Chapter 2
Greyson
“I’m just saying, I don’t get why people think Shay would win the bet over me,” Landon said, tossing his hands around like a madman as we walked home from the party. “I can’t stand the woman. There’s no way I’d fall in love with the chick.”
Ever since he’d made the bet with Shay a few weeks back, he’d been going on about how much he couldn’t stand her. Which, in turn, made me think he liked her a lot more than he was interested in admitting.
“Anyway, sorry I made you talk to her weird cousin,” he said, running his hand through his hair.
“She’s not that weird.”
“Cardigans every day. Head always in a book. Weird.”
“Just because someone is different doesn’t make them weird,” I said, getting a bit defensive about Eleanor.
Sure, she had her quirks, but so did Landon.
He bit down on forks and pulled them out of his mouth, making an unbearable sound.
He couldn’t watch a movie without going “Wait, rewind that, I missed something.” He couldn’t get over his infatuation with Shay and kept lying to himself about not having feelings for her.
Maybe no one else knew how much he’d randomly mention her, but as his best friend, I heard her name dropped a lot.
Plus, it really did bother me that he spoke about Eleanor like that. Sure, maybe Eleanor wore a lot of cardigans, but at least she seemed like a good person.
“All right, all right. I see you made a new friend today,” he said, tossing his hands up. “I still think she’s a weird loner, but whatever.”
I guess in a way Eleanor was a loner. She was a professional at keeping to herself, outside of Shay.
Sometimes I wished I could be more like that.
It seemed less complicated.
Landon lived on the same block as me, and when we walked up to my house, his over-the-top chatty persona faded as he took in the howling that was coming from my house.
Mom and Dad were home.
That was always a treat to partake in.
Landon stuffed his hands in his pockets, and he gave me a pathetic smile. “You wanna crash at my place tonight?”
I shook my head. “Nah, it’s fine. I’ll just hurry to my room. I’m sure my dad will find a reason to storm off soon enough.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Night.”
He scratched the back of his neck, hesitant about my choice, but he started walking away. “All right, night, Greyson.” He paused, then turned back to me. “I’ll leave the window to the first-floor guest room open tonight if you need it, OK?”
Even though he was sometimes a crappy human, he was a damn good best friend.
“Thanks, Landon.”
“Yup. Night.”
Once I reached my front porch, I didn’t go inside. I knew nothing good would come from walking into that place.
My parents were in yet another screaming match.
That was nothing new. Whenever they were both home, fighting was what they did best. Mom was probably wine-drunk, cussing out Dad, and Dad was probably whiskey-drunk, telling her to shut her piehole.
Though I was pretty sure whatever was going on was Dad’s fault.
He was pretty good at screwing up and making it look like Mom made the mess.
I’d never met a person who was so damn good at gaslighting another person.
Mr. Handers taught us that word last year in English class—gaslighting—and the moment I heard it, I knew it was my father to the T.
He was a professional manipulator. Both at work and at home.
He was so good at making my mother think she was completely mad.
If she smelled perfume on his clothes, he’d say it was hers.
If she found lipstick on his shirts, he’d convince her that she placed it there.
If he told her the sky was green, she’d doubt her own eyesight.
He once forced her into the hospital to test her psyche.
The tests showcased that she was sane. She’d married an asshole.
Dad stayed eerily calm during Mom’s meltdowns too. Which was another mind game of his—making her seem as if she was crazed, even though he was the one driving her to the loony bin. Sometimes I thought he left other women’s numbers in places just so she’d find them. I wouldn’t put it past him.
When I was younger, he’d try to get me to side with him—to use me to throw Mom under the bus. But I never did. I’d always known that the only thing Mom had done wrong was fall in love with a monster.
My father was a liar, a cheater, and a messed-up man.
Actually, there was one other thing Mom had done wrong. She stayed.
I never understood that.
I didn’t know if it was because she loved him or loved the comfortable life he created for us. Either way, it wasn’t healthy. I guess that’s why she was hardly ever home. Maybe she got comfort from seeing the world on Dad’s dime. Maybe spending his money made her feel as if she was somehow winning.
“I know you’re messing around with her, Greg!” Mom hollered as I sat on the top step of the porch. I rolled my hands over my ears and tried my best to drown out the sounds.
I wished Grandpa was still around. For the most part I tried my best not to think about him being gone, because it really messed with my head, but some nights I just wished I could sneak off to his house and watch old kung fu movies with him and eat insane amounts of popcorn.
The best thing about my grandfather was the fact that he was nothing like my father.
He was a good man through and through, and the world sucked that much more now that he was gone.
It had been a few weeks since I’d lost him, and honestly, I still didn’t know how to stop missing him.
The guidance counselor at school told me that over time, it would get easier dealing with loss, but I didn’t find that true. It didn’t get easier; it just got lonelier.
I glanced back and looked through the window. Something shattered in the living room. Mom had thrown a wine bottle at Dad’s head, but she’d missed—she always missed.
Housekeeping was going to have the time of their lives getting that red wine out of the carpet again.
“Just leave, Greg! Go!” she hollered at him. “Go be with that whore!”
Like always, Dad stormed out of the house.
I think it worked best for him when she told him to leave. Then he was free to go to whoever he was sleeping with behind Mom’s back.
He paused when he saw me sitting on the front porch. “Greyson. What are you doing out here?” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
Avoiding you.
“Just got home from hanging with Landon.”
“Your mom’s acting like a nutjob again. I’m wondering if she’s been taking her pills.”
I didn’t comment, because any time he called her crazy, I wanted to punch him square in the face.
Dad narrowed his eyes and nodded my way. “I heard Landon started an internship at his father’s law firm.”
“Yeah.” I knew where this conversation was headed.
“When are you going to come down to EastHouse and learn something, huh? I can’t run that place forever, and it’s about time you figured out the basics. The sooner you learn, the sooner you’ll be ready to take over one day.”
Here we go again.
My father was determined to have me work at EastHouse Whiskey headquarters, because he was certain I’d be taking over the company one day. My grandfather had started EastHouse, and he’d run it with all his heart and soul for years until his retirement. My father had followed in his footsteps.
It was a family business, and I intended to take over someday to honor Grandpa.
I just didn’t want to do it any time soon.
“Are you deaf, boy? Am I not speaking English?” he hollered.
I stood up and stuffed my hands into my pockets. “I just don’t think I’m ready for that yet.”
“Not ready? You’re sixteen years old, and you don’t have any time to waste. If you think this basketball thing is going to be your one-way ticket out, you’re fooling yourself. You don’t have what it takes to make it on basketball alone.”
There were three things to note about his comment:
1. I was seventeen, not sixteen.
2. I didn’t want to be a basketball star.
3. Piss off, Dad.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and walked past him and straight into the house. He hollered that we weren’t done talking about the internship, and we’d pick it up at a different time, but I wasn’t too worried about it. He never stayed home long enough to really hammer into me.
As I walked inside, I saw Mom picking up the shattered pieces of glass from the bottle.
“Mom, here, let me get that before you cut yourself,” I said, watching her sway drunkenly back and forth.
“Back off,” she said, pushing my arm away.
She looked up at me, with mascara cruising down her cheeks, and frowned.
She placed her wine-soaked hand against my cheek and parted her lips to speak.
“You look just like your father. You know how angry that makes me? It makes me hate you almost as much as I hate him.”
“You’re drunk,” I told her. She was the kind of drunk where she didn’t even look like herself. She looked wild in the eyes, and her hair was tangled. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“No!” She pulled her hand back and slapped me across the face, muttering, “Fuck you, Greg.”
My eyes shut as my cheeks stung. Her eyes watered, and she placed both of her hands over her mouth. “Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry, Greyson. I’m so sorry.” She began to sob into her hands, shaking. “I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t do this.”
I wrapped an arm around her and squeezed lightly, because I was pretty sure if I didn’t hug her, she wasn’t getting any hugs at all. “Yeah, it’s fine, Mom. You’re just tired. Just go to bed. All right? Everything’s OK.”
I gathered the large pieces of glass and tossed them into the trash can as she wandered off to bed. She’d probably be gone before I woke the next morning, off to catch a flight to her next adventure. But we’d cross paths again when she needed her monthly fight with Dad and a bottle of wine to toss.
I headed to the bathroom to wash the wine from my hands and face, and when I glanced in the mirror, I hated what I saw.
Because I did look like my father, and I kind of hated myself for it too.
When I went to bed, I tried to shake my parents from my mind, but when I did shake them, Grandpa entered my head, and that just made me sadder.
So I thought about Eleanor Gable.
The girl who read books at parties and really liked dragonflies.
Those thoughts weren’t as heavy as all my others.
So I let them stay.