The next afternoon, I fixed a nasty clog in 2C’s toilet, and then the rest of the day and night unrolled in front of me like an endless stretch of hours with nothing to fill them. The old hollow hunger had started to hit me when I remembered the Shack. Unless Miller was there, I’d still be alone, but it was a better kind of alone. Cleaner.
I hit the convenience store for lighter fluid and beer. The young guy behind the counter didn’t card me. The tattoos helped, but I didn’t look eighteen anyway. I didn’t feel eighteen. When my dad picked up that baseball bat, he beat my childhood out of me too.
Miller showed up at the Shack an hour after I did, carrying a banged-up guitar case. He sat down on a small boulder in front of the firepit and laid the case over his lap.
“I caught Chet fucking with it,” he said, answering my look. “I’ll have to bring it everywhere from now on. Here. To school. Fucking asshole.”
My skin grew hot at the thought of his mom’s lowlife boyfriend messing with that guitar. I remembered what Shiloh had said about Miller needing his hands to play. To make something of himself. There wasn’t much I was good for. No talents or special skills. But Miller was fucking smart and he thought about what he said before he said it. I nearly asked him to play and handed him a beer instead.
We shot the shit for a few minutes and then I caught him taking in my tattoos the way Shiloh had. Except when she did it, there’d been more than curiosity there. I felt it wherever her brown eyes landed on my skin, had noticed her lips parting just a little…
Cut it out.
I buried thoughts of Shiloh and told Miller my story. I said the words that tasted like blood. But the Shack was a place where you could be yourself, no matter how fucked up.
Still, I waited for Miller to decide I must be too much of a psycho to hang out with anymore, but he let it be and said nothing. What could he say anyway? Nothing that would change what happened. Nothing I could do, either. My chance to stop my dad had passed and I’d never get it back.
When I returned from gathering more driftwood for the fire, Miller was messing with his guitar.
“It’s about time,” I said.
“I don’t play much for people.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know. Besides, you don’t want to hear the shit I’ve been writing.”
I dumped the wood over the smoldering remains of the first fire I’d lit. “How the fuck do you know that?”
“What kind of music do you listen to?”
“Heavy stuff. Melvins. Tool.”
“Yeah, what I play is not that. Mostly, I’ve been writing songs for a girl.”
“A girl.” I popped another beer and handed it over. “Now I really feel bad that you can’t get drunk.”
“Amen,” he said, and we clinked beer bottles. Thanks to his diabetes, Miller was stuck with a two-beer maximum.
“What’s the story?” I asked.
“You’ll just call me a pussy, tell me to fuck someone else and to get over it.”
“Yeah, maybe I will.”
He laughed but it collapsed into a sigh. “It’s hopeless, is what it is. She’s perfect and rich, and I’m a poor bastard without a working pancreas.”
I snorted a laugh.
“Her name is Violet,” Miller said, his eyes on the fire. “When I was thirteen, I passed out in her backyard, pissed myself, and woke up in the hospital to see her sitting there, looking like a mess. Crying over me. Because she cared, you know?”
I didn’t know. I’d never had a girl cry over me. Couldn’t imagine it.
“That was the moment I knew she was it for me. Always.” Miller’s voice turned bitter. “And the same day we swore a blood oath to stay friends. Violet’s idea.” He took off his beanie and ran a hand through his brown hair. “So there you go.”
“Yep. You need to fuck someone else and get over it.”
I was going to stay out of his business like he’d stayed out of mine, but I remembered all the times my mother was ready to take me and get the hell away from Dad and never did. And then one day, it was too late.
“Nah, that’s bullshit,” I said. “You need to tell her.”
Miller frowned. “She’s hellbent on us being friends. She thinks it’d ruin us if we tried to be more.”
“So? Tell her anyway.”
“I can’t. She’d shoot me down, and things would never be the same. Though, I guess they’re pretty fucked already.”
“So don’t talk to her,” I said. “Just…I don’t know. Kiss her.”
Shiloh’s perfect lips rose in my mind. I took a sip a beer to wash the imagined taste of her out of my mouth.
“No way,” Miller said.
“Why the hell not?”
He made a sour face. “Uh, fucking boundaries, for one thing. She’s told me how she feels, explicitly. Friends. I have to honor that.”
I snorted and finished off my beer.
“What can I do?” Miller asked miserably. “I told you, we swore a blood oath.”
“When you were kids. Does she suspect you like her?”
“Not exactly.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.” Miller kicked at the sand at his feet. “There’s a party tonight. She’ll be there.”
“So, go to the party and tell her.”
“I just said—”
“You gotta fight, man,” I said. Practically shouted. Visions of my mom, bloody and motionless on the kitchen floor came at me out of nowhere. And me, crawling across the blood-smeared linoleum to help her. But I was too late.
“You fight,” I said, “because if you don’t, it’ll be too late. And too late is fucking death.”
Miller stared, shocked. I looked away and forced my hands to unclench, waiting for him to tell me to take my crazy shit and get the fuck out.
But he didn’t.
“She needs me to be her friend,” he said after a minute. “She needs…me.”
“So you’re her pack mule. You carry all her shit and try to make life easier on her because you care about her. What about you?”
Miller started to answer but then grew quiet. Thinking. Finally, he put his guitar back in its case and stood up.
“You want to come?” he asked. “I mean, it’s probably going to be a bunch of drunk jocks playing beer pong to shit music.”
“I’m coming,” I said, kicking sand over the fire. “I told you. I got your back.”
“Why?”
I stared. After everything he knew about me, he wanted to know why I bothered to hang out with him.
“You don’t annoy the living shit out of me,” I said gruffly. “Good enough?”
He grinned. “Good enough.”
I turned to grab my jacket so he couldn’t see my face.
The party was just what Miller had said it would be. Chance Blaylock, the center for the football team, invited half the school to his place at the start of every year. His team was wasted and playing beer pong in the kitchen while a sound system blasted popular music all over the huge house. We pushed through a crowd of dancers, Miller searching for Violet among the faces in the dark.