Chapter 5 Ali
Ali
Abi fell asleep, and I just lay there, holding my sister. She smelled weird. Sweat and a mixture of other scents that made zero sense. Something smoky and acidic, which only added to my thousands of questions for her.
She was restless, shifting and occasionally whining. I brushed my fingers over her cheek like Mom would do to us when we didn’t feel well. My touch made her flinch, but then she melted into the contact, a few tears spilling from the corners of her closed eyes.
Sleep and Abi were a weird combination. Simplified, it was sleepwalking, but it wasn’t actually that simple. It occurred more often when she was stressed, and from the looks of it, it was a safe bet that she was close to a mental breakdown. If she wasn’t already there.
Hayat’s arrival was a relief. I let her take my place without hesitation. Whatever was going on with Abi, Hayat could help her through it better than anyone else.
I could hear my parents downstairs, along with my godparents’ voices. Stopping at the top step, I strained to hear their conversation, but I didn’t catch much. Like me, they were clueless about Abi’s sudden appearance.
Returning to my room, I groaned at the mess still on my bed. I cleaned up the trash, putting the majority in the little recycling container I kept beside my desk. Once the bed was clear, I took a long, hot shower and then changed the sheets and bedding so I wasn’t lying in crumbs.
Instead of a fresh case, I placed another one of Sixx’s hoodies on one of my pillows. He’d left it behind a few weeks before and it hadn’t been washed, so it smelled like him.
Sitting in the middle of my bed, I snuggled the pillow to my chest, breathing in the comforting scent of my boyfriend’s cologne. Finding my phone, I read through the many missed messages from earlier in the day. Sixx and Evan had each sent more than a dozen texts.
I told Sixx what had happened, Abi’s bizarre arrival and how she was acting.
Evan knew about as much information as I did.
His texts were more throwing out theories than asking questions.
Mostly, he wondered if Abi was crashing after another “sleepwalking” episode.
That was exactly what I was wondering, worried that my sister was going to need some kind of inpatient treatment.
Shuddering at the thought, I tightened my arms around the pillow. I wasn’t too young to remember when Maddie had been placed in a mental health rehabilitation facility. She’d nearly succeeded in ending her own life.
Afterward, Banks had been a mess. He was an honorary family member and a good friend. I’d watched part of him fade from the near miss. He was the one who’d found his sister, forced her to puke up the bottle of pills she’d just swallowed, and called 9-1-1.
As traumatic as that incident was for Maddie, I wasn’t sure if anyone understood that Banks had been irrevocably changed from the experience as well.
Their family did the whole therapy thing, individual and group sessions.
Hayat and Abi were included in some of Maddie’s sessions because they were so close.
Evan and I were mostly on the periphery of it all, close enough to the group that it was emotional and scary. Yet not so involved that anyone felt like we needed extra counseling. By that point, all us kids had been in therapy already.
Having celebrity parents, being followed around by paparazzi, and having no anonymity in most public settings messed with a person’s psyche. It was a precaution in hopes of staying one step ahead of any mental health struggles.
Banks went to therapy, and he sat through the family sessions.
He showed up for his individual appointments.
It looked like he was just going through the motions to me.
I could see him sinking. Not so deep that he was drowning, but his face was the only thing above water.
I never doubted that Aunt Trin and Jarrett cared about his well-being, especially Trin.
She loved her adopted children so much. She was just too distracted with everything else to see all the pieces of the puzzle.
Maybe I was the only one who saw it, because I wasn’t as invested in Maddie’s outcome as everyone else.
She and I had never been close. I’d kept a distance between us because something in my gut never fully trusted her.
Banks was in my top-five closest friends, and that was primarily because, like Evan, he was always around when Aunt Trin and Jarrett had first gotten married.
I’d bonded with him, unlike with his sister.
For whatever reason, I’d seen that Banks wasn’t actually getting any valuable help from therapy, though.
His spark was no longer there, fading more and more each time I saw him.
It was like he was hiding his not being okay from everyone, including the doctors and counselors, so that no one worried about him.
And because the focus was primarily on Maddie and Avalyn since she was a baby, no one saw the red flags.
I tried to ask him about it once, and he’d emphatically told me to drop it—even as I saw the gratitude flicker in his eyes.
His silent thank-you for acknowledging his struggle, despite not wanting to address it.
I dropped it because I could see that pushing the matter would make it worse for him.
And now I understood it so much more clearly. His not being okay. Not wanting people to see his internal fight, while silently begging someone to notice. Just for a minute, I needed to unload some of the weight I was carrying. A small reprieve from all the pressure that continued to build.
Uncle Luca had already been a sort of mentor to Banks, but not long after I’d asked my friend how he was really doing, they’d begun growing closer. Banks had started hanging out more with Luca and his family, and Luca had started privately coaching him to get him ready for high school football.
Which would eventually turn into college football and hopefully pro ball at some point.
While Luca had been the GOAT defensive NFL player to date, Banks was a quarterback.
Not that their positions mattered. My honorary uncle was almost as good a coach as he’d been a player, and he’d been the best there ever was, in my opinion.
Football and Luca helped Banks more than any of the therapy he’d taken.
He started to get that light back, but even years later, a dimness still lingered.
Not dark, but definitely nowhere close to the light he’d once glowed with.
His relationship with Maddie became strained after her attempt to permanently delete herself.
That was something else no one talked about.
Or maybe they didn’t notice. Everyone still kind of tiptoed around the situation, and if I was honest, that pissed me off.
Banks was the one always falling through the cracks.
Aunt Trin and Jarrett could only do so much.
Their hands were full, and rationally, I knew that.
With Maddie. With Avalyn. With work and life and all the adult things.
But from the ten-year-old’s perspective I’d had back then, I kind of blamed Trin and Jarrett.
And if I let myself think about it deeper, I blamed Maddie too.
Not just a little, but with my whole heart.
As I got older, I began to see that was probably unfair to her.
My innocent-child blinders began to fade, and I truthfully didn’t know how I would have handled any of the crap she had been through.
Yet I still didn’t trust her. Something in my gut always held me back from trying to get closer to her.
While I considered Banks another honorary cousin, I didn’t extend that to his sister.
Fuck, I was sitting there sweating over my own bullshit while blaming other people for things that weren’t even part of my situation. Even my own mind was deflecting, getting upset about past drama when I needed to be focused on how to sort out my own messes.
I needed a plan.
First, I would find out who the unknown caller/texter/stalker was.
Second, I’d figure out how to make them destroy the videos and pictures of me.
I was fifteen, and that would make the content they possessed of me an even bigger crime than just filming me without my consent.
But if I called the cops, everything would blow up in exactly the ways I didn’t want it to.
Briefly, I considered calling Mieke. She was a freaking IT genius, and if anyone could hack and erase the material, it was her.
Getting her involved, however, meant Aunt Emmie would more than likely find out.
She wouldn’t keep this crap from my parents, and then it would spread among the Tainted Knights guys because Dad could not keep a secret.
He was so bad at it, we’d made our own memes with his picture from the time Aunt Lucy had taken a photo of him spilling a huge secret to Uncle Harris.
And that would mean Sin finding out, then Roanna and the other Blondes.
Once they knew, they wouldn’t keep it from Sixx.
Ugh! This was such a clusterfuck.
Taking a deep breath, I got back to making my mental to-do list. First, find the creep. Second, figure out how to delete the content of me, especially that disgusting shower video. Third, pass the semester so I could go on tour with my parents and Sixx. Fourth, figure out what had happened to Abi.
Not necessarily in that order. It was a to-do list. I’d cross off the tasks as I completed them.
Simple.
Ah, fucking hell, I was so screwed.