Suffer Love

by Ashley Herring Blake

  I dig my nails into my jeans, but say nothing. Let it go, Hadley. Those words are in every look my dad gives me, every irritated sigh issued from my mother’s lips. Every wary glance from Kat.

  Kat says something about making her curfew. We weave through the crowd and into the house, making our way toward the front door. In the living room, I see Jenny balled into one corner of the love seat, knees tucked to her chest. Our gazes lock and she shakes her head slightly before looking away.

  Just get over it, Hadley.

  Chapter Two

  Sam

  If I’ve learned anything in the past six months, it’s that life is a fickle little bitch and there’s not one damn thing I can do to tame her. It’s almost laughable, really. That after everything, I’m back in Tennessee about to waste away in one of Nashville’s suburbs.

  “Have you talked to your dad since you got back?” Ajay asks. He’s laid out in a ratty hammock strung between two reddening maples in the backyard of our new rental house. Livy and I are sprawled on the prickly grass nearby, taking a break from the sea of boxes that seem to multiply every time I manage to empty one.

  “Nah,” I say.

  “He knows you moved again, right?”

  “I think my mom told him.”

  “You think?”

  I sigh. “Does it really matter, Age? He’s like a thousand miles away. And he has my number too.”

  “Ah. I almost forgot about this whole Whatever, man with a side of I don’t give a shit dish you’ve been serving up lately.”

  I grin. “Refreshing, isn’t it?”

  “Not even remotely.”

  “Sam’s not like that,” Livy says, twirling a dandelion between her fingers. “He gives a shit about a lot of stuff.”

  “Whoa.” Ajay grabs the hooks in the hammock, pulling himself up. He tosses me a bewildered glance that I don’t return. “When did this start? What’s up with the foul mouth, little elf?”

  “You started it.”

  “Yes, but I’m an uncouth, ill-mannered seventeen-year-old boy.”

  Livy shrugs as she ties the stem of the browning weed into a knot.

  Ajay’s dark eyes squint at my sister through the dwindling evening light, and he frowns. He hasn’t seen us since June, when my dad moved to Boston and my mom bolted out of Nashville like a fugitive, reluctant kids in tow, to live with my grandmother in Atlanta. A lot can change in four months. Livy used to look like a freaking descendant of Legolas, with her white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. Now, barely fourteen and clad in black from eyelids down, she looks more like some undead character from a vampire show. Her occasional brush with expletives is the least of my worries.

  After his careful study, Ajay sighs and scrubs a hand through his black hair. It sticks up from all the junk he uses to make it look effortlessly messy. “My little elf is all grown up.” He lies back down, avoiding my eyes. He knows “growing up” has crap to do with Livy’s whole goth-girl persona.

  “Can I borrow your drill?” he asks. He rocks his body from side to side and the hammock pitches sharply. I’m just waiting for it to dump his ass on the ground.

  “What for?”

  “Let’s just say mine’s insufficient for my current project.”

  I laugh and shake my head. I don’t even want to know. “Sure. It’s in a box somewhere.”

  “Excellent.” Ajay slows the hammock and beams at me, that freaky I’m-the-next-Doctor-Frankenstein glint in his eyes. He’s my age, but started taking AP classes in ninth grade. He’s technically got enough credits to start college as a sophomore, but his mom thinks he needs a “developmentally appropriate social environment” and refuses to let him take courses at Vanderbilt or Belmont. So he’s a senior with about two minutes of actual classes during the day who spends his abundant free time reading Gogol and welding crap together in his garage. If I hadn’t known the guy since I was six, I’d probably report him as a terrorist threat.

  The back door creaks open and Mom sticks her head out. Livy stiffens next to me and I give her arm a gentle nudge. She reaches into her pocket and takes out her inhaler, tossing back a few lungfuls of the medicine.

  “Hey, guys.” Mom walks down the steps and into the yard. “I’m back. Why are you just lying around? We have a ton of unpacking to do.”

  I nearly snort in response. Mom hasn’t unpacked crap. We’d barely gotten home from registering Livy and me at Woodmont High School this morning before she was back in the car, a glowing smile on her usually wan face as she hightailed it to the sticks-up-their-asses private school where she got a job teaching creative writing because the regular teacher’s out having a baby or something. The school she didn’t want us attending with her. Well, didn’t want me attending with her.

  “We’re taking a break,” I say. “And Livy’s room is completely done.”

  “Fine.” She pulls her blond hair out of its tight bun and runs her fingers through it. “I know we have nothing in the house, so I thought I’d order Indian for dinner.”

  Before I can respond, Ajay pops up in the hammock. “From where?” he chirps.

  Mom startles. “Oh. Ajay. I didn’t see you there. How are you?”

  “I’m excellent. How are you, Mrs. Bennett?”

  Mom flinches and tries to cover it up by scratching her nose. “I’m well. And please, Ajay, call me Cora.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I could do that, Mrs. B,” he says in his best parents-love-me voice. Although right now, his syrupy tone is having the exact opposite effect on my mother, which Ajay knows perfectly well. “And you should try Sitar in downtown Woodmont. It has the most authentic Indian food around here. Excellent naan.”

  “I’ll do that.” She smiles tightly. “Sam, may I have a word?”

  Jesus, here we go. I groan and roll myself off the ground. Grass sticks to my legs and a few blades from my hair inch their way down my shirt collar. I shake them out, keeping my head down as I reach Mom.

  “Maybe you could ask Ajay if he wouldn’t mind giving us a little space to settle in,” she says. “We’ve had a long day and I think we could use some family time tonight.”

  Family time? “He hasn’t seen us in months. He just stopped by for a while. I don’t think he’s planning on moving in.”

  She presses her fingers to her temples and takes a deep breath. “Sam. Please. We just got into town last night and I’m exhausted. I want a quiet evening.”

  “Every evening is a quiet evening, Mom.”

  She lifts her eyes to mine and they harden, two blue lakes in the dead of winter.

  “Samuel, your sister has to start high school all over again in a couple days. I need you to help make this transition as smooth as possible. For her.” Her eyes soften a little as she looks over my shoulder toward Livy, who’s still lying in the grass, ankles crossed and hands folded on her chest like a corpse in a coffin. “Is that something you think you can do?”

  My fingers curl into my palms. I want to tell her to piss off, that watching out for Livy is all I’ve done for the past six months and I’ll keep doing it despite Mom’s passive-aggressive request. But I don’t tell her that. My mother is the people-believe-whatever-the-hell-they-want theory personified. So I just walk away and go tell my best friend of eleven years to get out of my house.

  Hours later, after a virtually silent dinner on paper plates and virtually silent unpacking and virtually silent shuffles to our own rooms, I lie in my bed and blink at the plastered ceiling. Since last April, sleep hasn’t come easily, and it sure as hell won’t come easily in this unfamiliar house stuffed full of a bunch of familiar shit I’d just as soon toss in a dumpster than bother unpacking.

  Dishes my parents got when they married.

  Framed pictures starring a family of four, plastic smiles glued to their faces.

  Old baseball trophies, both mine and Dad’s, dating back to his days playing at Auburn.

  Literary magazines featuring Mom’s short stories and essays.

  Just trash
it all.

  I flick the switch to my bedside lamp and leave it on for a couple minutes. Flick it off again. The stars on the ceiling, left by the previous tenants, glow a sickly green. There are a ton of them, arranged in chaotic patterns and swirls, covering nearly every inch of space. I stare at them until they fade and then disappear altogether.

  A soft knock on my door brings the room back into focus. I sit up and glance at the clock. Past midnight. I flop back on the bed and rub at my eyes. I was wondering if this would start up again.

  “Come on, then,” I say.

  Livy slips inside and clicks the door closed behind her. Orange from the streetlight pours in through the window, lighting up her purple and black flannel PJs. She doesn’t say a word. She just drags her puffy green sleeping bag next to my bed and crawls inside, curling her body in the fabric so that she looks like an inchworm.

  “My pillow smells like Grammy’s house,” she says after several minutes of silence.

  “Baked beans and gardenias?”

  “Yep.”

  “Yum.”

  “It’s disgusting.” She flips the pillow over and inhales. “Ugh.” Then she rips the sunshine yellow pillowcase off and tosses it into a box-covered corner.

  “I don’t know.” I sniff dramatically. “Better than this place.” Earlier today, when I first swung open the front door, the stale, unbreathed air snaked out and smacked me in the forehead. “This house reeks like an open grave.”

  Livy laughs. “I do miss Grammy, though. It was nice . . . having someone else around.”

  Grammy, Mom’s mom, was the rubber around the Bennett bumper cars this summer. Good ol’ Grammy lacks any kind of internal filter. Her constant chatter, which used to grate on my nerves, saved Livy and me from having to interact with Mom too much. When Mom wasn’t snapping at Grammy to give her a moment of peace or casting worried glances in Livy’s direction, she was scouring the Internet for jobs or locked in her room or out doing who the hell cared what.

  Whatever she was doing, she spent all summer perfecting the art of ignoring her only son as much as humanly possible, which, as it turns out, is a lot.

  “Check this out,” I say to Livy, clicking on my lamp.

  “What?” She squints against the sudden brightness.

  “Just wait a minute.”

  She huffs out a breath. I throw my leg off the bed and find her head, ruffling her hair with my foot. She yanks my leg hair.

  “Ow! Jeez.”

  “Sooorry,” she croons, a smile in her voice.

  “All right, here we go.” I turn off the light and the ceiling ignites.

  “Whoa! That’s a ton of stars. Wish my room had some.”

  “We’ll get you some tomorrow. They’re . . . luminous.”

  A beat. “Shiny.”

  I grin in the dark and tuck my arms under my head, settling in for our game. “Bright.”

  “Glittering.”

  “Radiant.”

  “Shimmering.”

  I scrunch up my nose, trying to think of another synonym. Mom started this game around the time Livy entered kindergarten. “It’s a great way to increase vocabulary,” she said when I’d asked why she kept chirping out words like “Pretty” and “Beautiful” and “Cute” to my confused-looking five-year-old sister. Once Livy caught on, though, she loved it. Sometimes she’d just play by herself, happily spitting out synonyms in the back seat of the car or while practicing her handwriting. Dad and I would join in every now and then, but it was really Mom and Livy’s thing.

  Until last April.

  I find myself pulling Livy into the game more and more lately. She always plays along, usually with a little pucker between her eyebrows. I’m pretty sure she knows why I want her to play all the time, as if this stupid word game can somehow keep her connected to the wide-eyed, curious girl she used to be before life shit all over her.

  “Do you surrender?” she asks.

  “Never!” I shake my head and concentrate. “Oh! Sparkling.”

  “Incandescent.”

  “Damn, that’s a good one. I got nothing after that.”

  She giggles and I smile. It’s worth getting my ass kicked at this game over and over just to hear her laugh.

  She says good night and rolls over. I do the same and my eyelids just start to grow heavy when her voice startles me awake again.

  “Sam?”

  “Mm?”

  “You think Dad’ll come visit us here?”

  I shift to my back and release a sigh to the fading stars.

  “I don’t know, Livy.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her breathing eventually grows soft and even, but mine stays hitched in my chest. It’s stuck on what I didn’t tell my sister, what I really think about Dad and the possibility of him coming back to Nashville.

  Not a chance in hell.

  Chapter Three

  Sam

  Mom pulls the car up behind five or six school buses at Woodmont High School and says something. I yank out my earbuds. “What?”

  She exhales through her nose, but doesn’t look away from the visor mirror as she slicks on bright red lipstick. “I said, is it okay if I drop you two off right here. You’ll have your car back tomorrow and I don’t want to be late this morning.”

  “Fine.” I grab my messenger bag from the floorboard, stuffing in rogue papers before slinging it over my shoulder.

  When I reach for the door handle, Mom stops me with one finger on my arm. She looks at my sister in the back seat. “Guys, listen. I know things have been hard and that moving back here was sudden, but I really think things will be better for all of us now. Please make an effort.”

  Better. I look at my reflection in the window—hair way longer than I’m used to, dark circles under my eyes, a thin layer of stubble over my jaw because I couldn’t even drum up the energy to shave. In the back seat, Livy’s tight clothes are strategically placed to give Mom a coronary. We’re starting school more than a month later than everyone else here. No friends. No dad. Just a mom who’s pissed off half the time and lost in her own world the other. Oh, I’m sure this year will be a huge improvement.

  “Olivia, you have your inhaler, right?” Mom asks as we climb out of the car.

  “Mm.”

  “The nurse has one on hand as well, if you need it. Don’t hesitate to go there at the first sign of tightness or wheezing. The last thing we need right now is a bad asthma attack, and you know how stress—”

  “I’ve got it, Mom. Jeez.” Livy stomps across the lawn. I can’t hide my smirk as I follow her.

  Livy tugs at her ass-tight black skinny jeans (the ones that make me want to wrap her in a tablecloth), while other pairs of ass-tight skinny jeans and hipster glasses swarm around us on the school’s front lawn. We make it through the front doors and I pull Livy to a stop alongside the rows of puke green lockers. From my bag, I take out the schedules Mom picked up on Friday before she dragged me to the gym to talk to the baseball coach and dropped off Livy’s inhalers. I scan them and find where Livy’s homeroom is located. We head down the hallway in silence.

  “So you’ll be okay?” I hand her the schedule in front of her classroom.

  “Yeah.” She starts walking through the door.

  “Hey.” I tug on her backpack and stop her. “Text me if you need anything. I mean it.”

  “I won’t need anything.” She lifts her lined eyes to mine and gives me a smile before she takes a pull on her inhaler. “But thanks.”

  I watch her meander through the rows of desks and find a spot in the back. Plenty of eyes follow her. Plenty of guys blatantly stare at her ass as she walks by. I force myself toward my own class before I embarrass her by knocking their teeth down their throats.

  Homeroom is predictable. First period Calculus, mystifying. American Government, one big snore. I get more than enough curious glances, which I don’t return. This whole thing would be a hell of a lot easier if Ajay were here, but I’ll manage. I’m not here for ne
w friends. I’m not here to avoid them either. As far as I’m concerned, that kind of shit just sort of happens whether you want it to or not.

  “Hey. You Bennett?”

  Case in point.

  “That’s me.” I slip my new books into my locker before third period English. I close the squeaky metal door to find a guy with light brown hair and a tight purple shirt leaning against the lockers. I recognize him from homeroom. Or rather, I recognize his shirt.

  “I saw you coming out of Coach Torrenti’s office last week,” he says. “You play ball, right? Pitcher?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  A smile tugs at one corner of his mouth and he jerks his chin at me. “Josh Ellison. Third base.”

  “Sam.”

  He nods. “So, listen, I know the season doesn’t start until January, but a bunch of us usually get together at the field to play and get in some batting practice if you’re interested.”

  “Maybe. When?”

  “Every Wednesday.”

  I pucker my lips, considering, when really there’s a little girl squealing inside my head. With my dad licking his wounds in Boston, I haven’t played decent ball since last spring. I got in a little play with the team from the school I went to in Atlanta for the past month, but they sucked ass.

  “I’ll be there.” I hitch my bag higher up on my shoulder.

  “Awesome.” Josh claps me on the back. He opens his mouth to say something else, but quickly snaps it shut and turns his body toward the lockers, hugging them so close, it’s almost indecent. “Shit.”

  “Uh, something wrong?”

  “Nah. I’m fine. It’s just . . .” He cuts his eyes toward the hallway again. “Ah, fuck.”

  I look around for the source of his turmoil and spot a girl walking down the hall. Sure, there are a lot of girls walking down the hall, but this one has dark eyes leveled at Josh like she wants to deep-fry his balls and shove them down his throat.

  She’s also holy-shit gorgeous.

  When she gets closer, she hesitates, and I think she’s going to lay into him right there in the middle of the hallway. Josh stays pressed against the locker, pretending to fiddle with the lock. Finally, her face slackens and everything softens. It’s like watching an entire story—a history of some unknown world—shift and unfold right in her eyes. I just stare at her until she moves on down the hall. Then I keep staring at her, because, God, how can you not? All eyes and mouth and curves and tangly dark hair down her back.