Hendrix
I put it off for over a week, but I ran out of excuses so now I’m sitting at the small table in our kitchen with the application to Henderson High School Youth Performing Arts Program in front of me. I had to go old-school, and print the application at the library this morning. Two mile walk there. Two mile walk back. My house is like a third world nation without a computer and internet. What a lot of people don’t understand—technology costs money.
All I’ve accomplished is my name—first, last and middle. That’s because I lost my Zen, and it requires all of my focus to stay in my seat. The rising and falling of Holiday’s voice along with her asshole boyfriend’s voice in the backyard is the equivalent of someone peeling off my skin.
“I’m not ready,” Holiday says. “So quit pressuring me.”
“You’re being a tease.”
The pen drops from my hands in an effort to keep from snapping it. One year of therapy and I’m hanging on to a stripped guitar wire of every piece of advice given to me on how to rein in my temper.
Breathe. Focus. Find empathy within the situation. If all else fails, leave.
Breathing ain’t working, I get double vision every time I try to focus, and I don’t have an ounce of empathy for this bastard. My final option before reverting back to the guy who spoke with his fists is to leave, but I can’t. Only way out of this deep level of hell is to walk past my sister and her dumb-ass boyfriend who are in this messed-up combination of making out in the driveway and arguing, and I don’t trust myself to not kick his ass.
From the window, they’re a tangled mess. Anytime she pulls away, he yanks her back, and anytime he steps in another direction, she wraps herself skintight around him.
“I’m not a tease.” My sister has this grating whine to her voice. I’ve heard other girls use it before—on me—but I’ve never heard that eye-clawing sound from her.
“I’m just being honest,” he says, and somehow she accepts that as an apology. Holiday slings her arms around his neck, clinging to him like her life depends on his presence.
“Just being a dick,” Dominic mumbles. “Did you hear how he called her fat?”
I heard, and I’m trying to not break my parole by killing him. Maybe I could get off on temporary insanity.
They lower their voices to whispers, and as their conversation continues, their arm motions get bigger until she starts to shrink from him while lowering her head. Dominic drops from the counter, picks up one of the folding chairs, lifts it high in the air and drops it to the ground. The chair bangs repeatedly against the floor. Holiday bolts away from Jeremy and pops her head into the back door. “Is everyone okay?”
Dominic straightens the chair. “Sorry. Just clumsy.”
Her eyes narrow on him, and when she looks over at me, she spots the paper on the table. “Are you doing it? Are you applying?”
“Yeah.”
“Awesome.” And then she’s gone again.
“Why is he still alive?” I ask, and the glare I give Dominic is probably illegal in fifteen states. Odds are, I went to jail for Dominic for a year. If he can’t fess up he did the crime or explain why he abandoned me that night, the least he could do is make this bastard go away.
Dominic doesn’t kill Jeremy. He doesn’t tell me the truth. He returns to sitting on the counter. The two of us are in purgatory. He’s still pissed I won’t ask him to play music with me, I’m still pissed he won’t tell me the truth, yet I feel like the one who killed a damn baby unicorn because I’m the one disappointing him.
Groggy from a nap because he’s taken on more roofing jobs to cover bills and then was up late studying, Axle stumbles into the kitchen and rubs his chest. “Holiday and Jeremy making out again?”
“Fighting,” I say.
“Imagine that. How’s the job search going? I need both of you to make me some money. Either that or you gotta stop eating. Your choice.”
“No one wants to hire a felon.” Even though my records are sealed, trending on social media negates the in-theory private parts of my life. Yeah, the headlines are calling me a hero, but while people say they are into forgiveness and second chances, they only mean it from a distance. Ninety-nine percent of people want someone else to take the chance on the ex-convict.
“Fantastic.” Axle leans against the counter, and the dark circles under his eyes indicate he needs a few more hours of sleep. “What about you?”
“No felony excuse here. They just don’t like me,” Dominic answers.
“Great.” But we all know Dominic busts his ass unloading freight at the warehouses, getting paid under the table so the company doesn’t have to document him as a worker. Axle and I also know he’s been trying to save money for a surgery that will help Kellen’s leg. She’s in pain, and he can’t stand her hurting.
“You have custody of Holiday now,” I say. “Make her break up with him.”
“We push Holiday too hard on Jeremy, it’ll drive her straight into his arms.”
“She’s already there, and if they aren’t shoving tongues down each other’s throats, they’re tearing each other apart. I say we break them up.”
My brother looks out the window and witnesses the horror movie being played out in 3-D. “Last year, she was in a bed with that kid. Now she’s in my driveway where one of us can watch. I consider clothes on an improvement. Plus, not sure if you noticed, but there are less bruises from all those ‘accidental’ falls she used to take during their last round of being together.”
Yeah, I noticed.
“Here she’s got a curfew,” Axle says. “Here she has rules. Here I dictate how much time she spends with him and where she spends it. It’s not the best solution, but it’s the best I got.”
Last year when I beat the hell out of Jeremy because he hit my sister, Axle didn’t see her for three weeks. I was arrested, she ran away from her grandmother’s that same night, and she blocked Axle out. Axle doesn’t want to risk that type of response from her again.
“I’m just trying to contain this,” Axle says. “Until she figures this bastard out.”
The guy claims he’s changed, and she bought it hook, line and sinker. Problem is, if she stays on the hook, she’s not going to be a fish that survives the aftermath of being reeled in. She’s going to be the type that dies on dry land.
“You think someone else is going to love you?” Jeremy raises his voice beyond a whisper, and Axle grabs on to my biceps when I stand.
“We try to run her life, we lose her.”
We lose her. My sister. Holiday. I’m tired of losing things. I shrug off his grip and go to the back door.
“What are you doing?” Axle demands.
“Showing her someone else does love her.” I lean out. “Holiday.”
She angles her head in my direction, and her tight black ringlets bounce with her raw fury. She hated it when I stuck my nose into her fights with Jeremy last year. Don’t guess she likes it now, but I’m doing things differently. “I got paint swatches for your room. Can you tell me what you want? If I’m buying paint it has to be before Axle heads to work. I already walked four miles today, and I’m not walking anymore.”
A slow smile spreads across her face. “You’re going to paint my room?”
“Nice,” Dominic says behind me like I need his approval.
Holiday says something I don’t hear to Jeremy, he points at me like I’m the knife sticking out of his side, but then she reaches up and kisses him. The smug-ass expression the bastard wears tells me he’s claiming this round as his victory. Keep smiling, asshole, because she’s leaving you someday for good.
When Holiday walks in, we head for her room. Earlier this morning, Dominic and I replaced the water-damaged drywall as Axle fixed the leaking roof. Axle and I agreed to give Holiday this room. I’m upstairs in the attic that has a ceiling so low I have to tilt my head when I stand, and Axle sleeps on a futon in the living room.
Three people in a house built for one. Reality is there are six people in residence since we’ve become a safe haven for Marcus, and Dominic and Kellen will crash here when their dad hates the world, which is most days.
Our house is a 1920s shotgun. As explained to me by my dad as a kid, someone could take a shotgun, shoot at the front door and the bullet would go through every room and head out the back. Except for when I moved in with Mom at fifteen, this is where I’ve lived all my life.
Even though some of the wiring may have been updated in the ’50s, the appliances updated in the ’80s and the walls painted yellow by me and Axle when I was in middle school, the place reeks of old. But it’s home, and there was an ache in me whenever I woke to find myself not here.
At the door to her bedroom, Holiday lifts my cell from my back pocket, and flops onto the twin bed. The cell’s a gift we received yesterday via personal courier from the governor’s office.
“Why did they give you the phone?” she asks.
“Because I’m going to be traveling more than they originally thought, and they want unlimited access to me.” To continue to be their dancing monkey, but now in a more pronounced way. According to Sean, people loved what I did, and that causes everyone to love the governor. It’s what he referred to as a win-win.
“That’s cool. When do you leave again?”
“Tomorrow.” I’m heading with the governor’s team to western Kentucky for some fund-raiser. I gather the remaining tools on the floor and place them back in Axle’s toolbox.
“I followed Ellison for you on Instagram and Twitter,” Holiday says. “Did you know she has thirty thousand followers? She gained ten thousand followers in days. That’s crazy.”
“I don’t have Instagram and Twitter.” I don’t have any social media.
“You do now. Don’t worry. It’s not like a real account. I called it DrummerBoy202, and I set up a fake email account for it.”
“Why?” Is all I got.
“Why not? Do you think I can meet Ellison? I’ve been following her on Instagram since she set up her account. Don’t tell her, but I’m one of her regular commenters, that is when I can get on a computer at the library. She posts the best pictures and always has something real smart to say.”
The hammer falls with a clunk into the toolbox, and I’m slow as I turn toward my little sister who might have limited time left on this earth. “You knew who she was on the midway?”
Holiday finally drags her eyes off my cell, but then ducks behind it. “I mean I may have been following her, but... I just linked it together who she was.”
Screw that. “Holiday.”
With a huff, she sits up like she’s the one who’s annoyed. “Okay, yeah, I did. But you didn’t and nobody else did, so what difference does it make?”
What difference does it make? My fingers twitch with the need to throttle something. “She’s the governor’s daughter.” The man who holds my entire future in his hands.
Holiday flashes a bright smile. “And she thought you were cute. By the way, you need to apologize to Jeremy.”
My teeth click together, and I have to breathe in and out several times before I can open my mouth without asking what the...is wrong with her. “For what?”
Holiday regards me for a mere second before returning her attention to my cell. “He’s still mad at you for when you beat him up before the arrest.”
“He hit you.”
“He said he was sorry to me, and you gave him a scar.”
I should have ripped off his balls and shoved them down his throat. “He hit you.”
“He’s changed. I broke up with him and he’s changed, and I would think you, of all people, would understand that because you’ve changed.”
Walk away. That’s what I need to do—walk away. I slam the toolbox shut, and when I make it to the narrow hall, Holiday yells out, “Jeremy’s been there for me when nobody else has. I know he didn’t treat me well before, and I know we have bad days now, but he’s better, and he’s changing and he’s there.”
And I wasn’t. Not during the past year and I wasn’t reliable before. But I’m here now. It’s what I want to tell her, but I don’t because it’ll be empty words. At least they will be to Holiday. I wasn’t a bad brother before, but I wasn’t a good one either.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. “With what you did on the midway...with Ellison.”
Air out of my lungs, past my lips and I lean my back against the doorway. “I would have done it for anyone. I would have done it for you.”
Holiday puts my phone on her bed and picks up the worn stuffed octopus she’s had since she was a toddler. It’s more holes with lost stuffing than anything else, but it’s loved. Just like everything else in her room. “I know you would have done it for me.”
In a heartbeat. Back then, though, I would have done it with fists.
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but while I know you would do anything for me or Axle or Dominic and Kellen...the old you...” Holiday twists one of the tentacles around her finger. “The old you wouldn’t have stood up for someone he didn’t know, and I think it’s cool that you did stand up for a stranger.”
Holiday glances up at me, gauging my reaction, and that makes me want to hit myself. I rap the back of my head against the door frame, then nod in defeat because my sister...she’s right.
“Guess that program did work.” I try for a joke, but it falls flat. Funny how easy it came with Elle, and it’s difficult with anyone else.
Holiday lifts one shoulder and loops another tentacle around another finger. “I don’t think Mom’s noticed I’m gone yet. At least Grandma hasn’t said anything about it, but I thought for sure Mom would have been home by now and would have seen that my stuff was gone. I thought if she saw that I left that she’d tried to...”
Find her? Call her? Notice that her mother, who’s in her nineties, wasn’t taking care of her daughter anymore? Holiday’s grandma lives around the corner. She’s a wonderful woman who couldn’t keep up with Holiday. When I think of Holiday’s grandma, I think of hot food, the scent of freshly baked cookies, soap operas on her TV and her dry smile that would stretch along her wrinkled face. A proud black woman who looked after me, Holiday, Axle, Dominic and Kellen until she could hardly take care of herself. We watch over her now, but we let her think she’s still watching over us.
As for Holiday’s mom. She’s a waste of space. It wouldn’t have taken much for her mother to try to search for Holiday, but giving a damn isn’t Holiday’s mother’s style.
I cross the room one slow foot at a time, then sit on the corner of the bed. I understand crap moms. I understand our crap dad, too. “What color do you want to paint your room?”
Holiday scoots closer to me and places her octopus on my leg and her head on my shoulder. I lock up as it still catches me off guard when someone touches me, but it’s Holiday. She’s the affectionate one in our family. “I don’t have to stick with yellow?”
“Your room. Your choice.”
“That’s cool. But you don’t have paint swatches, do you?”
“I’ll get you a million paint swatches.
She chuckles. “Jeremy’s changed. Give him a chance.”
I’m starting to get what Axle’s saying and not saying. Holiday trusts Jeremy because he’s been around, and she doesn’t trust me and Axle because we’ve only been around when it was convenient. Trust—she has to trust us before she chooses us.
Holiday wipes the drywall dust off her sheet, then blows out a breath. “Ask me, Drix.”
It’s a still night in my windpipe because I don’t want to ask her, and I sure as hell don’t like her knowing I have my doubts. That’s not going to help build trust. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. Things aren’t the same. We all look at each other differently. We’re all waiting for someone to spill that they were the one who robbed the store, and I want you to ask me because I don’t want you wondering if I’m the one.”
I’m shaking my head, placing my hands on the bed to push myself off, but Holiday lifts her head and clamps a hand on my shoulder. “I regret my last words to you that night.”
I don’t want to do this. Because her talking about her last words to me before I was arrested means I have to think of my last words to her. I’d rather cut out my own intestines.
Holiday got into a fight with her asshole boyfriend because he was going to Florida for two weeks, and he’d only take her if she had enough money to pay for her part of the room. Holiday came to me, begging for the money, begging to help her convince her grandma to let her go because otherwise, she knew Jeremy would cheat.
Her instincts were right. That jerk didn’t want her to go on his vacation because he was after as much tail as he could get—not too different how he acted in our neighborhood. Having a girlfriend hanging on him would ward off girls. The money—it wasn’t about her going, it was about keeping her home. Bloody fifteen. It’s a doomed age for the Pierces.
I told her to break up with the asshole, and she told me she hated me and that I was a worthless man-whore. Her words hurt so I told her to go to hell, and she told me she didn’t care if she ever saw me again. Then when the asshole showed his face toward the end of the argument, he yelled at me, made the mistake of smacking Holiday, and I beat the hell out of him—came close to cracking open his jaw. This made him the ever-loving martyr in Holiday’s mind.
I look down at my hands, still expecting to see his blood dripping from my knuckles. Half waiting for the torment in my heart to tear me open because I had felt joy in causing him pain.
“Ask me, Drix.”
I’m silent.
“You won’t ask because you think I was involved. You know how desperate I was. You know I was capable of anything that night. You know I had crossed the line of crazy.”
“Doesn’t matter who did it. Not anymore. I did the time. It’s over.”
“If it’s over, if it doesn’t matter, then why do you avoid Dominic?”
I stand, but Holiday grabs my hand. “I didn’t rob the convenience store. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t ask anyone else to do it. I swear to God I never stepped foot near that store that night.”
I collapse back onto the bed, but this time Holiday grants me my distance. I look over at her, and she looks over at me. We sit there, in silence, and I pick up her octopus. Oliver is his name. I used to hide it from her when she was little as a game, and she’d spend hours trying to find it. Life was easier then. Hard in its own way, but easier.
Holiday didn’t rob the store. One person down, one more to go. “Did Dominic do it?”
“I don’t know. He confessed he was the one that walked with you there and that he had dared you to go in and shoplift. He also said when he didn’t see you go in the convenience store that he thought you chickened out and went home. He said he didn’t know you were so high you passed out behind the store. That all puts Dominic there and puts what he thought was safe distance between you and the store. We all knew he had a gun he bought off someone in the neighborhood. He was doing a ton of stupid stuff, and I wouldn’t put it past him.”
To feel alive, Dominic had been after adrenaline rushes because on the inside he felt mostly dead. Plus Dominic is the primary caregiver for himself and his sister, and money doesn’t appear at the bottom of an empty milk carton.
“But I don’t think Dominic would have let you take the fall for him. That’s not who he is. He loves you.”
She doesn’t know he’s terrified of confined spaces. I do, and because of that I would have never ratted him out.
“Do you think we’ll all be the same again?” she asks. “Do you think we can go back to being the family we once were? Because I miss it. I miss when I was here and all of you were here and no one was high and no one was arguing and we were a family. I used to go back to grandma’s and pretend that’s what it was like all the time. Not just once a month. Not just every once in a while. That it was like that all the time. I liked pretending I had all of you, all the time.”
“You have us.”
“But I want all of us together, not separate. I want us to be a real family. You, me, Axle, Dominic, Kellen and now Marcus. I want a real family. I don’t know what that would look like, but it has to be better than what we had before and what we’re doing now.”
A real family. Society says that’s a mom, that’s a dad, that’s a smiling family in a shiny house behind a white picket fence. We don’t have that, but we do have each other, and that makes my stomach bottom out.
Holiday’s asking if I can get past not knowing the truth. She’s asking me to forget the past and focus on the future. She’s asking me to forgive Dominic. I inhale deeply. “I’ll try.”
“I guess that’s all I can ask for.”
That’s good because trying is all I have to offer.
“Hey, Drix?”
“Yeah?”
“I know what girls think when they smile a certain way, and I’m not letting this go. Ellison thought you were cute.”
Not having this conversation. I stand, and Holiday follows, grinning from ear to ear. “Can I help with your application?”
“Yeah.” I’ll take all the help I can get.