Nice Buns (Cheap Thrills 7)

“Wanna tell me about the situation between y’all yet? We all know you guys knew each other from where you grew up, but we don’t know how or if it was deep or not? The way you act around each other’s like two people who were once dating, but life got in the way or something.”

Spinning his phone in his hand, he blew out a breath. “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?” I asked cautiously.

“I was sitting on the side of the road while the wake was going on in the house.” Carter stopped talking, and all I could hear was the rasp of his nail on fabric as he picked at something on his vest.

“It was a busy road, and vehicles drover 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.”

I sucked in a breath, feeling pain for a kid I’d never known but wished I had so he’d never felt that way. I couldn’t make miracles happen, but through my own loss and DB’s, we might have been able to show him he wasn’t alone in his grief and feelings.

“Jesus, Carter. Man, I—”

“It’s cool,” he said roughly. “I don’t feel like it now and haven’t since that day.”

“How does this tie into Naomi?”

His tone changed to one that was slightly more gentle. “On the opposite side of the road was a trailer park. At the front of it were those 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.”

A plan that precise, that certain… I didn’t know how someone could go from feeling that way to not.

“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.”

I winced as the description fit what I’d been meaning when I’d thought about parents providing for their kids and how I’d felt about DB’s 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 her 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. Then she dropped one of them in my lap and said, ‘Life’s hard, you know. My parents leave us alone in the dark ‘cause 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.’”

“Naomi’s claustrophobic?”

“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.”

There was so much from this story to piece together that I didn’t know what to ask first.

“Why’d that change your mind about killing yourself?”

“It made me open my eyes and see I wasn’t the only one suffering,” he said absentmindedly. “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.”