We stopped when he reached my car. I unlocked it, and he opened the passenger door, dumping my small library onto the seat.
“Thanks for carrying my books,” I said.
He cocked his head to the side, “Don’t sweat it.”
I turned to open the door, but he beat me to it, and brushed his hand over my knuckles, sending a jolt of electricity through my entire body. In that moment, it dawned, if my attraction to him stretched any further, I would be committing myself to a solitary asylum.
“I met one of your friends today. It was pretty weird.” I commented.
“What makes you think he was my friend?” He asked, looking bored. Even being bland worked for this guy.
“He said he was.”
“Hmm,” he frowned, placing both hands on either side of me and completely trapping me.
“Yeah, he was asking questions about you and I. Stuff like how long I’ve known you. He said his name was Ron.” I rambled on, unnerved by his close proximity. Even more by the way I wasn’t as claustrophobic as I got whenever people did that around me.
Abruptly, the expression on his face turned angry and his knuckles flexed beside me.
“What?” I asked him.
He narrowed his eyes into space and said, “Ronald is not my friend, stay away from him.”
“Why?” I asked, “What did he do? I mean, he didn’t seem like a bad person or anything.”
He didn’t respond, leaving me with even more questions than before. He walked away and I continued to stare after him, wondering what it was about this Ron guy that had sent him from zero to a hundred in a nanosecond.
Charlie
Two weeks after my first breakfast ‘meeting’ with Xander, I sat at a table in Helen’s Breakfast Bar eat devouring one of their signature chocolate muffins. I’d always been a vanilla kind of person, so I guess this town was changing me. My phone buzzed, and I flipped it to see who was daring enough to disturb my breakfast at Helen’s. Xander.
“Where are you?”
I smiled, then waited a beat before responding. “Well, hello to you too.”
X: Miss me?
C: No, been busy...:)
X: Hmm, what’s your approval when every other girl in town is totally hooked on me?
I laughed, before it dawned on me that I was slowly becoming one of those girls.
X: You wanna have lunch with me tomorrow? To discuss our presentation, of course.
C: Nope. I’m unavailable...we’ll discuss it at school, yeah?
X: You got a date?
I could picture him smirking, baiting me to lie, just so he could ask me who I was going out with. And since I didn’t have friends here, I wouldn’t win this one. So I went with the one person I knew he didn’t even talk to.
C: Umm, yeah. Ezra from Lit.
X: Really?
C: Yes, really.
What did he think? That a guy like Ezra wouldn’t be interested in me?
X: Hmm. Ezra’s gay...and he’s dating Luca.
I choked on my milkshake, feeling like I could yank my hair out.
C: So? He said Luca is just a friend.
X: So, you’re funny. And I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow, at 10am.
I looked up from my phone to see a girl from school staring at me. She grinned impishly at my surprise. She was in her second year, like me. And I think she was studying Media or something.
“Hey,” she said, cocking her hear to the side. A lock of auburn hair strayed into her green eyes and she tucked it away irritably.
“Hi.”
“I’m Caitlyn, but everybody calls me Cat.” She smiled, her hand outstretched.
“Nice to meet you, I’m-”
“Charlie Cane, I know” she interjected. She must’ve sensed my wariness because she added, “You have Legal Studies with my cousin Lea, so I’ve seen you around.”
I nodded, not really knowing what to say to that. I basically suck at first impressions. “Okay.”
She laughed, “Awkward, I know. But I saw you watching The Vampire Diaries on your laptop yesterday, so I thought we should hang out.”
I sat back and cocked an eyebrow, “Because I’m so lonely that I watch Vampire Diaries during free period?”
She rolled her eyes, “No, silly. I’d give half an arm for one Salvatore brother.”
I gushed inwardly, it was good to meet another fangirl.
“I’m on the last season, have you watched it?” I asked.
She scooted her chair closer and ordered a strawberry milkshake. I officially had a friend.
Xander
The loudest noise in the world isn’t a bomb, and neither is it something crashing from the sky and onto the ground below. The loudest noise in the world...sounds loud only because it’s that way in your head.
In my head, the loudest noise in the world was the beeping of machines in a dimly lit room. Make that the necessary beeping of machines. This is a sound I can tolerate for the rest of my life, because it held me together. It’s the only reason I could stand this crippling guilt and the other reason I drove back home that night after dropping Charlie off. That night, I felt as if my life was incomplete in silence. I needed this sound, even when it rang in my head at full volume. I needed it to know that my little brother was still hanging in there and giving death the fight of his life.
It was now two hours past visiting hour, but the nurse in charge knew that I would be here until morning. In different circumstances, it would have been humorous that I got to stay with my little brother for two nights every week in exchange for paying her monthly magazine subscriptions. This had been my idea, but I knew she still felt bad about getting something in return for me seeing Cole in the same state every day. She didn’t know what she was giving me; being close to Cole and whispering dreams and pictures of a perfect world into his ear to keep him aware that he had something to come back to was a gift.
I had long since stopped fearing what my parents would do if they found out that I didn’t sleep in my own bed sometimes. They never looked for me, and whenever I was around, dad was either locked away in his man cave or at work. Mom had recently rediscovered her penchant for shopping and she travelled a lot with her new events management business. I didn’t mind all this, because it gave me time. Time that Cole used to beg me to spend with him.
My parents’ method of coping was to forget, to chase amnesia until for a minute, they forgot that their nine year old son was comatose. Until their memories erased that night when they’d had one of their major fights and had both walked out, leaving Cole defenceless against an intruding gunman. I preferred to remember. To remember that I had been out partying with my friends while my little brother screamed my name, crying for me to come to his rescue like I had always promised. I chose to remember that I had bailed on him the one time he needed me the most, all because I had been tipsy after a killer cocktail. It was why I didn’t drink anymore, why I didn’t have close friends and why I didn’t party. Ultimately, all three had kept me away from home when Cole urgently needed me to be there with him.
The one time I had asked her, mom had said that her and dad’s coping mechanisms kept them alive and fulfilled on the inside. I guess mine were to keep me empty and lifeless. They chose redemption, I chose penance.
Charlie
Cat and Lea sat across from me on one of the benches in the quad, grilling me about my ‘relationship’ with Xander. I had almost forgotten what it was like to have best friends, because when I left Chadwick, all the people I had expected to keep in touch with for my whole life had been the first to ignore my attempts at communication.
“I’d totally hit that,” Lea winked playfully at me, earning herself a scowl. She laughed, the multiple piercings in her ears glinting in the sunlight.
At first glance, it was hard to believe that she and Cat were related. Cat was bubbly and sweet, with long, curly dark hair while Lea’s was cut short, almost to her scalp. She also had a Ducati motorcycle that she seemed to l
ove more than anything (she even called her Quinn). But once you noticed the shapes of their faces and their hazel eyes, it was so easy to think they were siblings.
“Umm, can I ask you two something?” I said, once they’d stopped teasing me.
They both looked serious, “Yeah, sure.” Lea answered.
“You guys know a guy named Ron?” I kept my eyes on both of them, ready for their first reactions.
Lea snorted, “Who doesn’t know Ron?”
Cat elbowed her, her eyes shooting warnings. She turned to me and replied, “He and Alex used to be friends, like since grade school.”
This came as no surprise, only friends could have unresolved issues that still affected both of them. “Well, what made them stop being friends?”
They scanned the space around us, as if whatever they wanted to say wasn’t meant for public consumption.
Cat spoke first. “Has Alex uhh...” She fiddled with the sleeve of her denim jacket, “Has he told you about Cole?”
No. He hadn’t, and we’d been hanging out at school a lot lately. But I didn’t know what he did outside of school. Was Cole short for Nicole? Or was he involved with a guy named Cole. He hadn’t given me any reason to think that he was gay, though. Even with all these thoughts running around in my head, I couldn’t voice them, at the risk of sounding naive or ignorant.
“No, who’s Cole?” I frowned.
“Alex’s little brother.” Lea informed. “He was shot in their house last year-”
She suddenly stopped talking and started humming while staring at something behind me. I turned to see several members of the basketball team at the next table, which paused our conversation.
We sat in silence after this, me wondering whether this revelation had anything to do with Xander wanting to kill himself over the summer.
I excused myself half an hour later to go to the hospital. They walked me to my car, chatting and laughing, the whole conversation about Xander and Ron forgotten.
I was suddenly in the mood for The Little Prince, so I decided that that would be today’s story. Lunchtime traffic gave me time to think about what had happened to Cole. Had he been killed in the shooting? Or maybe he’d recovered and was back to living life like a normal kid. I hoped it was the latter.
Xander
He lay sound asleep in the hospital bed, like a tired little prince...a little lost angel. My little brother, Cole. The doctor had done his midday rounds, and he’d told me that there was progress and his vitals were significantly improving. But now, seeing him the same way I’d seen him for months, I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out any change in his condition.
I’ve always thought that it’s better to expect the worst, because when the hovering feeling of inevitable disappointment eventually descends, at least you’ve thickened your skin. For my whole life, this was just a theoretic belief, but what happened to Cole forced me to put it into practice.
The truth is, waiting hurts.
“Dude,” I ran my fingers along the ridges of his knuckles, “You know, if you don’t get up soon, I’ll get bored every time I come here and one day, you’ll wake up and see your finger nails painted orange. The most hideous shade, at that.” I smiled at the memory of a seven year old Cole that came to me. He once refused to sleep in his room after arriving home from school to find mom painting his room orange. Her response was that it was coral. I winced when I remembered...back then, we played pranks and laughed as a family. Since then, we hadn’t had a single peaceful meal without blame, tension and accusations hanging over us like a steel cross.
Doubt reared its ugly head in my brain. What would we become if Cole died?
I abruptly stood up to uproot that seed from my mind, knocking the bedside chair backwards. Cole would make it. He had to. The last time they had threatened to switch off the machines, I’d almost ended my own life. If he died, guilt will bury me alive.
My thoughts almost sent me spiralling into an anxiety attack, the same sickening feeling that resurfaced every single time I walked into our empty house. It always took me back to the last year’s scene: sneakers dumped on the staircase leading upstairs, the dismantled robot toy that lay abandoned on the carpet a few meters from where I stood...and the blood slowly flowing from the side of the room to the centre, where my eyes stared frozen, afraid, disbelieving.
When I had forced my feet to move further in, his small hand had been shaking, his fingers curling into his palm. I ran to kneel beside him, screaming his name. Asking him to tell me what had happened. Later, I noticed that my face was smeared with tears, but I didn’t know which part of the scene had set them free.
I held him in my arms, shocked to the point of sobriety. I fumbled for my phone, frustrated when I remembered that I had soaked it in the pool at Ron’s.
“Hold on, little man.” I shook him with one hand while the other dialled 911on the telephone frantically. “Help is on the way, okay?”
His eyes slowly opened, revealing the way they had become bloodshot, “X,” he hiccupped, tears trickling to the sides of his face.
By then, I was openly crying, “Yeah, I’m here. Everything’s gonna be okay.” God, I hoped it would be.
“X, it was a b-burglar...” he hiccupped again, the action reverberating over his whole frame. “H-he got in, you...mom...dad. N-no one...was here.”
If asked to pinpoint, I’d confess that that was the exact moment that my guilt took over my life. I hadn’t been there, neither had mom nor dad. I’d left him defenceless. Terrified. Alone. I had done this to him.
“Cole,” I sobbed, “I’m so sorry...so, so sorry.” I rocked him in my arms while his features contorted in agony.
“X, it hurts...hurts so bad.” He cried softly, and I wished it had been me that the asshole attacked. I couldn’t watch my brother suffer another second.
“They’re gonna take you to the hospital, buddy.” I told him, cursing them for not being here yet.
“Am I gonna die?”
“No. No you’re not.” I said, forcing control back into my voice. “You better not. I need you, we all do. I love you, Cole.”
When the wailings of the sirens sounded, his eyes fluttered shut. And they have been that way ever since. That was months ago.
The recollection had me bolting towards the door, needing some air. It was always so fresh, and real. I could smell the room and feel his warmth when he had lain on the cold tiles. The memory was suffocating, and I felt as if I’d been drowning in the fathomless depths of my mind, the surface too far above to break through.
I opened the door and found myself face to face with her. Charlie.
***
She swore, making me realize that I’d frightened her with my sudden appearance. Her eyes studied my face, not questioningly, but in the same way that she had looked at me the night I told her that I had planned on driving myself over a cliff.
Concern. Curiosity. Apprehension that unmanned me to my very core.
“What are you doing here,” I asked, breaking the silence between us.
She took a lingering glance behind me, and I obstructed her view by standing directly in front of her and shutting the door.
“Hey,” I snapped my fingers, jolting her to attention.
“Umm, nothing,” she said, looking flustered. “I was on my way upstairs.”
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously, hoping for her sake that she wasn’t stalking me. “What? The elevator not working?”
“It’s jammed,” she said, her brows knitting. “Besides, I don’t need to explain myself to you.”
I inclined my head, beckoning her to follow me down the hallway.
“Why are you here?” she asked, though from the look in her eyes, she probably knew why. Whitfield County was too small a place to maintain privacy.
“What’s it to you?” I stalled.
She looked affronted, but instead of saying something, she sighed, as if what I had to say wasn’t that important anyway.
“I ha
ve to go,” she said, checking her wristwatch.
“Wait,” I heard myself say. Why did I even say that? The best thing would be for her to remain oblivious to my screwed up life. If she knew how deep my fears ran, she would bolt out the door and never look back. True, I did like her. But I couldn’t give her normal dating milestones a normal guy would. I couldn’t take her to dates without setting crazy exes on her trail, or introduce her to my parents without them scaring her off. I couldn’t give her everything she deserved. Yet, I wanted her to stay so badly, I couldn’t even rationalize my logic.
“Yeah?” she turned, her kinky curls bouncing atop her head.
“I was just visiting someone,” I found myself explaining to her. At this moment, I chose to ignore the fact that I had dumped my last girlfriend over her incessant questions about where I spent most of my time and then stalking me to the hospital and confronting me about it in the lobby. It unnerved me that although Charlie hadn’t pressed, I had simply told her. Not in detail, but still...I’d almost opened the window to a discussion about my little brother.
“Oh, are they okay?” she asked tentatively. I closed the gap between up until we stood just a few feet apart. I fisted my hands at the gnawing urge to reach out and touch her face. She was making me feel things I couldn’t even figure out yet.
“Fine,” I said, hoping to divulge as little as possible. This wasn’t a subject I could broach anyhow. Cole was sacred territory. And pretty as she was, I didn’t trust Charlie yet. “No change, really.”
She looked up at me through her lashes before glancing sideways helplessly, “Well, I hope it works out well for you.”
“Charlie,” I said, before she could leave.
“Yes?”
“You visiting anyone here?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t opening up any wounds.
“A few friends,” was her vague response.
“You want to have lunch after you’re done?”
She cocked her head, considering the option and I mentally chastised myself for not thinking this through before ambushing her with a lunch date. Soon after that thought came the discomfort that for the first time, I possibly had to work to get a date.
With Every Sunset Page 4