Lottie Loves

by Samie Sands

  “Go on, go and see,” I hissed, my heart racing in my throat. “We need to know.”

  Throughout the night, I had gone back and forth in my mind, trying to work out what Marie had going so badly for her, why she would have done it. Maybe it was just an attention thing and it had freaked her parents out, maybe it was all just a misunderstanding, maybe…

  I didn’t know, I really had no clue, it could have been anything in the world. I just didn’t want it to be bad news. I wasn’t sure I could stand it.

  “He…hello?” Mum stammered, winding the telephone cord around her fingers. After that, nothing. I could hear someone talking on the other end of the line, but she wasn’t answering at all. Nausea swirled, a sickness spread, then as I watched her slump to the floor in horror, I knew. I didn’t want to know, my brain was dead against accepting it, but rationally, it was the only answer.

  Marie was dead, she was gone. She’d actually done it.

  If only we’d taken more notice of her, if only me and Joe had tried to be her friend, if only…

  “She’s dead,” Mum howled, dropping the phone to the ground with a loud clatter. “She’s dead, and Helen knows.”

  Huh? Helen knows? I didn’t want to tell Mum that of course Helen knew, that she was likely at the hospital with her husband at the time too, but she was obviously going through some sort of funny moment, so I held her close to me instead while she curled up into the foetal position.

  While she sobbed and I hugged her, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t crying myself, why I felt totally numb. It was as if all the emotion had been stripped from my body, and there was none of me left. I should have been going through the saddest feelings ever, but there was absolutely nothing inside.

  Did that make me a cold hearted bitch? Or had I just shut down while I comforted the person who needed me?

  “Is that a car?” I gasped, what felt like hours later. “Are they home?”

  I dropped my mum like a lead balloon and raced to the window in a heartbeat. Mum had been looked after by me all night and all morning long. Right now, Joe needed me more, he had just lost his sister, his parents would be wrapped up in their own grief, so I would have to put him first. Mum would understand, I felt sure of it.

  As I spotted the familiar maroon colour of the Davies’ car pulled up into the driveway, I practically ripped the door off its hinges to run outside. It didn’t matter that I looked a sodden mess in my pyjamas, I didn’t care that my eyes were red and puffy, and to be honest, I wasn’t much thinking about anyone else’s feelings either, only Joe’s. I just needed to hold him, to make everything all right again.

  Helen stepped from the car first, looked ashen and green all at once. She stared through me, as if I wasn’t even there, before spinning on her heels and stalking inside. Normally I might have taken a moment to be offended by that attitude, but today I knew I was the last thing on her mind. She couldn’t care enough to hate me, or to worry about what I wanted to do with her son, not when her only daughter was gone.

  Gone forever…that concept felt a little hard to grasp.

  Alex soon followed, looking quite frankly like shit too, but I didn’t really focus on him. My eyes were on the back of the car, waiting for Joe to come out.

  Thump, thump…

  My heart was so loud I could hear it clearly in my eardrums.

  Thump, thump…

  Where was he? I needed him, I felt utterly frantic without him. How could I comfort him if he wasn’t there?

  Thump, thump…

  And then the door swung noisily open…

  “Oh my God, Joe,” I gasped as he moved out of the car, fixing his eyes only on the ground beneath his feet. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  I flung my arms around him and squeezed him tight. I was so wrapped up in him, so grateful he was back with me, that it took me a while to notice that his arms were still planted firmly by his side. I stepped back slowly, terror encasing my heart once more. As I looked into his eyes, I already knew everything had changed, before he even said anything. He wasn’t even looking at me like I was human anymore, and I didn’t even have to wait long to find out why.

  “This is all your fault,” he spat at me, irrationality ruling his brain. “All of it.”

  “What…what do you mean?” I stammered, feeling myself stumble, as if my body wanted to escape, as if my feet were aware of something my brain hadn’t quite caught up with just yet.

  “What do I mean?” he sneered, showing me a vile, nasty side of him I’d never seen before. “You, you dragging all the attention away from Marie. If you and your whore mother hadn’t moved in next door, then maybe we could have spent more time with her.”

  “What? How is this my fault? And what did you call my mum?” My head was spinning, I could barely even think anymore. How had this gone from me comforting my fiancé, to him blaming everything on me? I didn’t even know Marie, how could her death be my fault?

  Unless that was the point…

  Maybe I should have known her, she was my next door neighbour, our families were really close. It was sort of terrible that she’d slipped under the radar for all of us. Maybe we all played a role in this tragedy.

  “You don’t know? You honestly don’t know?” He tugged at the ends of his hair, sending me a look as if I meant as much to him as dog dirt. “Well, everyone else does, so you might as well now. Your mum and my dad have been fucking in secret for years. Mum knew about it, at least for a while, so I guess all of us were too self-involved to care about Marie.”

  Why would he say that if it wasn’t true? Could that be possible? I didn’t even know how to begin processing that one. Which was probably the reason that my brain decided to do the most selfish thing it could, the worst possible action in that moment, and it completely shut down, turning the whole world to black…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I stared at Joe intently for a few moments, trying to work out exactly what he wanted me to say about that. I didn’t even know how to process his apology, never mind respond to it. In all my fantasies about us being reunited, I never even considered him saying sorry to me for any of it. It honestly never occurred to me that he would.

  Maybe it should have done, maybe that was where I was going wrong.

  “I’m serious, Lotts,” he continued, lacing his fingers lightly through mine. “I never should have taken any of my grief out on you, that was so wrong. Looking back, I can see that you were the only one who was ever truly there for me.” His eyes meant business, I could see total honesty in his gaze, but that wasn’t enough for me. Not anymore.

  I shook my head sadly, wishing I could think of any words to say, but my mind was frustratingly blank. Like a black abyss with no end. I couldn’t help but think he wanted me to pull him towards me, to embrace him once more, but I couldn’t quite do it. I wasn’t there yet. In that moment I really wasn’t sure I’d ever be there again. Ever since we’d started down this road, something fundamental had shifted within me.

  Instead I kept my eyes fixed upon him as his hands fell away from me and he grabbed his drink to take a big swig. It was clear his mind was twisting and turning, that he was suffering emotionally, but it wasn’t my place to make him feel any better. I used to feel that way, but not anymore. It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that I only had to be responsible for how I was feeling.

  “Look, Lotts.” Joe’s eyes were fixed on his drink. I couldn’t help but wonder if he could sense my gaze upon him, if I was giving him any goosebumps, or making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “I know we could have had something, if it wasn’t for me. I think about it all the time. I remember how great things were when we were engaged. I consider how it’d be now if we were married. Maybe we’d even have a child on the way by now.”

  Why couldn’t he look at me? Why were all of these words falling into his glass? Deep down in the part of me where all my deepest, darkest secrets lay, I’d pictured him saying those words to me—alth
ough maybe not exactly like that—and I always assumed it’d make me feel something. Maybe it was the conversation surrounding it, the issues that I never thought we would get out, but all I felt was hollow and numb.

  I cocked my head to one side, wondering how damaged Joe still was by losing his sister. I knew he wouldn’t get over it entirely, who could? Especially after learning that she was suffering a deep depression for years, questioning her sexuality, her identity, everything about herself. It must have been awful to learn she felt so alone, that she didn’t feel close enough to anyone to share her feelings. It made me feel terrible, and I wasn’t even officially family. The image of Marie sitting in her bedroom alone, writing that soul destroying suicide note before taking more sleeping pills than any human body could handle was terrible.

  But maybe I felt a distance from it that Joe never could.

  Although I blamed myself for my role in the whole thing, I always felt like it hadn’t really happened to someone I knew. Maybe that was cold and callous, but I couldn’t help the way my young, naïve mind dealt with things. It was just my coping mechanism.

  Maybe Joe’s way of coping was to pile everything on the shoulders of someone else, to deflect the blame he felt inside. Maybe that was why he still seemed to be stuck in a rut, why he couldn’t move on. From what he’d told me about his life, it didn’t seem like he’d made any real effort to move on. Maybe it was because he’d never really gone back and dealt with things.

  I felt bad for him, deep inside I felt pity, yet still I couldn’t speak.

  “Say something, Lotts, I’m dying here,” he whined, reminding me I’d been silent for far too long. “I’m pouring out my heart here and you’re just looking at me.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Oh God, why was my tone so cold? Couldn’t I just be kind, put everything behind me and just be nice? “What can I say?”

  “I don’t know.” He bit down on his lip and looked up at me, giving me the sort of stare that would have had my heart melting way back when. “Tell me what we are. Tell me what we could be? I mean, do you ever think we could be what we were?”

  “Friends?” I shrugged questioningly. “A couple? Engaged? Or maybe what came after…?” If we were really going to talk about it, then we had to cover it all. Even the real ugly bits that we probably both wanted to pretend never happened. I could see now that it wasn’t just Joe that was still affected by what had happened, I still had internal bruises too.

  “You want me to say it aloud?” He shrugged, smiling with one side of his mouth. “Fine, I want us to be together. I feel like we’ve gone off course, and I want to get us back to where we used to be. We took a detour and now I want us to get back on the right path. I want us to have all those things we used to talk about.” Was that even possible anymore? Could we go back to that? It certainly wouldn’t be as simple as he seemed to be suggesting, there was a lot to deal with. “I know that might not be easy for you.” Oh, maybe he did get it after all. “I’m sure what Danny has done to you will bother you for a bit, but there has to be a way we can make it work, right?” Nope, maybe not. Maybe he was just going to be pig-headed about the whole thing.

  My eyes widened in shock. I couldn’t actually believe he’d said those things to me. He’d brought Danny into this as if what he’d done was way worse. I didn’t even know the truth about Danny yet, which made the anger bubble even more intensely in my stomach. Danny was mine, any issues we had were ours, Joe had absolutely no right to bring them up now.

  My teeth instantly gritted together and my fists balled up by my sides, as if my body was trying to keep my rage inside. There was something about Joe that always made me feel that way, I hadn’t ever felt like I could be totally honest with him. At least with Danny I could express my emotions, even the ones he didn’t like, even if it made absolutely no difference.

  Nope, I couldn’t do it anymore. Too much had happened, too much had changed in my life. In me too. I couldn’t just sit here like a pressure cooker, bubbling over, waiting to explode. I needed to say it all now, as calmly as I could muster to make at least some of it sink in.

  “Joe, whatever you think about Danny isn’t my business. You don’t know him, you don’t know our relationship, and to be quite frank, you don’t know me anymore.” He looked really stunned by my words, but that wasn’t going to be enough to stop me. “Even if I wasn’t with Danny, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d be with you. I’ve grown up over the last few years, and I assume that you have too. We can’t just jump back into something we had when we were teenagers, expecting it to be exactly the same. That would be the most stupid thing ever.” I threw my hands up in the air, all of the potential issues now coming back to me. “How do you think our families would react if they knew? Your mum didn’t like us before, what makes you think she’ll be okay now? Her and your dad might have decided to give it a go at the time, but you already admitted that things are falling apart now. It’ll absolutely kill her if you tell her that you’re with me.”

  “So?” His eyes flashed amber at my words. “So what? I’m not living my life for anyone else, I’m living my life for me. Maybe you should do the same too.” I could see him gripping so tightly to the table that his knuckles were turning white under the pressure of it all. I wondered if the rest of the people in the pub could sense the tension swirling around our table, but I didn’t dare look. If they were staring, I’d have to just let them keep on at it. “So what if our parents don’t like it? Do you think they were ever thinking about us? Your mum and my dad, at it, not caring about the hurricane of destruction they were leaving behind. My mum, knowing about it and letting it carry on, she wasn’t thinking about anyone else either. They were all selfish…”

  “What, so you want to be too?” What the hell was going on here? Why was Joe so mad? He’d turned this into some crazy argument, and I wasn’t even sure why. He knew he couldn’t win, so why was he continuing? It seemed like a massive waste of breath to me. “You want to act like them and be selfish? Really?” I almost said that it wasn’t like him, but I bit down on my tongue at the last moment. Actually, looking back, he was always pretty selfish.

  “I don’t know,” he retorted angrily, trembling under the emotion of it all. “I just…I don’t know.”

  Then I watched in horror as a fat, wet tear cascaded down his cheek, falling onto his lip. I couldn’t recall a time when I’d ever seen Joe cry, and the sight of it left me a little breathless. His entire face crumbled, and the angry façade simply fell away. It was as if he’d been transformed back into a little boy, one who had lost his way in the world and needed someone to guide him.

  I had to gulp down my own emotions, I needed to control the years of bottled up frustration for now because my friend needed me. All the bullshit that had happened between us didn’t matter as much as that. I could be a big enough person to recognise that he had been very important to me for a long time, and because of that I could swallow my pride and move around to hug him once more.

  As I struggled out from my seat, I finally worked up the courage to look about and instantly regretted it. I thought we’d been talking quite quietly to one another, that we’d been keeping things just between us, but it seemed that we’d managed to attract attention regardless.

  I wrapped my arms around Joe from behind, my heart thundered noisily in my chest, causing a buzzing sensation in my ears. This was utterly insane, this whole evening had been a surprise, and I didn’t know how I felt anymore. It certainly wasn’t how I thought I would, which left me with only one question.

  What did I do next?

  It would have been easy to think that Joe would have gone back to the person he was before he lost Marie, but it would be naïve to forget the person he became afterwards. That version of him was still there, and I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t come out. Would I ever be willing to go through all of that again?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After that day, absolutely everything changed. It was
as if Marie was the one thing we all revolved around and now that she was gone, everything totally shifted. I missed her, much more than I ever thought I would. Her presence left a massive, gaping hole in my life, and I didn’t think anything could fill it. She might not have been a big part of my life when she was here, but after her death she became truly woven into my existence.

  But what I was going through was nothing compared to Joe. He was absolutely torn apart, and I became an unfortunate casualty of that. I guess I assumed that once the dust settled, Joe would totally get over his crazy blame of me, but that never quite seemed to happen. If anything, that was an idea he’d settled on, and nothing could shake it.

  “Bitch,” he’d mutter at me under his breath as he passed me in the hallways at school. Or sometimes it was ‘slut,’ but I got the distinct impression that was more about Mum than me. That was still a huge issue, one I had no idea how to deal with.

  The fact that my mum and his dad had been carrying on under everyone’s noses for all those years was utterly shocking. How did we not see it happening? How were we all so blind? And how could Mum have kept that from me? I thought she trusted me, I assumed we had a close relationship…well, ish. I mean, sure, I didn’t tell her anything about me, but wasn’t that my right as a teenager? Wasn’t I supposed to be the secretive one?

  I hadn’t spoken to her about it, I hadn’t yet confronted her with what I knew. I just couldn’t work out how to even begin that conversation. She probably assumed my mood was down to grief, which was fine by me. I couldn’t look at her at the moment anyway. I didn’t want to be forced into a conversation I was nowhere near ready for.

  I took the abuse from Joe, I didn’t even respond to it because I assumed he needed a punching bag, someone to take his stress out on. Even when he took things up a notch and other people were brought into the mix, I didn’t react. I squeezed my eyes shut, blocked the tears out, and convinced myself it’d all be worth it. I naïvely assumed that one day he’d just come around, that he’d revert back to the person he once was, and everything would return back to normal. I took it, thinking he’d respect me more at the end. Also I guess I felt like any attention from him was better than none.