“Clearly, she didn’t,” she huffed, but her eyes widened as she breathed a sigh. Instantly, she’d forgiven me, and it left guilt to swim in the pit of my stomach. Should I have been honest with her? Maybe, but the past wasn’t just mine to tell. It was a pretty big weight to drop on someone to tell them their best friend’s dad was murdered and you helped her find the body, along with her mother’s shot up face. That wasn’t a conversation you had in a cafeteria, even if I did decide to tell her. I mean, until I just made myself out to be a bigger ass by smearing food on Jaci’s face, I didn’t really owe her anything. Did I? I gave up and ate my food because there wasn’t any sense to waste it.
“Out of curiosity, do you know why this is a bad date for her?” I tried to sound nonchalant and really hoped I didn’t sound too interested.
“No clue,” Amaris said, fervently tapping a reply into her phone, no doubt to Jaci.
“Should one of us go check on her?”
She held up her phone, covering up the words. “Do you honestly think I wouldn’t check on her? You’re kind of an idiot sometimes.” She shook her head and then turned her back to me.
I wasn’t being nosy, or maybe I was, but I couldn’t see their replies, so looking was pointless. Seeing the date was important, though. Jaci and I may have been on a very limited talking status, but she’d never bitten my head off before… then again, I’d never put food on her either.
Nineteen
Cal
Writing the date the rest of the day never gave me any idea why she would be upset. Maybe she started her period. Chicks notoriously hated those days in history, right? Bleeding for that long would be enough to upset anyone.
Our moms were out of town for some book thing this weekend. They wanted to meet a smut writer named Ruby something, so I thought we might have a guys’ weekend. I was wrong. Dax basically left as soon as we had gotten home. He was not only in basically every club offered at the high school, he was in the show choir, too. They had a competition out of state, and they got to go to an amusement park. Technically, they weren’t supposed to leave until tonight, but he said he was going to get his stuff and go over to Jaci’s for dinner. I almost invited myself over, but figured I was the last person she wanted to see.
Amaris was going to her dad’s. I tried tagging along, but she said her dad would cut off my package and feed it to me if I showed up, and if he didn’t, his brothers would. Initially, I just thought he must have had a bunch of brothers, which technically he did, but not blood relatives. Her dad was in the motorcycle club a town or so over. After she told me that, I didn’t press the issue much further. I may or may not have asked her to skip it and just stay with me, but she didn’t.
After popping a plate of leftovers into the microwave to warm, mostly out of boredom, I swayed in front of it to the humming rhythm. It was hard for me to be alone. When I was alone, I had idle hands, and the saying about them rang incredibly true with me. I was good not to look for an outlet, unless I had nothing to do but think. Thinking was something I refused to do, other than school work and stuff. I actually kind of liked it, but let on like I didn’t. It was everything else that haunted me that I didn’t like cycling in my mind. When dark thoughts found their way into my head, it was like I was a rat running in a wheel of continuation. It all replayed so many times, until I broke down and found something to quiet the loud memories.
Jaci’s dad hadn’t been the first dead body I’d found, not even the second. When I said some people were born into tragedy, I was pretty damn serious. Sadly, he wasn’t the only dad either. I felt my eyes hazing over, and my chest heaved inward with a heaviness. I refused to sit by myself and reminisce. That was something reserved for people with great things to remember. Happiness had been a scarcity in my life for years. It was as if when I was born I was given the shittiest radio ever created, and it had the worst reception. It could only pick up mediocre radio stations, and that was exactly what my life had been up to this point. Mediocre.
Now, I was abundantly aware after I became a certain age, most of that was my doing, but what could I say? I was a creature of habit. Literally. I was driven by habit or whatever synonym you wanted to use. Addiction. Problem. Fixation. Obsession. They all applied to me, but I wasn’t in denial, so at least there was that. It didn’t matter how the word was pronounced, it all meant the same, weakness, which I learned was actually also listed as a synonym of habit. I didn’t know who wrote the thesaurus I used when I found that one, but I hated them a little for being right. I was in agreement, but it still didn’t mean I was happy about it.
My chest continued to heave, and inhaling a fresh breath of air was out of the question. I tried to be strong and not give into what was responsible for steering me most of the time. Truly, I liked having a level head and being able to make clear decisions, but when your thoughts were the exact thing you needed to escape from, what else could you do? It never really was a question when your brain had the power to landslide down upon you. Well, the real question at this point was no longer if I was going to do something to help me forget. It was what would I choose.
The high always came with a freely coursing stream of remorse. I was never really free of any of it, but it dulled the sadness. I was one of those people you’d never know was sad, unless you by some odd chance asked. I wouldn’t lie to anyone, but most people never stopped to ask. That’s how people were. They were too preoccupied with their own life to concern themselves with someone else’s problems. Myself included. I knew I could ask people how they were doing more often, like today. Even though it would have confused the crap out of Dax and Amaris, I should have run after Jaci. Dax may have been her boyfriend, but she and I had known each other basically our entire lives. I owed her that much, but I just sat there and did nothing. Well, except act oblivious to every part of it.
Pushing into my body or physically exerting myself into exhaustion seemed to be better choices than keeping this spiraling path I was on right then. Making my mind up, I climbed the carpeted stairs to get my tennis shoes out of my bedroom to go for a run. Mom would have had a fit if she was here to see me walk up her white carpet in my running/school shoes. I did it intentionally because I could since she wasn’t here.
Often, it was the oddest of things that happened to stop people from surging into a full-blown panic attack. Today, for me, it was my younger brother’s stupid red cummerbund, which I always thought was spelled cover bun, until he corrected me. Seeing it sparkle in his doorway stopped my heart from racing and my lungs from fighting against their natural course. He needed that thing to do his show because it was part of his uniform, so even though I didn’t plan to go to Jaci’s, it looked like I would be if I couldn’t get ahold of him.
After texting him and he didn’t answer—it didn’t even show that he’d looked at it—I huffed. It was without question where I would be going, whether I wanted to or not. I doubted she would welcome me. It’d be more likely for her to cuss me and shove food onto my face. Both of which I would deserve and take willingly because, well, I shouldn’t have been a dick to her. The fact that I didn’t realize I was being one didn’t really matter anymore.
Grabbing his ugly red sequined band and stuffing it into my drawstring bag with my cell and keys, I slipped my feet into my shoes and took off in the direction of Jaci’s house. Even if she didn’t want to see me, I had to be there for my brother. At least that was the reason I told myself. The alternative painted me an even shitter person, so I refused to entertain it.
“D here?” I breathlessly said as soon as Jaci opened the door, answering her questioning eyes.
“Nope,” she snipped, and I thought she might have left part of my face, but I couldn’t be sure with the bite her voice had.
“Look, Blue.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“But—”
“Cal, other than my mom, you are literally the only other person that has basically known me my entire life. And, you literally…” She pau
sed, fixating her eyes onto the ceiling, fighting back tears. This was something I’d forgotten about her. When we were kids, she’d often refuse to cry in situations where the rest of us had been a mess.
“You literally smeared our past in my face. The last meal I ever had with my dad, you thought it was appropriate to pick the day he died to pull that shit.” She was poking my chest with her finger, and with each word the force behind it increased.
Her bad day apparently wasn’t a period. Fuck! The date seemed like it should have been familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. Now I knew why it wasn’t something I could place. I’d specifically made myself forget the date. For a few years following what happened to her dad, I basically had a mental breakdown, so it was a necessity for me to forget.
“Right. Don’t say anything. Why would you?” she questioned me, sniffing back the tears that fought like hell to surface.
I needed to say something. Anything, really. How could I answer without making things worse, though?
“You want to know the icing on the cake, Calvary Whatever the M Stands for Trahan? Hmm. Do You?” She paused for a second, but not long enough for me to actually give an answer.
“I thought you would actually remember, and you’ve made me someone I hate, by the way. Why did you have to go after her? Any other girl, I could have dealt with, but my best friend, Cal?” Her voice faded in defeat, and I wanted to help her forget like I made myself. There were times in a person’s life where right and wrong were blatantly clear. Those I was prepared for. At least then if I was doing wrong, I knew what I was getting myself into. Yet, this was a time I was never ready for. The right thing to do seemed like it was also the wrong thing to do.
“I know you do, Sydage. You always have,” I admitted, using the very first name I’d ever called her. It was then what we needed to do became obvious. It wasn’t drugs that she needed. It was the stars.
The tiny part that usually lingered between her lips vanished and she put her tongue inside her cheek. It was unnerving for her to be quiet, even though she hadn’t really spoken to me in weeks. This was different. In those weeks, it was out of complete stubbornness. This silence, however, was a different emotion entirely. Her aggravation had grown into hatred, and there was no going back from that point. I knew, because that’s how I felt about Dax’s dead stepdad.
“Please, don’t call me that,” she pleaded, her words piercing my heart. I never knew it was possible to care for someone so much but not know the reason. We weren’t dating, and we weren’t in love, but I felt like I owed her the world.
“I won’t and I’ll leave you alone after this, but please, just give me tonight?” I held my hand out for her to take, expecting her to slam the door on it and break a few of my bones. She didn’t. Much to my surprise, she lightly placed her hand in mine but didn’t offer an explanation.
We walked in complete silence to my house and down the stairs into the basement, which doubled as my studio. There were many things I used as an outlet, but painting was still my number one.
Jaci stood, quietly watching me zoom around her as I gathered supplies. I didn’t offer any semblance of reason, and she didn’t ask for one. I prayed that I hadn’t stupidly thrown out all of the construction paper, and so I kept digging in the cabinet for at least a sheet. Basically, I had every color of paint in the rainbow and then some, and the number of paintbrushes I owned was in the double digits, but I couldn’t find one damn piece of construction paper.
I cussed under my breath and palmed a handful of brushes and snagged a few containers of paint on my left, dropping them onto the floor in front of Jaci. As I got onto my knees, I paused, waiting for her to do the same, but she didn’t.
In fact, she turned away from me and headed toward the stairs. I figured this would happen, I knew it wouldn’t work, but I assumed she would have left before now. She stopped a foot or so away from the stairs and tiptoed in front of the shelf beside them. Momentarily, she blindly patted her hands along the top of the shelf, and then after a squeak, she pulled her hands backward. Dust flew down onto her hair and face and she immediately sneezed. My mouth fell open as it actually registered what she not only held, but found when I couldn’t. Had Dax brought her down here?
“It’s where you used to keep it, Cal,” she offered an explanation and crawled onto the floor with me, putting to rest my question about my brother.
“Yeah. You’re right.” I rubbed the back of my neck and lay on my stomach, opening the paints and getting everything ready.
Jaci lay down beside me in a position similar to mine and put the paper in front of us, one white piece of construction paper. I held the paintbrush upward after dipping it into blue paint, waiting for her to place her hand beneath mine and she did.
“I’m still pissed at you.” She made it clear, and the paint dripped onto the paper as she explained herself.
“You should be,” I truthfully answered, guiding our hand into the first strokes of a star. Since our lives reconnected, I’d spent the majority of the time being an ass to her for no reason other than to keep her away from me. Yet, here we were in spite of all of that. Perhaps sometimes things were inescapable. Maybe if I’d spent a little less time ignoring her and if I’d shown back up to meet her when I basically implied I would, things would be different. I might not have been with Amaris, and she might not have been with Dax. It was hard to tell, though. I was a firm believer of everything happened for a reason. Basically, there were only so many possible moves you could make after certain things happened. Nobody was really aware what the right ones were, in my opinion. We were all just a bunch of clueless assholes hoping we made the right decisions.
“Then why are you here?” I asked and instantly regretted that I had.
“Because I know how you used to be and you had the same look in your eyes you got when we were kids right before you spazzed out. And honestly, I didn’t have it in me to do anything else. Not today.” Her voice was barely a whisper, yet it was one of the loudest statements I’d ever heard in my life. Maybe it was what she didn’t have to say. Jaci had been fighting for her life as hard and long as I had, and it was in this moment I knew I couldn’t be with Amaris anymore. Her pain was palpable, and I had just been an idiot not to notice it earlier today. I’d never denied being an addict. It wasn’t something I broadcasted, but if someone asked, I openly admitted that I needed help to be happy. It was in this moment reality made itself known. I’d always thought I had control of what I used, that I started using a few years ago to cope with things. I guess for all intents and purposes that was still true, but mentally, it was far from the first time. You see, sometimes you met someone in your life that had such a strong presence that they ruined you for anyone else.
While she simply prompted our hands to paint another star, I was taken back to the first time we met. I didn’t know then how important she would be to me. Hell, I didn’t know yesterday. Honestly, I didn’t think we’d ever see each other again, and when we did, I was selfish. I should have told her who I was in the graveyard, but it’d been so long since I had seen her. Everything about her was the little girl who used to be my best friend, but somehow she was vastly different, too. She’d grown from a headstrong little girl that used to press my buttons for the hell of it to such a beautiful woman. The thing we shared wasn’t something most people could see or feel. The chaos that resided in my head quieted in her presence, without any other drug. Clearly, I remained an addict, but my dealer had no idea she’d given me my first taste ten years ago in a tree house.
“I’m sorry,” I announced, stilling our hand momentarily, and noticed we’d run out of room on the tiny paper. Not wanting to stop, I pushed the bristles onto the concrete floor. Hesitation and irritation swirled in her eyes, and her mouth twitched as if she was trying to decide what she wanted to do with that information. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on in her head, but I pretended that I understood and kept my mouth closed. It was usually the first
thing to offend people.
“Thank you.” She halfway smiled, and it was her broken smile that sealed the deal for me. If anyone knew such tragedy as I did, it was Jaci. What she didn’t know about when we met was why I’d spent so much time in the psych ward, and I knew it would come up eventually. I just didn’t know if I was strong enough to tell her, so for now, I lived in the moment because people like us didn’t have anything else. We had glimpses of a promised future, but never really got to see the whole picture before it was erased. That was a downfall of being imperfect. You wore your imperfections proudly. You didn’t really have a choice. Even if you were the type of person to attempt to mask them, someone always found out. I just wondered when she would.
Twenty
Jaci
I reminded myself I had a boyfriend more than I was proud of, but really, even if I didn’t, today wasn’t the day to change anything about relationships. I was already emotionally wrecked enough as it was, and exhaustion was the understatement of the year. Shame and guilt pounded in my head as I thought of Mar. Although we weren’t doing anything wrong—Cal and I were just painting—I knew it felt like more to me. Then again, I could just be making things up in my head. I shook my head to clear all the thoughts that I didn’t want to have, which earned a side glance from Cal. I didn’t explain my actions, and sure as shit wasn’t going to either.
In a perfect world, my dad wouldn’t be dead and my mom wouldn’t have gotten shot. In that perfection we would have never moved, and Cal and I would have remained best friends. This wasn’t a perfect world, though. My dad was dead, and we had packed up a few belongings and burned the rest. Well, Mom had once she was released from the hospital.
“Cal, you here?” Dax’s voice bounced through the hushed house. Neither Cal nor I moved. His eyes widened with alarm and mine mirrored his reaction. I knew why I came here. I had been honest with Cal. Partially, anyway. I didn’t want to see him freak out, but I also didn’t want to be alone. Mom hadn’t realized this was Dad’s death anniversary, and when she did, she told me she was going to cancel. I wouldn’t let her. This was her first signing, and there was no reason for us both to live in the past. She deserved to be happy. Truthfully, I thought I wanted to be alone, and it was very rare for Mom to leave the house for an entire weekend, much less leave the state.
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