  “Miki’s too young,” I said, forcing my voice to exude patience. “I have to be here with them—or you do.”

  “I’m busy,” my mother said automatically.

  I had to rub my eyes in order not to roll them at her. God forbid anyone should remind her of her duty to her offspring.

  “Here’s an idea,” she said, the ice tinkling in her glass. “Get a night job. The kids’ll be asleep.”

  “Kids wake up,” I reminded her. “Are you guys going to be here with them? Things happen at night. There could be a fire, or a break-in.”