“Actually, I’m usually the one beneath him.”
CHAPTER 30
BRODY
The bus ride home is as miserable as the weather. We leave the icy sludge behind after we pass through Kentucky, but it’s still cold and grey. Perfectly reflective of my mood.
The bus is depressing. It smells weird, and everyone else looks as depressed as I am. It doesn’t feel like a bus full of people traveling to celebrate the holidays with friends and family. Maybe it’s just me projecting, but I feel like we’re all being transported to the same funeral service.
Forty hours, not including stops, is far too long to be trapped in a confined space with nothing but my own thoughts. I can’t use my phone to read or listen to music because the one time I switched it on, it blew up with notifications. The violent, constant buzzing of a hundred notifications exploded all at once, and it was just too much. I switched it off immediately and haven’t even been tempted to turn it back on again. I just can’t deal with it right now, and nothing anyone can say to me is going to make any of this better. I dug my own grave, and now I’m on a bus to a hell of my own making.
Out the smeared bus window, night turns to pale grey daylight, then back to a purple-bruised dusk. Fields flatten out intohighways, highways bleed into the edges of small towns that all look vaguely the same.
People get on. People get off. We cycle through three different drivers and at least a dozen gas stations. I eat the granola bars Eric had the foresight to stuff into my gym bag, and drink enough cheap truck stop coffee that my stomach feels like it’s lined with acid.
Along the way, I sleep in fits and starts, neck at a bad angle, knee jammed into the seat in front of me. Every time I drift off, I dream of Pierce’s smug face laughing at the mess I’ve made of things, or of the anguish in Beck’s eyes when I confronted him before storming out of the locker room.
Every time I wake up, I’m more tired and sore than I was before. My body feels unreasonably heavy, like I filled my chest full of frozen, wet soil when I was on that field in Nebraska.
When the bus finally pulls into the closest station to Colson Creek, it’s after one in the morning. Getting a rideshare in a small town like this is going to be expensive if it’s even possible. I consider walking, and probably would if it were morning, but my body is past done, and the thought of trudging an hour along the shoulder of the back roads it takes to get to my childhood home is more than I can face. So I sit on the cold bench and order a rideshare.
I get lucky and find someone working at this hour. The car that pulls up is a faded blue sedan with Christmas lights strung around the dashboard. There’s a lot of stuffed cats lining the front and back windshield, and it smells a little like cat pee and stale cigarettes, but the older woman driving seems nice enough. She tries to initiate conversation a few times but doesn’t push. We ride mostly in silence, the radio low and crackling throughsome country Christmas song that’s likely to get stuck in my head for the next week.
By the time we hit the long gravel driveway that leads to my childhood home, it’s a little after two in the morning. It’s dead quiet thanks to not having neighbors, the only sounds coming from random critters in the woods and the creek the town was named for less than a mile away.
I thank Kathy for the ride and tip her more than I can afford to thank her for picking me up. I wait until her headlights have backed out of the drive before turning to the house. Even in the dim light of the one bulb that hasn’t burned out on the porch, I can see the peeling paint, the sagging roof, and the half-rotted-out porch for what it is. Home.
“Brody?”
My eyes adjust to the shadows, and I see Davis on the porch, sitting on the middle step with his elbows on his knees, dark hoodie up, breath puffing white in the cold. He stands and nearly trips on a loose board as he bounds down the steps and meets me halfway through the small yard.
“What happened to your car?” Davis is the first to speak, pointing out the most obvious detail. Then his gaze grows more concerned as it flicks from the empty driveway to the bag on my shoulder, then roams over the rest of me. I can only imagine that I look as messed up as I feel, in a wrinkled pair of borrowed jeans, my filthy wrestling shoes, and my dirty Howlers zip-up hoodie that probably smells like several days of old sweat and bus funk. I don’t want to talk about how long I’ve been wearing my compression briefs from the meet. My hair feels greasy. My skin feels grimy. My eyes are dry and swollen, and overall my body feels like I was run over by the bus I rode in.
“It’s back at school,” I say, voice low and rough. “I’ll, uh… I’ll go back for it later.”Later when I pack up all the pieces of the future I’ll be leaving behind because I’m an idiot.
I try for a smile, but what I manage is a weird, twitchy grimace that feels like my face forgot its default setting.
“Surprise,” I say, holding up my hands in ata-dagesture. It sounds about as defeated as I am, despite trying to cover it up. Davis doesn’t need my bullshit right now.
My brother closes the distance between us and pulls me in, wrapping his arms around me in a tight, supportive hug. I freeze at first, not because we aren’t an affectionate family, but because of how aggressively I feel like he’s holding me up and holding me together at the same time. I don’t remember a time when I was able to lean on anyone like this.
Davis doesn’t say a word, just holds me for several long moments, until I remember what I’m supposed to do with my arms and all the emotion of the last few days hits me all at once.
I drop my bag and clutch the back of his hoodie, press my face into his shoulder, and do the only thing I seem capable of lately. I cry. Not the controlled, teary-eyed, single-manly-tear kind of crying. Isob. Ugly, shaking, gasping sobs that wrench my chest and scrape my throat raw all over again.
Davis doesn’t tell me to stop. He doesn’t tell me it’s okay or that it’s not that bad. He doesn’t pile me with questions or expect me to do anything.
He just holds me up, feet planted in the gravel, both of us swaying a little under the weight of it.
I wake up feeling more tired than when I finally crawled into bed around four, and like I gargled the same gravel I rubbed my eyes with.
It takes a few moments to remember where I am, and something about the tiny circle of water damage in the far corner of my room brings me a breath of relief.
I’m home.
I stare at the spot for a while, deciding if I want to get up at all. I have no idea what time it is, but I stayed up later than I should have for someone who hasn’t really slept in several days. I gave Davis the bare-bones version of the story while I shoveled cold pasta into my mouth and talked around the most painful parts. I told him about Pierce. About punching him and getting suspended. My head sagged when I told him about the almost-certain expulsion looming over me.
I couldn’t bear to mention what happened with Beck, about how broken I feel that he’d betrayed me like that, about how I should have known someone like that wouldn’t care about someone like me.
