2. Megyn
CHAPTER 2
MEGYN
I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling over my tiny bedroom, certain I could make out some new brown water spots staining the corners. I closed my eyes. Moisture dripped. Not rainwater or condensation. Cold tears, sliding down my cheeks and plopping off onto the pillow. A terrible aching loneliness yawned open in my chest, wide enough to swallow me whole. All that held me back from the edge was an exhaustion that went straight to my bones, preventing me from making a move in any direction, whether good or bad.
I wished that someone, anyone would come by and talk to me, even if it was my dad, or my evil-stepmother, that wretched fairytale figure who had slipped right out of the pages of a book and into my life. Unfortunately, my parents, if they could be called parents, lived in California. The most I could do was pick up my phone and call one of them, but that also took effort and I didn’t have it in me.
So I lay there.
Aching.
Wishing things were different.
Knowing they never would be, that I was trapped in this situation, yet not floundering enough to eventually wander into true failure. I made just enough to get by. I could keep going, moving on in a straight path through this world that hadn’t the patience for people like me, people with dreams and no means by which to act upon them.
My phone buzzed on the thin mattress beside me. I groaned and flopped my heavy arm over my face. My situation being what it was, there were only a few people who could be texting me: my boss, letting me know whether she had any extra hours I could pick up; my best friend Maggie; or the spam number who wanted me to sign up for car insurance from a company I had never heard of.
And my phone buzzed again. I sighed and fumbled for it, following the vibrations until I reached it. I picked it up and held it in the air over my face, scanning the messages.
Both had come from Maggie.
“Are you doing anything? Can I come over?”
I frowned a bit. Maggie usually wasn’t so needy. That was my niche. I started to sit up so I could text an answer, wondering if something had happened to upset her.
A pounding echoed throughout the little house. I jumped and lost my grip on my phone and dropped it right on my nose. Pain shot through my face, red like the blood I was certain had to be oozing from my abused nostrils right about now. I sat up and put my hand to my nose and checked my fingers for moisture. Nothing yet.
The pounding continued. My heartbeat picked up as I recognized the sound as coming from my front door. The last time someone had beat on my door like that, it turned out to be a criminal running from the law after having “accidentally” run over his wife in her own car. That I’d chosen then to call the cops over answering the door had probably saved my life.
I wasn’t going to answer it this time either, even though it certainly would have been an easy way to ensure all my problems were taken care of.
The pounding abruptly cut off in a hollow slam, unlike anything I had ever heard before. I grabbed up my phone and turned it on, my thumb sliding shakily over to the emergency call button. Where could I go? Where could I hide? The closet wasn’t big enough. Maybe the intruder wouldn’t see me if I went under the bed.
“Oops,” came a murmur. It must have only been a split second since the slam, though it felt like an eternity.
I recognize that voice.
Still gripping my phone, fear and hope twined together in my heart, I stepped out into the hallway and gasped at the person standing there a short distance away in the foyer.
“Megyn!”
“Maggie!” I gasped again, and clutched my heart. “What the hell were you doing? How did you get in?”
Maggie smiled sheepishly and rubbed the back of her neck, rustling the short bristly hairs at the base of her skull. “I’m sorry, Megyn. It’s just that I hadn’t heard from you in a bit and you usually text so much. I saw you were home, but then you didn’t answer my texts. I panicked.”
“So you broke down my front door?”
Another sheepish grin. Maggie grabbed the door handle and gave it a bit of a jostling, showing me how it was still locked. “I must have knocked it out of the frame from pounding on it so hard. It’s not like this house of yours is the best ever.”
I shook my head and brushed past her. I unlocked the door and pushed it shut. The latch clicked into place and held just fine, and the lock still worked despite the literal beating it had just endured. “Seems fine.”
“What’s not so fine is that your door pops right open with enough incentive,” Maggie scolded. “You need to get a deadbolt installed.”
I snorted. “Okay. Like I have enough money to not only buy a good deadbolt, but pay someone to install it for me.”
“I could get my brother to do it,” she suggested.
“Maggie, you know I’m not going to—”
Maggie put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my face, her bright green eyes flashing with a mixture of pity and firmness and annoyance. A single glimpse of that brew and I knew not to mess with her. She turned me around and propelled me forward by the shoulders, guiding me to the crappy little couch my parents had left me with when they jumped ship. A firm press down made my legs buckle. I sat down, since that was clearly what my friend wanted from me.
Maggie didn’t sit. She stood over me with her arms folded, gazing down her nose at me. Though I knew her very well, having been friends since our first day of high school, I couldn’t help but to be intimidated. She had always been the more physically-inclined of the two of us, while I was the type to sit around reading nonfiction books on random subjects and doing arts and crafts. Adulthood had transformed her from a rugged tomboy to a rough beauty, with a lean stature and very short blonde hair.
Aside from being tough, she was taller than me, taller than many men even without high heels, and had womanly curves that were to die for. She had perfected a makeup look that was at once alluring and severe.
“I’m not offering you charity. You’d be doing me a favor, getting the kid brother out of the house. All you’d have to do is buy the deadbolt and buy him some pizza afterwards as payment. Way cheaper than getting a company guy to do it.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to your brother not to pay him,” I pointed out.
“And?” she smirked.
I laughed a little. The Ross siblings couldn’t have been more different. Maggie was driven. Her brother, Deacon, had an above-average intelligence that had earned him a free ride through his college of choice; after speeding easily through four years of school in only two, he had reverted to the state of laziness known only by people who were too smart for their own good. He was bored, mostly because he could do anything.
Maybe it would be doing him a favor, to have him come out here and work.
“Fine,” I sighed. “Next paycheck, I’ll put some money aside for a deadbolt.”
“You sure you can wait that long? What if I was that criminal guy?”
“Slamming on my door like that? I thought you were,” I retorted.
Maggie flopped down on the floor, her incredibly long legs stretching out before her. “So, what’s been going on? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I’ve been looking for something I can do,” I said. I pointed at some loose newspaper pages on the far end of the couch. “There’s some stuff that kind of gets my interest, but none of it would help me out much, and none of it is a replacement for my job at the coffee shop. It’s just more of the same, Maggie. I’m stuck and I know it and it’s been hard to deal with lately.”
“If you’re really struggling, you can come stay with me,” she offered, voice soft.
“What about your brother?”
“It’d be incentive for me to kick him out.” Maggie laughed.
I detected something in her laugh. A reluctance. Hearing that, I would have refused to move in with her even if that wasn’t what I already planned on saying. Deacon needed her more than I did.
“Thank you, Mags.” I touched her hand. “But I don’t want anyone helping me out like that. And I don’t want to give up this house.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“Can you blame me?”
“Sweetie, not in the least.”
My parents used to live in this little house on Staten Island, moving in right around the time I was going to be born. My real parents. My biological father and mother. Mom and Dad. Mom died when I was an infant, and that left Dad to raise me, all alone. That’s always hard, but for some people, they come out of it better, changed. Unfortunately for us, Dad had no idea how to be a parent. As soon as he could, he took his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Crystal, and moved across the country, leaving me alone with this house that should have held so many memories, so much potential, but was instead a graveyard for such things.
I could have left all the bitterness behind. But I couldn’t leave the bedroom where my parents had lain together, discussing the future. I couldn’t leave the kitchen where they had eaten their meals, or the living room where they watched the news.
I couldn’t leave this dinky little place, with its core of candy-sweetness under all the bile and black, burnt failures.
“Oh, no,” Maggie intoned.
I looked up at her.
“You’re spiraling.”
“I am not spiraling,” I lied, to defend myself.
“You are totally spiraling.” Maggie jumped up to her feet and reached for me, grabbing my wrist and dragging me with her. “Let’s get you out of this place for a bit.”
I opened my mouth to tell her I couldn’t really afford to go get coffee or eat out.
Maggie rolled her eyes at me and interrupted my attempt to talk. “Going for a walk is free enough, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t argue with that.
Suddenly, leaving the house felt like a pretty good idea. I’d been inside all day and the weather would be nice out there.
Sensing my agreement, Maggie pulled me over to the front door. I got my shoes on and fetched my keys, to lock up the door behind us—more out of habit than because it would keep unwanted guests out.
Outside, the air was damp and a bit chilly, rattling naked tree branches all down the thin neighborhood street. Staten Island was one of the most affordable places to live in the whole city. However, it was still NYC, so affordable meant still pretty expensive and of bad quality. For the price of a ranch home in the Midwest, my parents’ home on Staten Island was a tiny and boxlike construction with a coat of faded green paint. The front and backyards were all but nonexistent, thin strips of land that struggled to provide grass, or even weeds.
All the other homes in the neighborhood were about the same, all single-story and shrunken. A few of the pricier homes had walkways leading around the side. Some of the more industrious of the homemakers had planted bushes and trees in their yards, which could actually look quite nice at any other time of the year when all the plants weren’t dying.
Maggie walked down to the sidewalk and turned back to me. “Let’s go to the park.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and went off with her, knowing I had nothing better to do—and no choice in the matter anyway.