Unbroken

Two

Skye

Thirteen years old…

Isat in the dark, eyeing the bedroom door, listening intently for any sounds.

It’d been an hour since my stepdad Kurt dragged his feet to bed, but I was waiting on my mother now. She’d been chimney smoking on the front porch, gossiping to the neighbour. Something about a “new whore” on the street. And now the women in the trailer park were hiding their men, or hovering over them, keeping a watchful eye out.

I’d seen the new woman. Her name was Jessie. She was really young and pretty. Fresh out of high school, frequently asking around for help. She always had her crying baby wrapped around her hip, bouncing that chubby boy up and down, looking stressed out.

She always looked like she wanted to cry.

Sometimes I wanted to comfort her, but Mom would give me hell if she knew.

“Bitch looks like a blowfish,” Mom said the first time she saw her. “Red eyes always puffy. Putting on that victim shit. Bitch should have been an actress.”

“Leave her alone,” Kurt murmured, knocking back his beer, looking tired from a day at the quarry. “She’s a single mom. She could use some help.”

That was the wrong thing to say to Mom.

Mom, who was insecure and scorned, was sniffing around for any sign of Kurt’s latest tail.

Kurt, a great stepfather but a shitty husband, too.

That fight was four hours long, and now, two days later, there was still tension in the air. The normal routine was shot to shit because of it. Usually Mom was inside, sleeping or making gross love to him next door, but because she was still so sour about him, she was knocking back her cigarettes with Rosie.

Rosie, the biggest gossip queen in the trailer park.

I hated Rosie.

I knocked my head against the paper-thin wall, feeling anxious and irritable.

Just go to sleep,I internally screamed.

Paranoid that the boys were going on without me, I wound up slipping out of bed and pacing. Every muffled word my mother was saying made me want to dig my fingernails into my skin and scream.

Why tonight of all nights?

Leo had come back from vacation today, and I hadn’t seen himallsummer, and now that he was here, I had to wait who knew how much longer. All because Kurt had to defend “Jessie the Blowfish.”

I checked the time.

It was close to 11 at night. I felt my heart fall. Hunter would have caught up to Leo by now. They’d have exchanged stories. Leo would have told him everything, and I would get the leftover storytelling tomorrow when Leo was probably too bored to repeat everything.

I didn’t want a gleaned version of events.

I wanted to knoweverythingLeo had been up to.

His family were the rich type. Lived in their huge house on the hill overlooking the bay. In another reality, we would have been two boats passing in the night. He would never have brushed against the likes of me.

Anyway, Hunter and I rotted away in Brown Bay while Leo spent the summer on a yacht in the Caribbean. Being without him was like a knife in the gut, and every day that knife dug deeper, twisted sharper, made breathing harder.

It was the longest summer of my life.

At least Hunter was on my side. Never strayed from it, either. Always rapped on my bedroom window at seven in the morning. I slipped out as recently as this morning. We wound up cycling through town, buying overpriced candy at the shorefront store and eating it along the pebbled beach, watching the boats from the marina come in and out. Big boats, little boats, boats with panting wives at the front while the husbands bellowed at them from behind the pilothouse wheel.

“What’s with these assholes always mouthing off to their missus?” Hunter had asked, biting off a chunk of his red liquorice.