“Cherri.” I turned my attention to the voice that called my name, and my heart started to calm. Looking back at me, through a reflection of my own crystal blue eyes, was my younger brother, Gus. His short, scraggly blond hair was still in bed-head mode, but his expression was panicked, and his arms were clenched tightly onto my arm. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
Finally, my brain started to tether to reality. It’d been nearly four years since I slept in that old twin bed, since that tiny, green house had been our home—since I’d last seen Deon.
“Hey, bud,” I greeted Gus finally, seeming to calm his fear a little. “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”
“I came to get you for breakfast, but you were screaming.” He hiked his feeble, nine-year-old body up onto my bed and sat cross-legged in front of me. “Who’s Deon?”
Gus and I used to share a room back in our old home. A path of fortune for my dad at work had taken us out of the slums and up to the ritzy part of town, to a six-bedroom, eight-bathroom home where we slept in different rooms. Thankfully, those old days of humility kept us close, even when we were no longer struggling for money.
I curled my arms around Gus and pulled him over to me. He repositioned so that he was sitting in my lap and leaned backward, and I gently pet his head. “He’s an old friend of mine.”
“I don’t remember him,” Gus replied.
“Yeah, you were still pretty young. I knew him from before we moved.”
“Did you stop being friends after we moved here, like what happened with Tia?” Gus asked.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from chuckling at Gus’s comparison. There was a young girl in our old neighborhood that Gus liked to run around after, but she didn’t like him much. Gus could be excitable, and Tia was very subdued. When we moved, Tia must have decided she was finally free of the little boy who would run around after her, and in order to keep him from being too sad about it, my parents had to tell him that he couldn’t be friends with her anymore because we moved.
“Something like that,” I replied.
The truth was, I never saw Deon after that day. I thought maybe he’d gotten caught or something, but when I went back to visit with his mom, she confirmed that Deon was fine, but he didn’t want to see me. For everything we’d been through and for the fact that he’d been my first crush, maybe even my first love, it was heartbreaking that he’d suddenly stop talking to me.
Gus tapped mindlessly at my fingertips. “Do you miss him?”
When tears started to rise to my eyes, I was actually a little shocked. It’d been over four years since I saw Deon last, and it’s been almost as long since I’d even thought about him. My mom told me to write it off, that sometimes the people in our lives were more important to us than we were to them, but I couldn’t get him out of my heart so quickly. Even though it was a bad idea, I kept an eye out for him in the neighborhood. I even asked some of the other kids about him, but I got nothing in return. Deon was gone, never to be seen again, at least by me.
“No,” I lied to Gus. “He didn’t want to be friends anymore.”
Gus flipped around and looked into my eyes with his now wild and wide eyes. “How could someone not want to be friends with you? You have all the cool kids as friends.”
“That’s true,” I said. Gus looked truly bewildered, and it made me smile. “Sometimes, people just don’t want to be friends. It’s part of growing up.”
Gus poked out his bottom lip. “I don’t wanna grow up then.”
“You and me both, kid.” I tapped his arm. “Come on, let’s go eat before Mom flips.”
There was a dull thud as Gus hopped out of my bed and scuttled from the room. I took a few moments after he was gone to stretch and try to shake my sudden memories of Deon and the last day I saw him from my mind. No good came from considering the past, I’d learned, and I had more than one thing to focus my attention on, so I packed my Deon memories into a mental box, used a little too much duct tape to seal it closed, and then stuck it up on a high, out-of-reach shelf, never to be pulled down again.
The covers around me tried to suck me in the more I tried to get out of them, but I fought against their pull and slid out. My PJs were enough to get me through the morning, so after unplugging my cell phone from its charger on the bedside table next to my bed, I walked out of my bedroom. All of the bedrooms were on the third floor of the house, so I made my way over to the staircase and down to the second floor, where my parents’ offices and Gus’s and my playroom was situated, then continued down to the first floor, where the living room, kitchen, and other such family meeting spaces were located.
The dream with Deon hadn’t just brought back my memories of him. It also brought back memories of the conditions we used to live in. Our old home had two floors, with two bedrooms and a single bathroom on the top floor, and a small, open living room and kitchen on the main floor. It wasn’t the extravagant home we lived in now, but I liked how contained everything was. Unlike the average teenage girl, I actually enjoyed sharing a room with Gus, and what our old home lacked in expense, we made
