I give him a few more minutes, and when he doesn’t return, I hesitantly stand and walk toward his room. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed, hunched over with his head hanging down and his hands wringing. I move so that I’m standing just inside the threshold, and he looks up.
There’s emotion etched all over his face. I freeze, unsure of what to say, because whatever that was all about has him upset.
When I open my mouth to speak, he cuts me off with a bleak, “You should probably go.”
I want to ask him if everything is all right, but questioning him seems like an overstep. We tease and push each other’s buttons, we don’t do seriousness.
“Are you sure?” I ask, hoping that maybe I’m wrong about him and that we could possibly have a meaningful conversation, but he shoots me down.
“I didn’t stutter,” he responds coarsely.
The sharpness of his words stuns me for a moment, but that quickly fades when I realize that he’s lashing out at me because he’s upset. That I understand, so without another word, I nod and duck out of his room, gather all my belongings, and leave.
While I’m driving back home, he’s heavy on my mind as I consider what happened to cause his mood to take such a sudden shift. The reasons could be infinite, so I give up trying to figure them out. If he wanted me to know, he would’ve told me.
I try to not take him telling me to leave personally, but the sting is there regardless. It’s pathetic that I would even assume he would confide in me. I shouldn’t have even entertained that idea.
I know better.
I feel like a fool as I head to my condo, and when I walk through the door, I toss my backpack on the floor and fall onto the couch.
“What’s wrong with you?” Piper asks from the kitchen.
“Boys suck.”
“Tell me about it.” She walks into the room with a bag of chips and sits on the sofa next to me. “Who’s the boy?” she asks before shoving a chip into her mouth.
“No one important.”
“If he isn’t important, then why are you so upset?”
“I’m not upset.”
“Oh-kay,” she responds unbelieving, dragging out the word.
“I’m pissed,” I clarify. “I mean, why are they all such single-minded pricks?”
“Because they just are. Since when do you care about guys?”
“I don’t,” I retort.
She pops another chip into her mouth as she stares curiously at me. “Does this have something to with Derek?”
“God, no!” I haven’t spoken to—or even thought twice about—my ex-boyfriend who dumped me right before high school graduation.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Piper knows that Derek didn’t leave me heartbroken—he left me pissed off.
I grab the bag of chips, shove a handful into my mouth, and chomp down in frustration.
“If you won’t tell me who the loser is, will you at least tell me what happened?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem. I’m too chicken shit to tell him that I like him.”
“Seriously?”
“What?” I exclaim as she gawks at me.
She swipes the bag from my hands and tosses it onto the coffee table. “Look, I know you have no experience with guys—”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I didn’t mean that to be bitchy, I’m just saying, take it from me . . . guys are dumb. Like, stupid dumb. You literally have to spell things out for them,” she says. “How is this guy supposed to know that you like him if you’ve never told him?”
“Honestly, he’s not even worth telling.”
“Well, if he isn’t worth telling, then he isn’t worth you being upset over.”
TRENT
“This is the last one,” my mom says as she hoists a box of Christmas decorations up to me.
“Good, because it’s hotter than the devil’s dick up here.”
“Trent! Language!”
I stack the box next to the others in the corner of the attic before crawling out and stepping down the ladder into the garage.
“Thank you so much, honey.”
Taking the hem of my T-shirt, I wipe the sweat from my forehead.
“I don’t know what I would do without you.”
We head back into the house where the AC is blasting, and I flop down onto one of the chairs in the living room. “You’re a chump, you know that?” I say to Garrett, my older brother, who’s kicked back on the couch.
“What’s got your panties in a wad?”
“I could’ve used your help. I was sweating my balls off up in that attic.”
Garrett laughs, and I chuck a pillow at his head.
“Boys,” my mother nags as she walks into the room.
“Don’t look at me. Trent’s the tulip here.”
“Eat dick.”
“Ugh.” Mom groans as she swats at my brother’s legs. “Sit up and make room for me.”
My mother has the patience of a saint, and I’m surprised with how well she’s been holding herself together with everything she’s been going through with Richard, my stepdad. When she called me a month ago to tell me she’d found out about his gambling addiction, I was just as shocked as she was. Apparently, he’d admitted to lying about their finances to cover for the debt he got himself into. On top of that, he drained the bank accounts, stole the stones out of several pieces of her jewelry, and pawned them for cash. He even had the balls to swap them for fake ones so she wouldn’t find out, but eventually she did.
I love my mother more than anything, but I’m pissed that she had no clue about what he was doing. She married him and then just turned all the finances over to him without bothering to be involved at all.
He’s now renting an apartment up north in Carollwood, which is only twenty minutes from us, but I haven’t seen him since I’ve been home for Christmas break. As soon as I was done with my last final, I drove here to be with her. The last thing I wanted was for her to be alone in this big house.
I saw how hard it was on her when Garrett moved out. The woman moped around for a couple of weeks like the kid died or something. And then six months ago, when I left for Miami, she was even worse. And now her husband is gone. She holds herself together pretty well for the most part, but I’ve caught her crying a few times.
“I really do appreciate all of your help around the house,” she says to me and Garrett. “I guess I never realized how much Richard did.”
“You’re going to be fine, Mom,” Garrett tells her, and I know the smile she’s giving him is pasted on for his sake.
She doesn’t want us to worry about her, but we are worried.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to throw him out,” she says.
“Fuck that.”
“Garrett!”
“He’s right, Mom. That guy turned out to be a total taint,” I tell her, irritated that she would even second-guess her decision to kick him out.
Her teary eyes drop, sending a pang through my chest, and I refrain from saying anything else that might upset her. If there’s one person in this world I have a soft spot for, it’s her. We’ve always been close. Between her career as a pediatrician and her volunteer work with the Junior League, she never missed a single little league or lacrosse game. She was always there for my brother and me when we were growing up, and even though the roll of stepdad has been a revolving door since my dad left when I was five years old, her presence never wavered. To see her, time and time again, struggling to pick up the pieces of her life is a hard thing to watch.