“Anyway, when I was eleven I managed to secure a partial scholarship to this fancy ass high school – not quite as elite as Everlake, but the education I could have gotten there was way superior to anything I could manage at the local high school.”
“What did you want to be?” she asked me and it took me a moment to remember the dreams of that foolish kid.
“I wanted to go to med school,” I admitted, knowing it was a million miles from where I’d ended up and feeling like an idiot for saying it. “My mom always used to come home with tales about the surgeons she worked with who earned six times her wages and were labelled as heroes for their work. I guess it sounded like an impossible dream. But I wanted to have that life, look after my mom, meet a nice girl and have three perfect kids.” I sighed and forced myself to continue. That man I’d imagined myself becoming was so far away from my reality that I couldn’t even picture him now. He hadn’t had any darkness in him. No grief, no burden of revenge. “Anyway, Mom started working even more shifts so that she could pay the rest of my fees and I picked up a paper route and a job in a hardware store on the weekends. Even Michael started helping with my paper route so that he could pitch in and he was only nine.”
“Your family sound amazing,” Tatum murmured, but the way her eyes glimmered as I turned to look at her said she already knew this didn’t have a happy ending.
“They were,” I agreed. “They were everything to me. It was the three of us against the world and then… One night, Mom got back late from a shift, it was gone nine and there hadn’t been anything in the fridge for dinner so me and Michael had eaten cereal on the couch while watching TV. But when she got back, she was smiling so much that we couldn’t stay mad at her for it. It turned out she’d been offered a promotion with a pay rise which meant more to us than I can even really explain. She’d been struggling to make up the difference in my school fees and that money was like an answer to all of our prayers. To celebrate, she took us out to a twenty four hour diner on the other side of town and we all ate pancakes and drank coke floats and talked about going on a holiday to California when I had my doctorate and a fancy surgeon’s job. It was like, this perfect fucking evening. We were all just happy. I used to dream about that night a lot…” I trailed off as half a smile tugged at my lips while a frown drove into my brow. These memories were precious, but they cut me open and left me bleeding too.
“You don’t have to tell me the rest if you don’t want to,” Tatum said, shifting closer again as she leaned her head on my shoulder.
I took comfort in the warmth of her body and the sweet scent of her skin and before I could overthink it, I curled my arm around her and pulled her into my lap.
She didn’t gasp or flinch or do anything to say she didn’t want me to hold her like that. She just curled her body against mine and laid her head down on my chest like she was listening to my heartbeat through my shirt.
I wrapped my arms around her and rested my cheek against her forehead, knowing she had her own grief too. That she knew this feeling, she’d lived it, survived it, learned the battle of coping with it every day. And knowing that she understood made it that bit easier to tell her the rest of it.
“We got back in our car and started to drive home. We’d been having so much fun that it was past midnight and Michael was practically asleep on his feet. I remember him crawling across the back seat and lying down with his head on his arms. Mom laughed and kissed his forehead, promising to drive slow because he didn’t have his seat belt on.” A lump rose in my throat and Tatum brushed her fingers across my ribs, back and forth again and again in a soothing motion that gave me the strength I needed to go on. “I got in the front with Mom and we began our journey home. We were crossing an intersection when the car hit us. The lights were green, I can remember it clear as day. The lights were green and Mom was driving slow because of Michael, but the other car ran the red light and…”
I was momentarily overwhelmed by the memory of that crash. Of the world flipping over and over, pain driving through me, Mom screaming, me screaming and Michael-
“By the time our car stopped rolling, I could hardly see straight, let alone think straight. It landed on its roof and I was hanging upside down in my seatbelt with blood dripping down my face from a cut on my neck. I’ve still got that scar. Mom was screaming and screaming and at first I didn’t even realise it was my brother’s name she was saying until I managed to focus on the view beyond the windshield, of the little broken body laying in the road. There was so much blood, so much fucking blood. And then I was screaming too and suddenly someone was ripping me out of the car. I didn’t know it then but that was Saint’s father. Troy Memphis,
