Chapter Nineteen

 

I SLAMMED THE phone back onto its receiver.

“Hey,” my mother said as she carried a large bowl of salad. “Please don’t break the phone. What’s wrong?”

I pressed my fingers over my forehead. “Abbey still isn’t answering her phone. No one is. I’ve been calling all day. I’m going there.”

“When was the last time you saw her,” my mother asked.

“When I brought her home yesterday morning and we found her mom passed out in her bed. I left Abbey there cuz that’s what she wanted me to do. But now I don’t think I should have done that.”

My mom placed the food on the table. “Lyssa, sweetie.” She took me in her arms. “I know you want to do so much for your friend. But in the end, this is her life, and you need to let her handle it the way she wants. You did the right thing by leaving her alone yesterday.”

I backed out of my mother’s grip. “But now I need to go there. What if she needs me but isn’t calling me because she hates me . . . even if it’s just a little bit.”

“What are you talking about? Why on earth would she hate you, even a little bit?”

I raked my fingers through my hair. “I . . . I can’t explain right now. I just need to go there.”

“Lyssa, please tell me what’s going on. Why would Abbey hate you?”

I heard the front door open and Franklin walk into the house.

“Something smells good!” he bellowed.

The worried expression on my mother’s face subsided, and she forced a big smile as Franklin walked into the room.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yep.” My mother perked up. “Go wash up and sit down and eat.”

Franklin walked over to us and gave my mother a kiss and ruffled my hair. “Graduation tomorrow, kid. Big day.”

I was sure that my mother hadn’t yet told Franklin all that was happening with Abbey. Since they’d been back from their weekend trip Franklin was spending a lot of time at the office.

“I know,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which wasn’t much at all.

Franklin appeared to pick up on my lackluster mood. He opened his mouth, and my mother took his arm, distracting him.

“I made your favorite,” she said. “Pot roast. Go wash up. It’s just about ready.”

Franklin grinned and walked down the hall. Men were so easy, I thought. I could never have sidetracked Jess so effortlessly.

My mother smiled at me. “I didn’t want him to ask questions you probably don’t feel like answering right now. I haven’t told him anything yet. I’ll fill him in later.”

“I’m gonna go now,” I said.

“Will you at least have dinner with us?”

I leaned my head back and sighed. “Come on, Mom. I can’t sit down at a table with you and Franklin and pretend that everything is okay and eat pot roast.”

Before my mother could respond, the front door bell rang.

“Who could that be?” my mother asked.

I hurried to the door and opened it. Even in the evening sun, Abbey’s tear-soaked red eyes popped out at me.

“She’s gone!” Abbey cried.

I stepped onto the porch. “What are you talking about? Who’s gone?”

“My mom.” She held onto my arms, and even though I outweighed her by a lot, she almost took me to the ground as I briefly lost my balance.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I said, holding her up, calming her. “Take it easy. Abbey. Breathe.”

Her chest moved slowly up and down in heavy, unsteady breaths. After a minute, she seemed to calm down and dried her eyes with the sleeve of her gray I.O.U. sweatshirt.

“Let’s go inside,” I said.

Abbey shook her head. “I don’t want to go inside. I don’t want anyone to hear me.”

“Okay, but we can’t stay out here. Someone will hear for sure.”

“What about the garage? We can go in there,” she said.

“Okay.” I tightened the flannel shirt wrapped around my waist and followed her to the garage. I punched in the code on the garage pad.

A few months after Franklin and my mom were married, he bought us a new garage door. My mother had been dead-set against moving into a new house like Franklin had wanted, so he settled on doing upgrades here and there. The old paint-chipped wooden door we used to have to pull up by hand had been replaced by an automatic door, but I liked the old door better.

Once the garage was open, we walked in. I picked up the buckets we used to sit and smoke on when we were kids.

In my first week of high school, I’d stumbled in on a bunch of seniors smoking in the girl’s bathroom. A girl with long dark blonde hair that fell loosely around her face, wearing tight jeans, and a buttoned-down white denim long-sleeved shirt held out a cig.

“You smoke?” she asked.

The unexpected invitation to hang out with older kids was too cool to pass up. I accepted the cigarette, slipped it between my lips, and waited patiently as one of the other girls in the group fished inside her purse for a lighter.

As soon as I was lit up, I took the familiar drag on the cigarette I remembered so well. The taste stayed with me and I didn’t choke. This feat brought impressive looks my way.

“Hey, kid knows how to inhale,” one girl said.

“This isn’t your first time,” the blonde observed.

I kept my composure, placed my books on the edge of the sink, and leaned coolly against the wall, nonchalantly sucking in my next inhale. Everything was fine until I imagined walking through the brush to the Hideout and finding Derek sitting on his favorite rock with his long legs stretched out before him, pulling deeply on a cigarette.

“What’s up?” he’d ask with a casual upward nod.

I took a deep drag on my cigarette as images of my old friend came charging at me in a sudden instant—Derek’s smile, Derek’s bruises, Derek’s body underneath that stained white sheet and his bloody shoes hanging over the stretcher.

I choked out the smoke caught in my throat, causing the girls to snicker behind shields of clamped hands. Through spasms of violent coughs, I flicked the cigarette into the sink, grabbed my books, and sped out of the rest room.

Before that moment of sneaking a cigarette with my older schoolmates, I hadn’t smoked since my days at the Hideout. I hadn’t consciously known why I had avoided lighting up again, but it became clear after the incident with the seniors—smoking conveyed such an excruciating sentiment of unfathomable nostalgia, that months later I still couldn’t break free from the memories of Derek that littered my mind.

Three years later, I hadn’t touched a cigarette since that day and I couldn’t imagine I ever would again.

I placed the buckets upside down in the middle of the garage. “You want me to close the door?”

“Yes. I don’t want anyone peeking in here.” Abbey sat down on one of the buckets.

I pushed a button on the side of the garage and the door noisily descended. I sat on the other bucket beside Abbey.

Abbey drummed her fingers anxiously in the space between her legs, against the edges of the bucket. The gesture conjured up rock ‘n’ roll memories of the two of us performing our private concerts with our fake instruments in the place we now sat, but now was no time to reminisce.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked.

Abbey stopped her drumming and for a couple moments she was still. She looked up at me and then dropped her head in her hands and rested her elbows onto her knees. “Mrs. Kasper from next door took her to a place. I fell asleep this afternoon cuz I couldn’t sleep most of the night. I woke up to this big commotion coming from outside my house. I looked out my window.” She pulled her head out of her hands and looked at me. “My mother was running through the streets, screaming and going fucking crazy. The cops came again. They were going to take her in, but Mrs. Kasper told them she didn’t need a jail cell, she needed a hospital. They said they don’t take people to hospitals, only jail. But Mrs. Kasper talked them into letting her go with her, but they said if they ever have to come back again, they were taking my mother with them. Mrs. Kasper put my mother in her car and took her to an institution, or something. A place they put crazy people. A woman from there called the house and asked me all kinds of questions. Said my mom would be staying there for a while, and since I was eighteen, I was on my own.”

“You’re not on your own. Abbey, you’re staying with me. With us.”

Abbey shot to her feet. “That’s a temporary fix. Don’t you see? No matter where I stay I’ll still have a father who replaced me and doesn’t care if he ever sees me again, and a mother in the loony bin.” She stared at me. With a softer, but sober tone, she continued. “And a best friend who lies right in my face. You treated me like a fool. We were all friends. You could have told me. You should have told me. Instead, you and Jess put on an act just like my father did. No one is what they seem. My father sneaking away to his other family. My mom pretending to be the happy wife and mother, but was sneaking bottles all my life because she was fucking miserable. She never did find that fountain of youth she was desperately looking for. And you, while I couldn’t sleep last night, I lay there recalling all those times we spent gushing over our favorite rockers and how cute we thought they were—Jon Bon Jovi, Mike Tramp, Kip Winger, Brett Michaels—you acted like you couldn’t wait to get your hands on any of those guys. Was that just to throw me off? Well it fucking worked. You fooled me. Just like everyone else did.”

I’d never heard Abbey curse like that before. I jumped to my feet. “Maybe I was trying to fool myself. I knew the way I was feeling, what I really was, even way back when I had posters of cute rockers hanging all over my walls. And maybe I was scared because I didn’t want to be that way and I thought the more I talked about how cute boys were, I’d be able to trick my mind into liking them. But that didn’t work. I was always like this. Don’t you understand, Ab? I thought all those guys on my posters were cute. I didn’t lie about that. But I didn’t fantasize being with them in any romantic way. I fantasized being them. I wanted the sexy girls screaming for me. Yet, I still tried liking a boy freshman year.”

“James,” Abbey chimed.

“That’s right. James. It didn’t go very well. And then I met Jess, and it was obvious there was no amount of talking about guys that could have masked the way she made me feel. But don’t you see? This wasn’t about you. This was about me. My sexuality. Mine. I would have told you when the time was right, but I needed to live with being who I was a little longer, you know? I figured you’d have all kinds of questions when I told you, and I wasn’t sure I’d have all the answers.”

Abbey’s red eyes appeared to sting with tears. “You treated me like a fool.”

I sighed. “No, Abbey. I didn’t. Weren’t you just listening to me?”

“You lied to me. You let me believe something that wasn’t true.”

“Abbey, I ju—”

“Just like my dad.”

“Now wait a minute. I am nothing like your father. This is nowhere near the same thing he did.”

“How is it different? Just proves nobody’s what they say they are. Nothing’s as it seems. I see that now. I just couldn’t see it then. My best friend was a lesbian right in front of my eyes, and I didn’t see it. My father had a whole other family for a fucking decade, and I didn’t see it. My mother was an alcoholic right in front of me, and I couldn’t see it, but you did. This is why I’m going to community college—because I’m fucking stupid.”

“You are not stupid. There was no way you could have known about me or your father. As for your mom, it was there, you just didn’t want to see it, but I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to see it either if it were my mom.”

“Everyone lies,” she said.

I looked at her. “I didn’t lie to you. I was just a kid. I didn’t know what I was.”

“I mean now. You knew now and you never told me. You did it behind my back, like everyone else.”

She turned away from me and started crying.

“Abbey, please don’t do that. One day you’ll see my situation is nothing like your parents’. I’m sorry that your father had this whole other life. But that’s on him, not you.”

Abbey turned around and wiped her face. “My mother drank herself into oblivion. My father’s gone for good. I’m actually surprised he stuck around as long as he did. The fake business trips he packed for grew more frequent over the years. He’d clearly chosen that family over ours—those kids over me—a long time ago. Before they hauled my mother away, she was so loaded, she was screaming, ‘Why’d you leave?’ ‘When are you coming back?’ And then, right before Mrs. Kasper and her husband put my mom in the back seat of their car, she yelled out, ‘I knew what you were doing all along, asshole! I knew you were up to no good!’ And you know what, Lyssa? I believe she did know. I think he was the reason my mother started drinking all those years ago. Being drunk all the time makes it easier to close your eyes to what’s happening right in front of you. But she knew. It’s why she tried so hard to stay young. A woman has to know when her husband stops loving her, if he ever loved her in the first place.

“The only reason my dad didn’t completely leave and divorce my mom was so he could stave off alimony payments as long as he could. I’m eighteen now. No child support. That’s not a coincidence. Everything he did was calculated for economical reasons. I don’t remember one time my father coming home from what we thought was a long business trip and hugging me or telling me that he missed me—not even when I was little. He would have left me forever a long time ago if it wouldn’t have cost him a penny.”

Abbey walked away from me. “I don’t want to ever be that stupid again, but that’s how you make me feel. All that time, of us hanging out and the two of you were together and I had no idea.”

“Abbey, I had to deal with this on my own. I told you, I needed to live with it for a little while and be with Jess before I went around telling people.”

“I’m not people Lyssa. I’m your best friend.”

“I didn’t think you’d understand.”

“You didn’t trust me enough to understand.”

I took a step closer to her. “Maybe I wasn’t sure how you’d react and I didn’t want to let you down, if finding out your best friend is a lesbian lets you down.”

“It doesn’t.”

I smiled softly at her. “Thank you. But you’re dealing with a lot right now. Talking about me seems miniscule compared to everything else. We graduate tomorrow and even that seems irrelevant.”

“I’m not going,” she said.

“I didn’t think you would. Stay here tonight.”

She shook her head. “I need to be home in case anyone from that place calls.”

“Then I’ll stay by you.”

“No. Stay here. I want to be alone tonight. I freaked out a bit when I saw my mom being taken away, and I needed to talk to my best friend, but I feel better now. So I’m gonna go.”

“Will you at least have dinner with us?” I asked.

Abbey turned around and smiled a serene smile at me. “I remember all the dinners I ate with you, your mom, and Franklin. I enjoyed them. Franklin’s a good man. I always liked him. I know you were self-conscious about growing up without a dad. But you just had to wait a little bit longer than most of us for your father to come around. But you ended up with a nice family.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I’d never heard Abbey talk this way before. She sounded so grown up, and maybe if this were the Abbey I had known most my life, rather than the Abbey who called in the middle of the night because she heard a chair move, I’d have felt more secure confiding in her about Jess and me. But this wasn’t the Abbey I was used to.

 

WE STOOD IN my driveway. Abbey wouldn’t stay for dinner, nor would she stay just to hang out in my room and listen to music like we’d done a million times before, no matter how hard I begged her. I used to be able to sway Abbey to do anything I wanted, but apparently those days were over.

I didn’t want her to be alone; maybe because I was sure I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone if this were happening to me.

“Do you want me to ride with you? Make sure you get home okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

I knew I was being pushy, but I didn’t care. I needed my best friend to need me. Times like these were when Abbey needed me the most, but now she seemed to not need me at all.

“I’m fine. I can drive home alone.”

“Then I’ll come over tomorrow.”

“You have graduation,” she said.

“Fuck graduation.”

“You can’t miss graduation.”

“It’s just a stupid ceremony. They hand out a piece of paper and we throw our caps in the air.”

“There’s a little more to it than that. Your mom’ll want you to be at graduation.” Abbey walked away from me.

With an air of confidence I’d never seen in her before, I watched Abbey get inside her car and disappear down the street into the late evening darkness.

She was gone.

 

“WHAT DO YOU mean you’re not going to graduation?” My mother followed me down the hall and into my room.

I plopped onto my bed and opened a magazine. She sat beside me, plucked the magazine from my hands, and tossed it to the side.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Abbey’s not going. And neither am I.”

My mother smoothed her hand gently over my leg. “Honey, I know you want to be loyal to your friend. You want to help her as much as you can. I get it. I really do. My heart breaks for Abbey. I wish this wasn’t happening to her. But I’m your mother and I want to see my only child graduate from high school. Please don’t take that moment away from me.”

“It’s just a stupid ceremony.”

 “Graduation is not just a stupid ceremony. It’s a celebration. You may not think so now, but when you’re handed that diploma, you’re going to be filled with an enormous sense of accomplishment. You’ll feel there’s nothing in the world you can’t do.”

I rolled my eyes. “Seriously, Mom. Give me a break. Half the kids in my class are rejects. Being handed the same piece of paper as them won’t make me feel very triumphant.”

“Then do it for me,” my mother pleaded.

 

I LAY ON my bed as the rain smacked hard against my bedroom window. I pulled back the curtain and watched as golf ball-sized hail dropped from the sky. “Can I see you tonight?” I whispered into the phone.

Ever since all the drama with Abbey’s family happened, I felt my mother hovering over me, watching me to be sure I was okay. I didn’t trust that she was somewhere out of ear shot as I lay back onto my bed. I had to be extra quiet talking to Jess.

“We have a big day tomorrow,” Jess replied. “God, I hope it stops raining by then.”

“I take it that’s a no?”

“It’s a I want to but don’t know if I can. My aunt’s coming over in a little bit. She has some special gift she wants to give me. I’m supposed to wear it for the ceremony. I think it’s something my grandmother gave her before she died.”

“That’s pretty serious.”

“I know. She doesn’t have any kids of her own. So she gets very sentimental with me.” Jess paused. “Did they really take Abbey’s mom away to some institution?”

“Yeah.”

“And Abbey saw all this?”

“Yeah.”

“She has got to be a wreck.”

“You would think. I mean, she’s not great, but she isn’t falling apart like I expected her to. She doesn’t need me. She wanted to be alone again tonight.”

“You’re her best friend. She’ll always need you.”

“I feel I let her down way too much for her to ever trust me again,” I said.

“Baby, you sound really sad. Maybe my aunt won’t stay too long and we can see each other later.”

“It’s okay. Spend time with your family. Don’t rush your aunt out the door.” I relaxed deeper into my bed. “Listening to all this rain’s actually making me kinda tired. I’m gonna lay here for a bit and then maybe watch TV with my mom and Franklin. I’ll call Abbey in a little while.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Have a good time with your aunt. I’ll call you before I go to bed.”

“Okay.”

“I love you,” I said in a low voice.

“I love you, too,” Jess said.