I’d never seen a grown man cry before, and it shocked me out of my stupor enough to notice that I was crying too.
And so was Jonathon.
His cheek was wet against mine as he curled me closer and then carefully stood up with me in his arms, my legs over one arm and my neck braced by his other.
I stared mutely up into his brown eyes, caught like an insect in wet amber.
“You’re comin’ with me,” he said in a voice as raw as an open wound. Involuntarily, his hands squeezed me tighter to his chest, and I hissed as he pressed into the open cuts filled with glass on the backs of my legs. “You’re comin’ home with me.”
Diogo was there then, too, his hulking, inelegant form shading us from the blue, the red, and the white lights splashing through the house. He slowly lifted a big hand, watching me as he did it, then he carefully, gentle as a petal landing on grass, placed it on my head and ran a rough thumb over my brow.
It felt like an anointment.
“You’re coming home with us,” he echoed.
And it was funny.
Not in a laugh out loud kind of way because nothing about the nightmare of my life in that moment was worthy of laughter.
It was funny as in ironic, though, I didn’t know how to explain the emotion until many years later.
Ellie had been fighting for me to be hers.
Then she was dead.
Ignacio had claimed I was his.
Then, after an open and shut trial, he was incarcerated for life for manslaughter.
And then, I was no one’s.
But the Booths… the Booths tried to make me theirs.
NOVA
I’d been awake for hours, but then again, I couldn’t ever sleep for shit. Insomnia had plagued me since I was fresh outta the womb. Though lately, I had real reasons not to sleep. The loss of Dane and Lila hovered over the Booth home like a mushroom cloud of toxicity. We moved slower, talked lower, smiled less. After the calamity of Ellie Davalos’s murder, social services had pried them right outta our hands and placed them separately in cities hours apart from each other by car. They were away from us and away from each other in a way not one’a us could stand.
In the short seven months since we’d moved to Entrance and met the kids next door, we’d fallen hook, line, and fuckin’ sinker for Dane and Lila Davalos.
Dane was my boy, the best friend I’d ever had. I was the kinda guy who’d always had lots’a friends, but I was also the kid who didn’t feel for anyone, not much and not really.
My parents and brothers were good people, salt of the earth kinda people, or maybe more fittingly, salt of the sea. They had love and affection to give stray cats, lost kids, family and friends galore.
I wasn’t born that way. Easy with a smile, free with a laugh, I could entertain the best of ’em, but I didn’t get in for bondin’. People didn’t interest me much because most people were easy. I could see their needs and desires like florescent lights at the back’a their eyes, and it was borin’.
Dane wasn’t borin’. He was the farthest fuckin’ thing from borin’, and not only because he was the son’a Entrance’s premier drug dealer, but because he was cut from bad cloth yet somehow constructed into a good man. He was stand-up, the guy who stuck by your side through thick and thin. He didn’t judge, and he couldn’t be swayed from his own ethical standards.
Between the two’a us, I was the fuck up. The one who got arrested graffitiin’ the side’a Evergreen Gas Station for the seventh time, the one that got chased off a property by a father and his shot gun for sleepin’ with both his daughters. The one that didn’t give a fuck about anythin’ unless it was fun or interestin’, unless it would push me to feel more alive.
And Dane was there through it all, drivin’ his shit ass Honda Civic as the getaway car, takin’ a punch that was meant for me straight to the gut and then dishin’ out his own to beat down the motherfucker who was jealous of me flirtin’ with his girl.
We were opposites, you get me? Me from good stock, kind, solid people, but I was skewed, wrong and rebel in a way I could never ignore. And Dane? He was good straight through, even if his blood shoulda made him mean.
So at first, takin’ an interest in Lila was purely for Dane. There was nothin’ he loved more in the world than his sister. He was knighted to her, a champion to the death. I reasoned, if Dane was my boy, Lila was just as much my responsibility. We were brothers, so she was my sister.
I had three brothers already, and truth be told, they were all varyin’ degrees of fuckin’ annoyin’, so I wasn’t into babysittin’ a girl.
But Lila was different.
She followed Dane around without complaint, doin’ everythin’ he did and doin’ it with a smile because she was with her brother, and that was her favourite place to be.
When Dane decided to try his hand at skateboardin’ ’cause of me, Lila did too, and honest to Christ, she took to it like a duck to water. It made sense to get her a pink, child-sized skateboard of her own for her sixth birthday, and I pretended that big smile on her awkwardly constructed face didn’t hit me right in the chest.
When Dane started fuckin’ Anne Munn, the hottest girl in our grade at Entrance High, I looked out for Lila so he could sneak out to be with her. Didn’t think anythin’ of it, just kept an eye on the front door of the Davalos house from my bedroom window. Creeps and fuckin’ pervs were in and outta that house like gnats, and none of us liked the fact that Lila had to live under that roof.
There was nothin’ we could do, my parents or me, but watch out for them. Dad even looked into it, reportin’ them to Child Protective Services, but the odds’a them bein’ split up and sent away were huge, and we didn’t have anythin’ concrete.
That night, Ellie Davalos dead on the floor between Lila’s spindly legs, we got somethin’ concrete.
So, I didn’t get what the fuckin’ hold up was on getting’ the two of them back where they belonged.
With us.
It haunted me. The thought’a them alone and apart, achin’ with loss and fear. I tried to chase the ghosts away with alcohol and sex––God knew there was enough high school pussy available to me––but nothin’ worked. Not even the sweet heat of a woman or the tight grip of my fingers around a pen.
The pen I was holdin’ exploded in my hand, the second one that night. I flexed my fingers to work the tension outta them, ignorin’ the wet, black stain sinkin’ into my fingers.
I liked the ink. Always had. It reminded me that I could change the way people viewed me. That I could construct my self-image into somethin’ I could be proud of, and maybe one day, help others do the same.
“You should be asleep.”
I looked up from the kitchen table where I’d been inkin’ new words into the wood grain to see my mum standin’ at the mouth of the stairs, wrapped loosely in her blue linen robe. She was sleep rumpled, but those eye–– the only blue ones in the family––were alert.
Molly Booth didn’t miss anythin’.
I tossed the ruined pen on the table and smeared my inked hand against my black sweats as I leaned back in the chair. “So should you.”
“I’m the mother here, Jonathon,” she noted mildly as she went to the kettle and filled it at the sink. “Sometimes, you forget that.”