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“Hell fucking no you’re not.” She was out of the car and around it so fast it was like she fucking teleported, and I didn’t know how she could walk in boots like that, let alone sprint. “You’re not going anywhere,” she told me, shoving me against the car, poking at my shoulders with her long nails, and I let her because that’s what I did. I took it. Even when it really hurt my back.
“They told me to drive you home. That’s it. I have classes. I have school.” I had a big ass fucking test that would make or break my future, and I was pretty sure I’d forgotten everything I’d learned in the past two weeks, that having her in my head again had shoved everything else out, and fuck I had to get out of here.
“You have a huge fucking mess to clean up from where you let your goddamn ceiling fall in, and you’re not leaving here until you do. Unless you want me to call the cops. They can pick you up for destroying property. Vandalizing. Taking off, letting the roof cave in? I’m not taking the blame for that, I’m not cleaning that up. I can fucking sue you for damages. Your little girlfriend too. Takethatup with the landlord. And the cops.” She pulled out her phone and held it up. “I can call Maddox shop right now. Call Mike. Have his friends come. This is damage to my property, bitch.”
She was getting louder and louder, right up in my face, and obviously she was talking shit. But she was talking shit when she came into school saying I had to come home with her too, and somehow here I was because people with some random authority told me what to do and what choice did I have.
What the fuck would happen if she really did call the cops? It wasn’t like I could trust anyone to be on my side. She could say what she wanted, make up anything she wanted, and people would believe it, they always did. No matter how drunk she was and how bloody I was, somehow they always bought her story. And yeah, a lot of that was on me, nodding and agreeing, but not always.
You’d think, somehow, with me grown and sober and her the way she was, that nobody would believe a word she said, that they’d tell me to just go on my way and not come back, but I was pretty sure that world didn’t exist. At least not for me. No matter what I did, no matter how far away I got or how hard I tried to convince myself I didn’t belong here, the universe slapped me back here anyway, so what was even the point of fighting it. It was a waste of everyone’s goddamn energy.
There were so many fucking missteps I could take that could end with me handcuffed or detained and not getting back to school at all, missing my Chem test altogether, and Jesus Christ, I didn’t know how I’d gotten myself into this situation, but I had a lifetime of skills to use to untangle myself and it was time to use them. No fucking way was I letting her ruin my life when I was this close to flipping the script. Even if I had to bow down and humiliate myself one last time. Hell, I was already doing it, what was a little deeper into the dark.
If I just put my head down and did what she wanted, waited for her to forget what she was mad about or why she even wanted me here, in twenty minutes or an hour she’d crash or throw me out again, and I could get the fuck out of here. Maybe that was stupid, maybe there was a simpler, smarter answer, but from this yard or this block with her breathing that heavy liquor stench into my face, I couldn’t think of it.
Zero options had never felt so much like home before.
CHAPTER FORTY
I’d seen the house a mess before,but mess didn’t really cover this, it was a specific kind of thing. Looked like every cabinet and closet and drawer was dumped all over the floor and the furniture. Clothes and dishes and makeup and bottles all mixed together on the couch, the coffee table going back to its roots as an ashtray and a pill box and a bar. Cigarette butts floated in half-empty glasses of who knows what, spread out all across the top. Something thick and sticky was spilled out on one end, the drips all congealed like this was some frozen-in-time museum. Which was pretty much what it felt like.
Much as I didn’t like it, I was a triggery, flashback kind of guy and I’d been around this kind of spirally disaster before. This was manic party mess, where she and her friends tore the place apart and didn’t even see it, where no one ate for days, and the music and the laughing got loud and dark and scary like a creepy funhouse, and hiding in my room and hoping no one remembered I was there was the only option. It would go on and on until I’d forget what it was like not to live that way, and then it would stop, abrupt, like slamming into a wall, like a lamp to the skull, and then it would be nonstop screaming about what a lazy fucking slob I was, how anyone who’d let their house get so filthy had something seriously wrong with them, and I agreed, we just didn’t live in the same reality.
It was all deja vu, clawing at me hard, begging me to give in and shatter. All one big, never-ending loop. Except for one thing.
The boxes were new.
Big cardboard stockroom boxes stacked up all over the living room like she was building a fort, most of them empty, still with the bottle separators inside, some of them filled up with junk like the rest of the place. No rhyme or reason— a pillow and a plate and the coffeemaker and some food wrappers all tipping out of one that was half turned over on the carpet. There was a bad vibe, but I wasn’t sure if it felt bad because I’d been away from it a few days or if shit really was extra dark. Seemed like maybe both.
“What is all this?” I asked her, avoiding piles of trash on the floor as well as I could so she didn’t accuse me of trying to damage anything else. The place reeked like alcohol spilled all over, definitely food rotting somewhere under something, and trash that hadn’t been taken out… probably since I left. This was not my fault, not my problem, not my anything. So tell me why I still felt responsible.
“Moving,” she said, lighting up a cigarette and pulling an open wine bottle out of one of the boxes like it just belonged there. This was the kind of over-the-top shit no one would even believe, the kind child services would take one look at and pretend they rang the wrong bell because who wanted to deal with this kind of paperwork, and fuck, I hated that it didn’t even phase me, that I wanted to believe I was a different kind of guy now, one that would be shocked by this trashy kind of shit, but who was I kidding. This was normal to me.
I shook out of my pathetic bullshit and stared at her. “Wait, what?”
“Moving in with Mike.”
“Who is?”
“I am.” She took a long drag and shook her head, blew the smoke out in my direction, her favorite thing to do since that one time in grade school I’d asked her not to. “Thanks to you this place is fucking trashed, gotta be out in thirty days.”
I didn’t even know what the feeling in my stomach was. Joy? Fury? Disbelief? Indignation? I thought it probably didn’t have a name. I really did not understand what I was doing here, and now I understood even less. “You’re leaving?”
“Do you ever listen toanythingI say?” She kicked at one of the box towers, sending it tumbling half down, and a dirty blanket spilled out on the floor. “Fucking hysterical you think you’re getting into any college. You are sodeeplyfucking stupid, I swear to god.”
“What the fuck am I doing here, then? Why would you show up and drag me back here if… I’m not going with you.”
“Fuck no you’re not going with me,” she laughed, like it was a question and not a statement, and my face got hot and shame crawled all over my body like I really had begged to go with her. Even her laughter could fucking gaslight me, I was that fucked up around her, and I hated it. She picked up a mostly empty glass off the table and dumped the rest of the wine bottle in it. “You. Are not invited. But you don’t fucking walk out,” she told me, narrowing her eyes and pointing a finger at me, and then flinging the empty bottle at me from a few feet away.
Cheap pink wine slashed across the front of my tshirt and the butt of the bottle hit me in the chest. Not that hard, but I made sure not to flinch anyway, because there were a hell of a lot of things around to throw if she was in the mood.
“You don’t have that fucking right,” she said, her voice getting thin and shrill. “You sponge off me, you steal from me, you live in my fucking house all these years and you think you can leave before I do? You think you have anywhere to go? Staying with yourboyfriend?That’s pathetic. What a fuckingjoke. What a fuckingslut. You’re not running off to play house and leaving this mess behind. Foronce, you cando some fucking work.”
She started grabbing the nasty ass, half-full glasses up off the table and whipping them all in my direction, sending booze and soda and trash everywhere while she screamed, drinks arcing through the air across the carpet, glasses shattering when they hit the wall behind me, and I backed toward the hall when I should have bolted past her for the door, but I was out of practice, cringing and cowering instead of pushing back and she was feeding on it, could smell my fucking fear like an animal.
I really did not belong here, and I belonged here in the middle of the day when I was supposed to be in class even less. I just didn’t understand how this had happened, how I’d let it happen. I should have been so much smarter than to get sucked into her guilt trip, gaslight, girl boss bullshit, but somehow I just kept getting caught in the same fucking net. This mess was rocking me hard, all the smells and the sounds freezing me, locking me in place until I felt trapped like a kid instead of a goddamn adult who shouldn’t be fucking doing this anymore. Who never should have come back here no matter what anyone told me to do.
“Get in your room and clean up all that shit and then get the fuck out. I don’teverwant to see you again, I’m not fucking kidding. Don’t ever show up begging me for shit, begging me to take you back in. I won’t fucking do it, I won’t fucking have it, I swear to fucking god, Logan, I’m done.”
