Lost Avalon: A Finding Nolan Novel (18 page)

             
Sadness flickered in his eyes. “Remember what high school was like for me?”

             
I did. People had been horrible to him. He’d never had a chance to come out on his own. Kids had been calling him every gay slur since ninth grade. Some days they’d taken it a notch further by spray painting it on his locker or tacking posters all around school. He and I hadn’t been friends back then, but I’d seen what was happening. Now I wished I had done something to stop it, but I’d been way too afraid of getting noticed by those same assholes torturing him to speak up.

             
“I’m sorry.” What else was there?

             
“Don’t be. Wasn’t your mess. It was mine. That’s my point. I know what it’s like to hate yourself, Blaise. Because I
hated
myself. Hated myself for being who I was. Hated myself for not being
normal
. Hated myself for being such an easy target. Mostly, I hated myself for never standing up to any of them. So, I get it.” He stopped when Mo came over with our food. Then he picked up where he’d left off, “Thing is, that kind of hatred will eventually kill you. Almost killed me, too. Know why I’m still standing?”

             
I had no idea, which my blank stare conveyed perfectly.

             
“The band. Ava came up to me one day at school as I was leaving. Insisted I come and play with you guys. Said you all were desperate for a decent bass player. She caught me so off guard that I agreed and got in her car.”

             
I remembered that day. “You were the missing piece. Once you showed up, we were complete. It was awesome. It was the first time we’d sounded like a real band.”

             
“It was also what saved my life.” I noticed Royce wasn’t eating. Just staring at his plate of biscuits and gravy.

             
“What’s wrong? I thought you liked your
sausage.
”

             
Royce grinned, but it didn’t stick. His eyes were getting that glassy look and I had the uncomfortable realization that he was about to cry.

             
“Shit, Royce, it was just a joke.”

             
“It’s not that, asshole. I know you’re just kidding. Listen. I’m going to tell you something I have never told another living soul. And the only reason I’m telling you is because I think you need to hear it, so that you really get it. Because I want you to get it. Life can change in an instant. Your life isn’t always going to blow shitballs.”

             
“Shitballs?”

             
“Just shut up and listen. That day, that day we became Finding Nolan, I had plans. Carefully constructed and prepared plans. I had written the perfect note. Left it in the perfect place. I’d acquired a gun and the single bullet needed to do the job.”

             
I stopped chewing.

             
“There was a place out by the river, where old Jimmy Nelson came through on his little fishing boat every night. No one would have been there in the afternoon to hear the shot.” He picked up his fork and began to move around a glob of gravy. “Only thing I hadn’t planned on was Ava. Coming up to me, talking to me like I wasn’t the school freak. Insisting I come and play music with you guys. It changed everything.”

             
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

             
“Why didn’t you?”

             
I popped my knuckles several times. “My mother killed herself.”

             
Royce looked stunned. Apparently that wasn’t the revelation he had expected. “Your mother’s death was an accident.”

             
I shook my head. “No. It was an overdose. And it was intentional. She’d tried twice before, but my dad had always managed to stop her.”

             
“So that’s the secret Ava’s been keeping for you.” I could tell Royce was quickly putting all the pieces together.

             
“Ava and I found her. She was in the bathtub. My dad came home shortly after.” There was no point in holding back now. “Thing is, my mother was sick. For a long time. Maybe always. My father treated her like she was the family’s shameful secret or something, so she never got any help. I have no idea how bad it really was, but I know she suffered a great deal from depression and mood swings. Sometimes even hallucinations. No one was ever allowed to talk about it. Of course her death wasn’t any different. My father quickly spun this story about an accidental fall in the shower causing her to hit her head and drown. It was total bullshit. She was dead before her head ever hit the water.”

             
“And you blame yourself?” Royce was studying me carefully. It wasn’t a random question.

             
“Why would you think that?” Did I?

             
“That night Ava called me to come and help her, you were muttering all this stuff. I thought you were talking to Ava at the time, although she said you weren’t. I just brushed it off like she didn’t want me in her business. But you really weren’t talking to her. You were talking to your mother.”

             
I reached up to rub my temples. This shit was getting deep. Ava was the only person on earth who knew about any of this stuff and it wasn’t because we’d ever discussed it. She just knew, because she’d been there for all of it.

             
“I got in trouble. It was stupid. I’d needed a piece of paper and I’d grabbed the closest thing to me. I thought it was just a random notebook she jotted down things like grocery lists in, but it wasn’t. She went ballistic when she saw that I’d ripped out a page. Called me names. Said I was a horrible son. Told me to get out of her sight. I just wrote it off as one of her episodes and took off to give her some time to cool down. I came home two hours later and she was dead.”

             
“Fuck, Blaise.”

             
“Kind of makes you want to buy me a drink, doesn’t it?!” I laughed bitterly.

             
“Or a gun. Shit man, let me do it for you. Put you out of your misery.”

             
Before I knew it, I was laughing more. Laughing louder. Death did that to you. Gave you a sick sense of humor. It was a relief to finally have someone who understood that and laughed with me. No judgment. No right or wrong way to feel. It was freeing.

             
“Thank you. For telling me your story,” I said when I finally calmed back down. “It made it easier to tell you mine.”

             
Royce nodded. “You’re going to be okay now. You know that, right?”

             
I took a breath and for a moment the whole world stood still while I listened for the rage within. It had gone quiet. “I do.”

             
I watched Royce as he finally took his first bite. “You know we’d support you if you ever wanted to come out publicly, don’t you?”

             
He nodded. “Of course. And I will. Someday.” He pointed his fork at me, “Same as you.”

             
Same as me.

Chapter 16

             
Blaise’s words had
stung. Bad. Suddenly it wasn’t enough anymore to force Blaise to face down his demons. I’d have to do the same with mine. Maybe then we could finally have a real chance. Good news was, I knew exactly where I’d find them.

             
My mother’s house was pitch black when I pulled up. No big surprise there. It was almost five in the morning. In all likelihood she was lying passed out on the sofa right about now and wouldn’t be getting up or become even remotely aware of anything for at least another four hours.

             
I let myself in through the front door and was instantly greeted with snoring too loud to be my mother’s. Apparently Timmy, my mother’s boyfriend, was sleeping over. They’d met a while back at Happy Hour and were a uniquely matched pair. Both longtime, functioning alcoholics who seemed perfectly content just working and drinking their lives away while enjoying each other’s presence. I’d say company, but that would suggest that they actually engaged in some sort of real conversations from time to time, which I seriously doubted.

             
I bypassed the living room all together and headed up the stairs to my old room. My baby sister, Addison, had had it last. She and Alex had been the final of us five to graduate high school just this past spring. It didn’t take much encouraging to get them to enroll for summer classes at college just to get them out of this house. All in all, that had been the best part about my job as the band’s manager. I’d been able to send all three of my brothers and my sister to college, as well as take care of their living expenses while they attended school. Which in turn had eased the guilt over leaving them behind to hit the road with Blaise and the others when really I knew my family still needed me.

             
Two seconds after I flipped the lights on I had to flip the switch again. Addison had defiled my walls with One Direction posters. The brief visual had already seared itself into my brain indefinitely, there would be no need for seeing much of anything in that room after.

             
I stumbled into the bed and plopped myself onto the mattress. I was too exhausted to even think, except maybe about how disappointing it was that my baby sister had strayed so far in her taste in music and how clearly my leaving had affected her more deeply than I had ever imagined. The last thing I remembered thinking was how she’d be getting a music education care package express mailed to her the next day.

             
By the time I woke up, the sun was already spilling into the bedroom unhindered by any curtains or blinds which were probably being left open on a permanent basis now that the room had been essentially abandoned. And who wouldn’t run screaming from this hell where Harry Styles was the first thing you saw upon opening your eyes in the morning.

             
I dug around in my purse blindly until I located my phone. Then I snapped a picture of boy wonder, as in ‘I wonder what is happening with that hair and can someone get the kid a pair of scissors’, and sent it to Addison, captioned, “WTF???”

             
I guess things could have been worse. The Biebs could have been lurking at me from some corner of the room, watching me while I slept. The thought alone made me shake involuntarily.

             
I didn’t waste any time lingering around the boy band wreckage that had once been my safe haven and hurried down the stairs only to find that the whole place was completely empty. Both Timmy and my mother had apparently already left for work. It was likely that neither had even been aware I was in the house with them.

Problem was, now that I was standing there alone in my mother’s kitchen, I had no clue what to do next. Did I follow through on my threat and walk away from the band? And if so, to do what exactly? I’d already attempted running away once and even though the whole thing got botched, I did eventually end up in Bora Bora as originally planned, which sort of put an end to my sudden travel ambitions.

              The annoying truth was, I’d never really thought about what I wanted to do with my life. There had always been something that simply needed doing and I had just gone ahead and done it. Something I used to think was one of my greatest strengths, but was quickly realizing was in reality my biggest obstacle.

             
“So…when was the last time I only did what I felt like?” Yes, I was talking to myself. “Logically, I suppose it would have to have been before Dad left. Which means I was eight?”

             
I nodded, confirming to myself what I had just said. “Well, let’s start there then.”

             
And so began my day of freedom. Imagine if you will, any one of the Home Alone movies. Well, the first third of them anyway. There weren’t any incompetent thieves trying to bring me down, but suffice it to say, there was a lot of jumping on my mother’s bed, eating Nutella straight from the jar with a spoon and putting on my own personal fashion show using every item I found in my mother’s closet. I was still dressed in the fancy black wide-legged jumpsuit I’d found hidden in her closet with everything else that should have died in the nineties, when she walked in.

             
“Ava!” She clutched her chest dramatically. “You scared the bejesus out of me.”

             
“What exactly is a bejesus, Mom?” I hugged her briefly before taking some of the shopping bags out of her hands.

             
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” Clearly she didn’t know either. “And what the hell are you wearing?”

             
“Found it in
your
closet, and I didn’t know I was. It was last minute.” I was placing the third box of wine into the fridge already. “Mom, you know you can afford to buy this shit in a bottle now, right? I mean, I don’t care what you spend the money on that I send you.”