But I don’t say any of this to him. I stay silent, prompting their next question.
“Tell me again why you were at the sight of the HMX?” slim guy asks.
This is where he expects to catch me in a lie. Little does he know, I had three hundred and sixty-five days in a hole to perfect my story. In case I ever got out. In case I didn’t completely die out there in that fucking desert.
“I was doing a perimeter sweep, checking into the route for the mission we were going to execute. I was sent for reconnaissance, to scope out the area. The HMX had been placed a day prior, as was the detail of the mission.” I don’t go into specifics, because a good soldier would never talk about his op even if it was to high-ranking Marines. “The HMX was secure. The village was fine, no commotion, and I was about to leave by foot to make it back to our base camp. I was jumped from behind by three, maybe four men, and a bag was shoved over my head. After that, I had no chance. My weapon was taken, and they dragged me off before I could do anything.”
I don’t tell them why I was really there. That I almost blew my fucking hand off before militia found me out.
There are minutes, maybe hours, of deafening silence. I’m not sure how long really, but it feels like years. Sweat trickles down my spine, but I keep stone still. Can’t let them see me sweat.
“Funny, not one of your fellow Marines can recall you being told to go on a reconnaissance mission,” the burly one tells me, eyeing me suspiciously.
He wants me to break, to squeal under the pressure. What they don’t remember is that I’ve been through far worse. That I kept state secrets, I kept loyal to my country, even when a man was lighting my hair on fire with a blow torch.
“Did those same Marines tell you how I kept my mouth shut for a year in a prison camp. A camp that, if given a choice, you’d pick death rather than to enter?”
They exchange a look and then stare at me for what seems like way too long. I school my features, not even daring to blink. They may rank higher, they may be in a position to knock me down, but I’ve been in cockfights far deadlier than this.
“We’ll be in touch,” the bigger guy says, his expression unreadable.
The minute they walk out the door, I go into a full-blown panic.
I should have known all along. I’ve been lazy, I got comfortable. In my hometown, with my girl. I let myself relax and my mind be eased. I thought I could come back to real life and make something for myself.
I should have known that the sins of my past were coming back to haunt me. That if it wasn’t those fucking enemy forces trapping me in a hole, it’d be the military of my own country, the one I was about to betray, that caught up with me.
It’s over, the life I have here. I have to get out before I hurt the people I love.
Before I drag Kennedy down with me.
30
Kennedy
When I step out of my car in the driveway, Everett is waiting for me.
I can see him, deep in thought, sitting on a rocking chair on his back patio. I haven’t seen him there since the first day we spoke when he returned home, and my stomach dips a little seeing his brow so furrowed.
Or maybe it dips because of the envelope burning a hole in my back pocket. No, not my college acceptance letter, although I’m still constantly worrying about that.
No, this letter is the one that was never delivered to him. The one that contains those three major words I’ve always wanted to say, and thought I had, until the letter was mailed back to me.
After Winter Wonderland, his admission to me about being a virgin—I still think I’m dreaming when I picture his face in that moment. I never imagined in a million years that we would be able to lose it to each other, that when we do have sex, it will have only ever been with each other. There is something so special in that, but it ascribes even more pressure to the moment. Which is why I wasn’t ready.
But I think I am now. We’ve been together for longer, and once I tell him I’m in love with him, and hopefully he says it back, then I’ll truly be ready. It might be cliché to say I need to be in love to have sex, but I’ve waited this long and I’m a traditional person.
So, I’m finally ready to give him the letter, and then give him myself.
“Hey you.” I smile as I walk into his backyard.
Everett brings his head up slowly, as if he’s so lost in his brain that he didn’t even hear me park my car. “Hey.”
Something feels off about his mood, but he gets this way sometime. I know he isn’t fully healed, that his PTSD may never fully go away. There are good days and bad days. But I try my best to be supportive, to be what he needs.
And what I need right now is to help him, and maybe this letter will do the trick. For both of us.
“Kennedy, we need to—”
I cut him off, barely hearing him because my nerves are hammering in my eardrums. “I have something for you.”
Without further talk, I whip the envelope out of my back pocket, the edges frayed and weathered. I’ve folded it in my hands for the past year, contemplating opening it. I never did, and now I’m glad it’s intact for his eyes only.
Everett takes it from me as I sit down beside him, his eyes guarded as he glances at me.
“Read it,” I say, prompting him with a tilt of my chin.
His eyes scan the page, and I know what they’re seeing.
Everett,
It’s been almost a month since I’ve heard from you. I’m scared. I hope you’re all right, that you’re just on a mission and you can’t write me at the moment. I lie awake at night, praying and hoping that the next day, I’ll open the mailbox to one of your letters.
Life isn’t right without knowing you’re there on the other end of the pen. I miss your corny jokes, or the random pictures from magazines you send. I miss updating you on my life here, and I miss hearing about the line cook’s antics at base camp.
Most of all, though, I miss the way you tell me what life will be like when you get home. How we’ll be together, or that I’ll finally get that kiss you promised. It better be stellar, by the way, with the way you’re talking it up! All the time I think about you coming to visit me at college, or finally getting out of Brentwick and being the people we want to be, together.
I’m not sure if you’ll get this. I’m really worried, Everett. Please come home to me. All of this is to say, if this is the one letter you receive for a while, I want to say it all. And I’ve known for a while now, even if we’ve never kissed, what my feelings are.
I love you, Everett Brock. I have since I can remember. Now, come home, so I can tell you in person.
Please, if you get this, even if you don’t feel the same, write me back. I want to know that you’re safe.
Come home,
Kennedy
I hold my breath, knowing he’s reached the last line. Everett gasped, ran a hand through his hair, and slumped into the rocker as he read the letter. My admission might be shocking to him, but I’d like to think it’s not. We both know how we feel.
Hope springs in my chest like brand new flowers trying to reach the sun, and a smile breaks out on my lips. This is the moment, the one I’ve been waiting for since I wrote those words down on paper. With this declaration out in the air between us, we can finally be together, no unspoken words between us.
“I can’t do this.” He folds the letter, hands it back.
“Wha … What?” I must have not heard him right.
Everett’s green eyes, the ones that have been so open and genuine lately, seem to shutter close. “While those words are nice, and I know you mean them, I don’t feel the same way.”
It feels like someone just took a pickaxe to my heart and tapped the center, sending thousands of tiny spider cracks running all over the organ.
“Yes, you do,” I say through the tears forming in my throat.
He shakes his head. “No, I don’t. I thought that after years of flirting around the idea, and writing about it, that I’d
give it a go. But what we have just doesn’t measure up to the hype. I’m not as into it as I thought I’d be.”
Each callous, horrible word feels like another slam of a fist down onto that axe. Pieces of my heart start chipping away, falling into the dark abyss.
“You don’t mean that.”
Every part of me that still holds an ounce of hope and rational thought thinks that he’s just lying. That Everett is running scared, that he doesn’t want to fight through the hard days to be with me. But the overwhelming majority of me, the one that has been put on his back burner for years, or worse, rejected, knows he has to be telling the truth.
How could I have been so stupid? How could I, once again, fall in love with the boy next door when he can never love me back?
“I do, Kennedy. It’s unfortunate, but I just … I don’t want you anymore.” He shrugs, as if this means absolutely nothing to him.
And my heart shatters. I’m not even sure if it’s there anymore. My hand flings out, reaching for the letter, and grabbing hold to one end.
As I go to stand, intending to take it back and run from him, the paper rips in half.
Everett is holding one half, the one with my most personal feelings written on them, and I hold the other.
Tears begin to slide down my cheeks and I know I need to get out of here. Away from him.
I don’t look back as I retreat, knowing that if I do, I’ll see the man who holds half my heart, sitting there watching me go.
31
Kennedy
The sad chords of Maddie & Tae’s “Die From a Broken Heart” fills my earbuds, as the thousandth tear slips from the corner of my eye.
As they sing about the utter devastation from a relationship ending, I feel like my chest is breaking open. If I looked down right now, from where I lie on my bed staring at the ceiling, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a heart-shaped hole.
Everett has been gone for close to six weeks, and I’m still not anywhere near over it. I probably will never be, at this rate, since I can’t do much more than go to school, EMT shifts, and then come home and cry to sad country songs.
The day after he told me he didn’t love me back, his car was gone from the Brock’s driveway. I thought maybe he was just away for a few days, maybe a week. But then another couple of days would pass, and then a week, and some more weeks …
He’s not coming back.
What makes everything that much worse is that I don’t even know where he went. I’ve called, I’ve texted. Like a desperate, heartbroken girl, I thought that one day he’d return any of them. He never has. I thought about driving to find him, but then realized he left word with no one where he’s going.
Well, that’s not true. He probably told his parents, but I can’t very well walk over there and ask them. I’m mortified just living next door, looking into his bedroom window at night knowing he won’t be looking back.
I’m devastated, as I knew I would be when our relationship inevitably blew up in my face. What I should have been protecting myself from all along, I instead took a shot at. Because I wanted it so badly that I ignored all the warning signs. I wanted him so much that even as he was telling me he felt nothing, I was trying to prove otherwise.
I feel like a fool. I can barely talk to my friends at school and have been absent for most of the memory-making senior year moments in the last six weeks.
I must not hear the knock at my door, because before I know what’s happening, Mom is walking in. Her lips move, but all I hear is Dylan Scott’s voice singing in my ears.
“What?” I sit up, clearing my throat from the tears and pulling out an earbud.
“I just wanted to come check if you were joining us for dinner.”
Her eyes are so sad, so sympathetic and full of pity, that I have to turn away from her. I pretend to fiddle with my phone on the bed, weighing whether I’m actually hungry today.
“Come down, Kenny. I made chicken cutlets, your favorite.” There is so much false hope in her voice.
I know she’s putting on, that she’s trying to pull me out of my funk. Mom has been trying for weeks to no avail; making my favorite food, asking me to go to the movies, offering retail therapy shopping trips. Not only have I not really accepted any of the invitations, but I have no motivation to go anywhere.
“I’m good. I’ll just have some later.” My voice sounds hollow and broken.
The weight of Mom sitting on the bed jostles me, and I look over at her. She brushes a stray lock from my cheek, one that probably needs a good wash but I just don’t care to try.
“Sweetheart, you will get through this.” She nods as if she knows.
Immediately, I burst into tears. I can’t hold it in, I can’t be strong. Every inch of me feels so fragile, like I’ll cave in on myself at the snap of a finger.
“Oh, honey, come here.” Mom gathers me in her arms, rubbing my back as I dissolve into sobs on her shoulder. “Talk to me. Talk it out. I swear, it helps.”
After wiping away my snot and tears, I blink up at her.
“I feel like I’m breaking, Mom. How could he do this to me? How will I ever trust someone again? Or even want to be with someone. Everett, he’s … I will never feel for someone the way I feel about him.”
In this moment, I feel completely hopeless. I know many people say young love feels like a fireball to your soul, that it burns bright but fizzles quickly. That’s not what we had, though. I waited years to be with him, and he even told me he waited for me. Wanted me to be his first. All the things he wrote to me, the things he’d said and done over the past months, I know that those were not the actions of a high school crush or someone only in it for the short term.
What we share feels monumental, it spans years and continents. I know, deep in my heart, I’ll never find that with someone else.
I fear I’ll be alone for the rest of my life.
“I know it feels like that now. And I know we don’t know Everett’s reasons for leaving, or why he did so in such a brutal way. You feel like you can’t possibly put your heart back together, that it will hurt forever. It might, I know how deep your connection was to each other. But in time, it will lessen. The agony will turn to a sting, and then to an ache. Someday, you’ll only think about him in passing, and sadness will come with that. But, someday when you least expect it, you will feel happy about your time with him. You’ll learn from this, from the good times and the pain now. You’ll be stronger because of it. And you’ll open your heart to love again, even though it feels impossible now. You will get through this, Kennedy.”
Her words equate to a drop in a bucket, something I can’t hear right now because they don’t ring true. I can appreciate the message she’s trying to send, how she’s trying to parent. But this heartbreak feels like a permanent eclipse.
Still, I know what part I need to play.
“Thanks, Mom.” I lean in to hug her, and it does make me feel marginally better. “I think I will join you for dinner.
Maybe if I fake feeling better, then I actually will be better.
Except with every step I take, with each vibration of movement through my body, my heart splits a little further. I have no idea how I’m going to get through this.
32
Kennedy
Almost two months after Everett leaves, in the middle of March, the letter finally comes.
I’ve already gotten into my three fallback schools, which really aren’t fallbacks but to me rank lower than my top choice. It has the best nursing program, the campus I love, and is far enough away that I can establish a bit of independence.
So I’ve been waiting, impatiently, for something to go right in my life. Because I need some sort of future that holds promise, that holds possibility.
I still think about him all the time, but Mom was semi-right. In the past month, the pain has dulled a little. Though, not to the point where it doesn’t stab at me and wake me in the middle of the night. I can’t go days without thinking about Everett
, or even hours. He’s constantly there, his cold expression on the day he left haunts me awake from my sleep. He still hasn’t returned my calls or texts, and no one around town seems to know where he is.
There is no way I can even consider any of the other guys at school, though Logan Myers is still trying. My friends are sympathetic, but they also want me to pick a prom date and go back to being the old Kennedy. The fun, albeit responsible, friend who wanted to make senior year count.
I just don’t think I’ll ever get back to her, or at least it doesn’t feel like it.
The only thing I can look forward to is getting into my top choice college. I’ve been checking the mailbox every day, the second I pull into the driveway.
So as I pull in, and see the little red flag that was up on my family’s old-fashioned mailbox this morning is now down, my heart begins to pound. It’s here, I just know it.
My parents aren’t home from work, and I’m glad, since I want to be alone while I open this. It seems like such a significant moment in my life, and I’ve always been more independent than anything. This is my accomplishment, the one I worked for. I want it to sink in in solitude.
The walk to the mailbox feels a hundred miles long, and as I fish through the envelopes and junk letters as I make my way through the garage inside, I’m frantic. Then, my eyes land on it.
My top choice. The envelope is here.
I set my bag down and shrug out of my coat. Steadying my hands on the counter as I look the envelope square in the face, I imagine feeling a thousand times happier than I am this time next year.
My nails slice the envelope. I pull out the letter. And begin to read.
Hometown Heartless Page 15
