Black Promises (Blackwoods College)

I hesitated then shook my head. “I shouldn’t leave Robyn.”

“Don’t stay on my account.” She stood up on her toes, looking across the room. “There’s a beer pong game going strong. I’ll manage by myself for a while.”

Jarrod never stopped looking at me. I felt a strange, cold chill, as I squeezed Robyn’s arm. “Are you sure?”

“Go ahead, talk about math or whatever the heck you two are doing.” She grinned and winked at me, then raised her eyebrows at her cousin. “Just don’t be a dick to her, okay?”

“Can’t make promises.” His eyes never left my face.

“I’ll be back in a bit.” I left her and followed Jarrod through the heavy crowd and into the relative quiet of the back yard.

Two drunk girls in their underwear lounged on inflatable rafts with red cups perched on their boobs. Guys took turns trying to toss ping pong balls into the cups and the girls screamed with delight. Lots of jokes about getting testicles in their faces and such. Jarrod ignored the group and went deeper toward the lush grass.

He stood staring up at the moon with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Glad you came,” he said softly.

“Everyone was staring at me in there.”

“There are rumors.” He grimaced and gave me an apologetic look. “There are always fucking rumors when it comes to me.”

“Yeah, I sort of figured that. What’s it feel like to be one of the most popular people at school?”

He grunted and looked back at the sky. “I never wanted any of this. Addler’s the one that craves attention.”

“Even still, you guys are like the kings of Blackwoods.”

He was quiet for a few seconds. His lips tugged down into a deep frown and I saw the worry lines along his eyes. He did seem different than I remembered—in my memory, he was a raging hot fire, a flame that wanted to only consume and consume and consume. He started fights for pleasure and stalked around the campus like an animal hunting his prey.

But ever since we started our strange little dance, he seemed more collected, like he’d been able to quiet the voices that pushed him into ever deeper depths of despair and violence and pain.

“You know where I come from,” he said finally, speaking nearly at a whisper. I moved closer so I could hear. “I spent half my life in a trailer park. Lived in a shitty little closet of a room until I was ten listening to my parents fight, fuck, and get high. I learned to take care of myself back then, and when my dad cracked his truck with my mom in the passenger seat passed out from whatever she’d snorted or injected and they both died, I felt happy for the first time in years.”

I sucked in a breath. I didn’t get along with my parents and resented them, but I couldn’t imagine being happy about their deaths. But then again, my mom and dad weren’t addicts and they didn’t raise me in abject poverty.

“Did you hate them?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I loved my parents. My dad took me to baseball games and my mom would sit up at night and play with my action figures, at least when she wasn’t too high to function. Only I knew that they were dangerous and they couldn’t take care of me the right way. I saw it whenever I went to school and noticed that I was different from the other kids.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had it so hard back then.”

“I don’t talk about it. I came to live with Uncle Bernard and I tried to put all that behind, but the past doesn’t go away, and it doesn’t change. That’s what’s so terrible about it, right?”

I move closer and slipped my hand through his arm. “I know what you mean. I feel stuck in that stupid chiropractor’s office sometimes, and I know it’ll never go away.”

“Fades though. New traumas come to replace it.”

“Happy things too.”

He grunted but didn’t smile. “Yeah, sometimes.”

“Why are you such a bastard to Robyn?”

He stiffened and I expected him to pull away, but he didn’t. “She’s got it hard too, you know. Uncle Bernard’s got a temper.”

I squeezed his hand. “She doesn’t talk about it, but I’ve noticed things.”

“I try to take the brunt of his anger. It was easy after a while, you know? I was the trailer park trash asshole kid that came to live with them after my junkie parents died. Whenever he got mad and looked like he’d go in on Robyn, I could redirect his rage to me. And shit, I can still do it, only I’m a lot bigger than I used to be.”

I leaned my head against his shoulder. “You went from one bad home to another.”

“A different kind of bad in both places. My parents loved me, even if they were lost in their addictions. They never hurt me, not on purpose. They couldn’t provide much and sometimes forgot about me for days on end, but they loved me. Uncle Bernard and Aunt Genni, they treat me like a burden, and their daughter like a sin.”