31. Lilah
31
LILAH
I was relieved when he didn’t follow me. He and Jude were way less obnoxious than Rafe, but they still had minds of their own, and none of the Bastards were great at taking direction.
They made their own way, forging their own path and going off-road when the one they were on didn’t suit them. I was still coming around to the fact that instead of terrifying me, their recklessness was a giant turn-on.
Maybe it was because they embodied everything I’d never been able to embrace. Maybe it was because I secretly envied them. Maybe it was just because they were stupid hot and even I — who’d hated them with the fire of Dante’s ninth circle of hell — couldn’t deny it.
I made my way down the sidewalk until I came to Mrs. Pulaski’s yard, then cut down the cracked sidewalk that ran along the side of her house. I was counting on the fact that she’d be dozing in her recliner without her hearing aids.
It was way more risky to access the backyard of my childhood home from the front of the house. My mom had eagle eyes — and ears. She also gave new meaning to the phrase “nosy neighbor.” Apparently it was only a sin to be nosy if you actually gossiped about the neighbors, and since my mom didn’t have any friends, she was content to busy herself with knowledge of her neighbors’ lives.
I passed Mrs. Pulaski’s trash cans, sitting up against the white siding of her small house, and continued to the backyard. I was glad her only pet was Mr. Riggens, an ancient cat too rotund and decrepit to jump on any of the windowsills. If Mrs. Pulaski had a dog, I’d be screwed, but the house remained silent as I crossed her overgrown back yard, climbed the chain-link fence, and landed with a soft thud on the dead grass in my mom’s backyard.
Everything was still brown from winter, but I knew it would be lush and green in summer, the air fragrant with freshly cut grass, the now-dormant flower beds brimming with life. From the looks of it, my mom had already been at work, a rake leaning against the house next to the back door, the beds cleared of dead leaves in preparation for spring.
I felt a pang of regret as I thought of my mom, bent to the dirt behind the house, planting annuals around the hydrangeas and peonies that returned every year. I couldn’t live with her — not ever again — but I also couldn’t help missing her. Or maybe I just missed the parent she might have been.
The one I wished she’d been.
And it hadn’t been all bad. I still remembered the way her palm had felt against my fevered forehead when I’d had the flu, the way she could laugh when Matt said something funny.
I stuffed down the swell of sadness that rose in my chest and headed toward the house in a hurry, hoping my mom wasn’t looking out the kitchen window, then I cut over to the concrete pathway — identical to Mrs. Pulaski’s — at the side of the house.
It was one level — the only way I’d been able to sneak out the night of Brandon Miller’s house party, the night that had changed my life — and I stopped at the window closest to the back of the house and leaned in to listen.
It was quiet, which meant that Matt was either reading or listening to music with his headphones on, assuming he was in the room at all.
I hoped he was reading, preferably without headphones.
I tapped lightly on his window, then waited. Nothing happened, and I tapped again, this time a little bit louder.
I heard footsteps from inside, then watched as the window slid upward.
Matt appeared in the opening, surprise written on his face.
He frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“Wow, really? That’s the greeting I get?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in months.”
Even in so short a time, he’d changed. His hair was shorter, making him look older, and there was a faint shadow on his upper lip that hadn’t been there before. His green eyes — same as mine — were guarded, his teeth perfect from the braces he’d finally gotten off last summer.
I realized with surprise that he was handsome. He looked like any other sixteen-year-old kid, which was to say not at all like someone with a religious freak of a mom who barely let him out of her sight.
“Sorry,” he said, “but why are you knocking on my window like a stalker instead of coming to the front door?”
“You know why,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I needed to talk to you. In private.”
The rest was self-explanatory: the fact that my mom wouldn’t allow me in the house, that she monitored Matt’s cell phone.
“Mom’s going to lose it if she finds you here.”
“So lower your voice and she won’t find me here,” I said. “And come out. My neck’s starting to hurt from looking up at you.”
The house was one level, but Matt’s window was still six feet off the ground.
“If she finds out, I’ll get in trouble too,” he said.
I wished we were like any other siblings, wished I could tease him for being scared of our mom, but that wouldn’t be fair. If he got caught sneaking out of the house — especially to talk to me — he’d be put in the closet.
( Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions…)
“We can be quieter if you come out,” I said.
He sighed and opened the window wider, then lifted one long leg through the opening, followed by the other.
He dropped to the ground on bare feet. “You better not get me in trouble.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Dishes.”
“Then we have a few minutes.” I looked up at him and felt my heart squeeze in my chest. I stepped forward to hug him. “I’ve missed you so much!”
He put his arms around my shoulders in a half-hearted squeeze. “Seriously, Lilah, what are you doing here?”
I pulled away and frowned up at him. Boys could be so dumb.
“Gee, thanks for the warm welcome.”
He looked nervously at the window and sighed. “I’m happy to see you, okay? I just don’t want to get in trouble.”
Annoyance prickled my skin. I took a breath and forced myself to remember what it was like to live with my mom: the constant paranoia, the fear that I might have done something wrong, that even if I hadn’t, my mom would think I had.
The closet.
I dropped my eyes to Matt’s knees, visible under the basketball shorts he wore around the house in any weather.
I reached for his arm. “Oh, Matt…”
I couldn’t help the sadness that filled my voice. His knees were red and raw from kneeling in the closet. I felt the ache in my own knees, a kind of fucked-up muscle memory, even though it had been ages since my mom had been able to put me in the closet.
He jerked away from me. “I deserved it.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “You never do, and neither did I.”
“You didn’t want to be good,” he said. “That’s why you hated it here.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”
“Mom’s just trying to teach us to be good, to love God so we get in to heaven. How are you going to get into heaven if you can’t follow his rules?”
He said it patiently, with maximum patronization, like I was a little kid at Sunday school.
Even worse, he sounded like he believed it.
“I don’t believe God has those rules,” I said. “You know that. If there is a god, he loves us, just as we are.”
“If there is a god?” He ran a hand through his floppy light brown hair. “What are you saying, Lilah? You don’t even believe in God anymore?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” I said. “I’m trying to figure that out, without Mom telling me what I have to believe. Is that so wrong?”
“Yeah, it is. ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.’”
“Stop it.” A weird light had come into his eyes when he’d repeated the scripture (Ephesians 2:8-9; ask me how I knew). “Stop acting like Mom.”
“I’m not acting like Mom,” he said. “I just happen to love God thanks to her. I’m not going to let you trick me into thinking that’s wrong.”
A pocket of dread had opened up in my chest. “I’m not trying to trick you, Matt.” I forced myself to take a breath because my voice had gotten louder as I’d become more panicked by the way Matt was acting. “I’m just saying that you — we — are entitled to choose what we believe, and that’s hard to do when Mom is telling you how she thinks it is 24/7.”
“Whatever,” he said. “I need to get back inside. Why are you here?”
I felt sick. The last time I’d come to see Matt he’d been happy to see me. We’d laughed about his latest infraction — a lie about a video game he liked to play.
But he was right. We were running out of time, and I didn’t want to spend the little time we had together arguing about religion and our mom.
“I wanted to tell you that I had to leave my apartment for a bit. I know I gave you the address in case of emergency, in case you need a place to go, but I’m not living there right now.”
Giving Matt a place to go had been as big a reason for leaving my mom’s house as my own mental health crisis. Before, neither of us had a place to go. Leaving was hard for me: I’d had to start from scratch. I didn’t want Matt in that position. I wanted him to have a place to go if he needed an escape.
“Okay?” He said it like I was stupid, like he’d never intended to take me up on the offer of a place to stay anyway.
“ Okay , I just wanted you to know so you didn’t show up there and wonder what happened to me.”
“Uh, okay, cool. Thanks for letting me know,” he said.
“Sure.” I sounded as deflated as I felt. I didn’t expect Matt to be grateful for the work I’d done to secure us a place away from our mom — I’d chosen to do that on my own — but I also never expected him to be so dismissive of my effort to be there for him.
He shifted on his feet. “So, uh, where are you staying then?”
He didn’t really care, that much was obvious, but I still wanted to take advantage of every second I had with him. Who knew how long it would be before I saw him again?
“With some friends on the mountain.” The words were out of my mouth before I could think about them.
Jesus. Matt was on Team Mom and I was calling the Bastards friends.
Hell really had frozen over.
“And you’re, I don’t know, safe there?”
I thought about the question. Was I safe with the Bastards up on the mountain? That remained to be seen, but if I wasn’t, it was because of my own desire for them, not because they would hurt me.
One thing I did know: I was safer with Nolan, Jude, and Rafe than I’d been at my mom’s.
Safer than Matt was at my mom’s.
“Yeah, I’m safe.”
“Good.” His gaze cut to the open window. “I, uh, I have to go.”
I nodded. “I still have the same number. Call if you have an emergency. I’ll come, any time of the day or night.”
“Thanks.” He gave a quick half-hearted hug, then hoisted himself back through the open window and started to close it.
“Matt!”
He sighed. “What?”
“I’ll always come.”
I held his gaze until he shut the window and disappeared inside.