“I’m not a psychic or a therapist.” Jackson ran his thumb along Day’s lip. “But, if I had to take a guess, I’d say it’s because you’re afraid of letting yourself feel something for me and then it being taken away from you. Which is a valid fear, but not worth never trying.”
Day just shook his head, bewildered. “I’m not a good person, Jackson.”
“You’ll never convince me of that, Dayton.”
Day took a deep breath and looked Jackson in the eye. “I killed my best friend.”
Jackson blinked at Day, processing his words. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Day that even murder wasn’t enough to keep Jackson away from him. His hands weren’t exactly clean, either. He’d made his fair share of kills both on and off the battlefield. “Explain.”
“It’s a long story, but she’s dead and it’s my fault. Just trust me.”
“You have to trust me first. I’ve got nothing but time as far as you’re concerned. Tell me what happened.”
Day rolled back over, facing away from Jackson, and, for a minute, he thought maybe Day was done with the conversation. But then he said, “Her name was Sarah. We grew up together. Her family owned this restaurant, and Sarah would always sneak me food.”
Jackson’s stomach churned at Day’s simple statement. Sneak him food? “Was your grandmother strict about your diet?”
“My grandma hated me. To be fair, she hated my mother, and I was just an extension of her, and she never let me forget it. My mom was a stripper, and my grandma used to say, ‘At least your mother could shake her ass to make a living. What are you gonna do, Dayton?’ Guess I showed her,” he said, giving a hollow laugh.
Jackson pressed his hand over Day’s heart, but he didn’t interrupt, no matter how badly he wanted to tell Day that his grandmother was clearly a damaged person, who took out her own insecurities on him. But maybe she was right about Day’s mother. Who runs and leaves their child behind with a woman like that?
“Grandma liked to go next door and get drunk and high with the guy in the next trailer over. Nothing heavy at first. Just weed, sometimes pills. I never liked him. I hated the way he looked at me. He was always touching me, pinching me, looking at me in ways that made my stomach sick. She thought it was funny. So, any chance I got, I would go stay with Sarah in her tree house. When we were older, she would do my homework for me, so I didn’t get any notes sent home. Those always set my grandma off, and believe me, nobody wanted my grandma pissed off.”
Day shuddered, like he was right back there in his past. Jackson wanted more than anything to make it better somehow, but he knew Day had to get this off his chest. Whatever this was that was eating a hole through him.
“Sarah had a disease. Cystic fibrosis. She needed new lungs. She was on oxygen almost for as long as I could remember us being kids, but she never let it stop her from doing anything. She was always the first to audition for plays, even musicals. They never gave her singing parts, but they always gave her a role. She said it was because they felt sorry for her, but I think they just saw what I saw. She was this…I don’t know…radiant light. She was just always happy and positive, and she would tell me that, as soon as she got her new lungs, we were going to move to LA and she would be a star and I would be her agent.”
Jackson could feel Day’s dread. He spoke each word like it was being pulled from him, like a splinter buried deep. Nothing could convince Jackson that Day had killed this girl, a girl he described as radiant, but he’d let Day pull the splinters out. It was the only way for him to heal.
“My grandma started doing heavy drugs when I turned thirteen. That’s when things got real bad. She didn’t care about whether I ate or whether we had power or water. She only cared about heroine and then the meth. When she started hinting about selling me to get her drugs, when she started making jokes about how I might be more useful than she first thought, Sarah threatened to tell her parents.”
Good. Somebody should’ve told an actual adult, somebody who could’ve saved Day from that woman. But obviously nobody had or Day wouldn’t be lying in Jackson’s arms bearing his soul to him.
“But before Sarah could tell, she became really sick to the point where she couldn’t leave the hospital anymore. That became our new playground. There were toys and video games there. Puzzles, coloring books, even a dog that would come once a week. The hospital became my escape. I stayed there for hours every single day. I think the staff felt sorry for me. They would bring me meal trays when they brought hers. They would bring us cookies and ginger ale. When I showered in her room, they pretended not to notice. It felt like a vacation to me, even with my best friend hooked up to so many machines. There were always cupcakes and even superheroes showing up to entertain. And then one day, she got the call. She was getting her transplant.
“She thought that would make her free, but getting the transplant meant she had to take a ton of drugs to keep her body from rejecting her new lungs, and they made her feel really sick, so she wouldn’t eat and when she did eat, she’d vomit for hours. She was wasting away, and we all thought she’d die before she ever got to enjoy her new lungs.
“But then she got better. By the time we were fourteen, it was almost like she was a different person. By then, I was sleeping in the treehouse in her backyard to avoid my grandma’s house. I didn’t want to turn tricks so she could pay for her meth. And then she died. Just like that. They found her behind the tire store… OD’d.” Day said it with no feeling. No joy or sorrow, no anything. Just the facts.
“Jesus,” Jackson whispered. Day’s grandmother had overdosed behind a tire store and that’s not even the part that had broken him.
“I told Sarah I was leaving. I wouldn’t let them put me in foster care. Everybody knew what went down in those places. I told her I was running away to LA, and that she could meet me there when she graduated. I imagined by then, I would have a place to live and a real job. I was so fucking stupid,” he said, so disgusted with himself. “I packed my bag and the food Sarah stole for me, and I hopped on a bus and took it all the way to LA. That’s where Carl found me. At the bus station. That’s where they all go to hunt for their fresh meat. Stupid kids like me who don’t know any better.
“He said I was pretty. Prettier than any girl he’d ever met. He said I was so pretty that I was sure to be somebody’s new meal within a week, but he could help. Carl owned this disgusting pay by the hour motel, riddled with every infestation imaginable. It was all junkies and pimps and girls and boys working to feed their drug habits. There was one room Carl kept for himself. He didn’t live there or anything, he just said he couldn’t rent it out. I never thought to ask why. So, he let me stay there. All I had to do was blow him whenever he wanted.”
Rage poured over Jackson like warm water, his nostrils flaring. What kind of piece of shit scumbag forced a fourteen-year-old to trade oral sex for a roof over his head?
“Ow,” Day muttered.
Jackson realized he was gripping Day tighter, fingers digging into Day’s hip. “Sorry.”
“It wasn’t so bad. It was better than getting fucked. Most of my money would have gone to whatever pimp decided I was his to turn out and they would have gotten me hooked on drugs, just like my grandma. Carl was the lesser of two evils. Instead of doing drugs, I ran them. It wasn’t exactly a financial windfall, but it was enough where I could get food and necessities from the bodega. I was too young for a real job, and I didn’t have a birth certificate or a social security number anyway. I would write letters to Sarah and tell her how great I was doing, but I think she knew it wasn’t true.”
Jackson had imagined Day’s childhood had sucked. Nobody as prickly as Day had come from a happy place. That level of self-protection usually came from years of emotionally insulating yourself from the next disappointment or heart break. But Jackson still hurt for Day. Life had been kicking him in the face pretty much since birth and Day still hadn’t gotten to the part where he’d supposedly killed his best friend. Jackson wasn’t even sure if Day knew he was just vomiting up his entire past to him. Maybe he thought Jackson would see his ugly past as a reflection of himself. He was wrong.
“She showed up on my doorstep one day. She had her bags with her. By then, I’d been there for almost two years, just treading water. I could tell she was shocked at how bad I looked, but she just smiled and dropped her bags and acted like we were staying at the Ritz and not in some disgusting motel with mold on the ceiling and stains on the mattress. I tried to convince her to leave, to go home. But she said there was nothing left for her in Idaho, and she couldn’t handle her parents and their constant babying of her. She said she had enough meds to last her six months, and if she hadn’t made it by then, she’d go home. I should have tried harder to make her go back, but I was just so fucking lonely, and it felt so good to have her there with me, to have somebody sleeping next to me every night. She made everything better.”
Jackson wished there was something he could do or say to lessen the anguish in Day’s words. The guilt was clearly weighing on him in ways Jackson would never understand. He had his own burdens to bear, his own wounds that hadn’t healed, just closed. Whatever Day was about to confess, it couldn’t be worse than the things Jackson had been forced to do in the name of fighting a war he hadn’t even believed in. But none of that mattered. Day was all Jackson cared about. He just needed Day to be okay.
