“I have to work tonight.”
“Oh. Okay.” She smiled faintly. Sadly. “Well…don’t be a stranger.”
“Nope.”
She walked away, almost reluctantly. I wanted to follow her. I wanted to spend every fucking second of my day with her. But after last night, everything changed. The hopelessness of us…
It’s already too hard.
The next few days of the new school year were blessedly uneventful. So far. I’d gotten into fights at least once a month since middle school. The rumors and whispers had been waiting for me when I got out of the hospital.
Frankie Dowd and his gang of assholes had been waiting for me.
Violet felt terrible that everyone knew I’d been living in a car. “But what was the alternative?” she’d said. “Let you die in my arms?”
That didn’t seem so terrible to me.
The first time I came home with a split lip and swollen eye, Mom looked up from watching TV on her short break between her job at the dry cleaners and her job at the 24-hour diner up the street and then went back to the TV again.
“Fight back, Miller. Fight back, or I don’t want to hear about it again.”
So, I fought back, even though I risked smashing my fingers and losing the dexterity I needed to play the guitar—my ticket out of this shit life.
A life that had, thanks to Chet fucking Hyland, just gotten shittier.
As I feared, he’d become a permanent fixture on our couch and in Mom’s bed; I had to sleep with a pillow crammed over my head to block out the squeaking bedsprings.
Worse, Mom seemed to have ditched her second job to hang out with Chet, who was a drain on our already delicate household economy and contributed nothing. Despite his promise, he didn’t stop pilfering from my meal plan, and Mom seemed helpless about how to replace it all. Beer became the top import in our apartment, with cigarettes a close second.
“How long’s he going to be here?” I whispered to Mom on the morning of the fourth day of school. I’d snuck into her room as she got ready for her dry-cleaning job while Chet watched The Price is Right in the living room.
“As long as I want him to be,” she said. “Don’t give him a hard time, Miller.”
“Jesus, Mom, he’s a fucking leech. Does he even have a job? Does he—?”
Mom moved in close, her brown eyes hard as they bore into mine. “Don’t give him a hard time, Miller,” she repeated, her smoky breath hissing and wavering. “Do you hear? Don’t do it.”
“But Mom…”
“I’m tired, honey. Just so tired.” She smiled wanly and gave my arm a squeeze. “You’ll be late for school.”
I went out without another word. In the living room, Chet watched me prepare my food and meds for the day.
“Off to school, son?” he asked with a hard smile. He threw that word out to bait me. Casting a line to see if I would bite.
I tilted my chin up. “Yeah. And then to my job. You know what a job is, right? One of those places you go to earn money, which is then used to do things like pay bills and buy food.”
“Smart guy, aren’t you? You got a smart mouth on you.” He smirked. “What happened? Your daddy didn’t teach you any manners before he took off?”
I felt something in me—that human internal mechanism that kept driving us onward, despite everything—begin to crack and falter. Rage and humiliation flooded me. I thought about what Violet had said, about our senior year being our best yet.
Bullshit. It’s all bullshit.
Chet chuckled darkly. “I can see why he left.”
“Fuck you.”
I heard a gasp from the hallway. Mom, staring and shaking her head at me. I stared back, silently begging her to get rid of this guy before he imbedded himself any deeper—like a thorn that burrowed too far beneath the surface to tear out.