The Girl's Got Secrets (Forbidden Men 7)

“I love it,” he gushed. “I can’t believe you wrote that.”

“Yeah, I could tell it was your favorite. What makes you like it so much?”

Sticks lifted a hand as if to wipe hair out of his eyes, when there wasn’t any hair in his face. “I don’t know...” The move made me crinkle my eyebrows because I’d seen Caroline do that to her hair many times. Made me wonder if he’d recently had long hair. “It reminds me of my mom, I guess,” he finally answered.

That caught my attention. “Really? Your mom?”

With a nod, he mumbled, “Yeah, she uh...she was pretty heavy into drugs for a while there when I was younger.”

I understood immediately. “Ceilings” was a depressing song. The lyrics followed the journey of a girl who spent her life looking up at ceilings during her most pivotal moments. She fell in love while staring up at the ceiling of the backseat of her boyfriend’s car. Then she gazed up at the ceiling of an auto repair shop where she was hiding when a drive-by shooting took his life. The ceiling of the hospital was what she watched as she gave birth to her dead lover’s baby at sixteen. And she cried up at that very same ceiling as she made the decision to sneak out of the hospital and abandon him. When her family refused to have anything to do with her, she hooked up with a drug dealer who turned her into a nasty addict. And she stared up at the ceiling of her bathroom as she tried to abort the baby that drug dealer had knocked her up with. And finally, she gazed up at the ceiling of his living room while the drug dealer took her life.

“It’s such a poignant, way-too realistic story that always sends shivers up my arms.” Sticks rubbed them now as goose flesh pebbled the skin. “And every time I hear it, I don’t know...I automatically think of my mom.”

I stared silently at Sticks, experiencing a weird connection with him I’d never experienced with anyone else before. Because what he said...it rang exactly true for me too. I always thought of my mom when I sang it. Probably because it was about her, but whatever.

Remy gave a sudden, self-conscious shrug. “I mean, if her family hadn’t kept such a tight leash on her, I could’ve so easily seen my mom falling into that very kind of life, hooking up with some guy who beat her to death and everything. Hell, if it hadn’t been for my uncle and grandma, she probably would’ve either left me at the hospital or tried to abort me, too.”

My heart thudded in my chest, because I totally got what he meant. “That sucks,” I murmured. “What ended up happening to her?” But I already knew it couldn’t be a happy ending. I didn’t know anyone who’d gotten into drugs and then met a good ending.

Sticks glanced down at his hands. “She fried her brain and ended up in a mental institution.”

“Jesus.” I shook my head, sympathy filling me. “I’m sorry, man.”

But he only shrugged. “Not your fault. I’m the one who’s the shittiest kid ever, because I can’t even stand to visit her. It hurts too much. She never remembers who I am. Last time, she thought I was her sister.”

I frowned. Then I said, “You mean, she thought she was your sister?”

The expression on Sticks’s face froze before he shook his head. “Uh...yeah. What did I say?”

“You said she thought you were her sister.”

“Oh. Shit. Sorry. Anyway, if it weren’t for Abuela and Tío Alonso, it’s hard to know where I would’ve ended up, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been anywhere good.”

When he began to play with the necklace he wore, I lifted an eyebrow. “Abuela?”

“Yeah. That’s Spanish for grandmother. She, along with my mom’s older brother Alonso, plus a couple more of her younger brothers, and all their families came to America two years before I was born. They’re a huge, overly religious group that’s always in everyone else’s business, but...I still kind of respect them for that. It keeps us together, you know, taken care of, which is a hell of a lot better off than I know I’d be on my own.”

I continued to watch as he toyed with the necklace’s medallion before my curiosity got the better of me. “Is that a family heirloom?”

“Hmm? Oh, this? No. Well... I guess, yeah. Abuela told me it was her mother’s but it’s actually just a pendant of la Virgen de Guadalupe.”

I shook my head. “Who?”

Sticks grinned. “The saint...Guadalupe. She’s famous in México. If you see someone wearing this, they’re probably Mexican. Personally, I’m not super religious, but...I don’t know. I like to wear it anyway. It reminds me of my roots, my family. It brings me a level of comfort, as if I’m home again. My family... It’s strange, but no one can drive me as crazy as they do. They’re all, like, complete opposites of me, but...there’s just something about them I adore. I love their culture, and Latin pride, and just everything that makes them them. They’re my heritage. My foundation.”

“That’s cool.” I watched the gold of Guadalupe’s image glint in the light and suddenly wished I had some family heirloom too. But, nope. “I don’t have anything like that.” I glanced down at my feet where I was idly winding a guitar cord around the toe of my shoe. “My mom...she’s the girl in the song. So my roots, a family foundation, just sort of got yanked out of the ground with her.”

I have no idea why I told him that. It was just...he’d told me about his mom. It only felt right to say something about my own, especially since both of ours had fallen into similar addictions.

He frowned at me a second before his eyes bugged. “You mean in ‘Ceilings’? You wrote that about your mom? It’s all...factual?”

I nodded. “Every single word.”

“But...” He shook his head, and I could tell he was trying to figure out which kid I was; the one she’d left at the hospital or the one she’d tried to kill in the womb.

So, I said, “I was her failed abortion attempt, the mistake she had with the drug dealer.”

Remy’s mouth dropped open. “Whoa. So, wait... Then, your dad...?”