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I shrugged, and scanning the horizon, spotted the waning crescent moon hovering over the edge of the sea. “I had no idea, thought that was how everyone lived. Mom was always off smoking something and getting busy with whoever would give her the time of day, which was pretty much everyone since she was a knockout. Slim, pretty, with long gorgeous blonde hair.”
“So you get your looks from her?”
Slowly, I turned to him, shaking my head. “Don’t I wish? No, I think I have more of my father in me. We think the same way and our mannerisms are nearly identical.”
“You and your father close?” He pressed his right side against mine. The warmth was penetrating, and involuntarily I pushed into him to steal more.
“We used to be.” Just saying those four words tightened my chest, and I hunched over.
“Oh, I’m sorry. What happened?” His arm wrapped around my back. “If you want to talk about it.”
“That’s what you want, right?” It was all too easy to sense. The air was cool, and when I took a deep lung-filling breath, it chilled me all the way through. “I don’t really understand it myself. One day we were fine, but it seemed like the literal next day, he couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me. But maybe, things had been building towards a big explosion.”
The whole situation still made my head spin, and I’d had years to break it down, process it, and try to figure out where it all went wrong. I came up empty-handed every time.
“When I finally blossomed into womanhood…”
Landon narrowed his eyes in confusion.
“When I started my… moon cycles…”
With the passing beam of light, it was easy to see the rush of heat to Landon’s cheeks.
“I wanted an education. A real one. In a traditional school. Not one taught in the back room of a house, or in someone’s kitchen or garden.”
“Can’t see how that would upset anyone.”
I looked him in the eye, snorting softly. “You don’t understand the way I grew up. It was the wrong thing to say, and it was wrong to sneak away and study on my own.”
“You were home-schooled?”
“Sort of, but not really. It’s the best way to describe it, although I later learned it wasn’t the most accurate. Sure, I could tell you which plants around the area were healthy and which were poisonous, and I learned how by watching the birds, there’d be a change in the weather, or I studied the stars while watching the skies at night and knew when winter was coming by the changing patterns of stars.”
“You should really spend more time with Holden. He’s big into that.”
“I know.” For good measure, I nodded. “My schooling involved teaching us how to reuse items and repair those that broke to make the most out of them. I could hand-stitch better and faster than most I knew, and I was a bit of a whiz in the kitchen. But those weren’t academic subjects, and I didn’t believe for a moment those would get me far in life.”
“But those things matter. I sure as hell couldn’t venture out into a forest and know which plants are poisonous, and I just listen to the weather guy to know when the weather’s changing.”
Shrugging, I carried on. “Regardless, it caused a rift between my family,” I air-quoted the word. “Pitting them against me and my dad, and to a small degree my older brothers.” The memory came flooding back. “Frank, that’s my father, he stood up for me, and when I was fifteen, and easily of child bearing age, he suggested we move someplace new, to give me the life I thought I wanted, and the life he wanted me to have. My older brothers tagged along, and because of his actions we were shunned, so to speak, and any further communications were abruptly halted, aside from one brother who went back.”
“Shunned?” Just hearing the way Landon said it, it had such a negative connotation to it, even though it was true.
“I didn’t grow up the way you and everyone else did.” Not even remotely close. Ignoring the curious, tightly knit expression on his face, I continued with my verbal diarrhea. “Only my brother Everest stayed until he left Frank and me to carve out his own path.”
“That was pretty cool of your dad to give you what you wanted.”
“It was. And I appreciated it. I was enrolled in a real high school, but sadly, I promptly dropped out. Turns out my backwoods education was no match for the superior public education system.” My words were full of hate and ribboned in venom. Kids were mean.
“I toughed it out for two months before calling it quits and returned to the quasi-commune life we had been living after leaving the full commune. Turned out, what I wanted, I wasn’t even remotely ready for.”
Landon’s hand rested on my back, gently rubbing it up and down. It was soothing, so much so, I felt like I was pulled under a trance.
“Frank and I continued to live at this one housing development where he built items in exchange for rent. Then, he started getting sick. Real sick. Long story short, after some convincing, he visited a real medical person, and after numerous tests, learned he was having some sort of kidney failure.”
“Oh wow.” His pitch rose.
“It’s okay, he survived as I gave him one of mine.” I placed his hand above the scar easily felt through my thin shirt. “You can feel it here.”
