Hear Me Now

by Melyssa Winchester

  ~*~*~

  We’ve been holding hands since my attempt to leave when he yelled at me and it stayed that way the entire walk from the bathroom, up the stairs and straight to the door of my mom’s class. It’s only then when he changed things up and released my hand, walking straight through the door, knowing that because we were late, he was going to get in trouble.

  My mom gave him a look when he walked in and it’s one I’ve seen her do loads of times before. She’s even done it with me, that’s how often she uses it. She rolls her eyes at him, as if walking in late is something she’d been expecting and it just proved her point about what a flake he is. It’s only when I walk in behind him that the entire dynamic of the room changes.

  Her eyes raise in surprise and I know that she wants to ask me just what the hell I’m doing with Dillon. Being where she is right now, all the eyes trained on her, she can’t. It means I’m definitely in for a long talking to when she gets me out in the car later, but for now, not having to answer her look brings me a whole lot of happiness.

  It’s none of this that surprises me though. Sure, I’d been surprised when he started walking with me to class because I thought it would be the last place he’d want to be after everything that happened, but past that, everything else was as normal as always. It’s what happened when we were both seated that changed everything.

  Waiting until my mom’s back was turned back toward the board, he leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder, his hand laying out in front of him. One side of his mouth is raised in a smirk and as if knowing that what he’s doing makes absolutely no sense to me, his lips start moving and just like always, I’m completely locked on them.

  “Hi. I’m Dillon.”

  It takes a minute but putting together the way his hand is held out, now hanging across the space between our desks, and the way he just introduced himself, I see what he’s doing and despite not totally believing his words, I can’t help but smile at the attempt he’s making.

  Reaching into my backpack and grabbing the pad of post it notes, I scribble my response. I could have easily spoken to him, but with the way my mom looked at me when I walked in and how sensitive I am to how she really feels about him, the last thing I want to do is call even more attention to it by speaking out loud for everyone to hear.

  Holding up the paper with one hand and reaching the other out to meet his, I shake his hand and as I watch his eyes read my words, I’m comforted by the way the other side of his mouth raises until he’s full on smiling at me.

  Nice to meet you Dillon. I’m Cadence.

  ~*~*~

  It was that moment, where he started to make good on his words about starting over that the disbelief I had in him began to fade. It wasn’t gone completely, but with the way he’s trying, I’m as into the new start as he is.

  If the way he was in class that afternoon wasn’t enough, he took it a step further this weekend, showing up at my house the way he did. It wasn’t only me that he wanted a fresh start with. It was my mom too and by the end of it, I’m pretty sure he even had her believing in him, which given everything she’s witnessed him do, is a pretty big deal.

  After hearing the speech from her again on the way home, yet another warning about Dillon and her belief that I needed to stay as far away from him as possible, even going so far as to warn me that she would keep me in class with her if I didn’t go along with what she wanted, I didn’t think anything would get past her protective defenses. As it turns out though, I didn’t give Dillon nearly enough credit.

  Spending the day together like we always do on the weekend while my dad works, we settle into our routine of lounging around on the sofa and flicking through the channels looking for something to watch together. It’s only when the light she installed so I’d always be able to tell when someone rang our doorbell starting flicking off and on that I pulled myself away enough to go and find out just who would be waiting on the other side.

  ~*~*~

  “Hey.”

  “Hi?”

  “I know it’s weird, me being here like this, especially when I tell you what I had to go through to find out your address, but um—do you think I can come in?”

  The talk my mom had comes to mind and I shake my head, pointing inside where she’s sitting, hoping that he’ll get the hint. If she’s home, it means he can’t be anywhere near me or this house.

  “I’m actually here because I want to talk to her. So can you ask her if it’s alright for me to come in?” he asks again, the smile never once leaving his face, meaning that whatever he’s here to do, he feels pretty secure with.

  I do as he asks and disappear inside the house and the minute I get to the living room and catch her eye, I motion to the door and sign to her.

  Dillon is here. He wants to talk to you.

  If I thought I was surprised with opening the door and finding him standing there, the look on my mom’s face is even more so. It’s obvious that Dillon being here is the last thing she expected and I can’t say that I’m not right there with her. I know he said he wanted to start over, but is this really one of the ways he has to do it?

  It’s not exactly a secret how my mom feels about him, so I just don’t see this going the way he assumes it will. At this rate, she’s gonna have me cuffed to her until my school is fixed.

  “Well don’t leave him standing out there, Caddy. Let the boy in.”

  Going back to the door, I smile and motion for him to come in. Closing the door once he’s made his way inside, I point toward the living room and following behind me, he doesn’t say another word until he’s standing about three feet away from my mom.

  Tapping me on the shoulder he hands me a paper when I turn to him and before I have a chance to question exactly what’s going on, he focuses his attention back on my mom and his lips start moving.

  “I know that showing up like this, it’s not right, but I need to speak with you about something and I didn’t want to wait until Monday. I hope that’s alright.”

  Turning to my mom I see her nod her head, her face a completely blank slate of emotion which doesn’t do anything for the nervous flipping going on in my stomach. If she’s not showing how she feels then I have no idea what she’s thinking or what she’s going to do next.

  “I can’t say that I’ve ever had a student show up at my front door, on a weekend no less, but if this can’t wait until Monday then it’s fine. What is it that you want to talk about, Dillon?”

  “Do you think we could do it privately?”

  What he says, it makes me laugh and it’s not really the question that does it, it’s the way that even knowing what he does about me, he still treats me like I’m the same as everyone else. He doesn’t want to talk around me even though he knows it doesn’t get more private for him then the way it is now. It’s not like I’m going to hear a word he says unless I spend the entire time focusing on his lips.

  Wait; never mind. Maybe he gets it more than I thought.

  “Of course. We can go into the kitchen. Cadence,” she says, shifting her body in my direction and away from the boy standing behind me. “I know how tempted you’re going to be to follow us, but I’m asking you to stay here.”

  With the paper still in my hands, no doubt something he wrote in order to explain what the hell he’s doing here, I’m pretty sure this one time I can heed her warning. I don’t plan on going anywhere until I start making sense of this whole thing. I might wanna know what it is that he wants to talk to her about, but not enough to risk him being unable to say it at all.

  Okay. I sign and as they both turn and leave the room, I slide open the paper and see the familiar scrawl across the page, this time, far less spacey and easier to understand. In a few lines, he’s given me all the answers I need. I just hope he gets what he wants.

  I know you’re gonna be pretty freaked that I’m here. I swear, I’m doing this for you. I meant what I said yesterday. I want to start fresh and that means starting fresh with your mom too. I d
on’t think I’ll ever be able to make her see me differently, well, at least not without a lot of work, but if I don’t try then we’re never going to be able to move forward and I want to move forward. I’ll explain what I mean by that later, promise.

  Wish me luck, I’m gonna need it.

  ~*~*~

  Whatever he said to her, it must have worked at least a little because for the rest of the weekend, even though she wouldn’t tell me what they talked about, she also didn’t warn me away from him. He’s right; with her he’s gonna have a lot of work to do with everything he’s done to the students in her class and his part in what happened to me, but seeing her giving him a chance, it gives me hope.

  She’s not nearly as anti-Dillon as she used to be and this morning, passing notes back and forth with him in class, her even witnessing it a few times, it’s the first time since my school shut down that I’m completely comfortable.

  Lunch at the ravine?

  Yes.

  Good because I already asked your mom and she said it was okay as long as we didn’t skip out on class.

  It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths he’s going to in order to make me believe in what he said Friday. Just when I think he can’t do anything more than he’s already done, he finds a way to do it and leave me even more speechless than I was when I first met him.

  Dillon doesn’t realize it, but what he’s doing, the steps he’s taking to prove to me that he can be a decent guy, he’s restoring my faith in something that I gave up on a long time ago.

  He’s reminding me that people really can change; if they want it bad enough and are willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen and if I didn’t already know it beyond a shadow of a doubt, knowing that he asked my mom before asking me would have sealed it.

  I like him. I like him a lot.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dillon

  I’ve been searching for one thing since right before my twelfth birthday and it might have taken a really long time, but I think I found it.

  I noticed it that day in Daniels office. The way my mom kept trying to make excuses for me despite knowing I did what I was being accused of. She might be completely out of it, but she knows the way I am and she knows a lot of the reason why I am this way. Sure, it’s not all my old man’s fault, but if he hadn’t decided that my underlying anger could be used in an underground fight club that he could make a profit from, it might never have happened at all.

  She sweeps what she knows under the rug and does everything in her power to defend me even though I’m not someone that can be defended. I might have been back when I was like ten or eleven, but now, definitely not. It’s because of the way she was in the office and the way everything has played out since that I see exactly what it is that I’ve wanted for so long but have never been able to have.

  I want to be put in my place. I want someone to see the stupid way I act, the shitty things I do and deal with me in a deserving way because I’m not strong enough to penetrate my thick head with the truth on my own. Someone needs to show me the way; push me to see the wrong in what I’ve been doing and not let up until I do whatever I need to in order to change it.

  Cadence did that for me. She’s the strong one. The one that can get through to me when I can’t get through to myself. Flicking me for rolling my eyes at her mom, smacking me when I moan or bitch about things that aren’t all that important, she’s pushing me to see the person that’s buried underneath all the bullshit. The kid I used to be.

  It’s because of her not letting me off the way my mom does, the way even my dad does when he does get wind of something I’ve done that I’m able to do what I am now. I thought about it Friday night after I went home and I didn’t stop thinking about it until I’d written the letter to her and ended up on their doorstep. If I’m going to make her believe in me, in her own view of me then I have to do it all the way through. I have to make starting fresh a whole experience and not just one part that centers on her.

  What Kayden tried to get me to see, the person that he said he remembered me being, I don’t want to run from that kid anymore, even though he might not be the coolest and most exciting person on the planet. I want to go back to him and knock some sense into him now before he turns into something even darker in the future. I want to own the shit I did, the horror I created for four years and I want to do everything in my power to fix it.

  Does that mean that I don’t still feel the urge to push people that are weaker than me around? No. I mean I’m still the same guy, at least that way. There are some things about me that even though I don’t entirely agree with anymore, I can’t entirely get away from. I’m still a pretty angry guy and the urge to take that out on kids that are different than me, it’s so damn strong, but I’ve got to push it down if I want this change to stick.

  I wasn’t always such a douche. I like to think I was a pretty decent kid before everything blew up in my face. I didn’t have the social standing then that I do now, but I did have one or two people in my life, kids like me that made life pretty damn fun. I didn’t hate people, hate wasn’t even a word I understood back then. I would hang out with anyone as long as they smiled, liked the same things as I did and didn’t mind that sometimes I seemed a little spacey.

  My mom used to call me a dreamer. I was always caught up in my own thoughts, staring off into space and imagining what life would be like when I was older. All the awesome things I would do, people I would meet and things I would do to change the world. Yeah, I know, it seems like a bullshit story to me too, but it’s the truth. I saw everything in color instead of the way I am now with everything being so damn black and white.

  Something happened when I was eight or nine and the color got all distorted and not long after I changed. My mom and dad were always fighting, he started drinking and she started drowning herself in the pills in order to cope with the way everything changed with them. I pulled away from all of that, the friends I had and preferred being alone to being around people. A few months before my twelfth birthday, my dad was taking me out for dinner and instead of going to get food, he took me to get my ass beat instead.

  Nothing was ever the same after that and for the last six years I’ve just gone along with it, riding the wave because it’s easier than stopping, standing in place and going against the norm. I allowed myself to become more twisted with each passing day until the kid that hung out and played hockey and soccer with his friends was gone and a monster who beat the shit out of people was left in his place.

  Kayden, he thinks that he made me the way I am. He actually told me that once, before he started hanging with Isabelle. It was such a random thing that at the time, I blew off but the more changes I’m trying to make, the more focus I put on it. He didn’t turn me into what I became, I did that on my own and the truth is, I think I’m the one that made him the way he was.

  Talking to Cadence’s mom, I went in with no expectations. I had a lot of shit to make up for with her and the one thing I was sure of going into the talk was that she wasn’t going to believe a word of what I had to say. I was going to have to show her, the same way I have to with her daughter and well, I’ve been spending every waking moment doing exactly that.

  It’s no secret that I don’t care a whole lot for authority figures. The way I feel about Daniels is proof of that. I think the guy is a total joke and I enjoy doing things that I know will piss him off. I mean the way he dealt with everything at Homecoming shows what a joke he is. It’s something that I’m pretty sure me and Kayden see eye to eye on. Instead of shutting the machine off the minute the shit storm I created started, he let it go right until the end. I mean if you want someone to take you seriously as an authority figure, shouldn’t you do things that inspire it instead of making yourself look like a joke?

  Ms. Taylor though, she’s different than Daniels and I knew it before I took one step through her front door. She wasn’t going to go easy on me. She was going to do exactly what her daughter did the first
day and give me back everything I gave out. She just might be the first adult in a very long time that I can look to and actually respect and it has nothing to do with how I feel about her daughter.

  ~*~*~

  “Alright Dillon, you have my attention. What brings you here?”

  “If I told you that I’m here because I want to change; what would you say?”

  “I would say I don’t believe that. I think you’re just looking for a way to get out of my class.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Are you telling me what I believe is wrong?”

  “No—well, maybe a little. When I first got thrown into your class, I saw it as a death sentence. I even told Cadence that exact thing the first day. I knew I was going to hate every minute of it. I also knew that because I didn’t give a shit what Daniels did to me, I would end up being in your class for the rest of the year because I wasn’t planning on changing.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, as much as I hate even admitting it because it makes me sound like such a chump, I think I’m starting to see what the point was.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “When Amy threw Cadence on the floor Monday, it bothered me. That’s when I started changing, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. I blew it off the same way I always do and just went back to doing the same thing the next day. I asked her to lunch because I thought that if she got to know my friends, I could get her away from the freaks. Deep down I knew that Amy and her weren’t going to get along, but because of the way she was in class with me, I wanted to give her another option. She was somehow better than Eric, ya know?”