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Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
About the Author
Permanent Adhesives
A novel by
Melissa T. Liban
Text copyright © 2013 by Melissa T. Liban
Cover design copyright © 2013 by Melissa T. Liban
Photograph copyright © Massonforstock
Smashwords Edition
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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All rights reserved. Any reproduction of this publication either in part or in whole is prohibited unless explicitly authorized by the copyright holder.
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This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, places or events is just mere coincidence.
http://melissatliban.com
http://www.melissalibanillustrations.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/MelissaLiban
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To my Fiction Writing II professor—the roots of this story started in her class.
Chapter One
I was sitting in the back of my English classroom, tapping my pencil on the desk, while my teacher who was a great beast of a woman, was droning on about something that was just white noise in the back of my brain. Few kids paid attention. Students were slouched down in their chairs, leaning on their arms, and balancing their chins on their pencils. She was killing us. Mrs. Gomez was her name. The fact that she was a Mrs. always made me shudder. Somebody was actually married to her. Besides her ability to comatose students and an unpleasant demeanor, she was built like a linebacker and perpetually wore khaki skirts that were always cinched too tight at the waist.
Due to my mind’s lack of interest on the subject being taught, I was working on the newest page of my webcomic. My heroine Sasha Santiago was in the middle of a battle with her arch nemesis Dranyan, who also happened to be her brother. I was tapping my pencil because I was trying to work out the proper perspective of a kicking pose; the tapping generally kept me focused somehow, but that day I was thrown off track because I noticed the sun was actually shining through the windows that lined the left side of the classroom. It had been a while since the sun made an appearance. Perhaps it came out just to greet us, even though probably for a short period of time. Fall in our city was usually on the dreary side. I studied the sun streaks that filtered in. Dust danced around in them, making the rays come alive. My eyes then followed along the paths the sun made on the worn, wood floor—totally abandoning the foreshortening issue I was contemplating.
One of the paths actually led me to a pair of Chuck clad feet standing in the doorway to the classroom. I glanced up and there stood a kid attached to said Chucks. He cautiously walked into the classroom holding the strap to his messenger bag. Mrs. Gomez didn’t acknowledge him. He nervously looked around and held out his hand which was holding a light-blue slip of paper. She turned and snapped it right from him. She looked at the piece of paper, then at him. I swear a scowl came across her face. “Go sit down,” Mrs. Gomez coldly demanded as she quickly turned her expansive back on him.
The kid scanned the classroom looking for an empty seat. His small, dark eyes darted back and forth, desperately trying to get away from what could have been one of the most unfriendly people ever. His eyes stopped, locked a chair into position, and he started heading for it. It was the row next to mine, two seats up. He walked with his shoulders hanging low, pointing towards the floor.
Mrs. Gomez walked to the podium in front of the class and looked down at her grade book. “What was your name again?” she asked, even though she probably just saw it on that slip of paper he handed her.
He continued on to his seat and mumbled something over his shoulder.
“I can’t hear a thing you are saying.”
“Ewiash Bickwah,” he said just over a whisper.
“Elias Bickler?” she asked.
He nodded.
I kept staring at him as he threw his bag on the ground and slumped down into his seat. His eyes caught my attention. Those dark eyes, where had I seen them before? Did I somehow know him from something? Another class, the bus stop, where? I started racking my brain, but nothing came up. I stared at his back, and as I stared at him, he wrapped his left arm around his waist and started gnawing on the nails to his right hand. He seemed very determined to rip and chew every one of them off.
I studied his profile. It would come to me, where I knew him from. Shaggy, dark-brown hair hung in his face. His nose had that crooked lump thing going on, like people who get their noses broken, but never properly set or whatever, and his lips were nice actually. I think they could have been categorized under sexy with the bottom one being kind of pouty. Where did I know those lips from? It was going to drive me crazy and then right in mid-stare he turned around and looked straight at me. I guess he felt my eyes burning into him. I could have done the look at something else real quick and whistle like I wasn’t staring, but I just kept looking and then BINGO! There it was! Holy crap, I knew I had seen him before. He was the Home Wrecker’s kid. Oh, my God, unfrickin believable, the Home Wrecker’s son was in my English class. What a small stinking world it was!
Wait, wait, I know. I need to back up for a minute. Who’s the Home Wrecker you ask? Who would ever have such a name? Well, she was my dad’s girlfriend. Let me do some explaining, so you can understand the exact point in my life I was at while sitting there staring at Elias Bickler. The previous school year my family used to live on the outskirts of the city, where it was still technically the city, but surrounded by suburbs, but anyways, my mom left my dad because he was an alcoholic and all around lousy human being. So she packed up my sister and I, and we moved across the city, well, just a matter of miles really. We moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a building that looked like it used to be a house and not a very spectacularly kept one at that, but we could afford no more. My mom took a job working retail, and my sister Janie started going to college and continued working, and I started my junior year. So we’re leading our little lives and then all of a sudden we started seeing my dad around, at like Mount Holy Burger and on the bus and stuff. I always tried to keep a low profile, so he wouldn’t see me. Well, turns out, he was keeping house with this woman, Home Wrecker, and guess where they frickin lived? Pretty much right acr
oss the goddamn street from us! I mean it’s a really large city, what were the chances?
I’m sorry if I sound angry, but I kind of was. We didn’t know if it was just one hell of a coincidence or what, but dude, it really burst our bubbles. As a side note right here, so everybody knows, there’s an old woman trapped in me, and she intermittently gets loose and makes me say things that only your grandma would say. So my dad was living with this woman, and we think that he probably met her at the bar he frequented; a fellow patron, not too sure, just my sister’s and my theory. And we knew she had a kid because on occasion, my dad would stumble across the street and beg to sleep over because Home Wrecker kicked him out, and at these moments he would sometimes mention what a little shit wad for a son that she had. Then one day we finally got to meet the little shit wad, i.e.; Elias Bickler.
The one evening my sister, mom, and I were all home at the same time; that rarely ever happened. My mom was in the living room watching TV because that’s all she ever did, my sister Janie was on the couch reading, and I was lying on the floor working on an art project. This was before I really got into my comic, so I had nothing to distract me and actually did my homework on a regular basis then. All of a sudden, we repeatedly heard this loud crashing noise. “What in the Sam Hill was that?” I asked, sitting up from the floor. Janie shrugged, and my mom ignored me.
I got up and looked out the front window. I didn’t see anything, so I went outside to take a look. Janie decided to join me. When we went outside it was like a scene from a movie because everybody suddenly started emerging from their houses and looked around kind of confused. People started cautiously walking down their steps and onto the sidewalk and started forming little clusters of people here and there. Nobody said much of anything because nobody really knew what happened and then my neighbor George, who lived in the basement apartment of our building, came running down the street. He was all out of breath and panting heavily. That was probably the most he ever ran in his life. He had a pretty impressive gut going on. George then started talking, to nobody in general, just whoever was around.
“There was this guy,” he said, then pausing to catch his breath. “And he was drivin’ his car.” At that point, it seemed like a pretty boring story. George put his gold ring covered hand on his chest and continued. “Well, he was goin’ backwards and in the process he seemed to have hit almost every car on the street.” He then wiped his hand across his forehead like he had been wandering in the desert for days.
All the people standing around outside all started to head for the street to look at the cars. Somebody then screamed, “Holy shit, my car!”
Everybody started inspecting the cars, which were pretty messed up. Most of them had these big dents in them, and there was this one with a whole piece of metal pulled back and crunched. As I was taking everything in, I wrapped my arms around myself to try to preserve some of my warmth because it was kind of nippy out.
“Hey,” my sister said, slapping my shoulder. “Home Wrecker alert.”
I looked across the street and there was the Home Wrecker—all in her rat’s nest glory. I had never seen an actual rat’s nest, but I’m pretty sure her hairdo is what one looked like. It was a dark tumbleweed of spilt ends and fly away pieces. She had this sunken face with these plum colored circles under her eyes. Home Wrecker stood there all angles and bones smoking a cigarette. She was wearing an oversized beer tee-shirt that hung pathetically on her body and some purple tight-fitting sweat pants.
“Go ask her in for some coffee,” Janie said.
“You,” was the only reply I could think of to her lame statement.
As we stood there, a kid walked up to her, said something, and she then went inside. The kid, her son I was assuming, looked at us and walked across the street. He had his hands shoved into the front pockets of a black hoodie that he wore. He came and stood next to us. We nodded in acknowledgement. We stood there a little while in total awkward silence, and then he spoke.
“Hey, you guys are my mom’s boyfriend’s kids’, right?”
It sounded so weird. I’d never heard it said from somebody else before. My dad actually had a girlfriend and while he was still technically married to my mother. This is how we came upon the name Home Wrecker. You sleep with a married man who has kids, you might be kind of a home wrecker, just in our own personal opinion, but then technically, our home was wrecked way before she even came along.
“Um, yeah, I guess that’s us,” I answered tentatively. An awkward silence once again filled the air. Then my sister had to go and open her stupid, big fat mouth.
“Ha, you’re the Home Wrecker’s kid, great!”
His face seemed to have frozen in shock. He didn’t say anything. He just turned and went back across the street. I looked at my sister with my mouth hanging open not believing that I was related to such a tactless person.
“What did you go and say that for?” I asked, wanting to know what was going through her mind.
“What?” That was her response.
“You called his mother a Home Wrecker!”
“I didn’t set out to offend him.”
“How could you not have!” I was highly irritated with her, but then again, she always irritated me. She just shrugged her shoulders. I went inside. After that incident, I didn’t see him again until the moment he walked into my English class. It’s a small frickin world, isn’t it?
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Elias and I seemed to have been locked in a stare down. I was about to open my mouth to try to speak to him, but then the bell rang robbing me of my chance. I just wanted to talk to him, say I’m sorry or something. He then gave me what could have been the official stare of death, turned around, picked up his bag, and left. I sat there for a bit and just stared at the chalkboard up front. Mrs. Gomez prompted me, and I got up and left.
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At lunch that day, I sat on the side lawn of the school with a couple of my friends. It was nice and brisk out; the tips of my ears just starting to get cold. It would have been smart of us to eat inside or at Taco Mel’s or something, but I just wanted to sit outside and think and let the cool air clear my brain because it was all junked up with stuff. I sat with my hands behind me on the ground and my legs straight out front, tapping the tips of my crusty old imitation Chucks together. I studied my shoes. The one corner of the fabric near the rubber toe tip—which was drawn all over with squiggly lines and patterns from my pen—was starting to get a hole in it.
“Are you there?” my friend Kate asked, obnoxiously waving her hand in front of my face.
“Yeah,” I said, looking up at her. Her round face was capped in black braids. She always had her hair in braids, and she was kind of chubby, but as she always said, “I wear chubby well.” I liked hanging out with her; she was my best friend actually, but sometimes, as friends do, she got on my nerves. She was an only child and just lived with her mom, and she was so spoiled. They weren’t well to do or anything; it was a spoil that included Kate being quite used to getting her way. So when we did stuff she didn’t necessarily want to do, we never heard the end of it. Next to Kate sat Roberto. At that moment, his face held a frown as he was reading a paperback with the cover folded back. As he read, he pulled on his dark hair. It always curled right under his ears in the front and flipped up like crazy in the back. He looked up from his book for a moment. I crossed my eyes at him and then looked around at our campus. It was quite nice; people often though it was a college. It was a big, old brick building with gothic features that used to be an all boys’ prep school. The school had this clock tower that people liked to ogle over and nice green lawns all around. I wasn’t the biggest fan of high school, but I always felt a sense of pride when I saw ours.
Kate was waving her hand in front of my face again—her dark, almond-shaped eyes looking for an answer—, shoving a sandwich on wheat bread into her mouth. It seemed she asked me a question, but it did not register in my brain.
“Yup,” she said, talking with her mouth full. “He’s in my gym class, always riding around on a little BMX bike, never talked to him though.”
“How come, until today, I haven’t seen this kid before?”
“One, he’s not a kid. He’s the same age as you and three, our school is ginormous. You can’t possibly know and see everybody.” Kate was right on that one; our school was huge. As far as enrollment went, we were the fifth largest in the country.
“I guess that’s true.”
“He’s in my history class,” Roberto said, standing up.
“How come I’ve never heard of him? Or you guys never mentioned him, or I’ve never seen him riding around on his bike?”
Kate shrugged her shoulders.
“He’s really quiet,” Roberto said. “But I gotta go.” He waved bye.
“Are you in love?” Kate asked, poking me in the ribs.
“No, but all of a sudden he’s in my English class.”
“So?” Kate said, looking at her watch.
“He’s my dad’s girlfriend’s kid.”
“Oh,” Kate said, lifting her right eyebrow.
“I didn’t even know he went to this school.” I stretched my arms over my head while getting up off the ground.
“Weird.”
“Yeah, it kinda is.”
Kate went to class, and I went on with the rest of my day. The rest of my day, oh, the rest of my day where I could not stop thinking about Elias Bickler. Even on the bus ride home my mind kept going back to him. One of the things I was kind of concerned with was if he read my comic. I mean it was nothing big or fancy or super popular, but lots of the kids at school read it (they actually had a club that kind of revolved around it). What if he did too? I’m saying this because one of the villains in my comic was named The Home Wrecker, and she might have resembled his mother a bit.
That would be bad if he read it, I thought, as I stood holding onto one of those poles on the bus. My body encased with high school students, trying to keep my balance as the bus kept coming to screeching halts; the bus driver trying to shove more high school kids on. I don’t think the city bus drivers enjoyed the time of the day when school got out since they had to deal with all the teenagers because I never had a pleasant ride on the way home.
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