Crash

“Don’t you?” Jude teased, leaning across the console and tickling my side.

“Yeah, I do,” I said, jolting away from him. “And I’m past it. Plus, I’m grounded and not really minding the whole rules of being grounded. So I’m extra grounded now.”

“You were at your dance studio,” he said, clearing his throat, “perfecting your moves. How can your parents punish you for that?”

“You’re every kind of twisted,” I said, shoving his arm before glancing back at Last Chance Boys’ Home. Nothing about it seemed welcoming or warm or conducive to nurturing young boys into men. It looked like the kind of place you dared your friends to go up to on Halloween and ring the doorbell. “You sure you’re not going to get in trouble?” I looked at the time on the dashboard; not quite midnight, but close enough to count.

“Not as long as I use the back window and don’t get caught,” he said, reaching for the handle.

“Jude?” I said, winding my fingers around the steering wheel, looking for the right words.

“Yeah?” He let go of the handle and turned to face me.

“Just because I want to really try to make this whole thing work--”

“So do I,” he added.

“I just want to lay everything out on the table now before we go any farther.” I was nervous, and when I got nervous, my voice got all high.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, guessing I wasn’t looking for a life story, but fishing for something specific. He was right.

Taking in a breath, I pressed on. “Is there anyone from your past that could potentially come between us?” I said, peering over at him. “Anyone in your life I need to know about?”

Jude tilted his head, looking puzzled. “Are you talking about a girl?”

“Not specifically because I don’t know or want to know the girls of your past—I just need to know if there’s one you still have any kind of ties to.” I’d tried to flush Holly’s name from my brain all week long, but I was a woman; we didn’t just forget the names of our man’s ex flames.

“Hey,” he said, lowering his head until his face was level with mine. “There’s you, Luce. Only you. And don’t let anyone, most of all yourself, convince you otherwise.”

Everything inside me sighed with relief. “Okay, thanks,” I said, unwinding my fingers from the wheel.

“Anything else you want me to lay out on the table?”

Staring over at him, I wet my lips. “Nothing other than me.”

His eyes widened in surprise before he could recover. Chuckling, he said, “Anytime, Luce. Name the time and place. I’ll supply the table.”

“Make sure you disinfect that sucker first,” I called after him as he swung the door open. “I don’t want to catch whatever’s been laid out on the table before me.”

Pausing with his hand on the door, he suddenly turned and threw himself back in the car. His mouth was on mine before my heart could react and then, once it was trilling at flying speed, his mouth left mine. “Just you, Luce. No one else. There never has been.”

“That sounds like a convenient case of selective memory,” I said, wishing he’d come back and finish what he’d started.

“I try to only keep the happy memories,” he said, exiting the car. “If that’s what you call selective memories, I’m good with that.”

“Me too,” I replied after he’d left, watching him disappear into the dark or into the boys’ home, I couldn’t be sure.

It was becoming a familiar sight. One light burning in a window late at night, my mom’s silhouette behind it. I was either in deep shit or deeper shit coming home this late at night on the second to last night of my week long grounding sentence. Grabbing my bag, I shoved out of the Mazda and marched up the stairs, not even attempting to mask my footsteps. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked through that front door; knowing what to expect from mom was kind of like flipping a coin. In the morning she might be cold, removed, and act like I was the bane of humanity, and by evening she could be baking cookies and asking if I’d learned anything interesting in class that day.

For years I’d been able to predict her, I always knew what to expect, and could so accordingly tailor my life around that. Now, I couldn’t. For a teenager who, as a race, thrived on manipulating the routines and regimens of their parents so they could get away with all forms of hedonism, I should have been devastated beyond repair. But I wasn’t. Seeing the pieces of my mom, the one from my childhood, come back together, made me feel like maybe there was hope for our family after all. Maybe we could get back to what we were, never forgetting, but moving on.

It was a childish wish, but I held onto it.

Opening the door, I paused in the doorway, waiting for mom to spin on me, not sure if she was going to scold or smile at me. She did neither. Her attention was focused on her laptop and nothing else.

“Hey, mom,” I greeted, dropping my bag on a nearby chair. “I’m off to bed.”

“Lucy?” she said, sounding confused. Spinning in her desk chair, she glanced at me and then the clock on the wall behind me. Her eyes bulged. “Are you just getting home?”

Great. She had just turned into my dad. Didn’t have a damn clue what was going on in her household, but was cordial enough not to raise her voice.

“Yeah,” I said, grabbing an apple from the counter. “I was at the dance studio practicing a new routine. Time totally got away from me. Sorry.” I was ashamed enough to hang my head. Lying was not something I wanted to list as a top skill on my resume one day.