The Fire Between High & Lo

by Brittainy C. Cherry

  “Plates?” I offered.

  “Just a fork,” he replied.

  Grabbing a fork, I jumped on the countertop beside him. He took the fork, scooped up a large piece of pie, and held it out toward me. I willingly took a bite, closed my eyes, and fell in love.

  Gosh.

  He was the best cook. I wasn’t certain of it, but I doubted many people could pull off a goat cheese and honey pie. Logan not only pulled it off, he gave life to it. It was creamy, fresh, totally delish.

  I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, waiting for another bite, which he gave me. “Mmm,” I lightly sighed.

  “Are you moaning over my pie?”

  “I’m definitely moaning over your pie.”

  “Open your mouth. I want to hear you do it again.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “You’re being weird again.” He smiled. I loved that smile. So much of his life involved frowns, that whenever he smiled, I learned to cherish that moment. He scooped up a piece of the pie and hovered it by my lips. He started making plane noises, moving the spoon as if it were flying through the air. I tried my best not to laugh, but I did. Then I opened my mouth, and the plane landed. “Mmm,” I moaned.

  “You are such a good moaner.”

  “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that,” I mocked him.

  He narrowed his eyes. “You’d have zero dollars and zero cents,” he mocked back.

  “You’re a jerk.”

  “Just to be clear, if there are any guys calling you a good moaner other than me, jokingly, I’ll kill them.”

  He always said he’d kill any boy who looked my way, and a big part of why my relationships never worked out probably had something to do with that fact—they were all deathly afraid of Logan Francis Silverstone. I didn’t get the fear, though. To me, he was just a big teddy bear.

  “This is the best thing I’ve eaten all day. It’s so good that I want to frame the fork.”

  “That good?” he smirked, a heavy amount of pride running through him.

  “That good,” I said. “You should really think about going to culinary school like we talked about before. You would be amazing.”

  He huffed, a slight frown finding him. “College isn’t for me.”

  “It could be, though.”

  “Next subject,” he said, scrunching his nose. I wouldn’t push it. I knew that the subject was a touchy one for him. He didn’t think he was smart enough to ever get into any kind of school, but that wasn’t the truth. Logan was one of the smartest people I knew. If only he saw himself the way I saw him, his life would change forever.

  Stealing the fork from his grip, I scooped more into my mouth, moaning loudly, to make the conversation much lighter. He smiled again. Good. “I’m seriously so happy you brought this, Lo. I’ve actually hardly eaten all day. My mom said I needed to lose twenty pounds before I start college in the fall, because I’m in danger of the freshman thirty.”

  “I thought it was the freshman fifteen?”

  “Mom said since I was already overweight, that it would turn out to be even more than the average student. You know, she loves me like that.”

  He dramatically rolled his eyes. “What a sweetheart.”

  “I’m not supposed to eat after eight at night.”

  “Luckily, it’s past four in the morning, so it’s a new day! We must eat all the pie before eight!”

  I giggled, quickly covering his mouth with my hands to keep him from shouting anymore. I felt his lips lightly kiss the palms of my hands, and my heart skipped once. I pulled my hands away slowly, feeling the butterflies forming, and cleared my throat. “It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.”

  We did it too; we ate the whole thing. As I went to clean the fork in the sink, he grabbed my hand. “No, we can’t clean it. We have to frame it, remember?” As his hands held mine, my heart skipped twice.

  Our eyes met, and he stepped closer. “And just so you know, you’re beautiful the way you are, Aly. Screw your mom’s opinion. I think you’re beautiful. Not just in the superficial ways that fade over time, but I mean in every way possible. You’re just a beautiful fucking person, so screw other people’s thoughts. You know how I feel about people.”

  I nodded, knowing his motto by heart. “Fuck people, get a pet.”

  “That’s right,” he smirked, releasing his hold on my hand. I missed his touch before it even left. He began yawning, which distracted me from my erratic heartbeats.

  “Tired?” I asked.

  “I could sleep.”

  “You’ll have to be gone before my mom wakes up.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  We went into my bedroom. I gave him a pair of sweatpants and a shirt that I had stolen from him a few weeks ago. After he changed, we climbed into my bed and lay side by side. I’d never slept in the same bed with a boy before, other than Logan. Sometimes, when we slept, I’d awaken with my head on his chest, and before I pulled away, I’d listen to his heartbeats. He was a heavy breather, who inhaled and exhaled through his mouth. The first time he stayed over, I didn’t sleep a wink. Yet as time went by, his sounds began to remind me of home. As it turned out, home wasn’t a certain place; home was a feeling from the ones for whom you cared most, a feeling of peace that calmed the wildfires of your soul.

  “Still tired?” I asked, as we lay in the darkness, my mind still wide awake.

  “Yeah, but we can talk.”

  “I’ve just been wondering. You’ve never explained to me why you love documentaries so much.”

  He brushed his hands through his hair before placing his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. “One summer, I stayed with my Grandpa before he died. He had this documentary on the galaxy that got me hooked on wanting to know more about…everything. I wished I remembered the name of the documentary because I’d buy it in a heartbeat. It was like black hole…or black star…” He frowned. “I don’t know. Anyway. He and I started watching more and more documentaries together; it became our thing. It was the best summer of my life.” A wave of sadness seemed to hit him as he glanced down. “After he died, I just kept up the tradition. It’s probably one of the only traditions that I’d ever had.”

  “You know a lot about the stars?”

  “A lot about the stars. If there was a good enough place in this town I’d show you the stars without all of the light pollution, and show you a few of the constellations. But sadly, there isn’t.”

  “That’s too bad. I would love that. I’ve been thinking, though. You should make a documentary about your life.”

  He laughed. “No one would want to watch that.”

  I tilted my head in his direction. “I would.”

  He gave me half a smile before he wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into the curve of his body. His warmth always sent sparks flying through me.

  “Lo?” I whispered, half awake, half asleep, and secretly falling for my best friend.

  “Yeah?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but instead of words, a quiet sigh left me. My head fell against his chest, and I listened to the sound of his heartbeats, counting each one. One... Two… Forty-five…

  Within minutes, my mind slowed down. Within minutes, I forgot why I was so sad. Within minutes, I was asleep.

  Chapter Three

  Logan

  Ma and I didn’t have cable in our apartment, which was fine, I didn’t mind much. When I was a kid, we had cable, but it didn’t seem worth it because of my dad. He was the one who paid the cable bill, and he always complained about me sitting in front of the television watching cartoons. It was as if he hated that I was somewhat happy for a few moments during the day. Then one day he came into our home, took the television, and canceled the services.

  That was the day he moved out of the apartment.

  That was also one of the best days of my life.

  After some time, I found a television in a dumpster. It was a small 19-inch television with a DVD player, so I’d check o
ut a bunch of documentaries from the library and watch them at home. I was the person who knew too much about everything: baseball, tropical birds, and Area 51, all due to the documentaries. Yet, at the same time, I knew absolutely nothing.

  Sometimes Ma watched them with me, but most of the time, it was a solo gig.

  Ma loved me, but she didn’t like me much.

  Well, that wasn’t true.

  Sober Ma loved me as if I was her best friend.

  Drugged Ma was a monster, and she was the only one who lived in our house lately.

  I missed Sober Ma some days. Sometimes when I shut my eyes, I’d remember the sound of her laugh, and the curve of her lips when she was happy.

  Stop, Logan.

  I hated my mind, how it remembered. Memories were daggers to my soul, and I hardly had any positive ones to hold on to.

  I didn’t care though, because I kept my mind high enough to almost forget about the crappy life I lived. If I stayed locked in my room, stocked up on documentaries, with some good shit to smoke, I could almost forget that my mom stood on a corner a few weeks ago, trying to sell her body for a few lines of blow.

  That was a call I never wanted to get from my friend, Jacob.

  “Dude. I just saw your mom on the corner of Jefferson and Wells Street. I think she’s um…” Jacob paused. “I think you should get down here.”

  Tuesday morning, I sat in my bed, staring at my ceiling, while a documentary on Chinese artifacts played as my background music, when she shouted my name.

  “Logan! Logan! Logan, get in here!”

  I laid as still as I could, hoping she’d stop calling me, but she didn’t. Pushing myself up from my mattress, I headed out of my bedroom, to find Ma sitting at the dining room table. Our apartment was tiny, but we didn’t have much to put inside of it anyway. A broken down sofa, a dirty coffee table with stains, and a dining room table with three different chairs.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “I need you to clean the windows from the outside, Logan,” Ma said, pouring herself a bowl of milk and placing five Cheerios inside of the cracked bowl. She said she was on a new diet, and didn’t want to get fat. There was no way that she weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and being five foot and nine inches tall, I thought she was almost skeletal.

  She looked exhausted. Did she even sleep last night?

  Her hair was a mess that morning, but no more a mess than her entire existence. Ma always looked broken down, and I couldn’t think of a time when she didn’t. She always painted her fingernails on Sunday morning, and always chipped it off by Sunday night, leaving little spots of color remaining on her nails throughout the week until the next Sunday morning when she repeated the task. Her clothes were always dirty, but she would spray Febreze on them at four in the morning, before ironing them. She believed that Febreze was a decent replacement for washing our clothes at the local laundr0mat.

  I disagreed with her technique, and snuck her clothes out whenever I could, to wash them. Most people probably walked past spare change on the ground, but for me, it could’ve meant clean pants that week.

  “It’s supposed to rain all day. I’ll clean them tomorrow,” I replied. I wouldn’t though. She’d forget soon enough. Plus, cleaning our third floor apartment windows without a balcony seemed a bit ridiculous. Especially during a rainstorm.

  I opened the fridge door to stare at the bare shelves. It had been empty for days now.

  My fingers stayed wrapped around the handle of the refrigerator. I opened and closed it, almost as if food would magically appear to fill my noisy stomach. Right then, like the wizard he was, the front door opened and my brother Kellan came in behind me, holding grocery bags in his hand, and shaking the rainwater from his jacket.

  “Hungry?” he asked, nudging me in the arm. Maybe Ma was only eating Cheerios because that’s all we had.

  Kellan was the only person I’d ever trusted—other than Alyssa. We looked almost like twins, except he was stronger, more handsome, and more stable. He had a classic buzz cut, designer clothes, and no bags under his eyes. The only bruises that ever showed up on his skin were from a tackle during a college football game—which didn’t happen that often.

  He lucked out with a better life, simply because he had a better dad. His father was a surgeon. My dad was more of a street pharmacist who dealt drugs to the neighborhood kids, and to my mother.

  DNA: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

  “Geez,” he said, looking into the refrigerator. “You’ll need more stuff than what I bought.”

  “How did you even know we needed food?” I questioned, helping him unload the bags.

  “I called him,” Ma said, eating one of her Cheerios, slurping on the milk. “It’s not like you were gonna feed us.”

  My hands formed fists, and I pounded them against my side. My nostrils flared, but I tried to contain my anger from her comment. I hated that Kellan had to step in and save us so often from ourselves. He deserved to be far, far away from this lifestyle. “I’ll pick up some more things and drop them off after my night class.”

  “You live an hour away. You don’t have to drive back out here.”

  He ignored me. “Any requests?” he asked.

  “Food would be good,” I grumbled, along with my stomach.

  He reached into his backpack and pulled out two brown paper bags. “Food.”

  “You cooked for us, too?”

  “Well, kind of.” He took the bags and dumped them on the countertops. Random food items, uncooked. “I know when you came to stay with me for a bit we watched a lot of that cooking show where they just give you random supplies and you have to make a meal. Alyssa told me you thought about becoming a chef.”

  “Alyssa talks too much.”

  “She’s crazy about you.”

  I didn’t argue that.

  “So,” he smirked, tossing a potato my way, “I have a bit of time before I go to work. Make something happen, chef!”

  I did too. He and I sat eating my fancy grilled cheese with ham, three kinds of cheeses, and a garlic aioli sauce. On the side, I made homemade hash browns with a spicy, bacon flavored ketchup.

  “How is it?” I asked, my eyes glued to Kellan. “Do you like it?” Without thought, I placed half of my sandwich in front of Ma. She shook her head.

  “Diet,” she murmured, eating her last Cheerio.

  “Dang, Logan,” Kellan sighed, somehow tuning out Ma’s comment. I wished I could do that. “This is amazing.”

  I smirked, a spark of pride. “Really?”

  “I bit into the sandwich and literally almost died from how good it was. If I believed in Heaven, it would’ve been solely due to that sandwich.”

  My smile widened. “Right?! I kind of outdid myself.”

  “Fucking brilliant.”

  I shrugged my shoulders with that smug look on my face. “I’m kind of amazing.” I couldn’t thank Kellan enough—that was the most fun I’d had in a long time. Maybe someday I could go to college… Maybe Alyssa was right.

  “I gotta get going though. You sure you don’t want a ride anywhere?” Kellan asked.

  I wanted out of the apartment, that was for sure. But I wasn’t certain if my dad would be stopping by, and I didn’t want him alone with Ma. Whenever he was alone with her, her skin was always more purple than when I left her.

  It took a certain kind of demon to ever lay his hands on a woman.

  “No. I’m good. I work at the gas station later today anyway.”

  “Isn’t that like an hour walk away from here?”

  “No. Forty-five minutes. It’s fine.”

  “You want bus fare?”

  “I can walk.”

  He dug into his wallet and put money on the table. “Listen,” he leaned in closer to me and whispered. “If you ever want to stay at my dad’s place, it’s closer to your job…”

  “Your dad hates me,” I interrupted.

  “He doesn’t.”

&
nbsp; I gave him an are-you-fucking-kidding look.

  “Okay. You might not be his favorite person, but to be fair, you did steal three hundred dollars from his wallet.”

  “I had to make rent.”

  “Yeah, but Logan, your first thought shouldn’t have been to steal it.”

  “Then what should it have been?” I asked, growing upset, mostly because I knew he was right.

  “I don’t know. Maybe asking for help?”

  “I don’t need anyone’s help. Never have, never will.” That pride I had was always so harsh. I understood why some called it the deadliest sin.

  Kellan frowned, knowing I was in need of an escape. Being in that apartment so long had a way of driving one crazy. “All right then.” He walked around to Ma and placed his lips against her forehead. “Love you, Ma.”

  She kind of smiled. “Bye, Kellan.”

  He moved behind me, placing his hands on my shoulders, and softly spoke. “She’s even thinner than the last time I saw her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That scares me.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I saw the worry weighing heavy on his mind. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll get her to eat something.”

  His concern didn’t vanish. “You look kind of smaller, too.”

  “That’s just because of my high metabolism,” I joked. He didn’t laugh. I patted him on the back. “Seriously, Kel. I’m okay. And I’ll try to get her to eat. I promise to try, okay?”

  He released a weighted sigh. “Okay. I’ll see you later. If you’re not back from work when I stop by tonight, I’ll see you next week.” Kellan waved goodbye and before he stepped outside of the apartment, I called his name.

  “Yeah?” he asked. I shrugged my left shoulder. He shrugged his right.

  That was how we always said, “I love you” to one another. He meant so much to me. The person I someday dreamed of becoming. Yet still, we were men. And men didn’t say, “I love you.” Truth was, I didn’t say those words to anyone.

  Clearing my throat, I nodded once. “Thanks again. For...” I shrugged my left shoulder. “Everything.”