Chapter 21
I sat up, wrenching myself out of his arms.
“I can’t listen to this. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” I dived for the door, but Dusty stopped me, trying to pull me back.
“Let me go, let me go, let me go!” I screamed. My door burst open and Dusty froze.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” Dusty let go of me and Renee pulled me away from him. “I think you need to get the fuck out of this house and I hope the door hits you on the way out.”
“I’m so sorry.... I just...” Renee held me and turned her body so she was between me and Dusty.
“Get. The. Fuck. OUT.” He gave me one last desperate look and pushed past us and went up the stairs.
“Did he do anything to you?” Renee said, holding my face as if she was looking for bruises.
“No, nothing like that. He didn’t hurt me.”
“That’s not what it looked like from my perspective. Shit, I never should have trusted him, but Hunter was all for it. I swear, I’ll never let him near you again.” She hugged me, and I tried to tell her that it wasn’t Dusty’s fault. That I was to blame. For this, for everything.
But the words were too big and too heavy for my tongue to form, so I just started crying again. It seemed to be my default form of expression lately.
“It’s okay, Jos. It’ll be okay.”
It was less okay than it had ever been.
We both heard yelling upstairs and then the front door slammed so hard it shook the whole house.
“It’s okay, baby girl. I’m not going to let anything hurt you.”
* * *
Renee insisted on putting me to bed and then bringing me soup. No one else came downstairs, but I could hear them upstairs, and even if I didn’t know what they were saying, I knew they were talking about me. I wondered who had taken what side. When Renee left to go make the soup, after tucking me in bed, I checked my phone. Nothing.
I’d expected at least a phone call or something from Dusty, but I finally seemed to have driven him away for good.
So why did I feel like someone had frozen my heart and then smashed it into a million pieces with a hammer? I curled up in the fetal position and tried to stop myself from crying. Seriously, how many gallons of tears could I produce? I was apparently going for the world record.
Renee came back with the soup, and I had some of it, just to appease her. She also handed me some Tylenol PM, and I swallowed it down without thinking. I wouldn’t sleep otherwise. I’d done this routine nine months ago, only that time I didn’t have Renee.
“You just rest. Don’t worry about school or homework or anything else. I’ll take care of everything. Okay?” She kissed my forehead and turned off the light as she left the room, and I lay there in the dark silence.
“Come on! I’ve never been to a concert before. Please? I can’t do this without you,” I said, clasping my hands together. “Please be with me when my concert cherry gets popped.” That made him laugh.
“Fine, fine. But you’re paying for gas.”
“Deal!” I said and threw my arms around him. “You also need to tell me what to wear. I don’t really have concert attire in my closet.”
“I know. What is up with your wardrobe? You look like you just stepped off C-SPAN all the time.”
“I’m going to have to dress like this all the time someday, so I might as well get used to it.”
I tried to shut out the memories, but they wouldn’t go back in the place I normally kept them. They were too big, too close, and I couldn’t shove them away, no matter what I did.
“So, what do you think?” he yelled in my ear as the first act finished their set and the crowd went berserk.
“Amazing!” I yelled and then screamed with everyone else at the top of my lungs.
“This is life, Jossy. This is living the day,” he yelled as people chanted for an encore.
We watched the second act, which wasn’t as good as the first, but it didn’t matter. Nathan got a text that made him frown, and I asked what was wrong.
“Nothing. Nothing that I need to deal with. You want to see if we can get closer?” We’d pushed and worked our way to the front by the time the third act took the stage. I was drunk on the music and the atmosphere, and I’d never felt like that in my life. It was too much and not enough at the same time.
“I never want to leave!” I yelled.
“You’ll have to sleep sometime. And they will kick us out eventually.”
He seemed distracted.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah, fine. My head’s somewhere else.”
“Do you want to go?”
He shook his head and smiled.
“No way. I’m not cutting your first experience short. We’re staying until the end.”
“We don’t have to.”
“Are you sure?”
I looked at the stage.
“One more song?” I said.
“Deal!” He put his arm around me and kissed my forehead.
We stayed for that one song, that song that changed our lives.
When it ended, we moved through the crowd and went back to the parking lot. Nathan had volunteered to drive me back to Maine to surprise my stepsister Jessica on her birthday. He’d said he had a few friends he wanted to visit anyway, so it was no big deal. I felt bad for making him drive me all the way to Maine, but he said he didn’t mind and I could pay him back by giving him a ride another time. He was such a good friend. Would have given me the shirt off his back.
“Friends don’t owe friends. You do a favor, they do one back and eventually you forget and you just end up doing nice things for each other. That’s how it should work anyway.” When it came to advice, Nathan always had some, and it was always good, even if I didn’t understand it at the time, or thought he was crazy. In the end, he was always right.
We spent the trip back home searching every station on the radio for new music. Up and down the dial, AM and FM. It was amazing what you could find when you went outside your comfort zone, something I’d always been afraid of. Nathan had held my hand and pulled me into a world I didn’t know existed. A world of passion and music and love. He was just so happy that being with him made me happy, too.
“Call me if you need anything, Jossy, and I’ll be here,” he said when he dropped me off. I’d told him about my family issues, and he’d told me he had some of his own. “So I’ll see you on Sunday?”
“Unless I go crazy before then,” I said, rolling my eyes. From the driveway I could already hear my stepdad yelling at one or another of my siblings and then there was a crash.
“Just call me if you need to.” He gave me a hug and I didn’t want to get out of the car.
Barely a half hour later, I’d already had a fight with my mother and had escaped the house. Luckily, one of my stepbrothers had gotten a letter from the school principal about cutting class, so I’d seized my chance. I felt bad for doing it, but I figured Nathan wasn’t that far away and could come get me.
“Hey, Jossy, what’s up?”
“Hey, Nathan. Can you come get me? I hate to ask, but I can’t stay here.”
“Of course. I just have to take care of something and then I’ll be right there, okay?”
I wiped my eyes and looked back at the house. I didn’t know if I could handle that. Things had been bad lately, and I was pretty sure Mom was on the verge of another divorce.
“Hurry.”
“I’m on my way, Jossy.” He hung up and that was the last thing he said to me.
* * *
I got up a few hours later and put on some music, but I had to turn it off because it seemed like every song was trying to either remind me of Dusty or remind me of Nathan, so I shut it off and put a movie on my computer. Something with a lot of explosions and crappy dialogue that wouldn’t make me cry or think or anything like that. But even those movies have some sappy moments, and I found myself crying for a stupid robot.
“Knock, knock.”
“It’s open,” I said, wiping my eyes and shutting my computer. I would not let anyone know that I cried watching a movie about robots from space.
Taylor poked her head in with a tentative smile on her face.
“I thought you might want something to eat. Or drink. Or company.” I didn’t want any of the above, but it was sweet of her to ask, so I sat up and patted the end of my bed.
“I’ve been where you are, Jos.” No, she hadn’t, but I kept my mouth shut. The reason Taylor had been messed up was because of something that happened to her. Not something that she had any control over. I was messed up because I deserved it. I deserved the torment the universe was visiting on me. I deserved to drown in it.
She said sweet things, and I listened and tried to look like I was listening and absorbing and that she was being helpful.
“So you can’t let the bad things that happen to you stop you from seeing the good things.” It was cute and all well and good for her. I was happy that she was happy and had a good life. I’d never get that.
This was the most depressing pity party ever, which was probably the point of a pity party.
“Renee is convinced he tried to hurt you, but she’s suspicious of everyone and everything. I also know that if I’ve learned anything about you, it’s that if a guy tried to hurt you, he would never survive, and you wouldn’t defend him. So, what I think is that he was trying to tell you something that you didn’t want to hear. Am I getting warm?”
Yes.
“No.”
“Uh-huh. So the question is, what was he trying to tell you and why didn’t you want to hear it?”
Okay, I was really sick of people having theories about me. If I was better at lying, I’d come up with a completely reasonable explanation that everyone would believe. Or I should have just done what I’d considered a few times and run away without looking back. But of course, that plan had a flaw in the form of my sister Renee. If there was anyone who would search the ends of the earth for me and then drag me back from the edge of it, it would be Renee.
“I’m not going to force it out of you. It will happen when you’re ready. Hell, I spent years keeping my secret just as fiercely as you’re keeping yours. So I get it.” She got up and patted my shoulder.
“Things have a way of working themselves out, whether you make the effort or not.” With that she shut the door quietly and left me alone again.