Chapter 5 Fathers
FATHERS
I overslept. If I didn’t hurry, I’d be late for first hour. Thankfully on Fridays, I only had two core classes, and the rest were study hall. I somehow had managed to get all my credits in the first three years. I showered quickly and left my long hair hanging in wet clumps as I dressed.
Me:
can you pick me up
Tristan:
on my way
I brushed my teeth, and that was when I saw it. “Shit.” I pulled at the neck of my T-shirt. I had a hickey. “Fucker,” I cursed, digging through my makeup drawer for foundation or something to cover it up. When that only made it more noticeable, I changed into a hoodie, this one my own.
I bounced down the stairs, and my mother was shocked to see me.
“What are you doing here?” She had on yet another new workout uniform, and her hair had been freshly dyed.
Which was odd since she’d complained about not having enough money to pay the water bill.
We’d been struggling with money since Dad died.
I say “we” because she made it a “we” problem.
“I live here.” I slipped on my shoes. How had she missed her seventeen-year-old daughter not getting up for school?
“I thought I heard you getting up around four. Hurry, or you’re going to be late.” She grabbed my backpack.
Tristan had left at four. He carried a still sleeping Noah out to his car.
I must’ve fallen back to sleep after he left.
“Why would I be getting up for school at four in the morning?” I took my backpack and walked into the kitchen, opening the fridge.
I was starving, which was either from the sex or the pot.
“I don’t know. Why were you up at four a.m.? Don’t you dare tell me you were out with that boy all night. So help me god, Evan, if you get pregnant, I will—”
“You’ll what?” I shoved a couple cans of pop—diet, of course—and an apple in my bag.
My mother had made it very clear to me when she found my birth control if I thought I was old enough to have sex, I was old enough to deal with the consequences.
Alone. Thankfully, Planned Parenthood turned out to be a better mother than she was.
“Evan.” She followed me around the kitchen. “You are going to be eighteen in a month. I can’t keep putting my life on hold for you. Harold wants me to move to Florida with him, and I want to. I am not going to stay here because you get knocked up by some deadbeat kid. I deserve a better life.”
I paused my foraging. She deserved a better life?
A woman who was forty-six, who had lived the best years of her life, deserved better.
Not her daughter, who still had all those years to live.
My mother had always been selfish. But this was a new level even for her.
“You deserve better? Better than what? Me? And don’t worry, if I get knocked up, I won’t ask for your help. ”
“Watch your mouth, young lady. I don’t like this new attitude of yours. Ever since your father—”
“Don’t bring him into this.” She blamed everything on his dying. Like he did it on purpose so she’d have to suffer. That he died to prove how shitty of a mother she was. “I’m on the pill, remember?” I grabbed the last two granola bars. “And can you buy some damn groceries?”
“Why not bring your father into this? It’s his fault.
I told him that boy was trouble. But no, he wouldn’t listen.
And look where we are now. You’re late for school again, with a hickey on your neck, and he’s not here to deal with any of this.
I don’t know what to do with you anymore.
Mrs. Peterson called; she’s concerned. She says you’ve been skipping class. Your grades are slipping.”
I listened to her rant about all my failures. It was never about how well I was doing. Or how she understood what I was going through. Nope, just how I let her down, not that she was the one failing me. That she had erased my father from our lives. Used him like a curse. “Are you done?”
“No. I don’t want you seeing him anymore.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen.” I brushed by her on my way out of the kitchen.
“Yes, it is.” She followed me. “I’m not going to allow my seventeen-year-old to have sex under my roof.”
“So this is about sex?” Not about which college I’d go to.
Or if I was worried about leaving home and who my dormmate would be.
But where I was having sex. I had never had sex with Tristan in my bed.
In the back seat of his car. The floor of the tree house.
The back seat of someone else’s car. But never in my bed.
“I’m not having this conversation with you. ”
“Yes, you are. I want better for you than getting knocked up at seventeen and living with Tristan in the trailer park,” she shouted.
“Well, there go my after-school plans.” I opened the door to see Tristan pulling up.
“Evan, this isn’t over. I want you home right after school.”
“Can’t, gotta work. Someone has to put food on the table.” I slammed the door in her face and walked out to Tristan’s car, then tossed my bag into the back seat and slammed the car door.
“You alright, Blu?” he asked, a cigarette bouncing between his lips.
I slouched down in my seat. My home life was nothing like Tristan’s. Darcy and I yelled at each other, but she never laid a hand on me. She never kicked me out. “Yeah, it’s fine.” I forced a smile and looked at him. His dark hair fell over his eyes. “How was your morning?”
“Perfect.”
He still had on the clothes from last night. I noticed dried blood on his knuckle.
“Tristan?”
“Not now, Blu. Not now,” he said and turned up the music. The bass vibrated through my body. Something was wrong. I knew his movements. The way the muscle in his jaw tightened. The narrowness of his gaze. He pulled up in front of the school.
I turned down the music. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Nah, I got shit to take care of.” He still didn’t look at me.
“Look at me.”
He shook his head.
“Tristan.” I grabbed his chin and twisted his head.
“Oh god.” It came out before I could stop it.
I should have been used to this, used to seeing the damage James had done.
“What happened?” There was a large cut above his left eye.
It looked like someone had tried to tape it up.
My fingers fluttered over the cut and down his cheek that was bruised.
“Nothing.” Tristan pulled out of my grip.
“Nothing?” Nights when Tristan would stumble into my room, I would fantasize about hurting James. I’d wish the worst for him. Like cancer.
“Don’t. It’s fine. You should get to class,” he whispered, staring out the windshield.
“Why?” I sat back in my seat. This all seemed like a waste of time.
I looked at the school, wondering if my father had died with regrets.
If doing the right things all those years had been worth it.
Because I doubted it was. I did everything right.
I went to school and sat through classes that taught me useless shit that I would never use outside these walls.
And for what? My father still died, and Tristan was still bruised and broken.
“Blu.” He took my hand and kissed it. I wanted to take away the pain I could feel leaking from his body. “One of us has to graduate. And since you are the smart one, I vote you.”
“Yeah, and look where being smart got me.” I pulled my hand away and turned the music up and waited for him to leave. “Can we go now?”
“Ev.” Tristan turned down the music. “I’m not going to let you throw your life away because of my shit. Now get your ass in that building and graduate so I can live off my rich wife.” He leaned closer to me. “Please.”
He was doing this for me, pretending to be okay. Pretending it didn’t bother him that James had gotten in a shot and had left a mark for the world to see. The mark of weakness. I leaned in closer, inhaling his cologne and the smell of cigarettes. “Rich wife, huh?”
“Very rich.” He ran his nose along my cheek, bringing his mouth to mine, his lips a soft contradiction to his words. “Now go.”
“I love you.” I watched my words find the crack in his armor.
“I know.” Some of the darkness had left his eyes, but the edge was still there. Sharp and gleaming in the bright morning sun.