The roar made me go out of my mind.
And when he let go, I fled out the side door.
Maybe Sam wasn’t the only one who could just walk away when it was all too much.
Chapter Two
Sam
Unh. Gasp. Uhn. Gasp. I shifted on the couch and turned over, shoving my face into the back of it, trying to block out the sun. Trevor and Joe had a great place here on the Fenway, but I could do without the soundtrack. Uhn. Gasp.
A door creaked open and I heard Trevor mumble, “Where the f**k is the extra lube?”
I rolled my eyes and turned enough to wedge my entire face into the corner of the couch. Oh, God. Again? It didn’t help that I woke up with morning wood and the last time that I’d actually been with a woman...well, let’s just say I was dating Pamela Handerson or Jennifer Handiston. I had been arguing with Harry Longfellow. Strangling Patrick Stewart. And it made me feel like Hand Solo.
“Right there,” I heard Darla groan.
The bathroom door slammed and Trevor’s feet pounded on the floor as if he were running, and then, I heard the unmistakable sound of bedsprings. Did he just launch himself onto the bed? I crammed the pillow over my head. In my dark little cave I could still hear the sounds of obvious hotness. So, while my friends were acting out something out of an amateur YouPorn video, I was sitting here on the couch with an aching dick and no end in sight.
Amy. Her name flashed through my head and damn, if the morning wood didn’t grow from a twig to a Goddamn log. She’d disappeared last night, out of the blue. Darla had come up on stage and then poof! Amy was gone. I didn’t know what that meant—not that I had a right to know what that meant.
Some sort of slapping sound hit the wall and the bedsprings creaked in a steady pattern. Jesus Christ, this was one macrobeat I did not need to hear. Whenever Darla was over here they went at it like ferrets, or bunnies, or whatever rodent goes at it a lot. At least twice a day, usually more. Who the hell has the stamina? Who was I kidding? I had that kind of stamina. I just didn’t have a girlfriend. Amy. Dammit! What was she doing there last night?
“Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!” came a feminine chant from the bedroom.
I flung the blanket off of me, threw the pillow against the wall where it smacked with an utterly unsatisfactory sound, and slammed my way into the bathroom down the hall. Peeing was like pulling a tight slot machine lever, I had to use a hell of a lot of forearm force to keep it down or I was gonna end up with splatter in my face.
Morning rituals complete, I wandered back into the kitchen and opened the fridge to see what I had to eat for breakfast. My share of the food consisted of two eggs, and a half a quart of chocolate milk. I shrugged. Better than nothing. Finding a dish was more challenging than figuring out what to eat.
“Get the one with the tickler,” Darla said, the walls impossibly thin here. I shuddered.
A sauté pan caked on with something that probably had been cooked four days ago was on top of the heap of dishes. Joe and Trevor didn’t have a dishwasher—I supposed that, technically, I was the dishwasher, considering the fact that they weren’t charging me any rent to couch surf. It probably was the best thing to do. I pulled the plates, and cups, and pans out, stacked them neatly, put them back in and filled the sink with hot water and soap, letting everything soak before I tackled them.
This gave me the chance to set the nasty sauté pan filled with hot water and soap on the counter, give it five minutes and I’d be able to start eating. The chocolate milk, thank God, wasn’t rancid, so at least I filled my stomach before setting down on my bed—that would be the couch—to wait for the water to do its job. That gave me five minutes to obsess about Amy, not that I needed an excuse to think about her. The events of four and a half years ago came slamming through my mind, boom, boom, boom, like paintballs, multicolored and painful.
Slap. Slap. Slap. It sounded like someone’s upper body was being flung against the wall. Why did they have to do it right there? The wall that they were sexually bitch-slapping was the one right behind the kitchen sink.
“No, you climb on top,” a guy’s voice said, I couldn’t tell whether it was Joe or Trevor, and I didn’t want to know. I grabbed my pillow and just curled it around the back of my head, my palms pressing against my ears.
Amy. Amy. Amy. That long brown hair, her sweet smile, that intense gaze when she was laser-focused on something. Why hadn’t she come up on stage and said something to me? You stupid idiot, I thought, of course she’s not going to do that. You’re the one who blew it. Four and a half years and I hadn’t spoken to her, nothing. It was as if she didn’t exist. All of that anger, and resentment, and confusion, and desire from four and a half years ago...it turns out, hadn’t really gone away.
The anger had, the resentment, too. It was what had happened when I went home and saw Dad that made me never contact with her again. It had absolutely nothing to do with her—that was the kicker. It was my own shame. All me. Knowing her, she assumed that it was all about her, and bridging that was like asking me to go to the moon on a pogo stick.
Joe rounded the corner, nak*d, ass muscles rippling as I caught him out of the corner of my eye before I could quickly turn away and close my lids, wincing. “Jesus, Ross, do you have to parade that shit around?”
“Sorry.” I could tell from his tone of voice that he wasn’t. “We just need some food.”
I could hear the refrigerator door open. He grabbed something, slammed it shut, and padded away. And then, the unmistakable sound of a can of whipped cream being discharged. “I’ll get a yeast infection if you put it there!” I heard Darla say.
My stomach tightened and I cringed.
“How about there?” I heard one of the guys say. Sshfft!
“Oh, that’s nice,” she moaned.
I walked to the window and stared out over the rooftops. Joe and Trevor had a fourth floor apartment in one of those brick blocks that littered Allston, where all the students were crammed in. God, I needed my own place. I reached in my back pocket for that card Liam had given me last night, pulled it out. Entertainment, huh?
I found my smartphone—even when you’re stone cold broke, you’ve got $35 a month for a basic plan—and dialed the number. I got a machine, some woman, so I left a message just saying that Liam had given me her number, and that I was interested in applying for the job. Entertainment... probably some DJ thing, or helping set up and break down for a crew, whatever. I didn’t care. I needed money.
I wasn’t exactly a trust fund kid. Dad had cut me off in more ways than just financial the day I lost that debate to Amy. I’d moved out and pinged between Trevor and Joe’s houses. Both had been nice enough—or, at least, their parents had been nice enough—to let me live out my senior year. My school district never knew. My dad apparently covered up the fact that I didn’t live at home. Couldn’t have the flock thinking that there was something wrong with their shepherd, right?
“You are a bull!” Darla shouted.
I looked at the counter, reached in my front pocket; three bucks and a debit card for an account with $17 left in it. We wouldn’t get paid for last night’s gig for at least a month. Fuck! I grabbed some earbuds, shoved the cord into my phone and found whatever the first song was on my playlist. The combination of Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Nickelback could kill anything, could override whatever tortured fun was taking place in the other room. All I could do this morning was scrub that pan, make my eggs, and wait.
Amy
The thing about living in the city is that everything is right there. You can walk out of your front door and hop on the T to some other part of the city or across the river to Cambridge. You can walk a block and hit three different restaurants of three different ethnicities. Fifteen different buskers playing eleven different instruments can give you music free—of course, they’d love it if you throw them some sort of recompense for their effort and I tried, until I finally figured out that I wasn’t able to help everybody.
That was a major revelation for me—not the busker part. The idea that you can’t help everybody.
This morning I was avoiding my mom’s early morning call—ever since I moved out she made it a point to call at least once a day and text a couple times. Nothing had changed. Everything was about my nineteen year old brother. Evan this and Evan that and Evan. Evan. Evan. Evan.
Evan was the golden boy—and had been for years—except, how many golden boys are on their second year of detox? This was our family secret. You see, Mom was the high school guidance counselor and having a son with an addiction problem was something that she just didn’t want to admit. Of course, having him show up at school drunk his senior year made it really hard to remain Cleopatra—the Queen of Denial.
I’d known since he was eleven or twelve when he’d find older eighth and ninth graders to supply him with beer from their older brothers and sisters. He’d even tried me but there was no way—I was the good little girl. I didn’t do that. And besides, who would I go to? I didn’t even know who the drug dealers were at school or who could hook you up with a six pack of beer.
That was a world I had no interest in. My nose was in a book, on the Internet doing research, and involved in academic pursuits. That’s where I excelled—that’s where I was Mrs. Smithson’s daughter. The good little girl. Maybe I ruined it for Evan—I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly going to let myself be wracked with guilt over that considering the fact that he was first caught drunk when he was twelve and ever since then, for the past six years, two out of three sentences that came out of my mom’s mouth involved the word Evan.
It had become a form of profanity to me.
The day that I graduated from high school, Evan got shitfaced and threw up all over my cake that was set up for my graduation party. “Thank God,” my mom said, “he hadn’t done it in public.” And we were able to clean up the mess and quickly buy a new one. But you don’t forget the sight, or smell, of that.
When I graduated college in May, Mom was prepared—she basically tomato staked him and made sure he couldn’t cause a scene. I appreciated that, but again, that meant that Evan got Mom. Evan always got Mom. Evan could suck the energy out of a nuclear reactor.
Right now, though, he was in detox—due to get out any day. And that was when Mom’s delusion would start all over again.
“Oh, this time Evan’s gonna make it,” she would say. “This time I know he’s gonna kick it, honey. Oh, sorry, I’m not sure we can afford to pay for—(whatever new thing I’d requested)—because we have to handle Evan’s bills.”
Private drug rehab is what she meant.
I may sound bitter and I’ll own that—I am bitter—but when you’ve been going through this for six years and you’ve watched people you love being manipulated and lied to and, worse, watch them want to be manipulated and lied to because they can’t accept the truth...what are you supposed to do, other than become bitter? How can anyone with a modicum of reason and logic watch it all play out, month in and month out, year in and year out, and not get so twisted and angry inside that all you want to do one morning is avoid your own phone and go out for a cup of coffee?