Chapter 6 Holden #2
Miller’s grateful expression came back as he shouldered his backpack and headed out.
I suspected he hadn’t had many friends either.
I learned he’d once been homeless, living out of his car with his mother.
Kids at school had spent the last four years bullying him for it, Frankie Dowd in particular.
Hence the ugly little scene at Chance’s party.
The idea of anyone giving Miller shit made me want to break something. True to form, Ronan had broken something—Frankie’s nose. If I hadn’t already loved the big lug, that did the trick.
“What about you?” I asked, sitting on my rock chair beside the bonfire. “Do you work?”
“I do odd jobs,” Ronan said as he gathered bits of driftwood. The sun was hours away from setting that afternoon, but I’d never say no to a fire, and he liked to watch things burn.
“You’re a freelancer,” I said.
“Sure.”
“And you live with your uncle?”
I was treading on thin ice, asking Ronan to actually talk about himself—his least favorite subject. He grunted a response that might’ve been yes, no, or fuck off.
“The reason I ask is that I also used to live with my parents and now live with my aunt and uncle. We’re twinsies.”
Ronan didn’t crack a smile but drenched the charred wood—remnants of last night’s fire—with lighter fluid and struck a match. The fire roared and then subsided, and he took his seat on his rock.
“Shit happened in Wisconsin,” he said finally. “I had to get out of there.”
I glanced at him without letting on I was observing him, taking in his details like an artist might make a rough sketch.
Ronan was eighteen going on nineteen with at least six visible tattoos.
He’d packed on muscles like armor, and his gray eyes looked as if they held decades’ worth of bad memories.
“What’s that all about?” he asked as I took a pull from my flask with my bandaged hand.
“Oh, this?” I flexed my aching fingers. “Or are you wondering why today is a vodka day?”
He shrugged. “Seems like every day is a vodka day.”
“True. Today’s been extra special.” I glanced at him. “You want to hear this?”
“If you want to tell it.”
Did I? Dr. Lange was always saying the more you talked about something, the less power it had over you. I found that impossible to believe. I could spend the rest of my life talking about what was done to us in Alaska, and the cold would never leave. Embedded forever.
I turned my gaze to the ocean, waves crashing against the shore in bursts of white foam, then retreating. Ronan was silent.
“Alcohol keeps me warm because Alaska stole something from me,” I said finally. “It stole something and left me with nightmares—memories—to remind me I’ll never get it back.”
“The camp?”
I nodded. “It fucked me up, and I wasn’t entirely solid to begin with. There were seven of us. It broke us down until we were nearly dead. Or wanted to die.”
Ronan was silent. When I glanced at him, his gray eyes were stormy, his hand balled into a fist, flexing the inked muscles on his forearm.
“Anyway, that’s why most days are vodka days. And why I sometimes put my fist through bathroom mirrors. Or”—I cleared my throat—“why I dare people to stab me in the chest at parties.”
A silence fell, and I hunched deeper into my coat.
Welp, if he was on the fence about hanging around with me, that should push him over.
“I don’t live with my parents because they’re dead,” Ronan said suddenly.
I held very still. Ronan offering a piece of himself was like finding a diamond in a pile of coal. But I’d offered a piece of myself, and now he was giving in return. Keeping the scales balanced. A feeling expanded in my chest, warm and soft and utterly foreign to me. Unfamiliar.
Acceptance. This is what acceptance feels like.
“What happened?” I asked gently.
“When I was a kid, my father killed my mother. I watched it happen.”
“Holy shit… How old were you?”
“Eight. He went to prison and died there. I went into foster care.”
My heart ached, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, except that I hated that Ronan was carrying that kind of pain. I wished I could erase it or carry it for him. I had enough baggage. One more shit-tastic memory wouldn’t kill me.
“I was pretty messed up,” Ronan said, his eyes on the dying fire. “I had to repeat fourth grade and did ten years in foster care. Eventually, social services tracked down my dad’s brother. That’s how I ended up here.”
“I’m so sorry about your mother, Ronan.”
He nodded, and a silence fell that should’ve been awkward or uncomfortable, but instead I felt our friendship cement into something more solid with every passing minute. The sun began to sink, the sky bruised yet beautiful. Peaceful.
“Well, aren’t we a jolly pair,” I said after a while. “Tell me something good that happened to you today, Wentz. Anything. Before I throw myself into the ocean.”
He rubbed his stubbled chin, thinking. “I didn’t get suspended.”
“Hey, there you go! A two-day streak.” I offered up a high five and got a resounding smack on the palm. I hissed a breath and shook my stinging hand. “Easy, tiger.”
Ronan almost smiled. “Your turn. Something good.”
“Hmm, don’t know that it’s good so much as doomed and hopeless but…” I heaved a sigh. “There’s a guy.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t say who, so don’t ask.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Of course you weren’t,” I said. “That’s one of your most endearing characteristics. Anyway, there’s a guy, and I don’t want there to be a guy. Not one that I might…”
“Want to fuck?”
“That’s a given.”
“Care about?”
“Exactly. And I can’t care about anyone.
Bad for me, worse for them.” I stared into the flames that clung to ashen wood while the breeze tried to blow them out.
“It’s stupid. And too soon. I didn’t come here to immediately have my every waking thought hijacked by someone I’ve only known for a few days. ”
Ronan’s eyes widened.
“No, it’s not Miller,” I said, laughing. “And I hate to break your heart, but it’s not you either.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that the guy in question is not my type, to put it mildly. An all-American good boy. Warm, gooey, everyone loves him. He’s the human equivalent of a grilled cheese sandwich.”
“So?”
“So? It doesn’t make sense. Yet I can’t stop thinking about him and feeling guilty, because…I may have said some things I shouldn’t have.”
Ronan took a pull of beer. “I’m shocked.”
“Oh, shut up. But yes, I stirred up some shit for him that I had no business stirring. I even gave him my number in the event he wants to talk. To me. As if I could actually help somehow.” I shook my head with a dry laugh. “It’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“I’m not one hundred percent positive that he and I are on the same page, if you catch my drift. I need to leave it alone. Leave him alone.”
Ronan rolled his eyes and chucked a rock into the fire.
“You disagree?”
“If you care about him—”
“Let’s not go that far.”
“—then tell him.”
“That proves difficult, since he specifically asked that I never speak to him again. And even if by some miracle he is gay, nothing good can come of something with me. Except for sex. I can do meaningless sex.” I glanced at him. “That’s not an offer, by the way.”
Ronan didn’t crack a smile.
I took a sip from my flask, wishing the bite of vodka would kill that soft feeling in my stomach that had been living there since the day I met River.
The fire flared suddenly as Ronan spewed lighter fluid over the charred embers. “Is that what they stole from you in Alaska?”
“What?”
“You said nothing good could come of you being with that guy. Is that what they taught you? That you’re no good?”
The doctors at the sanitarium had discussed the conversion therapy more than I ever wanted to discuss it, with convoluted terms and jargon and analysis. Ronan cut it down to its most essential element.
“Yes,” I said. “But it began earlier with my parents. And it’s more complicated—”
“It’s bullshit is what it is,” Ronan snapped. “Whoever made you think that, no matter when it started, it’s bullshit.”
He drained his beer and got up for another. He came back with two and stood over me, his expression softer than I’d ever seen it. He offered one of the beers to me.
I took it and put the flask away.
***
The next night, Miller, Ronan, and I strolled the boardwalk on one of our nightly prowls. The three of us garnered stares—mostly due to my fabulous wardrobe—and I knew whispers and rumors about us filtered back to the school. But none of us gave a shit what anyone thought. Least of all me.
Okay, least of all Ronan.
But I gave a shit about him. That afternoon, Ronan had come to the shack with bruises peeking out from under his sleeves and a shiner over one eye. When Miller and I asked what happened, he snarled at us to mind our own fucking business.
Later, Miller left us to hang out with Violet and finally tell her how he felt about her. Ronan and I went back to the shack.
“Is it true that Violet has a thing for River?” I asked Ronan with Academy Award levels of casual.
He shrugged. “They’re going to homecoming together unless something happens tonight.”
I nodded.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “What?”
I blinked, pure innocence. “What what?”
“You’re quiet.”
“It happens.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
I laughed. “Can’t a man contemplate the mysteries of the universe in peace?”
Ronan snorted but left it alone. Unconsciously, he rubbed his upper arm where a bruise lay dark against a tattoo of a black-and-white owl with orange eyes. I was itching to ask him who’d hurt him, but I had to leave that alone too.
A few hours later, Miller came trudging back.
“Well? How did it go?”
The bonfire cast light and shadows over his hardened expression. “About as bad as humanly possible.”
His boss at the arcade had given him three beach chairs to replace our rocks around the fire. Miller sat in his heavily, tossing his guitar case on the sand with more force than I’d ever seen him use.
“What happened?”
“Violet wanted to make a video of me playing,” Miller said, staring into the fire. “To put on YouTube or something. So I sang for her, and the moment grew big, and I felt things change and go deeper, so I kissed her. And she kissed me back.”
“That doesn’t sound terrible,” I offered, glaring at Ronan, who was leaving me to handle this conversation solo.
“It all went to shit,” Miller said. “Nothing changed. I kissed her, and nothing changed.” He ran his hands through his hair and then held his head, elbows resting on his knees.
“She and River?”
“Still going to homecoming together,” Miller said miserably. He sat up and hurled a pebble into the fire. “Screw it. I’ll ask Amber to the dance. Maybe start something with her and try to just…let Violet go.” His heavy glance went to Ronan. “You going to go?”
“No.”
“What about you?” Miller asked me, and I could see he hoped that at least one of us would back him up.
“No,” I said, ideas whirring in my head—one of them possibly a good one. “I have other plans.”