All Broke Down (Rusk University 2)

“Mom, I’ve got to go.”

“What?”

“Tell Dad I said bye. And that I want to talk to him about the shelter sometime this week.”

“Dylan . . .”

I don’t stay to hear whatever it is she’s going to say. Instead I head for the wall where Silas had been, stop, and scan the crowd. He’s not by the food table. He’s not anywhere I can see him. I walk through all the smaller rooms, waiting to see his head towering above all the shorter, gray-haired ones. But he’s nowhere.

And when I go outside hoping to find him at his pickup, it’s gone.

IT TAKES ME fifteen minutes to walk from the library to my apartment, and my feet feel like I’ve been treading on nails instead of just walking across campus in heels. I switch into flats and grab my keys.

On my way out, Nell asks where I’m going.

“To Silas’s.”

She looks up from the couch, where she’s packing her book bag for tomorrow, and says, “So you’re like dating him or something?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. Or something.”

“Don’t stay out too late!” she calls out as I head out the door. “First day of class tomorrow!”

God, last year I would have been sitting on that couch right beside her, getting prepared like doomsday was coming instead of college classes. Crazy how things have changed.

I duck into my car, and I’m at Silas’s house in just over five minutes. Pulling into the driveway, my headlights flash over his front porch, revealing a girl with peroxide-white hair, standing by his front door smoking.

I switch off my car and try to squint at the front porch to see the girl again, but now that my headlights are off, all I see is the orange glow at the end of her cigarette.

He wouldn’t hook up with some other girl already, would he? She has to be a friend. Or maybe she’s here for Torres or Brookes. It can’t have been much longer than half an hour since I saw him last. She’d have to just be a booty call to be over here that fast and . . .

And that’s exactly the kind of thing that Silas could do. He’s probably got fifty numbers in his phone from girls willing to just be a quick tumble and toss out the door.

Part of me thinks I should just go. Restart my car, and get the hell out of here. Cut my losses before any damage is done.

But I’m not the kind of girl who walks away. I don’t keep my mouth shut when I’m upset. And I’m not about to start now just because the thought of some other girl hooking up with Silas makes me want to throw up.

I push open my door and slam it behind me when I’m out. I stalk up the driveway to his front porch, and before I can say anything she asks, “Who are you?”

“Dylan,” I answer.

I almost return the question. Almost. But then I decide I don’t want to know the answer. This girl is pretty, no doubt, but her clothes are skimpy, and she wears so much mascara and eyeliner it looks like there was an oil spill around her eyes. She’s older than us. Not because I see any major wrinkles or signs of age, more because she looks like what someone not in college thinks a college girl looks like. When I look closer, there are other clues, too. Her hands, for instance. When I look at the cigarette she’s holding, her skin is more weathered there, and it makes me look at her again through a whole new lens.

It seems so comical to think that this would be the girl Silas would call. A woman who’s probably at least a decade older than us, if not more.

“Is Silas home?”

I don’t know why I asked. He is. I can see his truck.

She snorts. “Oh yeah. He’s home.”

I cringe. I so don’t want to know the subtext of whatever she just said.

I’m about to ring the doorbell when she bangs on the door a few times, hard, and yells, “Baby! You’ve got company!”

I hear the creak of the floorboards on the other side, a pair of stomping feet, and the door is ripped open while the blonde calmly takes another drag on her cigarette.

“I told you to—” Silas stops, his eyes widening when he sees me. “What are you doing here?”

I frown. I don’t understand this. Any of it.

“You left. I went to find you, and you were gone.”

“Yeah, well. You were busy. I didn’t think I was needed.”

“I told you I was coming right back. I just had to—”

“Lie about us?”

The woman beside me blows out a column of smoke and says, “Aw. Lover’s quarrel. How sweet.”

Silas turns on her. “Shut up. And leave. I’m not going to tell you again.”

“Maybe if you learned how to talk to women, you wouldn’t be fighting with her now.”

“That’s it. I’m calling the cops.”

He pulls out his cell phone, and suddenly she shoots past me, trying to force her way inside, but Silas is too strong and keeps his hold on the door.

“You bastard! I haven’t asked you for anything in your life, and you can’t give me this one thing? One thing.”

“I told you. I don’t have the money. And even if I did, why would I give it to you?”

“Because I’m your mother!”

I must gasp because Silas’s gaze flicks to mine, his eyes wide like he’d completely forgotten I was here.

“Dylan, you should go.”

I can’t believe this girl . . . this woman who I thought might have been a hookup is his mother.

“Don’t want your girl to see this? See you turn away your own mom?” Something in Silas snaps, and he steps forward, slamming the door behind him. He takes hold of his mom’s arm and starts marching her across the lawn, toward a car parked on the street. But she doesn’t stop. “You’re too good for me now? Is that it? You have your new life here. Fancy school. Fancy sports. You’re ready to forget all about me. You won’t even know my name when you’re off making millions a year playing some stupid game that you never would have played without me. I let you play. You could have been spending all that time after school working, making money so we had a place to live.”

She rips her arm out of his grip, stumbling a few feet away in the grass.

I can’t see Silas’s face when he answers, but his voice sounds harder than I’ve ever heard it.

“You forgot about me and Sean long before I forgot about you, Ma. If you wanted to be part of my life, maybe you should have actually come back like you said you would after you dropped us off at that joke of a house.”