I sighed and made my way through the halls, still unsure of what I wanted to do.
3
Nicki
I was makingmy way through the crowded restaurant, balancing a tray stacked high with food when suddenly something akin to a koala latched on to my side.
“Nicki! There’s my favorite boy!” Vivian yelled in my ear, squeezing me tightly.
Vivian Dunwoody was my next-door neighbor, and the only thing that had kept me sane since I moved to Florida. Viv was five eleven with straight brown hair that hung to the middle of her back and beautiful dark brown eyes. If I’d had any sexual interest in women, I would have married her a long time ago. Those eyes were smiling when she looked up at me, but then she froze as she realized how stiff I’d gotten in her embrace.
“Shit, no... Not again?!” she exclaimed, quickly releasing her hold on me.
I took a deep breath, shaking off the pain her hug had caused my still-healing back.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
“No, Nicki, it’snotokay!” she exclaimed, then lowered her voice as we drew looks from the diners. “It’snotokay for him to hurt you, and it’snotokay for you to do nothing about it.”
I knew I had started to blush, and I really felt like shit. Ofcourseshe felt that way. If anyone ever laid a hand on Vivian Dunwoody, I was pretty sure they would lose it. She always stood up for herself, and for everyone else, too. Bullies in our high school had learned quickly not to attract Vivian’s attention. Her payback was legendary.
“I’m fine, Viv, really,” I said, shifting the tray to my other arm uncomfortably. Vivian didn’t know about my bargain with my father, and I hoped she never would.
Disbelief was evident on her sweet face. Vivian and I had been best friends ever since I moved to Florida from Ohio.
My first few weeks here had been rough, and it only got worse once we had received my diagnosis. I’d loved Kaine Devereaux with all the passion of first love, but in those early days in Florida, I had felt so guilty for being the reason my parents had to move, I would have done anything they had asked me to. Including leave the one person in my life who really understood me.
My parents had uprooted the family and brought us cross country to try and figure out what was wrong with me. That was a lot of responsibility to place on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old kid. I felt so incredibly guilty for having caused them both to lose their jobs, their friends and even family to move to this miserably hot and humid corner or the world.
While I missed Kaine like you wouldn’t believe, I thought my Mom had suffered more. She was a child of the north, loving the cooler climes, the changing seasons. Even though air conditioning was readily available in Florida, she couldn’t get outside like she had in Ohio, and her mood suffered as a result. And my god! Thebugs! Mom was terrified of insects, so Florida was a nightmare for her.
She put up with all of it, though, for me. I knew it wasn’t for my father. They hadn’t really loved each other in a long time, but my mother would have done anything in the world for me.
When we got the official diagnosis that I was HIV positive, my father had gone ballistic. He was sure at first that I had gotten it from Kaine or another of my “gay friends,” as he called them, but I knew that was impossible because I’d never had sex. Dad had just assumed that because I was gay, I must be a slut and that was the only way it could have happened. Then the doctors had insisted the whole family get tested, and we found out Mom was positive, too.
They reviewed all my medical history from the time I was born and determined that I had probably contracted it from my mother during childbirth. Which meant she had been the one to have it first.
As much as I wished I could, I would never forget hearing the argument where my mom had confessed that she had been involved in an affair years ago, when she and Dad were going through a tough patch in their relationship. That was when Dad began beating her.
When Mom left, I went through so many conflicting emotions. I was angry she was gone, hurt she left me behind, furious that she had given me this disease. With all of that, I loved her. She was my mother, always my confidante, always my friend. A part of me was eternally happy she had escaped.
I had loved my dad, too, in a distant kind of way, but he was a man’s man. I was a nerd, more bookworm than athlete, the kid who’d rather read comic books than play catch. I had never lived up to his ideal of what a son should be. Mom was always the one I was closer to, but she hadn’t taken me with her when she left.
I remember the day Dad had been served with the divorce papers. I had been in the living room watching television when he got home, since I hadn’t been expecting him home from work so early. I heard crashing from the kitchen along with a thud so loud it made the floor shake throughout the whole house. Then I heard gunshots.
“Goddammit! Youfuckingwhore! You goddamnbitch!” he’d screamed.
“Dad!” I’d exclaimed as I’d ran to the kitchen, only to stop at the doorway in shock. He had tipped over the corner hutch that held my grandma’s china on display. It had been my mother’s favorite possession, something that linked her back to her own mother, who had died before I was born.
I stood and stared in shock at the broken wood, glass and china. My father stood over it all, his revolver in his hand as he repeatedly kicked the splintered wood and stomped every piece of china he could find. I had never seen him so angry… His face was flushed and red, his eyes wide, nostrils flaring like an animal, spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth like a rabid dog. He stomped over and over, taking his anger out on the china.
“Dad!” I yelled again. He swung the gun toward me, his eyes glazed, almost blind as I said his name again. “Dad?”
“You! This is allyourfault! DominicRowenTerhune,” he snarled, the gun trained on me. “I should never have let her name you that. What kind of fucking name is ‘Rowen’?”
I froze, my very breath quiet in my lungs as blood roared in my ears. While I’d never liked guns, my father had made sure that I was trained in gun safety from the time I was a child. I stared into the black hole of his weapon and mentally cataloged that the safety was off.
“Dad? Wh-what happened?” I stuttered.
