PROLOGUE
Adapted from Nice Buns
* * *
Carter
I hated thinking back to when I’d lost my parents, and admitting how low I’d sunk after it was so hard to do.
“When I was twelve, my parents were killed in a house fire. At their funeral, everyone kept coming up to me and saying they’d be there for me, but I’d already decided I didn’t want to live that life. I loved both of them, and, sure, I loved my aunt and grandmother—who were my guardians—but I hated what I thought life was going to be like and decided just not to live it.”
“Does that mean you were going to run away or kill yourself?” Alex asked me cautiously.
“I was sitting on the side of the road while the wake was going on in the house.”
I stopped talking, struggling over what I was about to reveal. We all had secrets, and this was one of my biggest. With the silence in the car, the rasp of my nail on my vest as I picked at the seam was unnecessarily loud.
Knowing me well by now, Alex let me finish the story in my own time.
“It was a busy road, and vehicles drove over the speed limit down it all the time. I was waiting for a truck or van to come down it fast enough so I could jump in front of it.” The words were practically forced out of my throat.
“Jesus, Carter. Man, I—”
“It’s cool,” I interrupted him, not needing to hear the platitudes people usually offered when they heard things like this. “I don’t feel like it now and haven’t since that day.”
“How does this tie into Naomi?”
“On the opposite side of the road was a trailer park. At the front of it were the nice trailers, with vines growing on them and roses and shit. Behind them were the rougher ones, where the parents drank and did drugs, hidden by the beauty at the front. My plan was that, if a truck didn’t come along, I’d run through the trailer park to the railway track behind it and jump in front of the train due forty minutes later.”
I could still see the road and trailer park clearly from the viewpoint of a grieving twelve-year-old kid.
“I was looking to the left, waiting for the truck, when a little girl with long red hair sat down beside me. She was skinny and covered in dirt, but she had a sucker in her mouth. I didn’t say anything, just glared at her because she was fucking up my plan, when she reached into her pocket and pulled out a watermelon Blow Pop and handed it to me.”
“Was that Naomi?”
“Yep. Back then, Naomi was tiny for her age, and she was wearing clothes that were stained, old, and looked like they were hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs.”
At the time, I remembered looking at the button-down and slacks I’d worn to my parents’ funeral and comparing our clothes. It wasn’t pity that’d hit me, but empathy for the kid whose parents couldn’t afford to buy her nice clothes.
“Scratch that, they were definitely hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs. Anyway, she said that she did some jobs for people in the trailer park to earn money so she and her brother could have candy and sometimes presents from Goodwill for their birthdays and Christmases. She’d just been to the store and bought her favorite lollipops with some of it.”
I shook my head, my heart hurting again for her. With those words, she’d interrupted my pity party, but what she did next restarted my life.
“Then she dropped one of them in my lap and said, ‘Life’s hard, you know. My parents leave us alone in the dark ‘cos they haven’t paid the electric in months. My favorite time of the day is when the sun rises because I’m afraid of the dark. I feel like I can’t breathe. Like everything’s crushing me.’”
Alex looked at me sharply. “Naomi’s claustrophobic?”
I couldn’t say for definite now because I’d noticed she had ways of avoiding things I’d assume would be a trigger for her, but still. “Yes, badly, and it’s because her parents used to lock her and her brother in a tiny cupboard, so the neighbors didn’t see them when they left them alone at night. I found that out from her brother.”
“Why’d that change your mind about killing yourself?”
“It made me open my eyes and see I wasn’t the only one suffering. I wasn’t the only one who felt like they couldn’t breathe. I mean, my family’s not rich, but we could afford clothes and candy, and we always had electricity. Even though they’re not my parents, my aunt and grandma never left me alone in the house or locked me away, so people didn’t know they had.
“And her saying, ‘You can have my spare lollipop. It always makes me feel better and stops the butterflies in my tummy,’ changed the way I was thinking. To her, that sucker was a huge deal, and here she was giving it to me because she somehow knew I needed something to help me.”