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Looking out for her these days means focusing all of my attention on her. I don’t want her to have the life Kelle and I had: the life of not being important to the person who’s supposed to take care of you. Some molds will take time to break, like that of not having much money, but it’s easy to control who I let into our lives, and I refuse to be self-centered. I don’t want Rae to suffer because I’m preoccupied with a man.
I hated Kelle’s men.
I hated my mom’s even more. She frequently got caught up in drugs and alcohol like my sister, but the men she brought around us…they were the absolute worst. I hated so many of them knowing where we lived, where Kelle and I went to school, what we looked like in pajamas. Hated the nights I spent lying awake, nearly sick with fear of the latest boyfriend. I hate now that I’m only good at reading people because there’s no forgetting what a monster looks like once you’ve seen one.
God, I can’t remember ever meeting someone Mom brought home and thinking he was nice. Not even once.
Hatedthat.
Hated that she only brought darkness into my and my sister’s lives.
For such a long time, I didn’t understand her. Didn’t know how she could endanger all of us so often, or buy drugs with money we needed for food and bills, or not care that our house was dirty, or ignore my reports of how cruel her boyfriends could be. I didn’t understand it with my sister, either, once she started making bad decisions of her own.
But I know now that some people push through their little hells and some people don’t even see there’s a way out. Mom and Kelle are the second sort: all they know is the mess of their lives, and instead of striving for something better, they numb themselves into oblivion.
I’m not like that. I know I can make a good life for myself if I really want to…and, more importantly, I know how a child should be raised because I know how oneshouldn’tbe raised. I’m not perfect, but I’ve learned from the things I’ve seen and experienced. Rae will benefit from that.
So, no, dating doesn’t matter to me. Even the kiss in the hallway was really nothing more than a small compliment.
Thinking about it prompts me to ask the guy, “What happened, anyway? In the hall, I mean. What were you choking on?”
He scoffs, but I can tell he’s relieved we’re no longer sitting in silence. “A Jolly Rancher—well, two of them. And not even good ones. One was cherry-flavored and the other was lemon.” He rolls his eyes. “I thought the lemon would make the cherry taste better somehow, but I was wrong.”
I scowl. “Ew.” I can’t stand cherry-flavored anything, thanks to Mom forcing cough syrup on us when we weren’t sleepy enough for her liking. I used to get sick over just the smell of cherries.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Actually, it figures it tried to kill me, huh? Cherry is the flavor from hell.”
That’s the damn truth, and I can’t help chuckling about it.
He smiles at me before he laughs, too, a little hoarsely.
Then a serious look comes onto his face.
For some reason, his tone is gentle when he asks, “What’s your name?”
It’s not a flirtatious tone, just nice, so I give it back to him. “Liv-Andria.” When his brow knits in puzzlement, I spell it out for him and then say, “Liv is fine. That’s what everyone calls me.” Except for Rae. To her, I’m Annie.
He’s nodding slowly. “Well, your full name is pretty cool. Guess your parents thought so, too, huh?”
Truth is, my dad was off living his own life by the time I was born, but I don’t care to talk about him now or ever. “Yeah, Mom couldn’t pick one or the other, so I got both.”
“Good decision on her part. I’m Landon.”
I start to give a nod of my own, but I freeze when I hear a noise from Rae’s room. It fades almost as soon as I tune in to it, leaving me unsure of what it was.
I don’t have time to shoo Landon out the front door before I go check, so I hold up a finger and give him a look that says he better not do anything stupid while I’m gone.
The calm look he returns seems to say,‘No trouble here, I swear.’
Because he doesn’t feel dark in the least, I believe him. So I hurry out of the kitchen.
I turn on the hall light and push Rae’s door all the way open. She’s still in bed, looking quite asleep. Because of this building’s layout, the only window in our apartment is in my bedroom, and our being on the top floor makes an intrusion unlikely; still, I’m relieved when a quick inspection of her room tells me everything is as it should be.
I’m just about to feel her forehead—maybe she coughed before and has a fever—when she lets out a whine.
It alarms me until it turns into, “No, I said no ants. Don’t push me in the ants….”
I relax.
