Chapter 38
Andy
Rain clouds hang heavy in the sky, just barely breaking so that the day’s last rays of sunshine can filter through.
I scan the side street by my mom’s apartment, crossing my fingers that Delilah isn’t there.
And I know it’s cowardly, but lying to Sloane somehow feels worse.
Distance, I’ve decided, saves her from the knowledge that would wreck her.
But she must already be at the hospital for her mom’s treatment, or maybe she’s still at the conservatory.
She wouldn’t, I imagine, want to see me anyway after what I said to Grant yesterday.
I’m grateful when I round the corner and miss any sight of the red convertible on the small street, though it’s immediately followed by guilt at the relief, then resentment that those emotions exist on a continuous pendulum for me.
It’s why I’m here—I need to get off the ride. All this guilt…I don’t know what to do with it. Don’t know how to move forward. But here, with my mom, with Carm, I’m away from all of that. Even if it’s temporary.
A laundry basket sits on the floor when I walk in, my mom on her tip toes as she piles sheets on the top rack of the hall closet.
I do it for her, gently hip-checking her before putting the rest away.
But when I’m done, and look down at her, her eyes are wet.
Her arms are crossed, and she walks away from me, shoulders squared.
“What’s, uh…what’s going on?” I ask her, and just the look of disappointment she gives me is like a knee to my ever present bruise.
She glances down the hallway to Carmen’s room, where Hamilton roars from her speakers. “You tell me.”
My gaze falls for a fraction of a second before I see the mulish slant of her jaw harden. “I’m lost,” I chuckle, taking her hand so we can sit on the couch. She yanks it away from me and I just know.
She starts to speak, only for her teeth to clatter against each other. She has to press her lips together to still them, and it takes every ounce of my will not to run from this feeling as she finally manages to look me in the eye. “When did you meet him?”
The words fall from her lips like the heaviest thing we’ve ever carried, and die on the carpet of the living room floor.
My stomach feels hollow, and I wouldn’t be shocked if the roof caved in.
This has always been my worst case scenario.
My one real nightmare, come true. I blink and I blink and I blink but my eyes wont stop watering.
“Senior year.” My teeth dig into my lip, and it’s not nearly hard enough. I breathe in shallow takes because it staunches the tears I haven’t shed since Luis died.
Her small gasp is unsteady as she covers her mouth with her hand. “What are you doing for him, Andrew?” she asks, and there’s a sea of knowledge there that I, pettily, wish she would’ve told me years ago.
“Nothing,” I lie, like maybe I can protect her from it. “It’s… nothing.” Pure disbelief floods her gaze when she looks at me. She’s never looked at me like that. Like I’m someone she doesn’t know.
“Then why did he fix her scholarship? Is it because he’s the reason she has one?” Fresh tears well in her eyes, the ones that mine mimic in every way, and she looks to make sure we’re still alone. “I never wanted you to know him. He’s poisonous and—”
“I know,” I cut her off, looking down at my hands as they cradle each other. “I know that now.” I look up at the ceiling, exhaling as I scrunch my nose. “Fuck.”
“Language,” my mom mutters behind her tears. “You need to tell me everything, Andrew.”
“There’s no point,” I tell her, and the hopelessness of it rocks me. “It’s done. He…he paid for Astor. He got me on the team.”
Her head knocks to the side, horror laced in her gaze as tears stream down her cheeks. “Why? Why does he help you?”
I breathe, sniffing back the tears. “I tell him things…about people,” I shrug.
“About your friends,” she says, matter of factly, something hard gathering in her gaze. “Will.”
I knock my head to the side, looking past her, teeth grinding, head nodding.
“Who else?” she whispers, reaching for my hand in a move that sends a small wave of belonging over me.
“Don’t worry about—”
“I’ll worry about whatever I want, because I’m your mother. It is my job to worry about you, not the other way around. When—” her breath stutters as she swallows, flicking her gaze to the ground. “Luis would never have wanted you to put the world on your shoulders. To put us on your shoulders.”
I wet my lips, stifling the sob that gets caught in my throat. “It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.”
She nods, eyes red rimmed and glassy, and I wait for the invisible balm she’d always lather over my wounds when I’d come to her as a child, weeping, disappointed, fractured…but it doesn’t come. Her lips tug into a sorrowful curve, wobbles as she stays composed, and says, “No. No it wasn’t.”
The shift in her gaze now reminds me that I haven’t been that child in a long time.
My small bones, my soft heart, grew and hardened into something I didn’t even let her bear witness to; I slid into a darkness I thought wouldn’t swallow me whole if I just moved into her light, Carmen’s light, sometimes, but it did.
I look at her, the filter of childhood innocence gone for the first time I think ever, and don’t only see exhaustion, and she looks at me like she sees a man and not her boy.
I exhale. “Any one he’d ask,” I admit, keeping my gaze steady on hers as I force myself to be honest. “He wanted me to watch Sloane.”
It’s ripped out of me, her name is; it’s been embedded in the bloody, jagged mess of my mistakes, haphazardly hung in the midst of it, always on the edge of skittering to the ground. But I say it, I say the truth even though the force of it is a wound in itself.
“And did you?” Mom asks, wringing her hands so weathered from years of using them to hold this small house together.
I can’t help but notice how deftly she always has, how the gentle firmness of her guidance right now is something I took from her when I decided to lock her out of my struggles, when I decided to struggle for her.
I shake my head, my breath still shaky in my chest. “No. I couldn’t. I, uh…” I swallow hard, flicking my gaze up to hers from where my head hangs. “Ian helped me. A lot. He’s my…brother,” I tell her, voice cracking on the word, and her eyes lit up, fresh tears welling in her eyes.
“Oh,” she croons, squeezing my hand in her hers.
“Andrew, I should’ve told you. You deserved to know everything and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want things to change even more.
Especially after Luis.” She rolls her lips together, shaking her head.
“How is he?” she asks of Ian, and the familiarity of the question sends warmth, rather than sadness, through me.
“Funny. Really…fucking kind,” I chuckle, sniffing back tears.
“Language,” she smiles, and I hear the soft patter of rain as it begins to fall in the early spring sky. Dusk begins to spread, a golden glow cracking across the landscape through the mist of the shower, and I’m reminded of Christmas. Of the snow, of the roof—of Sloane.
“I messed up with her.” I don’t need to say who; my mother turns towards me, head knocking to the side as assesses me with soft intensity. “I pulled away. My…Glenn threatened you. And Carm. And I didn’t want to but I pulled away because I couldn’t stand to lie to her.”
“So don’t,” she says, like it’s the obvious thing. The easiest thing in the world. “Honey…you can’t mold everything in this world with your own two hands. It’s not up to you to save Sloane from a feeling. Or me, or Carm for that matter. You be honest, you show up, and what’s meant to be will be.”
“I can’t…” I grimace, molars grinding. “She has so much going on. She doesn’t need…
all of this.” What I don’t say is that the thought of Sloane seeing me, who I really am beneath all the lies, scares the shit out of me.
That ripping back the curtain and giving her a front row seat to all the ways I’ve fucked everyone over wouldn’t just ruin us—that’s the likely conclusion to all of this anyway.
No, what I don’t want is to shatter whatever illusion Sloane still has about this life.
The magic and the whimsy, the way she swears there’s a point to all of this?
I want that for her. I always want that for her.
Like she can hear the turmoil in my mind, my mom shifts in her seat. “She doesn’t need you to be perfect. None of us do.”
“Mommy,” Carm’s voice comes from down the hallway, timid and uncertain. “Is…is everything okay?”
When I turn, there’s that tell tale panic laced in her gaze, and I hate that we’ve scared her like this. Thrown her back into the hazy memories she has from after her dad died.
“Yes, sweetie. Your brother’s just…figuring out what to do about Sloane,” she says, reducing all of this to the only part that really matters. Carm drops all sense of immediate panic, her eyes shifting into pure anticipation.
“I knew something was wrong! What did you do, you ding-dong?” She leaps over to us, crashing into the small wedge of space between us on the couch. She narrows her eyes, concerned. “Are you crying?”
My laughter grates out of me, my chest rumbling with emotional exhaustion as I ruffle her hair. “Yeah, actually. I am. You should try it sometime.” It’s not something either of us really do.
“So what happened?” she demands to know as my mom loops an arm around her and tugs her close. “She’s grumpy, and you’re crying, and—why aren’t you at her show?” Carm’s eyes go wide as she shoves herself off the couch, exasperated.
“Shit,” I still, before checking the time. “No, it starts…fuck. In thirty minutes.”
“Language!” they both bemoan, but Carm’s is cut off by her giggle. Mom brushes her hand down my arm in silent solidarity, and I don’t need to say a thing.
I just get up, and go.