Stopping at my room long enough to grab a T-shirt, I didn’t bother changing out of my sweat pants and headed for the front door. I was almost home free, but I stopped when I heard her voice. Everly. What. The. Hell.
I’d told Mom to send her away. I mean, why was she here anyway? Did she want another look at the freak?
That pin inside my head—the one attached to a crap ton of anger just waiting to explode—well, that pin pulled and I swung around, heading for the kitchen before I could (A) think about it and realize maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, or (B) stop myself once I did realize that I was probably going to make a complete ass out of myself.
Everly was at the kitchen table and turned when I walked into the room.
“Why are you here?” The words tore out of me, and inside, my heart beat as fast and furious as a Metallica drum track. Double kick and hitting hard. I wanted to break something. Anything.
My gaze swung widely until I caught sight of my mom, her soft brown eyes shadowed with a whole bunch of stuff that I was responsible for.
“Trevor,” she said quietly. “Take a moment, okay? Just breathe.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a goddamn baby,” I shouted.
Shit. This wasn’t going well.
The last time I “pulled the pin,” as my dad liked to call it, I’d put my fist through the drywall in the garage. When it came over me, the rage was hard to control, and this morning my feelings were all over the place. So yeah, I knew I should have run out the front door, but here I was and there was no turning back.
“Breathe,” Mom said again, moving toward me.
I stared down into her eyes when she put her hands on me. Saw the hurt in them when I flinched. It was hard to explain, but I felt twitchy, like my skin was pulled too tight. And I had to be honest. I was scared shitless that I would hurt her.
“I gotta get out of here.”
“Trevor, please. Just sit down with us. I made your favorite. Waffles and strawberries.”
She didn’t get it. No one did. Hell, I didn’t even get why I acted the way I did sometimes. It was like there was an ocean of stuff inside me, rolling in like constant waves buffeting the shore, just waiting for a chance to break. And when they did? When they crashed onto the beach and annihilated the sand, there would be nothing left. The weird thing is that sometimes it was the nothing that I wanted, because feeling nothing was somehow better than this.
“Where are the car keys?” I asked, shoving past my mom.
Taylor appeared from nowhere and scooped them off the counter. “What the hell, Trevor? Are you insane? You can’t drive. Not after…” Her eyes shot to Mom’s. God, she couldn’t even look at me.
“Not after what, Taylor? Just say it.” I practically growled the words.
Silence. Yeah. Not surprised. Everyone was so concerned about treating me like a baby that they didn’t for once consider I hated it. I was gonna be eighteen in a few months, not eight.
“I had a goddamn seizure, Taylor. And maybe I’ll have another one. And another one after that. Maybe I’ll have the biggest freaking seizure on record, and then we can all call it what it is. Epilepsy. Yeah, that’s me. That’s my future, so why don’t you just goddamn well say it?”
Taylor’s eyes got real small, the way they did when she was pissed off. Good. I could deal with pissed off. Pissed off went hand in hand with the way I was feeling right about now.
“You’re such an asshole.”
“Epileptic asshole,” I shot back.
“You expect me to feel sorry for you?” she shouted.
Taylor was small. She was small and blond with a pretty dated Goth thing going on, but when she wanted to, she could be fierce. I’d seen her stand up to a chick twice her size at school and win the face-off.
“Well, I don’t feel sorry for you, Trevor. I don’t feel sorry for you one bit, and I’m sick of everyone in this family treating you as if you’re some fragile doll that’s going to crack if we do or say the wrong thing.”
My mom stepped between us. “Taylor and Trevor, please.”
“No,” Taylor spat. “He doesn’t get to shit on us just because he feels sorry for himself, and you don’t get to expect me to treat him like he’s going to fall apart if I say seizure or epi-effing-lepsy.” She held the keys up in the air, taunting me, and then shoved them in her pocket. “So you had a seizure? So what? Is the world supposed to stop spinning? Am I not allowed to enjoy my goddamn waffles and strawberries?”
“Taylor!” My mom’s voice reached that pitch, that critical point where I knew she was going to either explode or break down. “Language.”
“See?” Taylor said shrilly. “You yell at me for swearing but Trevor gets a pass? Maybe I should get into a car with some drunk loser and maybe I should end up in a ditch somewhere with a major TBI so that I can swear and stay out late and do whatever the hell I want.”