My sister lets go, reaching for the packet of chewing gum shoved in my drink holder. I know she is putting on a brave face for me, but I see the way her pupils wobble beneath her tears.
“Don’t let him take that from you. You hear me?” she mumbles around the gum, “I’m f-fine.”
My temper flares, chiseling into my marrow. My fist tightening on the wheel.
“You deserve a better life, J, the things you’ve seen, and now felt…” I swallow my words, throwing my palms down on the wheel and shaking my head. “Fuck!”
Jade curls both of her hands around my biceps, and with my heart battering behind my ribs, she burrows into my side, whispering, “We both do.”
A door slams, the tinny sound pulling our attention over the peeling red hood of my truck.
Jade’s best friend trips over the dead pot plant at the entrance of her trailer, mumbling profanities beneath her breath. Her white-blonde hair is stuck in her glossed lips, her cheeks rosy as she drives her foot back and crunches her bare toes to the plastic pot, this time on purpose.
I snort and Jade lifts herself from my arm, giggling at her friend's expense. Reaching toward the window, I wind it down, raising my chin, calling out, “Hey, Laik!”
Laiken’s head slices toward me and her bright-pink painted nails work to yank the strands of hair from her mouth, guiding them behind both ears.
“Please, do that again,” I taunt, laughing beneath my breath.
A grin quirks the corner of her mouth, and it’s small but I catch it, and she knows it too.
Laiken retrieves a cigarette from the waistband of her running shorts, along with a lighter that was in the same pot plant she had just stubbed her toe against, adjusting the strap of her cut-off white tank that tumbles off her fair shoulder.
She probably just got back from a run. She loved running, and often said there was nothing quite comparable to the feeling she felt when she threw her body against the wind.
I’d said she was a fucking freak.
She bites the trunk, the small gap between her front teeth prominent as she ignites the flame. Jerking her chin at me, she closes her lips around it and takes her first pull.
“Hey, Chase!” she shouts back, dropping the arm holding the cigarette to her side and reclining her head, letting go of her breath. A cloud of smoky-gray whispers above her and she licks her lips, smoothing them together. She levels her sea-moss eyes to mine, offering me another hint of a smile.
“How about you go fuck yourself.”
Laiken Campbell bites into her bottom lip, chuckling on the return of the cigarette to her mouth.
Sixteen Years Old
The timbre of an engine flattens outside the trailer.
A shiver sweeps across the base of my neck, shakes me from my hands to my heels. I drop the glass I’m holding into the stacked sink. It chips and small translucent shards like crushed ice catch in the blade of light cutting through the small window centered above.
When three quick taps of a horn tell me who it is, I let go of the breath I’m holding, glancing over my shoulder, toward my mother, Sara Campbell. She is lying across the two-person torn-up, saggy sofa and she doesn’t so much as flinch, not even a stir.
My heart thumps, and nerves bite. A rancorous taste fills my mouth. It is familiar and raw, brutally uncut.
I leave the mess in the sink and move around the counter toward my mother’s motionless shell. I pull her white-blonde hair, that had been toned a few shades too purple, away from her neck, slipping two fingers against her pulse.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It’s slightly arrhythmic, but it’s there.
I sigh a breath of relief, thankful we weren’t going to have a repeat of last week, and still, my knees knock together, threatening to give way.
I crouch, feeling a familiar shadow darken over my heart, staring at the living as though it had become the lifeless.
Heroin was a nasty drug, and I knew well what it could do to a person. But I also knew intimately the havoc it could wreak on the people around them. I was tired wondering every day if it would be the day I’d find my mother foaming from the mouth, cold on our couch.
I press my lips together, inhale roughly, the air ballooning my chest.
