The Fire Between High & Lo (Elements 2)

I tilted my head in his direction. “I would.”

He gave me half a smile before he wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into the curve of his body. His warmth always sent sparks flying through me.

“Lo?” I whispered, half awake, half asleep, and secretly falling for my best friend.

“Yeah?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but instead of words, a quiet sigh left me. My head fell against his chest, and I listened to the sound of his heartbeats, counting each one. One... Two… Forty-five…

Within minutes, my mind slowed down. Within minutes, I forgot why I was so sad. Within minutes, I was asleep.

Chapter Three

Logan

Ma and I didn’t have cable in our apartment, which was fine, I didn’t mind much. When I was a kid, we had cable, but it didn’t seem worth it because of my dad. He was the one who paid the cable bill, and he always complained about me sitting in front of the television watching cartoons. It was as if he hated that I was somewhat happy for a few moments during the day. Then one day he came into our home, took the television, and canceled the services.

That was the day he moved out of the apartment.

That was also one of the best days of my life.

After some time, I found a television in a dumpster. It was a small 19-inch television with a DVD player, so I’d check o

ut a bunch of documentaries from the library and watch them at home. I was the person who knew too much about everything: baseball, tropical birds, and Area 51, all due to the documentaries. Yet, at the same time, I knew absolutely nothing.

Sometimes Ma watched them with me, but most of the time, it was a solo gig.

Ma loved me, but she didn’t like me much.

Well, that wasn’t true.

Sober Ma loved me as if I was her best friend.

Drugged Ma was a monster, and she was the only one who lived in our house lately.

I missed Sober Ma some days. Sometimes when I shut my eyes, I’d remember the sound of her laugh, and the curve of her lips when she was happy.

Stop, Logan.

I hated my mind, how it remembered. Memories were daggers to my soul, and I hardly had any positive ones to hold on to.

I didn’t care though, because I kept my mind high enough to almost forget about the crappy life I lived. If I stayed locked in my room, stocked up on documentaries, with some good shit to smoke, I could almost forget that my mom stood on a corner a few weeks ago, trying to sell her body for a few lines of blow.

That was a call I never wanted to get from my friend, Jacob.

“Dude. I just saw your mom on the corner of Jefferson and Wells Street. I think she’s um…” Jacob paused. “I think you should get down here.”

Tuesday morning, I sat in my bed, staring at my ceiling, while a documentary on Chinese artifacts played as my background music, when she shouted my name.

“Logan! Logan! Logan, get in here!”

I laid as still as I could, hoping she’d stop calling me, but she didn’t. Pushing myself up from my mattress, I headed out of my bedroom, to find Ma sitting at the dining room table. Our apartment was tiny, but we didn’t have much to put inside of it anyway. A broken down sofa, a dirty coffee table with stains, and a dining room table with three different chairs.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“I need you to clean the windows from the outside, Logan,” Ma said, pouring herself a bowl of milk and placing five Cheerios inside of the cracked bowl. She said she was on a new diet, and didn’t want to get fat. There was no way that she weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and being five foot and nine inches tall, I thought she was almost skeletal.

She looked exhausted. Did she even sleep last night?