Storm: Book 2 (2 page)

I nod. “With everything that’s happened, I don’t see anything in my life getting better. I don’t know who or what is making all this stuff happen, but I don’t know how much more I can take.

“Brynn,” he flicks the tip of my chin, “you’re the strongest person I know, you’re going to be okay. Trust me.”

“How do you always know how to say the right things?”

“Super telekinetic powers. It’s my superpower.”

“I knew it all along! You keep saving my life. It’s all starting to make sense now.”

We both laugh. “How’s your mom doing?” he asks breaking the silence. My smile fades.

While I was recovering, the only thing I could think about was how much I let my mom down. She was lying in some hospital, battered, on and off life support and her daughter couldn’t be there for her because she’s in the hospital herself because she took too many pills and snorted too much coke.

As soon as the doctor’s cleared me I checked out and headed east to see her. That jerk Robert beat her nearly to death. When I got there, she was still unconscious, a tube still stuck in her mouth. Her face swollen and purple, wrapped in bandages. My Aunt Vera who had never left her side since she got rushed there in the middle of the night. Seeing my mom bandaged up, being on life support was the hardest thing I ever endured. She must have felt my presence because she became conscious a few hours after I got there. I didn’t let go of her hand my entire time there. It was just me, my psychology textbook, and a blanket, keeping me warm from the frigid air of the hospital room. Over the days she got better, she practically begged me to go back up to school and stop worrying about her. She said I had my own life to worry about. And plus, my Aunt Vera who recently retired, would be there for her.

“She’s good. I just feel a little guilty that I’m here and not there for her like I should be.”

“She’ll be fine. You said she got sick of you, right?”

I laugh. “It’s the truth. I was hell on the nurses. ‘Make sure her pillows are fluffy’. ‘Her coffee isn’t hot enough’. ‘That TV isn’t loud enough, you know how much she likes her soap operas’. If my mom didn’t practically kick me out of there, the nursing staff would’ve.”

We share a small laugh and drift back in slight sleep.

***

As the rain slowed down from a banging on rooftops and pavement into a fine faint, soothing sprinkle, there’s a knock on the door. I had plans of letting the rain carry me into nice, long bout of sedation for a few hours in Chase’s arms, but the knock on the door foils my plans. I lift up slightly and look to the left of me. Chase is gone. Probably watching TV. I know boys don’t really like to cuddle anyways.

“Can you get that for me?” he says from the bathroom. “I’m expecting a package.”

I grab a grey sweatshirt of his off the bedroom doorknob and pull it over me, the hem drapes a few inches above my knees and walk to the door. I open it and a girl, wearing a purple LA Lakers hoodie and yoga pants, stands there looking up and down at me surprised.

“Uh, is Chase here?” she says. She wears glasses, thick black square plastic frames that have no lenses in them.

“Uh, he’s here,” I say with an attitude. Who is this person? And why is she looking at me like I don’t belong here? Like I’m somehow intruding on her territory. “Uh, is he expecting you?” Already I don’t like her demeanor. I’ve laid eyes on her for three seconds and that’s enough for me to realize that I don’t like her. She sucks her teeth and looks behind me into the hallway of the apartment. I find her eyes, making me the focal point of her attention. “Uh, yeah, like…actually he is.”

“Like…he’s…like…like busy like right now and stuff,” I say making fun mocking her Valley girl accent.

She looks down at my toenails, red, chipped, clearly needed to be painted again and holds a laugh in her throat. I look at hers, a deep purple, perfectly manicured with the precision of a surgeon. I have to give it to her; she has the prettiest feet I’ve seen since I’ve been in the Inland Empire; unlike mine, hardened from being scrunched in lacrosse cleats several times a week. At least I’ll be able to walk when I’m fifty. She probably walks to the mailbox in heels and will need ankle surgery by thirty-five because of it.

She reminds me of all the girls in high school who sat at the ‘cool’ lunch table and made a notebook of grades they’d given to the other girls in our class. Clothing, hair, makeup and the ever important it factor—breast size. A being the obvious best and F being the worst. Needless to say, I received a failing grade on every category. Bitches. They thought they were better than everyone else. So what their father owned a BMW dealership on the edge of town or ran the country club on the east side; they still grew up in the same dusty old town just like me. I hear Meghan, the big-breasted ditzy one got dumped by Don Valentine, the quarterback the night of the prom and is about to have a baby at the ripe old age of eighteen—her parents kicked her out of the house because of it. I hear she lives on the south side with her unemployed twenty seven year old boyfriend who sells Vicodin. I give her life an F-. I guess apart of me will never escape my hometown, no matter how far away I am from it.

The bathroom door opens and Chase approaches us, clutching me by my waist from behind. He kisses the side of my neck. I look at Chase’s face and it’s colored with a mix of shock, confusion, fright and annoyance.

“Lisa,” his voice is shaky, a far cry from his normal cool, confident, and assertive tone. “I told you before, to call before you come over here.”

“I did call, but you didn’t pick up.”

“What I mean is call before you come over and actually speak to me.”

She rolls her eyes at me. “We need to talk,” she says.

He grabs me and pulls me in to him. Yeah, that’s more like it—show this bitch who he belongs to. Clearly not her. She doesn’t look like his type. Not that I really know what type he likes anyways because I never asked him. But just knowing him for the time that I’ve known him, he likes athletic, artsy, intelligent type of girls. I’m two out of the three. There’s nothing artsy about me, but I can out lift most of the average guys in any gym on the west coast and I’m surely I’m no dummy. Okay, so I make a lot of unwise decisions, especially lately, and I’ve skipped a lot of classes lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid. She can’t be his type. Who wears glasses with no lenses in them? She’s the type who would have him taking her shopping and complain to him about how the prices of lattes are going up and how her dad won’t buy her a BMW for Christmas. She is the exact reason why I hate Los Angeles.

“Does it look like I have time to talk?” His jaws tighten. “I told you how things are going to work from here on out. Now if you’ll excuse me, as you can see, I have company. I’ll talk to you later. I can’t deal with rudeness. You know that about me.”

“Really, so you’re just gonna stand here and act like I wasn’t wearing the same fucking sweatshirt just last Tuesday,” she says. She pinches the collar, where the hood and the neck are. It makes me flinch. “You didn’t even bother to wash it.” She shakes her head with a smirk on her face. I look down at the neck and there’s a faint smudge of red lipstick. “You could've at least washed it before you let the poor girl wear it. I wonder how many strands of my hair are in the fabric.”

Guilt and shame course through me. I dart off to the bedroom to grab my stuff. This was definitely a bad idea coming here. I should’ve known better. The tough exterior, the loner attitude, the tattoos—it was a dead giveaway. I came here in a rush of emotion and leaving the same way I came—in the heat of the moment. I should’ve stayed with my mom. My mom is in some damn hospital and I left her to go have sex with a boy only to be treated like this?

I yank off his sweatshirt and throw it behind me; the girl’s cheap perfume saturated in the material is now obvious to me. It reeks. Chase is still talking to the girl, who is still making a case to try to enter his apartment and I walk past both of them, my shoulder bumping into him and the girl, bag in hand.

“Brynn, wait.” Chase shouts as I storm down the metal stair steps, cursing and chastising myself under my breath.

He runs after me, still in his towel, holding it at the knot so it won’t fall down. Knowing him he probably wouldn’t care at all if it did. He grabs my arm, but I pull away fumbling for my keys. I have no desire to hear what he has to say.

“Go to hell,” I say, swinging my car door open.

“Will you just listen? That’s not what it looks like. Just let me explain.”

I jut my key in the ignition, but it refuses to turn over. He yanks the door handle up and down repeatedly, but I lock it. I’m sweating and the engine still won’t turn over. He knocks on the window repetitively but I refuse to look at him. I pull the key out and breathe a few times and look up at his doorway, the girl looks down at us with a smirk, shaking her head from side to side, amused by it all. I roll the window down.

“You know you could have really handled this better. You could have at least told her to come by after I left.”

“It’s not like you think. Brynn please.”

“You said that already. How many times are you going to say that?”

The starter sputters but still doesn’t start.

“She’s just a friend.”

“Wow, nice try. That’s so eight grade. All you boys read from the same playbook don’t you? You still can’t come up with a good lie.”

The car starts finally and I shift into reverse, my foot still on the break, giving him a slightest chance to say something that would stop me from peeling out of this parking space, even if I didn’t believe anything that would come out of his mouth. I put my sunglasses on and look out the windshield at the man walking his dog, his face animated with surprise and confusion as he sees Chase with a towel wrapped around his waist.

“Okay, she’s more than a friend.”

“Finally the truth.” At least a smidgen of it.

“She used to be on the lacrosse team—”

“Is that supposed to make it better?” Lacrosse team? I can’t tell. She doesn’t look like she has an athletic bone in her body.

“Coach had me train her so she could get back on the team—”

“And you’ve been fucking her ever since. You know I left my mother who was just on life support to be here with you. You could’ve shown a little more decency.”

I release my foot from the brake leaving him, the girl and his towel to hear my tires screeching across the pavement.

Chapter 3

I sit in my car with the windows rolled up and scream so loud I hope I sever my vocal chords. It sounds primal. I came all the back for that? My mother was on life support only days ago and I left her bedside just so I could witness that. Seriously? Another bad decision, Brynn. It’s all I ever seem to do lately. I beat on the steering wheel until my knuckles hurt. When is this supposed to stop? As soon as think things get better, shit finds a way to come crumbling down. That’s it. I quit. I’m going up to my dorm, packing a few clothes, going home and I’m never coming back. Forget lacrosse. Forget the scholarship. Forget Chase. College just isn’t for me. At least back home I knew where I was headed—a couple of classes at the community college and pregnant by my nineteenth birthday. Maybe that’s not so bad as I used to think it was. Up here? I don’t even know which way is up anymore. I slam my car door so hard, determined to shatter the windows.

I rush into my room and swing the door open. Tessa is sitting on the couch, naked with cotton balls between her toes painting them fire engine red. She bops up in fright, spilling the toenail polish on the floor. “Oh my God! Brynn! I didn’t expect you home until tomorrow afternoon.” She covers herself up with the towel and swoops into the room behind me.

“Brynn, what’s going on?” Tessa says, but it’s like she isn’t even here. I hear the words coming out of her mouth, but they have no meaning, no purpose to me whatsoever. I dump my purse and my book bag out on the bed and scatter everything out like a box of puzzle pieces frenziedly trying to find what I crave. What I need. My breathing is jagged and I’m murmuring to myself a zillion miles a minute about how I’m so stupid and I’m a loser.

“Brynn, you’re scaring me.” She stands behind me and she’s not saying that just to say it. I’ve never acted so frantic about anything before. I nearly tear the room apart, tossing back panties, yanking back socks and pens and nearly yanking the drawers of my dresser off their hinges. It’s not there.

“It’s not here. Nothing is here,” I shriek

“What’s not there? Brynn you’re scaring me. Please! What’s going on?

“I just…have to find…my pills.” With both of my hands I grab a fistful of my hair, my eyes peeled back on the verge of a panic attack. I speak so rapidly; I barely understand what I’m saying. “I need them. Just one or two. That’s all. That’s it. This is too much for me. I can’t ever get what I what. Story of my fucking life. I just want it all to go away.”

“No! Brynn just calm down,” she says trying to grab ahold of me by my elbow, but I snatch it away. My breathing is off the charts now, I’m wheezing and there’s a whistling sound in my lungs. A cold sweat covers my body like a blanket. I plunder through my closet, thumbing through every compartment or canister where I would have stashed them. I find a pill bottle underneath my mattress, nearly flipping it over on its side. The bottle is empty and I grip it so tightly that my fist turns white.

The plastic bottle cracks.

The tightness in my chest intensifies with each breath. Tessa places her hand on my shoulder and it startles me. I turn around, breathing harsh, jerky hot air in her face, my eyes pried open as far as they can be. Tessa’s face is full of fright. She places both hands on my shoulders and rubs them slowly. It’s soothing.

“Brynn. Babe. It’s gonna be okay.” I refuse to look in her eyes, down on the floor at the scatter of lip gloss and calculators and rubber bands—any place not to meet her gaze. “Hey. Hey…look at me. Look at me,” she says moving her head around to capture my eyes. Our eyes finally bolt together. She places her hand on my cheek. “Brynn. It’s okay. I’m here. Just breathe. Just breathe.” I follow her directions and each breath lets the pain out until it subsides. My heart rate slows and the panic erases.