41. Abigail – “Some people have lives some people have music.” — John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
41
Abigail
“Some people have lives; some people have music.” — John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“Yes, that’s called bravado. You can make that noise with the guitar or the violin.”
“That sounds so cool.”
Bodie and I’ve been in the car, trying to give Cliff and Colt space. I’m not sure what is going on with them, but I could sniff out the scent of fierce tension boiling in the room, so I figured it would be wise to take Bodie away from the growing animosity between them. Within thirty minutes, Bodie discovered my addiction to candy and gum from the stash I kept hidden in my glove department. That his uncle, who died, played the guitar and was super cool, and that my least favorite candy to suck on was peppermint since that's what I had left in the bag.
“What’s the name of this song, Abigail?”
I look up and see Colt running back to the house. His hair was drenched with sweat. He slows up as he nears the house.
“Abigail?” Bodie’s voice forces me to take my eyes off Colt's perfect body.
‘Oh, um. You Make My Dreams Come True by Darrell Hall and John Oats.”
“Just like Walt Disney says. Dreams do come true.” he starts shaking his head as the beat continues.
“Yeah, like him,” I say as I ruffle his hair.
“You stay here for a second. I’m going to check on your dad real quick, okay, bud?”
“Okay,” He starts playing with an air drum, pretending he is jamming out, and my heart melts at the sight, and I take one long look before closing the car door. Colt is bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
“Hey,” I say as I approach him. “You okay?”
He lifts his head with his mouth hung open a little, squinting his eyes as he tries to block the sun as he looks up at me.
He continues to catch his breath as he rises, his gaze hovering above me now.
“Have you ever been to Blakes's room?” He asks.
“Excuse me?”
“Well, not this room, obviously, but the one he lived in when he was living with my dad and his wife of the year?”
I straighten my shoulders and stand taller, not sure where he’s going with all of this.
“Yeah, once.” I cleared my throat.
He gives me a look as if to say, thought you guys never had sex.
We didn’t.
“An idea popped into my head, maybe a bad idea, but it needs to be done. Should have been done years ago.”
“Okay.” I say, elongating the vowels.
“It hasn’t been touched in four years, and maybe it’s time. But I need help.”
“To clean?”
“To set foot in it, again.”
I lapsed into a contemplation of silence. He just watches me.
“So what do you say?”
I squinted at him, and he squinted back.
“I’ll pay you,” he snapped.
“I’ll do it for free,” I say flatly, then frown at him. “I’ll do it if you let me teach Bodie how to play the guitar. Just a few lessons, to see if he likes it. You shouldn’t limit him because of fear.”
“Really? You agree that sex, drugs, and rock and roll go hand in hand?”
“For some, I said for some.”
“It’s why you told me you never pursued the music career thing.”
“No, I said it’s because I wasn’t pretty enough.”
“Which is the biggest crock of shit I’ve heard, but my point is, all musicians are susceptible to drugs and being assholes just like jocks are susceptible to women and being assholes. It’s what you said.”
“Okay, fine, let’s pretend I did say that, but if the world had to boycott assholes out of their artistic menu, people would be starved for movies, books, songs, and entertainment.”’
“Whatever you say, sweetheart..”
Silence fills the air as Colt looks over my shoulder at my car.
“So, you guys have been hanging out in your car?”
“Yeah, I figured you wanted some alone time with your dad, so I brought him out here. My parents didn’t give two shits if they argued in front of me, and sometimes I wish they did.”
He runs a hand through his wet hair, and I can’t help but notice how his damp shirt clings to every muscle.
God, he’s so damn beautiful .
When I saw Cliff, I definitely could see Colt in him. They both had that angular side profile going for them. They both were tall. Cliff had more wrinkles and skin damage from years of sun exposure.
“I have to work tonight, so when do you want to start?” I ask him.
“How about now?”
When Colt opens the bedroom door, it’s as if an immediate rush runs through me. The last time I was in here, Colt and I almost had sex on Bodie’s bed. Colt and I exchange a look before we turn our focus back on Blake’s bed. It’s as if the energy we conjured up in this room never left. I hadn’t noticed before, but it was dusty here. Colt wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t been in here for years.
“Where’s Cliff? You didn’t want him to help? Don’t you think this would be therapeutic for him as well?”
“No, besides, he offered to take Bodie to get ice cream. Running from his problems is what he does best, so I told him to get lost so we could do this.”
“What a way to treat your father.”
“He’s not my father. Just a man who screwed my mother. It's not the best thing to be admired for, especially now. The only card he has to play is the NFL, and that’s a shitty hand since he is broke.”
“It’s still conception.”
“It’s just fucking.”
His words stung so bad they felt venomous, Toxic to my soul, as I let them sink in.
It's just fucking. Is that all he thought we were doing? Instead of letting his words get the best of me, I turn it around.
“I did say jocks don’t know how to please a woman, so that’s too bad for your mom.”
He looks over at me. “I bet your bottom dollar that I can bend you over right here right now and have you dripping on my fingers before I even stick my dick in you, sweetheart.” I swivel around, my mouth hanging open in shock.
“Excuse me?”
Colt stared at me with a flat, almost disinterested look, like he was back to cold, distant Colt again.
“You forgot how many times I made you moan my name last night, sweetheart. Don’t insult me because I’m a jock who’s speaking the truth on how he was conceived.”
He comes nearer to me and slips a finger into my shorts. I gasp. “I knew that would make you wet,” he smirks as he licks my slickness off his finger.
I’m almost annoyed at his cockiness and my stupid body for reacting to it. I chose to ignore his outbursts. There was no point in bickering with him before we even started. Besides, I figured it was just his way of coping. I looked over at the wall and saw a broomstick, trashbag, paper towels, and cleaning products lined up on the wall like tiny soldiers. He looked at me, and I looked at him. It felt as if he was stalling.
“Do you want me to do it?” I ask
Colt shook his head and took a deep breath as he strolled over to the products, grabbing a trash bag. It felt like he was still here. That’s how much this room was untouched. Posters of rock bands and girls covered with the weed symbol hung on the walls. Hundreds of CDs and records stood piled on the floor, soaring into three twisted towers. This room was so Blake, and it’s as if I was sixteen years old all over again.
“I miss him.” My words were barely audible, even to myself.
Colt groaned. “Should I put it all in storage?”
I shook my head. “You’re never going to use these things. We need to give them away. Blake would have liked that.”
For the next three hours, we scrubbed Blake's room clean and threw five trash bags worth of stuff.
Colt had been literal when he said he hadn’t touched the room in years. The trash can under Blake's death still had an empty Doritos bag and Auntie Anne’s peanut butter cookie wrapper. I smiled at that wrapper before I threw it away. We dusted, scrubbed, vacuumed, and opened the window in silence. The only thing we hadn’t opened were the two drawers to Blake's dresser. It was an excellent desk made of natural oak. I shook the handle a little, but it didn’t budge.
“Is there a key anywhere?” I say as I look around. Colt walks over and yanks on the drawer, and in one swoop, the drawers open along with papers that went flying everywhere. Colt seemed like the most confident, formidable man I ever knew, but right now, as the papers flew around us like large snowflakes, he appeared as lost as his baby brother during our school years. His eyes drifted up to mine.
“So much for finding a key,” I smile. But Colt’s lips remained plastered in a thin line. I knelt and picked up the papers individually, catching glimpses of what was written. I paused when one stood out.
Where the words fail, music speaks.
Music is the most potent form of magic.
“What’s so funny?” Colt asks.
“Oh, nothing,” I shake my head once, not taking my eyes off the words as I remember that day outside on the patio.
“Blake and I had this argument. Well, it's more like a back-and-forth agreement. He argued music was the way to one's soul and needed to be created, which I couldn’t argue. But I told him I liked music too much to create it.”
I reach Colt’s gaze with my silly grin.
“I’m not following.”
“Haven’t you ever heard that once your art becomes your job, it loses its elusive charm? It’s like seeing your favorite music video or movie behind the scenes. The cables and green screen with people floating around on set. It desensitizes you. That’s why I never wanted to become a music star.”
That’s the excuse I told myself and everyone else until they believed it, anyway.
“I wonder if Cliff had that problem. Money, fame, and football didn’t mix well with him.” He picked up a piece of paper that fell by his shoes, reading it absentmindedly. I sat on the floor, legs criss crossed as if ready to dive into the magic of each word on these papers.
“Not that I’m too far off these days,” he mutters as he lets the papers slip out of his fingers and drop back down to the floor.
“I can only imagine what that type of pressure feels like,” I say.
“Not to spoil your happy ending, but he became a womanizer, a gambler, a short-term addict and a shit dad.”
“At least now you know why. He probably hates himself.”
“Good, he should.” He looked around as if the papers overwhelmed him and he was too afraid to touch them because he might damage one.
His musky cologne had an undercurrent today. And it made my stomach clench almost violently.
“What’s your big D?”
“My big D?” I say, looking up at him with a scrunched-up face.
“Yeah, disaster.
“Oh,” I tear my gaze away from him and resume gathering the papers one by one.
“C’mon, you think I go around talking about my dead brother who overdosed?” He let out a bitter chuckle.
“We’re past small talk, sweetheart. Don’t think we’ve ever been there.”
I said nothing. I honestly wasn’t sure. All I know is things changed after I turned six, and I was walking around with a hole in my chest, waiting for it to be filled.
“C’mon, I could use a distraction. I’m this close to saying to hell with this project and marching down those steps, putting a big sign on the front door, letting Cliff know there are no deadbeat dads allowed.”
His low voice seeped into my gut, though it had no business going there. “So Bodie would be very grateful if you pulled my head out of my ass because I was this close to not giving a shit and looking like the monster I feel like being in front of my son.” He held up two fingers, indicating how much patience he had left.
“I wasn’t lying. I don’t know. All I know is that when I turned six years old, everything changed.”
“Can you maybe elaborate,” he says with a raised eyebrow.
“I’m sure you know my cousins and I all grew up with each other, and we were best friends, but then something changed one day. I’ll never forget the day they started treating me differently. It was around six years old, and they all started picking on me, excluding me from playing activities, except for my sister. She never played along with their shenanigans, but she never stopped it either. And somewhere along the way I stopped loving myself. Then, if that wasn’t weird enough, sometimes I found my dad giving me these looks.”
“Looks? Like-”
“No,” I say, quickly shutting that thought down.
“He never touched me or looked at me inappropriately. It was more of an evil glare as if he couldn’t stand the sight of me.”
“Damn,” Colt says under his breath.
“And sometimes, the dreams come back.”
“What dreams?”
“It was worse when I was younger, but it’s the same dream over and over. It’s like I'm in this black square, and it gets smaller and smaller, suffocating me until I wake up. At first, I thought it was after watching Alice in Wonderland, but when the dream came back, even in my later years, I knew it meant something, but I had no idea what.”
“Maybe you should see if you can find answers in your zodiac books.”
I glare up at him. “Very funny. The subconscious mind and astrology are two different things.”
“Could have fooled me.” He says, sarcasm slipping between his lips
His phone rings in his pocket, and he walks off to answer it for a second.
I look back down at the paper with the quotes on it.
Some people have lives, and some people have music.
Written underneath that, Blake rewrote his own version of John Green's quote.
Some people have music, and some people have toxic wishes.