The catastrophe hadn't been easy for her either. She adored all of them: Darren was a second son, Sammy an adopted daughter and Lil - I think mom was already picturing picking out baby clothes for the grandchild Lil would most certainly give her. But none of those aches compared to the ache of almost losing her own child, of being that close. That scare had left permanent worry lines deep in her features.
I kissed a streak of gray on her scalp. "Yes, Mom. I'm sure. This will be bad enough without my mommy dropping me off."
She sighed sadly and clasped my large hand in her small ones. The gaze in her eyes held a look that I'd seen all too often in the past few weeks. She was drinking me in, absorbing me, in case she didn't ever see me again. I always let her do this. No matter how long she needed to do it.
Her eyes started on my hair, brown and wavy and longer on the top than she approved of, then she skipped down to my jaw line, smooth for the first time in weeks, since I'd actually shaved this morning. She glossed over my other features and settled on my eyes, an exact duplicate of her hazel shade.
She smoothed out my black t-shirt and reached behind her to hand me my letterman's jacket. Her eyes drifted over the large letters of our last name - West - the only thing my father had given me really. She nodded slightly as she watched me slip the jacket on. Her sad eyes traveled back up to mine and a sad smile to match it played on her lips. "Have a good day, Luc."
I swallowed and nodded back at her, attempting a smile of reassurance but I'm sure failing miserably. "Thanks, Mom." I kissed her head again and headed out the front door.
My mother watched me as I stood outside in the light drizzle of the morning rain. I saw her hand pulling back the flimsy lace curtain in the kitchen and saw the shadow of her face as she watched over me, protecting me with her vision and I'm sure multiple silent prayers. I turned back to watch the road.
As the raindrops picked up strength, my eyes lingered on one spot of the pavement, where a small puddle was starting to form in a dip in the sidewalk. I watched that puddle, mesmerized. Drops plunged heavily into the small circle of water, splashing the edges out further with each steady drip. Within moments there was a half inch of depth in that puddle. In my mind, the puddle suddenly became a huge lake on the surface of the now vast sidewalk. In my mind, cars flew over that lake, none of them having an issue with the depth of the water as their tires broke waves into the surface. Then, suddenly, I was driving Darren's Geo across that lake, and almost the instant the tires hit that water, I started losing control. I also started having trouble breathing.
A horn was blaring at me. Still lost in my vision, I imagined my hand on the wheel, holding down the horn as I attempted to right the floundering car. Someone was yelling...or were they screaming? Always so much screaming. I felt myself hunch over, my breath even weaker. A touch on my shoulder startled me. I looked over to my mother's worried face, droplets of rain running down her cheeks, like tears. Still confused, I wondered what she was doing crying in Darren's car.
"Are you okay, Lucas?" she asked as she touched my face.
"Is he getting in or not?"
A harsh voice snapped me completely back to reality. I looked up at a surly bus driver staring at me grumpily and I realized he'd been laying on the horn and yelling at me while I'd been...confused. I glanced over the windows of the bus and noticed more than a few students laughing at me. Great.
"I'm fine, Mom," I muttered as I gave her a quick hug and slunk into the bus.
Everyone was staring at me as the doors closed and the bus started pulling away. The spectacle on the sidewalk wasn't the only reason why either. It wasn't just that an upperclassman was on the bus and not driving himself to school. It wasn't just that I took the first empty seat and didn't acknowledge any of them. It was because they all knew who I was, even the freshman. I was famous...for the worst possible reason.
Sheridan was a small town in Oregon and Sheridan High was even smaller. The entire high school consisted of about three hundred people, and that was a high estimate. A lot of the people had known and liked my friends. Everyone on the bus knew my story. Everyone on the bus had an opinion on my story. Some were quiet about it...others, not so much.
From behind where I sat in the front row, I clearly heard, "Yeah, I heard he pounded a dozen beers and could barely see straight, let alone drive." I clenched my jaw as the crystal clear words hit me; they weren't even trying to hide the fact that they were talking about me. In an equally loud voice, someone beside the first person answered with, "Oh yeah, I heard Darren tried to take the keys away, but he threatened to knock him out cold if he did."
I fisted my hands and closed my eyes as tears started to fill them. They were so wrong...they all had everything so wrong. But nothing I said was going to change their opinion, of me or the night in question. I gritted my teeth and pictured Darren in the seat beside me, turning around and blowing up at them in my defense, like I knew he would have. I pictured Sammy sitting beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder to try and calm him down, and even though a part of me didn't want to, even though it hurt like hell, I pictured Lillian placing her warm hand in mine, squeezing it tight and whispering how much she adored me, urging my fist to relax.
The babbling behind me didn't stop however, and those tears in my eyes were threatening to spill down my cheeks. I pushed away the painful image of my friends and the vicious words behind me. To block out everything, I started humming in my head. I could do this. I could give my mom one year and then I'd leave this nightmare...physically at least.
I managed to ignore the humdrum that way for the rest of the bus ride. It couldn't have been more than a ten minute ride, but it felt like hours. When the bus pulled in front of the school and I glanced over at the two girls sitting in the front seat across from me, I realized my mental humming had switched to actual humming and they were regarding me like I was even more of a mental case. I sighed and then shut up.
The hydraulics of the bus screeched as it lurked to a stop and the door immediately squeaked open. I flew out of my seat and out that door, wanting to be away from the bad-mouthers behind me before I did something really stupid. A few feet away from the bus, I stopped and stared.
Sheridan High. Not exactly an impressive Ivy League school, but it was intimidating the hell out of me anyway. As we lived in what would be considered by most a "rural" area, the school wasn't overly large or overly fancy. It mainly consisted of a boring two-story rectangular building that someone in the architectural world had tried to fancy up with a façade of brick outlining the double doors of the entryway and underscoring every window.
It wasn't the most put together work though and on occasion those bricks would chip apart or even come loose and pop off all together. In fact, the third brick from the left, on the bottom fourth window, was frequently used as a spot to store your stash, since that brick was completely removable but still seemed perfectly intact unless you touched it. The brick underneath it had eroded into a concave shape creating a perfect little hole. Darren had nabbed a few bags of pot out of there once, probably from some upperclassman that had needed a quick hiding place. It was a pretty discreet spot; I have no idea how he'd found out about it.
Aside from that oddity, the rest of the building was horridly plain. The building next to it was equally austere. It was a squatty square with faded gray paint and windows large enough for three people to crawl out of at the same time, if they had the desire to, which, I had a feeling I frequently would this year. It was the room we were all shepherded into to eat the food the school district was considering a nutritious lunch. It was also the room where Lil and I had kissed for the first time - I mean really kissed; not the playful, momentary lip on lip action that she loved to give me sporadically throughout the day, even before we were a couple. No, the let's get down to business and connect on a molecular level kiss. A kiss that had left me breathless and wanting more, and had probably started the whole process of falling for her.
I was jostled from behind and snapped out of my painful memories by students meandering through the campus on their way to another year of dreary school life. The rain had stopped on the short ride over, but a dampness clung to the air and I shivered in my jacket. I started walking with the herd, keeping my head down, watching the grass poking up through cracks in the pavement. I adjusted my backpack on my shoulder and thrust my hands in my jeans pockets, for a moment feeling invisible in the school that I was sure wasn't excited to see me. That thought was confirmed when from behind me I heard:
"Hey, douchebag!"
I don't know why, but I instinctively turned to look. I probably shouldn't have, but then again, this was probably going to happen if I looked or not. A rock the size of my thumb whizzed through the air and smacked me right in the temple. Focusing so hard on not focusing on anything, I hadn't been fast enough to avoid it, and man, it stung. I brought a hand to my head and felt the blood next to my eye. Great.
"Learn some reflexes, alchy," Josh sneered at me, standing a few feet away with an assortment of laughing friends around his age. He was wearing a slightly too big letterman's jacket that matched mine, and I briefly wondered if he'd finally made the varsity team for football this year; Darren had been helping him for his tryout before the wreck, so we could all be on the team together.
Pulling my eyes from his clothes, I moved up to his face. His dark eyes danced as he waited for me to get angry and attack him. He'd probably love that. I knew he blamed me for his brother. I knew he hated me because he assumed, like everyone else, that I'd been wasted. I turned and walked away. As I was turning, I watched his lean body start to quiver with anger. He was itching for it...bad.
"Coward!" he yelled behind me and I shut my eyes, ignoring him. One more year.
I ducked into the main building and immediately turned right. Weaving my way through the loitering crowds that had noticed the incident outside and had definitely noticed me now, I tried my best to ignore the hiss of whispers as I walked past various people that I had gone to school with for years. Even still, I caught pieces as I hurried along.
"Did you hear ...chugging beers...Lillian tried to stop...puking as he got in...never should have...always drunk...loser..."
I made myself ignore the stares and the buzzing current of talk that followed me up the hall, and forcefully shoved the door into the restroom open. Feeling my breath start to weaken, I hunched over the sink and rested my head against the cool surface of the mirror. I worked on calming the breath that I could feel getting fainter and fainter.
It was like these people I'd grown up with, suddenly didn't know me at all. I was never the one who got wasted and threw up everywhere. Anyone who'd ever partied with me, at least before that night, would have confirmed that to you in a heartbeat. I was the one that held back, that "reluctantly" drank and usually stopped at two. It just wasn't my thing. It was Darren's. He was the one that loved getting buzzed and usually tried to pull me along for his ride. I generally didn't follow him though. In fact, I'd only been "drunk" once in my life...and it had been a bad enough experience that I'd never felt the need to duplicate it.