After December (By Your Side #2)

Chapter 1 Healing Wounds

Healing Wounds

They say time creeps by when things are going badly…and I couldn’t agree more.

I’d suffered, and the worst part of all is I was the one to blame for it. I’d made a decision that had seemed like the right one, but it was difficult to live with. I’d abandoned the guy I loved.

Maybe abandoned is too strong a word. The guy in question still had his friends on his side: Will, Naya, even his brother Mike. They were with him. I was the one who’d stepped away, who’d gone back to stay with my parents, who’d left everything behind.

A year before that, I’d decided to go away to college and study a major that didn’t interest me, just to get as far as possible from the life I’d lived before. That’s where I met all the people I just mentioned, along with Jack Ross, who was something more complicated than just a friend.

He helped me understand that my relationship with Monty wasn’t love, that I’d need to learn to think for myself, that I had devoted my entire life to pleasing others no matter whether they wanted to make me happy.

I don’t think he realized that the first decision I’d make for myself would be leaving him. Jack needed to chase his dreams, and I wasn’t ready to accompany him. I needed to find out what my own dreams were.

I’d like to take the credit for these insights, which sound like they came straight from a self-help book, but the truth is I’d learned them from the woman who had been my therapist for the last year.

My big brother and big sister, Spencer and Shannon, had helped me pay for my sessions with her until I managed to scrape together money of my own.

In a single year, I’d worked as a cashier, a gas station attendant, a warehouse worker, and assistant phys ed teacher under Spencer.

Some of these jobs had overlapped, and they’d taken up so much of my time that all I could ever think about was how tired I was. And funny enough, that helped me a lot.

The chance to do as I wanted, make my own money, decide things for myself…it was a huge change. One I hadn’t known how to anticipate. Along with my therapy, it allowed me to see things from a different perspective.

And one of those things was my family.

What Jack had told me once, that they always managed to make me do whatever they wanted, had gotten stuck in my head. For a long time, I ignored the truth, the hundreds of signs that he’d been right. I kept pretending everything was OK…but then one night, it all exploded.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with Sonny and Steve, my parents, and Spencer. The only sound was the game on the little TV by the fridge. My brothers and my father had their eyes glued to the screen, and Mom and I were picking apathetically at our meal.

That was probably what started it—the fact that she and I didn’t like sports and couldn’t distract ourselves—because it gave us no choice but to interact.

“You’re not hungry?” she asked me, watching me push around a brussels sprout with my fork.

I was too tired to deal with her. I’d worked five hours at the gas station and four out on the fields, and I could hardly keep myself upright.

“Not really. I’ll probably wrap this up and save it for tomorrow.”

Mom glared at my basically untouched plate with resentment in her brown eyes, which looked almost exactly like mine. “Fine,” she said after a moment. “I’m not hungry either. Maybe it’s my cooking. Maybe it’s just not good enough.”

“Mom, I didn’t say that,” I responded.

“You don’t have to. You never like anything lately.”

“I’m tired.”

“You always have an excuse.”

She’d been snippy with me ever since I’d returned home, but this was the first time she’d just come out and attacked me, and I struggled to see why. Something was clearly up, but she wouldn’t tell me what. And that meant I would have to be the one to pull it out of her.

“You want to tell me what’s going on with you?” I asked. My tone was calm, but direct. Assertive, as my therapist called it. I had never spoken to my parents that way before, and everyone at the table turned to me with surprise.

My mother, of course, brought her hand to her heart. “What do you mean?”

“Mom,” I told her, “you’ve been acting weird, anyone can see it. What I can’t understand is why you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

She and Dad exchanged glances. They’d been doing that a lot lately. I knew that they had talked about the situation, and it enraged me that they were both sitting there playing dumb.

“Well?” I insisted.

Dad warned me, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”

“I haven’t talked to her any way,” I said, “I just asked what was going on and why you keep nitpicking at me.”

Sonny and Steve burst out laughing, and I gripped my fork so tight in my fist, I was worried I’d bend it. Sonny told me I was out of my mind, and Steve added, “Yeah, since you came back, you think the whole world’s against you.”

“I don’t think anything,” I replied, “it’s just that all of you are talking about me behind my back, and I’m over it.”

“No one’s talking about you,” my father reassured me. He was lying, I could tell. He even blushed a little before he glanced over at Mom.

“Oh yeah?” I fired back. “Then why do you two keep looking back and forth like that?”

“We’re not!” Mom shouted.

“You are!”

Steve pretended to cough, saying the word psycho as he and Sonny cracked up. I was furious and could feel the blood draining from my face, and that made me yell at my brothers for the first time in ages: “Can you shut up for once?”

“Jennifer!” my mother responded. “That’s enough! No one’s plotting against you! Stop being paranoid!”

“I’m not paranoid! Y’all are up to something!”

“Like what? Your brothers are laughing! What’s wrong with that?” Mom asked.

“It’s not that they’re laughing,” I told her, my voice getting louder, “it’s that they’re making fun of me! They’ve been making fun of me constantly, and you never say anything, and Dad doesn’t either!”

My brothers turned irate, but Mom talked over them: “Where is all this coming from? Why now? When we’re trying to have dinner in peace?”

I told her she’d started it, that she’d been acting weird with me ever since I’d returned home and I didn’t understand why.

I asked whether she even wanted me back, or whether I was just extra now.

She shouted back that I was pushing it, and I saw my father’s back straighten as he got ready to intervene.

“You’re taking it too far!” he screamed. That wasn’t like him. But I stood my ground and asked if he was really going to deny that Sonny and Steve made fun of me all the time. Sonny jumped in to tell me to stop making everyone feel bad, and to top it off, he threw a napkin in my face.

At that point, I lost control: “Can you not just leave me alone? Do you two really have nothing better to do than mess with your little sister? Shouldn’t you maybe try to drag your garage business out of debt for once? Focus on your own shit and stay out of my business!”

That was the first time in history I’d gotten them both to shut up. But Mom was fiery red, which meant I’d really gotten under her skin. She pointed at me and said, “You can’t just go through life making everyone else feel miserable, Jennifer!”

“Everyone else? What about me?! Have you ever asked yourself how I feel, or does that just not matter to you?”

“When did you decide it was OK to talk to people that way?” she screamed, and started burbling something about how I’d changed since I’d gone away to college, and I must have picked up my bad behavior from my friends there and the guy I had gone out with.

For some reason, since my return, Mom had refused to call Jack by his name. He was always that guy you were going out with, and her tone, which had once been affectionate, was now totally disrespectful.

I agreed with her, though, and I let her know it, slamming my fork down on the table: “You’re right! Jack opened my eyes to lots of things!”

“Exactly,” Mom said, and I realized that was the answer she’d been looking for. “He got into your head and turned you against us! He even got your old boyfriend thrown in jail!”

I couldn’t answer—her words had shocked me too much. Frozen, I noticed that Spencer, who hadn’t yet said a word, stood and warned her in a steely tone, “Mom, no. Don’t go there.”

She wasn’t used to people defending me, especially not against her, and she almost flinched as she said, “I’m just telling it like it is.”

“He was an asshole, and he got what he deserved,” Spencer said, and when Dad stood up and shouted at him, Spencer cut him off. “Stay out of it, Dad.”

Mom yelled that getting Monty arrested had caused all sorts of problems for them: “Do you know how the rest of the neighborhood has looked at us since then? Do you know what they say about us? It’s like we don’t even exist anymore.”

“He was hitting Jenny, Mom!” Spencer screamed.

“That’s what she says!”

That made me react. I had been miffed before the subject of Monty came up, but now I saw what was really going on, and it shocked me.

Mom wasn’t mad that I was back home, she was mad because things had changed in her life.

She wasn’t worried about some maniac who might come stalking me, she was worried about the inconvenience it might cause her.

Before I realized it, I heard my chair sliding backward and found myself running toward the stairs. My movements were at once robotic and enraged. Enraged at my mother, at the twins… I couldn’t believe a year had passed and people still didn’t believe me.

Because most of them didn’t. A few people in the neighborhood, maybe, but even then, they weren’t brave enough to say anything.

Monty just wasn’t the kind of guy they looked at as an abuser.

He was handsome, funny, and good at basketball.

For many, he was the perfect man. And I was the weird girl who had insisted on going off to college, returned home without warning, and ruined a guy’s life by turning him in to the cops.