Brax hadn’t been home for the last two days, and after meeting his mom, I can’t say I’m surprised.
I turn away from my new foster “brother” and my sister, and head down the dirty hallway to my room at the end. Behind me I can hear giggling and I turn back to see a practically naked Brax leaning over my sister, arm on the wall above her head. A mischievous smile is on his face and my sister is twirling her hair. Fuck.
I enter my room with a deep sigh and slam the door harder than I mean to. Despite what most people assume about me, my life hasn’t been all privilege and decadence. I’ve had some very low moments, but standing in this bare room with a view out the window of the concrete slab where the house next door used to be before it burned down, my future ruined, my sister about to join a gang, and my parents having abandoned us—oh, and also my boyfriend just broke up with me a couple days ago—this is my lowest moment.
I put it off as long as possible, but by eight o’clock that evening I’m starving and I need to find something to eat. I walk into the kitchen and stop short.
There’s an absolute beast of a man in there. He’s probably six five and built like a tank. His back is to me and I can see that his whole body is covered in massive muscles. His arms are like tree trunks and covered in unusual tattoos which are made up of very thick black blocks that stretch in lines all over both arms.
He hears me and turns around like he’s ready for a fight. I put up my hands to show that I mean no harm. He sees me and seems to calm down, slightly.
“Hi, I’m Addison, I… live here now.”
“Theo,” he says brusquely, before turning back to the joint he was rolling on the counter.
I recognize him too from school. I remember his shaved head and the light scar over his eyebrow. He was one of the guys hanging out with Brax in the halls.
I edge around him cautiously and head towards the fridge. I look inside, even though I know what I’ll find. It’s the same as what was in there the last two days. There’s a half empty ketchup bottle, a rotten lemon, and about a dozen bottles of beer with a sticky note that says “DO NOT TOUCH.”
I slam the door in frustration. Theo cocks a brow at me but doesn’t turn away from what he’s doing.
“There’s never anything to eat around here and I’m starving,” I say.
“Yeah, you’re on your own as far as that goes. Brax’s house is a food wasteland. His mom doesn’t want to waste those precious foster kid dollars on stupid things like food, when she could spend it on cheap vodka.”
I sigh in frustration. Just then my sister bounds into the room.
“Hey, Theo!” she says enthusiastically, and my eyes bulge at what she’s wearing. A tube top and short gym shorts pulled up her crack.
I see Theo eyeing her up and I feel like I’m going to be sick.
I dash over and grab her hand.
“Come on.” I pull her out of the room.
“Where are we going?” she whines.
Saving you from teen pregnancy, I think as I start searching around the house.
“Yes!” I exclaim as I find a crumpled twenty-dollar bill fallen beneath a dresser. “We are getting food.”
I pull her outside on to the sagging porch, but then I take a minute to really look around and think about what I’m doing. In the daytime this place is scary, but in the night it’s about a hundred times worse. There're no streetlights for several blocks because they’ve all been smashed. The only light is coming from the few houses that are still occupied. In the distance, there’s a lone car slowly driving down the street like it’s stalking the neighborhood.
There’s a sudden loud bang and I throw myself back inside, taking Olivia with me, and slam the door closed.
“Was that a gunshot?” she asks in disbelief.
“I don’t know. It sounded like one,” I say, a bit shaken up.
Ok, we are not leaving this house tonight. We’ll have to order in.
It takes me half an hour to find a pizza place that’ll deliver to this neighborhood. Olivia keeps trying to leave, but I keep her with me locked in my room. Even though she doesn’t really like me, she’ll still kind of do what I say—maybe it’s ingrained in some younger sibling hard-wiring or something. I don’t want to analyze it too much but I’m just happy she respects me at least a little.
The pizza comes about an hour later and we head down. The delivery driver looks terrified and like he can’t wait to get out of here—I can’t blame him. He doesn’t even wait around for his tip. I give him the cash and he throws the change at me before sprinting back to his car and peeling out of the driveway in a shriek of tire squeals.
I’m about to take the pizza back up to my room, when Olivia suggests sharing it with the guys out back.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask.
“Oh, cooooome on.” She rolls her eyes at me dramatically. “Can you try not to be such a freak? We need to fit in. We need to make friends—and those guys are super hot. Come on!”
She pulls on my arm insistently, but I jerk it back.
“Those guys are trouble, Olivia. We need to stay as far away from them as possible.”
She rolls her eyes, and I have the briefest flash of desire to slap some sense into her.
“They are dangerous,” I almost plead with her.
“Whatever. If you want to spend your life being a loser locked in your room, then that’s your business. But Mom and Dad abandoned us and now we are stuck here so we have to deal with it. They left us with nothing and didn’t even bother to tell us they were leaving. We are on our own. Get over it.” And with that, she turns away from me and heads towards the back of the house. I hear the backdoor slam.
I’m left standing there, holding a full pizza in my hands.
She’s right too. One day we came home to find the house empty and our parents gone. It looked like they packed and left in a hurry. We had no idea why they left—still don’t. Both of our parents are only children and all our grandparents are dead so we have no close extended family that we could have called. Our housekeeper eventually found us and took us to the authorities to help us sort out what happened.
All of our parent’s bank accounts had been emptied, even the house had been recently sold, and that money was gone too. With nowhere else to go, Olivia and I went into the foster care system. Our housekeeper offered to take us in, but the state said that it didn’t work like that, you can’t just take in a couple of orphaned kids. So that’s how we found ourselves in this terrible house in Marter.
Our parents were not good parents, but it’s the not knowing what happened that kills me the most. I’ve lost everything I have ever known, and now I feel like I’m losing my sister too.
I walk sadly to the kitchen. I take a few slices and put the rest in the fridge, hoping Olivia will get it. Before I can head up the stairs though, this sleazy-looking older guy in a stained white wife beater comes into the kitchen. He’s leering at me with a mouth full of slightly discolored teeth.
“You must be the new girl that Diane took in,” he says while licking his lips.
“Yeah. Who are you?”
“I’m her boyfriend.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say without any enthusiasm and try to head out of the room, but he walks over to block me.