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Mali shrugs. “He grabbed his keys and stormed out the door while you were busy displaying your colorful vocabulary.”
Of course he did. He always has been a fucking coward when it comes to having to face shit he doesn’t want to deal with. I love him, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get the urge to strangle him at times. And he’s being exceptionally infuriating lately.
Going back to the task at hand of getting into Hayes’s Apple ID, I put in another guess.
Invalid Password.
“Son of a motherfucking bitch,” I mutter under my breath, only for Mali to raise her brows at me warningly.
As if she doesn’t say worse.
I watchas the waves break against the shore. It’s been a long time since I’ve come up here. This shitty old ice cream place closed down a few years ago, but its bones still remain. After my dad left, this is where I came to think. To give myself a minute of not having to pretend to be strong. I’d climb up to the roof and sit on this ledge, letting my feet hang off the edge, and just watch the ocean.
I guess old habits really do die hard.
My phone goes off, adding to the building list of notifications, but I can’t bring myself to look at it. There are so many different emotions running through me. Emotions I can’t seem to make sense of.
Hurt.
Anger.
Chaos.
Confusion.
It’s like yesterday, only intensified.
I’m sure if I answered one of Laiken’s calls, she would be able to make me feel better, but right now, I just can’t. I need to feel this. It’s all the things I forced myself to block out after I accepted the fact that he was never coming back. And even though I knew it then, there was still that little sliver of hope.
A part of me wonders if it would bother me less if he had gotten his life together. If it was something about us that made him drink until he passed out every night. At least then I’d have something to blame it all on, rather than having to come to terms with the fact that he simply loved his alcohol more than anything else in his life.
I think the worst part is remembering the times he wasn’t drunk. When I was little and he was an actual father. And believe it or not, he was a good one. He bought me my first hockey stick after we watched a game together on TV. God, he was so fucking proud when he came to my first game.
My parents always looked so happy together. Dad would come home every payday with a bouquet of flowers just to show Mom he loved her. And when Devin got jealous, he would pull one of them out and hand it to her. But she was only seven when he started drinking.
They kept up appearances, making us look like this loving family, but inside those four walls, it was hell. My mom never told us what led to his drinking. She always said it wasn’t our burden to bear. All I remember is him coming home one day, stumbling through the front door, drunk off his ass. And it only got worse from there.
The fighting was the hardest part. All of the screaming that would come through the walls, no matter how much Mom tried to keep her voice down. I sheltered Devin from it as much as I could. She thought I was just being a cool big brother who wanted to listen to music with her while dancing around the room or jumping on the bed. I don’t think she ever realized I was just trying to keep her from hearing it.
Then the time came where he left, and the sound of the door slamming shut haunted me for months.
Mom was an emotional basket case—crying every night after spending the day being strong for us. The house that was once so loving and warm was now aGroundhog Daynightmare that never seemed to end. Devin couldn’t understand that he wasn’t coming back, and I was left to be the man of the house.
Let me tell you, fifteen is too young to be given that kind of responsibility. I was still trying to figure out who the hell I was when the world I knew was ripped out from under me. All the lies I told myself—that it would get better eventually—they were shot to hell with everything else I thought I knew.
But if he was such a shit person, why do I feel like I lost something?
The sound of someone climbing up the side of the building barely registers as I keep my eyes on the ocean, but I don’t turn around to see who it is. There’s only one person who knows about this place. And when Cam sits down next to me with a six pack of beer, he pops one open and hands it to me.
“Thanks,” I say quietly.
We sit there in silence, letting the cold beer battle against the heat as it slides down our throats. It’s a little ironic—drinking to get over the loss of my alcoholic father—but Devin has made sure to drill into my head that I am nothing like him. The thing is, I want to be.
Not the version of him that walked out on his family. I’m talking about the dad that would play hockey with me in the street and taught me how to lace up my skates. The one that danced with my mom in the middle of the living room just because he knew it made her smile.
That’s the one I want to be like.
That’sthe one I’m grieving.
