She gave me hell for it, but she still did it.
Once Frankie entered my life in a big capacity, I shared my coping mechanism with her. Music. I explained to her how I felt when I listened to music, how I could go into a new world and escape mine whenever I listened to a song. Whenever I listened to the riffs of a guitar, the ping of a piano, the beat of drums and the emotion in a vocalist’s voice, I became part of a moment with them that took me away from all my anger, hurt and misery.
It was thanks to Frankie that I found out that I could sing.
She had severe asthma, I had known that for as long as I had known her, but I found out just how bad it was during the time that we became close friends because it was around the same time that her dad died. The day she ran towards me, screaming and crying. I knew I’d never forget how scared I was when she dropped to her knees before me and gasped for breath. Her lips had turned blue by the time I got her inhaler from her pocket and forced it into her mouth.
Hearing her inhale her medicine and listening as her wheezing faded to nothing gave me a relief I had never felt before in my life, but it also added a great worry to my mind too. Frankie was a girl who I quickly realised I needed in every way and the very thought of her dying because of her asthma terrified me whenever I allowed myself to think about it. It was the reason why I stole one of my foster mother’s blue inhalers every few months. I made sure I had one of them with me at all times just in case Frankie was ever without one of hers.
Owen had caught me stealing one once and he sliced a line into my back as punishment. Out of all of the times that the man had beat me, that was the only time he had ever left a forever-lasting physical mark on me. Across my shoulders and down to the right of my back was a thick, jagged scar. Its pink colour was fading with time. It was always there to touch though, to feel, to remember.
That awful day, when Frankie’s attack subsided, I sat on the side of the street with her and hugged her but it didn’t seem like it was enough. I asked what I could do to help; she told me patting her lower back was what her parents did so I did that and then I began to sing to her to distract her from the pain she was feeling. I didn’t know what it was like to have a real father. I never knew who mine was, and my foster father was never in the running for Dad of the Year, but just because I didn’t have a father didn’t mean I didn’t understand the pain of losing one. I had never seen Frankie so broken before and I wanted to do something, anything, to take away some of that pain.
So I sang and to my great surprise, it helped her.
A long time later, when her sobs turned to sniffles, she turned her tear-streaked, blotchy red face to mine and stared at me through her swollen, bloodshot eyes and she offered me the sweetest smile I had ever been given. She leaned her face against mine and I could still remember feeling my heart stop when her lips brushed against mine. It was a simple, chaste kiss but it was my first, hers too, and I still couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. It would be the only kiss we would share until just over two years later just after her fifteenth birthday when I bit the bullet and asked her on a date. During that date I asked her to be my girlfriend, and I kissed her, and that was that.
Her kissing me back had been enough to shake my world.
Ever since Frankie heard me sing, she almost demanded I sing to her all of the time. She encouraged me to start a band to put my passion for music into something I could create myself. It was like a switch had been flipped inside of me. I loved to sing, I just loved it. Singing felt like breathing to me. May and Hayes took to the idea of being in a band like fish to water. At our school, Mr Jones was musically inclined and he was delighted to finally have students to start an after-school music club with. He taught us how to play the guitar, piano, and the drums. We learned our other instruments on our own, but Mr Jones was the reason we could even do that.
He supported Blood Oath from the second we came up with our name and took our band seriously.
He didn’t have much on a teacher’s salary, but the man went out of his way and bought us our first instruments. They weren’t new or even second hand, they were third hand and obviously not in the best of shape, but they were ours. Once we had instruments, May’s parents sat up and took notice of us one day when we were jamming out in their back garden. Three weeks later, they allowed us to have their small garage converted into a makeshift soundproof studio for us to work out of. May’s parents didn’t know it then, but they gave me a place to escape to every single day and I always appreciated them for it.
The day I turned eighteen, I moved out of my foster parents’ house with a bag full of my belongings before the sun had even risen, and I kept my promise to Frankie: I never looked back once I closed the door behind me. The
