CHAPTER NINE #2
I pushed her off my lap, sending her to the grassy ground.
I stood, brushing off my thighs, as if to wipe away the mess she'd left behind.
Then, without a word uttered, I bent to reach into her purse and grabbed the joint she'd taunted me with earlier that day, back when I’d thought we'd smoke it together before I eventually found myself buried between her legs somewhere other than my parents' house.
“Hey!” she shouted, reaching out to grab it from my hand, but she was too slow.
I tucked it behind my ear and walked away, knowing I'd be smoking it alone.
But it was better than being with her.
Maybe I'll actually sleep peacefully tonight.
***
“The sky looks like cosmic tar,” I mumbled to nobody, tipping my head back further to stare into a cloudless night.
The moon was absent, and only a smattering of stars could be seen with all the streetlamps lighting the way along Main Street's sidewalks.
But it was so big. The sky, I mean. Huge actually. And it went on forever and ever and ever and ever, and who the fuck even knew what else was out there?
I didn't think there were aliens within our solar system.
No, I thought, giving my head an adamant shake. Definitely not. There are aliens outside of it, and they’re looking in on us like … like … like …
“Like fish,” I mumbled. “Like we're … in an aquarium.”
Mom and Dad had taken us to the Mystic Aquarium a couple of years ago.
Miles was one, maybe two, at the time, and they thought he'd be into it. He didn’t give a single fuck.
But I thought it was pretty cool. The octopuses especially.
One of them had even crawled out of its stony little cave to press itself to the glass, waving its tentacle at me, then crawled back into its home.
It said hi, I remembered thinking, and I thought about it again now with eyes widening more and more by the second.
“What if … what if octopuses are …” I sat up on the bench and leaned forward, smacking my palm against my forehead.
“What if they're aliens? And they were just …
sent here to observe us and-and-and to be friends, and …
share their knowledge and resources, and we're just over here, like … shoving them in tanks!”
Holy fuck. It was all making so much sense.
“I gotta tell Dad,” I decided, nodding affirmatively.
Dad usually agreed with me on things like this. He was smart. He was sensible. Mom liked to roll her eyes a lot. She liked to laugh and say things like, Oh, Noah, you're ridiculous. But not Dad. He got me. I had known he would the second I saw him sitting there in The Fisch Market. I’d just known.
Tears pricked the back of my eyes.
Man, I loved him. God, I really did! I loved him so much. Mom, too, but Dad … shit. There was something so wild about knowing he'd chosen us. We'd chosen him. He had seen us and decided to put his life on the line, like his life was worth nothing.
“He fucking died,” I muttered, wiping a hand over my mouth and realizing my cheeks were wet.
I was crying. But of course I was. We'd almost lost him. I almost didn't have a dad at all. We’d almost not had Miles, and, damn, I loved that little kid. Yeah, he pissed me off, and I hated knowing that everything he had right now was something I’d never had at his age.
God, I hated that so much—so fucking much—but that didn't mean I didn't love him.
He'd never done anything wrong. He was just a kid.
So was I. Once.
My eyes fell to the ground at my feet.
I was a kid too. A little kid. A kid who was dragged to … somewhere and asked to grab a bag from some place and … someone was …
BANG!
I squeezed my eyes shut to the phantom sound, and I was six years old again, standing outside that house on crumbling stone steps. Shaking but frozen, covered in my own puke.
He shot someone. He killed someone. God, he killed so many people, probably, and we don’t know who or how many.
What was that kid’s name?
“Noah?”
I jumped at the sound of my name, gasping and shifting backward two inches on the bench until my spine pressed painfully against the wooden slats. My eyelids snapped open to find Meghan Kinney, my angel with curly blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, watching me with utmost concern.
“Meg!” I cried, jumping to my feet and brushing invisible crumbs off my shirt.
“Whoa, man.” An immediate wave of dizziness barreled through me, and I held a hand to my forehead, as if to steady my swimming brain.
“That's crazy. Wow. Okay.” With an exhale, I dropped my hand to my side and forced a smile at the woman of my dreams. “Hey.”
She blinked up into my eyes, hers narrowing with judgmental speculation. “You're high,” she stated.
“What?” My voice rose in pitch as I pressed a hand to my chest. “No! No, I'm not. I'm just … fuck, it's a beautiful night, isn't it? Like, where the hell is the moon? It's so dark.”
Her brow furrowed. She looked angry. “If my dad catches you sitting here, stoned out of your mind, he's going to write you up. You know that, right?”
The mention of her dad reminded me again of that night when Seth had killed Soldier in a showdown before Mom pumped my biological father full of bullets.
Meg's dad was one of the responding officers.
He was there. It was her stepmom who gave my mom clean clothes.
Mom was covered in so much blood—blood Officer Kinney saw.
I had heard it was everywhere, but nobody had let me back into the house until it was cleaned up.
Officer Kinney had helped with that too. Made it so we could come back to a nice, clean house.
“Noah, are you listening to me? You have to—”
“I never thanked your dad,” I mumbled, looking up and down the street, like I might find him at this very moment.
“What?”
“I never thanked him,” I said again. “He was there. He … he helped my mom and dad. I should thank him. He's gotta be around here somewhere. Dude's always working.”
Meg released a sigh that sounded a little sad.
Then she took a step closer, wrapped her hand around my arm, and tugged me along.
At first, I thought she might help me find her dad, but then I remembered that night at the party, when Ash had led me away just like this to her room.
I thought about being in Meg's room. I thought about being in her bed, between her legs, and I wondered if maybe she was thinking the same thing.
And then, before I could think anything else at all, I hurried my pace, leaned down to her ear, sucked in the scent of her shampoo, and whispered, “When was the last time you were fucked?”
Her footsteps came to a screeching halt as she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and released my arm so quickly that it might as well have been on fire. She took a step back and stared up at me, horrified.
“Excuse me?” she nearly shrieked.
I opened my mouth to speak, but before I had the chance, she continued, “Don't you ever speak to me like that again. Do you understand me?”
Wait a second. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, pinching my eyes shut and holding up my hands. “Why … why … why …”
“Spit it out!”
I opened my eyes to hers, so full of fury and disgust. “Why are you talking to me like you're, like … like … like my mom?”
“Because I am an adult, Noah. And you are—”
“I'm an adult too!” I slapped my chest with the palm of my hand.
“I'm eighteen, Meghan! You wanna see my license?
‘Cause I got it! You want it? Hold on. I'll show you.
I'll prove it.” I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, only to find that it wasn't there.
My keys weren't either. “Fuck. Wait a second. Oh God, where—”
She reached over without hesitation and straight into my other back pocket, pulling out both my wallet and keys.
She only handed me the wallet but stuffed the keys into her purse.
“Hey! Come on. That's not … Meg, that's not fair.” I huffed with exasperation as I held my hand out. “I'm gonna need those. I have to get home.”
“You are perfectly capable of walking home. And then you can explain to your parents why your eyes look like that.”
“What?” I scoffed and rolled my eyes toward the moonless sky. “My eyes look fine.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, nodding. “I'm sure they'll agree.”
“I can't tell, but I'm pretty sure you're being sarcastic right now.”
“You're only pretty sure, huh?” She huffed, turned, and started walking away. “Go home, Noah. Go to bed.”
I shook my head at her back. “I don't know what I have to do to make you believe I'm not a child,” I muttered, and then I held my hand to my temple, silently cursing myself for saying it out loud. “Fuck. I was supposed to keep that in my head.”
Meg spun on her heel and cocked her head.
“I'm never going to look at you as anything but a child, Noah,” she stated firmly, as if it was a promise.
One she intended to keep. “Because as long as you act like this, that's exactly what you're going to be. A child. And I feel sorry for you. I truly do. I feel for you so deeply, but only in that I understand the depth of your trauma—”
“Nope,” I interrupted, shaking my head, stuffing my hands into my jeans pockets. “No, you don’t. You can't possibly understand. You have no fucking clue.”
She pressed her lips together, then nodded softly.
“You're right. I don't have a single clue, and I'm not going to pretend like I do.
And whatever you've witnessed in your life, that isn't your fault.
Whatever trauma you've experienced, that isn't your fault. None of that was within your control. But you have full control over how you handle it now. So, until you get yourself some help or guidance or whatever the hell you need, I will always see you as a child.”
I swallowed hard, surprised that, suddenly, once again, I wanted to cry. “And what if what I need is you?” I found myself asking, even though it embarrassed me and set my cheeks on fire.
She blinked, then slowly shook her head. “If you want my help, you have it. Always. But otherwise, you can't have me. You will never have me.”
“But I want you,” I admitted, my eyes watering pathetically, and I realized she was right. I was a child. A selfish, whiny little kid.
“You think you want me,” she corrected. “But I promise you, that has nothing to do with what you truly want and everything to do with your mind's response to a traumatic moment—”
“Bullshit!” I shouted, quickly coming to my own defense—because if I didn't, who would? Nobody was here. Not the moon, not the aliens.
I was alone with Meghan Kinney, and she was hammering a fucking nail in my coffin with the stupid shit she was saying.
But what if she's right?
And then I wiped a hand against my cheek to find that I was crying again.
I really need to stop smoking pot.
Her face contorted with sympathy, her body sagging and her head tipping. “Oh, Noah,” she whispered, shaking her head. Then she sighed again, this time with resignation. “All right. I will take your car and drive you home. Let's go.”
“It's fine,” I murmured, hastily wiping the tears away. “I'm perfectly capable of walking. Don't want you to spend the rest of your night babysitting my stoned ass.”
“I thought you weren't high,” she quietly said, her lips quirking into an affectionate smile.
“I was trying to trick you. Guess it didn't work,” I muttered with a shrug as I started to turn in the direction of my parents' house.
Without sticking around to hear if she ever replied, I slowly trudged my way down the sidewalk toward home, knowing there was no fucking way I was getting any sleep tonight.