Last year when I beat the hell out of Jeremy because he hit my sister, Axle didn’t see her for three weeks. I was arrested, she ran away from her grandmother’s that same night, and she blocked Axle out. Axle doesn’t want to risk that type of response from her again.
“I’m just trying to contain this,” Axle says. “Until she figures this bastard out.”
The guy claims he’s changed, and she bought it hook, line and sinker. Problem is, if she stays on the hook, she’s not going to be a fish that survives the aftermath of being reeled in. She’s going to be the type that dies on dry land.
“You think someone else is going to love you?” Jeremy raises his voice beyond a whisper, and Axle grabs on to my biceps when I stand.
“We try to run her life, we lose her.”
We lose her. My sister. Holiday. I’m tired of losing things. I shrug off his grip and go to the back door.
“What are you doing?” Axle demands.
“Showing her someone else does love her.” I lean out. “Holiday.”
She angles her head in my direction, and her tight black ringlets bounce with her raw fury. She hated it when I stuck my nose into her fights with Jeremy last year. Don’t guess she likes it now, but I’m doing things differently. “I got paint swatches for your room. Can you tell me what you want? If I’m buying paint it has to be before Axle heads to work. I already walked four miles today, and I’m not walking anymore.”
A slow smile spreads across her face. “You’re going to paint my room?”
“Nice,” Dominic says behind me like I need his approval.
Holiday says something I don’t hear to Jeremy, he points at me like I’m the knife sticking out of his side, but then she reaches up and kisses him. The smug-ass expression the bastard wears tells me he’s claiming this round as his victory. Keep smiling, asshole, because she’s leaving you someday for good.
When Holiday walks in, we head for her room. Earlier this morning, Dominic and I replaced the water-damaged drywall as Axle fixed the leaking roof. Axle and I agreed to give Holiday this room. I’m upstairs in the attic that has a ceiling so low I have to tilt my head when I stand, and Axle sleeps on a futon in the living room.
Three people in a house built for one. Reality is there are six people in residence since we’ve become a safe haven for Marcus, and Dominic and Kellen will crash here when their dad hates the world, which is most days.
Our house is a 1920s shotgun. As explained to me by my dad as a kid, someone could take a shotgun, shoot at the front door and the bullet would go through every room and head out the back. Except for when I moved in with Mom at fifteen, this is where I’ve lived all my life.
Even though some of the wiring may have been updated in the ’50s, the appliances updated in the ’80s and the walls painted yellow by me and Axle when I was in middle school, the place reeks of old. But it’s home, and there was an ache in me whenever I woke to find myself not here.
At the door to her bedroom, Holiday lifts my cell from my back pocket, and flops onto the twin bed. The cell’s a gift we received yesterday via personal courier from the governor’s office.
“Why did they give you the phone?” she asks.
“Because I’m going to be traveling more than they originally thought, and they want unlimited access to me.” To continue to be their dancing monkey, but now in a more pronounced way. According to Sean, people loved what I did, and that causes everyone to love the governor. It’s what he referred to as a win-win.
“That’s cool. When do you leave again?”
“Tomorrow.” I’m heading with the governor’s team to western Kentucky for some fund-raiser. I gather the remaining tools on the floor and place them back in Axle’s toolbox.
“I followed Ellison for you on Instagram and Twitter,” Holiday says. “Did you know she has thirty thousand followers? She gained ten thousand followers in days. That’s crazy.”
“I don’t have Instagram and Twitter.” I don’t have any social media.
“You do now. Don’t worry. It’s not like a real account. I called it DrummerBoy202, and I set up a fake email account for it.”
“Why?” Is all I got.
“Why not? Do you think I can meet Ellison? I’ve been following her on Instagram since she set up her account. Don’t tell her, but I’m one of her regular commenters, that is when I can get on a computer at the library. She posts the best pictures and always has something real smart to say.”
The hammer falls with a clunk into the toolbox, and I’m slow as I turn toward my little sister who might have limited time left on this earth. “You knew who she was on the midway?”
Holiday finally drags her eyes off my cell, but then ducks behind it. “I mean I may have been following her, but... I just linked it together who she was.”
Screw that. “Holiday.”
With a huff, she sits up like she’s the one who’s annoyed. “Okay, yeah, I did. But you didn’t and nobody else did, so what difference does it make?”
What difference does it make? My fingers twitch with the need to throttle something. “She’s the governor’s daughter.” The man who holds my entire future in his hands.
Holiday flashes a bright smile. “And she thought you were cute. By the way, you need to apologize to Jeremy.”
My teeth click together, and I have to breathe in and out several times before I can open my mouth without asking what the...is wrong with her. “For what?”
Holiday regards me for a mere second before returning her attention to my cell. “He’s still mad at you for when you beat him up before the arrest.”
“He hit you.”
“He said he was sorry to me, and you gave him a scar.”
I should have ripped off his balls and shoved them down his throat. “He hit you.”
“He’s changed. I broke up with him and he’s changed, and I would think you, of all people, would understand that because you’ve changed.”
Walk away. That’s what I need to do—walk away. I slam the toolbox shut, and when I make it to the narrow hall, Holiday yells out, “Jeremy’s been there for me when nobody else has. I know he didn’t treat me well before, and I know we have bad days now, but he’s better, and he’s changing and he’s there.”
And I wasn’t. Not during the past year and I wasn’t reliable before. But I’m here now. It’s what I want to tell her, but I don’t because it’ll be empty words. At least they will be to Holiday. I wasn’t a bad brother before, but I wasn’t a good one either.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. “With what you did on the midway...with Ellison.”
Air out of my lungs, past my lips and I lean my back against the doorway. “I would have done it for anyone. I would have done it for you.”
Holiday puts my phone on her bed and picks up the worn stuffed octopus she’s had since she was a toddler. It’s more holes with lost stuffing than anything else, but it’s loved. Just like everything else in her room. “I know you would have done it for me.”
In a heartbeat. Back then, though, I would have done it with fists.
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but while I know you would do anything for me or Axle or Dominic and Kellen...the old you...” Holiday twists one of the tentacles around her finger. “The old you wouldn’t have stood up for someone he didn’t know, and I think it’s cool that you did stand up for a stranger.”
Holiday glances up at me, gauging my reaction, and that makes me want to hit myself. I rap the back of my head against the door frame, then nod in defeat because my sister...she’s right.
“Guess that program did work.” I try for a joke, but it falls flat. Funny how easy it came with Elle, and it’s difficult with anyone else.
Holiday lifts one shoulder and loops another tentacle around another finger. “I don’t think Mom’s noticed I’m gone yet. At least Gr
andma hasn’t said anything about it, but I thought for sure Mom would have been home by now and would have seen that my stuff was gone. I thought if she saw that I left that she’d tried to...”
Find her? Call her? Notice that her mother, who’s in her nineties, wasn’t taking care of her daughter anymore? Holiday’s grandma lives around the corner. She’s a wonderful woman who couldn’t keep up with Holiday. When I think of Holiday’s grandma, I think of hot food, the scent of freshly baked cookies, soap operas on her TV and her dry smile that would stretch along her wrinkled face. A proud black woman who looked after me, Holiday, Axle, Dominic and Kellen until she could hardly take care of herself. We watch over her now, but we let her think she’s still watching over us.
As for Holiday’s mom. She’s a waste of space. It wouldn’t have taken much for her mother to try to search for Holiday, but giving a damn isn’t Holiday’s mother’s style.
I cross the room one slow foot at a time, then sit on the corner of the bed. I understand crap moms. I understand our crap dad, too. “What color do you want to paint your room?”
Holiday scoots closer to me and places her octopus on my leg and her head on my shoulder. I lock up as it still catches me off guard when someone touches me, but it’s Holiday. She’s the affectionate one in our family. “I don’t have to stick with yellow?”
“Your room. Your choice.”
“That’s cool. But you don’t have paint swatches, do you?”
“I’ll get you a million paint swatches.
She chuckles. “Jeremy’s changed. Give him a chance.”
I’m starting to get what Axle’s saying and not saying. Holiday trusts Jeremy because he’s been around, and she doesn’t trust me and Axle because we’ve only been around when it was convenient. Trust—she has to trust us before she chooses us.
Holiday wipes the drywall dust off her sheet, then blows out a breath. “Ask me, Drix.”
It’s a still night in my windpipe because I don’t want to ask her, and I sure as hell don’t like her knowing I have my doubts. That’s not going to help build trust. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. Things aren’t the same. We all look at each other differently. We’re all waiting for someone to spill that they were the one who robbed the store, and I want you to ask me because I don’t want you wondering if I’m the one.”
I’m shaking my head, placing my hands on the bed to push myself off, but Holiday lifts her head and clamps a hand on my shoulder. “I regret my last words to you that night.”
I don’t want to do this. Because her talking about her last words to me before I was arrested means I have to think of my last words to her. I’d rather cut out my own intestines.
Holiday got into a fight with her asshole boyfriend because he was going to Florida for two weeks, and he’d only take her if she had enough money to pay for her part of the room. Holiday came to me, begging for the money, begging to help her convince her grandma to let her go because otherwise, she knew Jeremy would cheat.
Her instincts were right. That jerk didn’t want her to go on his vacation because he was after as much tail as he could get—not too different how he acted in our neighborhood. Having a girlfriend hanging on him would ward off girls. The money—it wasn’t about her going, it was about keeping her home. Bloody fifteen. It’s a doomed age for the Pierces.
I told her to break up with the asshole, and she told me she hated me and that I was a worthless man-whore. Her words hurt so I told her to go to hell, and she told me she didn’t care if she ever saw me again. Then when the asshole showed his face toward the end of the argument, he yelled at me, made the mistake of smacking Holiday, and I beat the hell out of him—came close to cracking open his jaw. This made him the ever-loving martyr in Holiday’s mind.
I look down at my hands, still expecting to see his blood dripping from my knuckles. Half waiting for the torment in my heart to tear me open because I had felt joy in causing him pain.
“Ask me, Drix.”
I’m silent.
“You won’t ask because you think I was involved. You know how desperate I was. You know I was capable of anything that night. You know I had crossed the line of crazy.”
“Doesn’t matter who did it. Not anymore. I did the time. It’s over.”
“If it’s over, if it doesn’t matter, then why do you avoid Dominic?”
I stand, but Holiday grabs my hand. “I didn’t rob the convenience store. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t ask anyone else to do it. I swear to God I never stepped foot near that store that night.”
I collapse back onto the bed, but this time Holiday grants me my distance. I look over at her, and she looks over at me. We sit there, in silence, and I pick up her octopus. Oliver is his name. I used to hide it from her when she was little as a game, and she’d spend hours trying to find it. Life was easier then. Hard in its own way, but easier.
Holiday didn’t rob the store. One person down, one more to go. “Did Dominic do it?”
“I don’t know. He confessed he was the one that walked with you there and that he had dared you to go in and shoplift. He also said when he didn’t see you go in the convenience store that he thought you chickened out and went home. He said he didn’t know you were so high you passed out behind the store. That all puts Dominic there and puts what he thought was safe distance between you and the store. We all knew he had a gun he bought off someone in the neighborhood. He was doing a ton of stupid stuff, and I wouldn’t put it past him.”
To feel alive, Dominic had been after adrenaline rushes because on the inside he felt mostly dead. Plus Dominic is the primary caregiver for himself and his sister, and money doesn’t appear at the bottom of an empty milk carton.
“But I don’t think Dominic would have let you take the fall for him. That’s not who he is. He loves you.”
She doesn’t know he’s terrified of confined spaces. I do, and because of that I would have never ratted him out.
“Do you think we’ll all be the same again?” she asks. “Do you think we can go back to being the family we once were? Because I miss it. I miss when I was here and all of you were here and no one was high and no one was arguing and we were a family. I used to go back to grandma’s and pretend that’s what it was like all the time. Not just once a month. Not just every once in a while. That it was like that all the time. I liked pretending I had all of you, all the time.”
“You have us.”
“But I want all of us together, not separate. I want us to be a real family. You, me, Axle, Dominic, Kellen and now Marcus. I want a real family. I don’t know what that would look like, but it has to be better than what we had before and what we’re doing now.”
A real family. Society says that’s a mom, that’s a dad, that’s a smiling family in a shiny house behind a white picket fence. We don’t have that, but we do have each other, and that makes my stomach bottom out.
Holiday’s asking if I can get past not knowing the truth. She’s asking me to forget the past and focus on the future. She’s asking me to forgive Dominic. I inhale deeply. “I’ll try.”
“I guess that’s all I can ask for.”
That’s good because trying is all I have to offer.
“Hey, Drix?”
“Yeah?”
“I know what girls think when they smile a certain way, and I’m not letting this go. Ellison thought you were cute.”
Not having this conversation. I stand, and Holiday follows, grinning from ear to ear. “Can I help with your application?”
“Yeah.” I’ll take all the help I can get.
Ellison
Mom just informed me her stylist has to dye my hair. As it turns out, people with my shade of blond aren’t taken as seriously as people with a different shade of blond that comes in a bottle. Mom also made an appointment at the eye doctor for new p
rescription contacts—colored contacts. Ones that will make my eyes pop. All of this is done courtesy of answers from a focus group, and I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around certain truths.
One—that a focus group was created with the purpose of asking questions about me.
Two—some of those questions seriously asked what shade of blond and blue makes people like me better.
Three—that anyone thinks changing my appearance to please anyone is okay.
“What do you think?” Mom asks. “I think you’re going to look gorgeous when we’re done.”
It’s a rhetorical question. This is where I say yes, and Mom is happy. I can say no and make her disappointed. So I give her a, “Sounds good.”
“Great! Now, let’s continue.” Mom holds up a picture on her tablet. “Who is this?”
I rest my elbow on the dining room table and prop my head up by my hand. My brain is melting and is in the process of draining out the side of my ear. It’s been the same thing for the past week...names, faces, why the person is important and then an endless stream of possible questions I could be asked and the appropriate answers, and I’m wondering if melted brain fluid can be collected and poured back in at a later date.
Next to me, my Southwest chicken salad sits practically untouched. It’s a down day in my house. I’m in yoga pants and a cotton T-shirt. Mom is wearing the same, but just her own style, and Dad’s wearing his favorite pair of jeans Mom complains are too old and need to be thrown out. He also wears one of his numerous shirts that claims he’s a University of Kentucky fan.
We finished dinner a half hour ago. Dad, in theory, went to get more to drink, but I have a feeling he got sucked into ESPN. That gave Mom the excuse to focus us back on work. “Really, Elle, I know you know who this is.”
Another old, rich white guy. They all look the same at the moment. Gray hair, aging face, black suit. Why not mix it up? Wear something else? Try some color? It’s like they want to make it easy for their family when they drop dead in their Sunday best. “Senator Michael Jacobson.”
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