Hear Me Now (19 page)

“I don’t know. I just lost it.”

“Do you lose it a lot?”

I lower my head and nod, her words getting to me more than I want to admit. I do lose my temper a lot and there’s never really a good reason for it. Things just set me off and instead of thinking things through rationally, I always just let the anger consume me until there’s nothing left but the rage.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

Reaching out as her eyes lower to the ground, I run my hand across her cheek and bring my other hand up to level her to me again. As painful as it is for me hearing her say that she’s giving up, it pains me even more having her look away and I don’t even want to start with how it feels inside my chest, the way everything is all torn up because I’m standing here and not even touching her the way I want to.

“You can’t do what?”

“I liked you for you, Dillon. The way you were right from the start. I knew that you weren’t a nice guy, I knew everything you did to people, but I still saw past all of that and liked you anyway. I didn’t want you to be different, but then you decided that you needed to be.”

“I did need to be different.”

“Why?”

“For you because the person you talked to that first day wasn’t someone worthy to even sit near you, let alone talk to you the way I did.”

“Dillon,
stop it.”

“Stop what? Telling you the truth? I’m sorry. I can’t do that.”

“I need you to hear me!”

It’s the first time
I’ve ever heard her shout and even though she sounds the same to me as she always has, there’s something completely different about this. Her words, it’s like she’s punched me in the stomach, that’s how powerful they are.

All this time I’ve been going about things the wrong way. Cadence isn’t the one that’s deaf. I am. I’ve been able to hear her speak to me all this time, something that she doesn’t have the luxury of doing with me, relying only on the move of my lips for understanding, but I haven’t
really heard a damn word she’s said, despite my claims otherwise.

I’ve listened to her, been captivated by her, but never actually allowed myself to hear her.

“What do you need me to hear?” I ask but before she can answer, I place my finger to her lips. “I didn’t hear you before, but I swear I’ll do it now.”

“Dillon, you don’t need to be anyone else when you’re wi
th me. You only need to be you.” She stops, taking a breath her eyes not giving any hint of what she’s about to say next and I brace myself. “The parts of you that you hate so much, they’re parts of you that I love because even though they’re not so good, if you lost them completely, you’d lose you. I don’t want that. You’ve been doing it with me a lot, thinking you have to act a certain way, say things differently, being someone other than you.” Again she pauses and I wait, afraid to speak until she’s done.

“
I hate the fighting, the violence, the reactions you have. They scare me, but they’re you. I don’t want you to stop being you. It’s why I can’t do this anymore.”

“You can’t do what?”

“I can’t do this. I can’t be with you and watch you change because you think it’s what I need or want. I can’t be the reason you change or even lose yourself.”

“But the way I am when I’m with you is better. You think that I’m changing into something I think you deserve and that’s true, but for the first time in six years, Caddy, I’m changing into
someone I can actually stand being around. I’m changing back into me.”

“Dillon—”

“I love you—don’t do this.”

The way it f
eels letting those words slip, it’s powerful and as much as I didn’t want to admit to her, let alone myself, it’s the truth. I’m in love with her or at least what I believe love to be. If saying those words is what stops her from doing what I know she’s going to do then I’ll say them as many times as I need to.

I can’t let her walk away.

“I—I have to go. Goodbye Dillon.”

She moves so quickly that in the time it takes me to adapt to the change in atmosphere, she’s around the corner and I hear the door opening and closing behind her. Coming in here, I thought that if this is where things were going to go, I could stop them. Admitting the truth to her, telling her how I feel even though I know it’s fast and it could possibly be too much to take was supposed to put things back together again.

It didn’t do that. All it did is leave me facing something that I never wanted to again.

Being alone.

Chapter Twenty

Cadence

Falling back into my old routine, waking up in the morning, making my lunch and waiting for my mom to finish her daily ritual of spending an hour trying to tame her hair so that she could take me to school was easier than I expected it to be.

Sure, those were the parts of the routine that haven’t changed with the pipes bursting but where I expected to wake up today and school to be the last place I wanted to go, it wasn’t and things fell into a comfortable groove almost immediately.

The four days leading up to it weren’t quite so easy.

Thursday, I did
n’t even bother going with my mom. I couldn’t face what happened the day before and the way when I walked out on him, I bailed on the plan of having him spend the night. She knew there was more going on than I was telling her and in her usual way, she didn’t let up on me until it all came spilling out.

~*~*~

“Caddy, I know you think that because I’m old, I don’t notice things, but I’ve been watching you and I think there’s more going on than you’re admitting to.”

Sticking to the decision I made, not to speak another word after walking out of the bathroom the day before, I start signing and after her first initial eyebrow raise, she sits down on the bed and waits until I’m finished.

I don’t want to talk about it.

“Does it have something to do with Dillon?”

Yes and no.

“Caddy;
you like this boy, don’t you?”

That’s such a silly question. Of course I like the boy. I wouldn’t have gone to bat for him so much if I didn’t like him. She knows this and since I know it’s not what she really wants to know, I just give her the answer she’s after.

Until yesterday afternoon I was his girlfriend.

“What happened yesterday afternoon?” she asks and I can tell she wants to say more, but she’s giving me the space I need to get it all out on my own. It’s her mom and teacher roles combined and I’m the guinea pig she’s testing it on.

Tim said some things to Dillon, it set him off and he went after him. I couldn’t handle it so I ran and everything blew up after that.

“What did Tim say?”

Not telling you that. You know I hate saying it.

She doesn’t say anything for a few minutes and I wonder what she’s thinking.
She knows how I am about repeating nasty names back to her, how it makes me feel no better than the people who originally said them.

“So you’re telling me
Dillon defended you?”

I nod, not wanting to sign at all anymore.

“Maybe I was wrong about that boy after all.”

Huh? She’s the last person i
n the world to condone violence. She’s half the reason I feel as strongly as I do about it and now she’s admitting that what he did defending me was right? Since when?

Violence is never right, Mom. You’
re the one that taught me that.
I sign and she nods her head in agreement.

“Yes.
I’m the one that told you that and as wrong as what he did is and there can be no disputing that it was wrong, defending you will never be wrong to me.”

Great, so my mom’s on Dillon’s side. It makes what I did walking away that much worse.

“Did he do something to you? Is that why the two of you aren’t together anymore?”

When I admitted that Dillon and I were dating, I expected her to get mad at me. I know she’s not a mean person, but she is my mom and hiding the fact that I’m dating from her, I have to figure she would have
had some kind of response to, but so far she hasn’t said a word about it. It’s like she knew all along.

He didn’t do anyt
hing to me.

Except
tell me he loves me and plead with me not to leave him.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. So the reason you don’t want to go today
, it’s because of seeing him again?”

I nod weakly and she sighs.

“Is there more going on that you aren’t telling me?”

“Can I ask you something?” I say, this time speaking aloud.

“You can ask me anything sweetheart.”

“Is it wrong to have someone change for you?”

“I don’t believe it’s wrong for someone to change, but a person shouldn’t do it just to please someone else. I think if they really want to change and be a different person, it has to be for them alone.”

“What happens if you like the person just way they are, faults and all? Is that wrong?”

“Caring about someone, it’s never easy. Seeing past their imperfections; the things you don’t necessarily like, it speaks to the size of your heart and the person you are. That can never be wrong.”

“Mom, I think I screwed everything up.”

“Do you want to tell me why you think that?”

“Dillon, before I walked away from him, he said some things and I think I should have stayed but I d
idn’t and now I think I messed up.”

“What did he say?”

“That he wanted to be someone that could be worthy of me. He wanted to change for me, but at the same time, he wanted to be someone he hasn’t been in a long time.”

“So he was changing for both of you.”

I nod slowly and she smiles, though it’s so small it doesn’t even look like a real smile at all.

“Dillon cares a great deal about you. You’ve been a good influence on him and something tells me that what
you’re feeling, believing you screwed up, he’s feeling even more so. With everything you’ve told me about him since the two of you started hanging out, I think that’s his default setting.”

“What do you mean?”

“The bullying, fighting, name calling; all of the things he does that no one around him can tolerate, they’re all his way of dealing with his life because he hasn’t been taught the right way to handle it. Before you came along, I would venture to say that he didn’t give much thought to any of that and was just surviving the only way he knew how. When you came along all of that changed. Now he feels as though all of those things are screwing everything up.”

“He’s not a screw up.”

“We know that, but I don’t think he’s quite there yet.”

“Is this where you tell me that he needs someone to show him the way?”

She laughs and I can’t help but smile weakly in return.

“No, I’m not going to tell you that. Putting that much pressure on one person isn’t right. Dillon has to learn how to do this on his own. He has to realize that not every step he takes is the wrong
one in his own time and way.”

“Are you going to let me stay home?”

“For today, I think I am, but you know the rules. No leaving the house, no answering the door and I’ll be checking in as often as I can.”

~*~*~

She wasn’t so accommodating for my last day. She woke me up early and we went through the motions of our daily routine, though I was definitely not feeling it as the majority of the time I was slumping along and wanting to just go back and hide under my covers. Not coming back out until all visions of Dillon Murphy were erased from my memory altogether.

Going to class, seeing the seat beside me empty, it just made me want to turn around and run out, until I was as far away from the room and the school as possible.

If I thought staying in class without him was going to be the worst of it, I’d been wrong. Sitting in the middle of the desk was a piece of paper and it didn’t take a brain surgeon to know who it was from.

This is the beginning of something that no matter where we go from here, will never have an end.

- D

There were no more notes that day and no matter where I went in the school, even the locker room where I expected to at least catch a glimpse of him in passing while I hid out, he was nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to be let down by it but
I was. With the way my mom talked to me the day before, making it seem that there wasn’t anything in the world that couldn’t be fixed, I hoped I would have gotten the chance to do it even though my feelings haven’t changed.

I’m still wary of the reason for him changing. I don’t want that k
ind of pressure on either of us and no matter how badly I want to change the way I think so that we could work through this, I know it won’t happen.

We’re no good for each other and it has nothing to do with him being a fighter and me being deaf. It’s the way we look at the world. For all of our similarities, there are things that we won’t ever see the same and they’re big enough that staying together knowing it would be wrong.

So here I am now, after a weekend spent crying in my room, saying goodbye to something that never really had a chance to be anything, back at my own school and miles away from the school where the troubled boy that has my heart is. Where I should be focusing on my friends, my work and everything that comes with being back here, all I can think about is prom and all the plans that we never got around to making.

Dillon’s wrong. What we saw as a beginning that day at the ravine, it wasn’t something with no end. It had a very clear end and the way things are now proves it. No matter how much I miss him, how I wish things were different, it has to be this way. We can never go back.

This is our ending.

Dillon

It feels so fucking good to be back.

Walking the halls and seeing people duck away, some of them even turning and running from me, it brings me an immeasurable amount of pleasure. This is where I belong.

I might have gotten sidetracked for a while there, thinking I could be someone different, do better and be a person that would eventually mean something to the world, but not anymore. That craziness left the day that Cadence walked out of Wexfield and with her not planning to return, I didn’t have to worry about it coming back.

The first thing I made sure to do the minute I got here this morning was search out Tim and the others and make amends. Kayden tried to stop me when he saw where I was headed, but just like I’m done with Cadence, I’m also done with him. He can go back to his stupid girlfriend and leave me alone. I don’t need him. I never did.

Now that I’m square with my friends, we can get back to what’s really important. Today that means finding Eric and finally making him pay for what happened two weeks ago, and also for being the reason I’d gotten thrown into the class to begin with.

I can’t wait t
o make that stupid little baby pay.

“So, you and Ames; you back together yet?” Tim asks when I’ve finally escaped class and made my way into the hall.

“No, not planning on it either. I’m sick of her shit.”

“So you’re going stag to prom?”

“Not going at all.”

“Dude, you gotta go. Coach expects us all to be there. Solidarity and all that.”

How could I forget that? He mentioned it during practice last week. With everything that happened at the last dance, he felt that for this one, we needed to show a united front, showing the world and Daniels that even though we hated each other, we were gonna do what was right for business. The only business I even give a damn about—football.

The idea of getting dressed up like a monkey and parading around a dance with a bunch of people I can’t stand makes me sick, but there’s no way I’m going to go against what Coach wants. If it w
asn’t for him, I would have been kicked off the team completely last fall and there’s no way I’m risking it again.

“It’s all about the after party right? I’ll suffer through it as long as we’re planning on partying hard later.”

I’ve actually got another fight coming up that night, but I’m not about to admit that to Tim. There’s only one person in the world besides me and my father that knows anything about my extracurricular activities and with her gone, it’s gone back to being buried down deep again.

Maybe the after party will be worth it after all. I’m pretty sure after the fight I’m gonna need to get good and wasted and maybe if I get drunk enough, I can find a girl willing enough to help me banish Cadence and her stupid voice from my brain once and for all.

“Well, I asked Eve to go with me, so if you wanna ride with, you’re more than welcome.”

“No thanks, man. You’ve been talking about getting into her pants for a while now. Wouldn’t wanna be a buzzkill.”

Tim stops and following where he’s now pointing, I see why. Standing at the end of the hall is the very person we’ve been looking for. He wasn’t in class this morning so I was beginning to think he wasn’t gonna show today, but now that I see him, my day is looking up considerably.

It’s time to get a little payback.

“It’s about time, I’ve been waiting to smash that little punk all week.” Tim says and I grin. He’s not the only one. I might have gotten sidetracked for a while, but I’m definitely back on track now. No more distractions for me. It’s time to get back to doing what I do best.