by A. L. Wood
I hold my breath.
Oh. My. God.
Is his song about me?
Maybe he loves me?
I sit up in his bed so that I could be eye-level with him when I finally say it.
“I love you,” I spit out before my courage wains.
“I love you, too, Lyrik,” He replies easily.
Ugh. He doesn’t get it.
“No, like, I love you, I love you.”
“What?”
“I love you, like as more than a friend. I am in love with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
Hold on, “Yes, I am.”
“Lyrik, you are not in love with me.”
“How would you know? I know how I feel Anson Blake and I do in fact love you. You can’t tell me that I don’t. I’m telling you that I do. I want to make you happy, and take care of you and I think you're handsome all the time. I am in love with you. You just said so yourself that you knew what love was, it’s because you are in love with someone.”
“I am in love with someone, it’s not you!” Anson shouts at me.
His words hit me like a figurative football finger smacking me in the chest. I fall back down on his bed no longer wanting to meet his eyes.
I’m too late.
“Fuck. Lyk…”
“No…It’s…It’s fine. You’re right. I’m not in love with you. Just my crazy head running away from me.” But I am in love with him. I just have to swallow my pride. I can’t let my stupid feelings mess our friendship up. He doesn’t feel the same way. “I’m…I’m feeling tired. I’m just going to go home.” I stand up, open his window and climb out onto the tree, I make quick work of getting back to my house. I just want the ground to swallow me whole. Before I shut my window, I hear Anson call out.
“Lyk, don’t go like this. Just talk to me.”
“It’s cool. We’re cool. I was wrong, don’t worry about it. Just tired. We’ll talk tomorrow,” I yell back.
We’ll be fine tomorrow.
Anson
We’ll be fine tomorrow she says.
Fuck.
I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I thought I was in love with her last year, but recognized it as just being in lust. She and I are close, as close as any friends can be and she’s just always there in my head. I wasn’t trying to date any other girls let alone being friends with them. Only Lyrik. This year though I’ve broken out of my shell, I’ve gone on dates while Lyk sits at home in her bedroom. I didn’t ask her if she had an issue with it because I didn’t think she felt like that for me.
She didn’t say anything either.
Until now.
All of a sudden, when I’m feeling something for someone else she loves me. She wants me. I can’t just break it off because she thinks she has feelings. She doesn’t. She only thinks she does because I’m her only friend. She never leaves her house unless it’s to go to our school or come over to mine. She’s lonely and hormonal or something and just sees me and thinks she’s in love.
She probably does love me, but she’s not in love with me like that. There’s no way.
It’s just not possible.
I refuse to believe that maybe if I had waited I would’ve had a shot with her.
That we could be something.
We’ll be fine tomorrow.
Lyrik
I’m an idiot.
I should’ve known he didn’t feel the same way. He’s been going on dates with the most popular girl in the school, Jessica, so there’s no way he was feeling any type of way for me.
I’m just his friend.
Like a damn sister or something.
A friend who just confessed her feelings, emotions that he doesn’t share.
I told him we’d be fine tomorrow, that I didn’t mean it.
I said we’d be fine.
Hopefully he believes me and tomorrow is the same as any other day.
**
Today isn’t okay.
It is not the same as yesterday or any other day.
I’ve only just woken up and I can feel it in my bones.
Something’s going to happen, something bad. I hate when I can feel the churning in my gut. It leaves me in anticipation of all of the bad that could happen. I’ve been lucky. My parents have been lucky, Anson has been lucky but today it will end.
I don’t know if it has to do with what I said to Anson yesterday or if it’s something else, but just feeling this way makes me want to stay in bed and shut the world out for the next twenty-four hours. But as Anson would say, you can hide away for as long as you’d like, it will still follow you when it wants. There’s no escaping fate. What has to happen will, whether I like it or not.
I tug the blankets off my face, second guess just staying in bed then hear Anson all over again in my head. School it is.
It’s a cool spring day so I get dressed in jeans, a shirt and a hoodie. I make my bed, grab my backpack and head downstairs to meet Anson in my driveway.
Even though my parents give no fucks about me or my well-being I still look in on them often. I always greet them when I’m coming home and say goodbye when I’m leaving. I don’t have to, but maybe one day they’ll decide they want their lives back, they want to actually live and know who I am or themselves again, then they’ll remember that I didn’t leave.
I didn’t give up.
I’m here.
Just waiting.
Like any day, I stop in the living room where they usually pass out and end up sleeping if I can’t get them to their room, and say goodbye. I always check their pulse, make sure they have water and nothing in their vicinity that could harm them, well besides the drugs.
Mom’s breathing, just out of it. I kiss her on the forehead and tell her that I love her.
I sit down next to Dad, his hand feels cold and clammy. I press my index finger into his wrist while leaning into his face to hear for breathing.
His pulse is slow.
Scarily slow. His breathing is shallow, and barely there.
What do I do?
“Dad,” I say.
Answer me, “Dad!” I yell while smacking his chest.
“Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!”
No answer. Nothing.
Oh, my God. This isn’t normal.
I know that nothing could be normal for a drug addict, especially a drug as strong as the one they love. I’ve researched as much as I could to learn anything that might possibly help. This isn’t okay.
“Dad!” I try again, “Wake up! Wake up damn you!”
Anson must’ve heard me yelling because he comes running into the living room.
“What’s wrong? I heard you screaming from your driveway.”
“I don’t…I don’t know…Dad’s barely breathing and he isn’t conscience. What do I do?”
“We have to call 911 right now Lyk. I’ll do it, you just make sure he stays breathing. Try laying him down and tilt his head to the side.”
Anson
She won’t speak to me.
She won’t talk to anyone.
Her dad overdosed, they rushed him to the hospital and her mother just to be safe. We haven’t gone to school yet, and probably won’t. We’re standing in her living room, looking at the mess her parents left.
The mess that the cops left.
They searched the entire house, wanting to make sure they were only on the one drug. Neighbors lined the streets to witness what was going on. They wanted a small piece of knowledge that they could exaggerate then spread around as gossip.
That’s the way it was here.
Luckily the cops haven’t seen to calling child protective services, but only because I begged my parents to say they’d keep watch over her until her parents were okay. She’s seventeen, so they thought it would be fine if she stayed at our house for a few days.
My parents didn’t want to say yes. They would’ve been fine with her just going to the state until her parents were either released and sober or she turned eighteen
. I couldn’t have that.
I couldn’t fathom a day without her let alone almost an entire year. I need her.
Both of my parents had to work so we were left alone without their supervision. Now I just had to get Lyrik to speak to me. I needed to know that she was okay.
“It will be all right,” I lie. None of this is all right.
It’s fucking horrible and selfish. I’ve seen what their addiction has done to her. I’ve seen how it’s robbed her of a normal life, of a loving home and happiness. They don’t deserve her. None of us do.
“It’s not going to be okay Anson! It will never be okay! They’re in love with this stupid drug, they love what it does to them. Love how they don’t have to face their lives or me. They’ll never become free,” she cries.
Finally.
She speaks.
I know that in our rules it says I can’t hug her, but I think that most rules are meant to broken. At least friendship rules. So, I’m going to break it.
I pull her into me for a hug. I hold her while she cries and cries.
I tell her that she’ll be okay. That she’s stronger than this and I’ll always be here for her.
I’m not going anywhere.
She has me.
Lyrik
Yesterday never happened.
That’s what today feels like.
All of the issues of being in love with Anson don’t matter, it’s just a small over dramatized event in my life. Something that won’t exist after all is settled with my parents. It won’t cross his mind because something tragic happened right after, which will replace the words, I’m in love with you, that I said.
I regret saying them because the worry over him not feeling the same and knowing how I felt toward him kept me awake most of the night.
Then this.
Then an overdose because my parents love her more than they love me.
Why have I placed a gender to identify heroin?
Because I think of Heroin as a she.
She’s seducing, addicting, enticing and deadly.
She’s sly. She convinces you that one try won’t hurt, that it only lasts twenty minutes and the effects wear off. That after one use you won’t need her again and again and again.
She’s needy.
Men don’t seem so needy to me.
Well, Anson doesn’t seem so needy.
But his Mom is.
I watch people, and woman around here are always clingy and needy, like her.
So, I’m convinced that Heroin is in fact a she if she were a person.
She might just be chemicals– but I’m here to tell you that you can believe it’s just some scientific chemical mixed up to get someone high, but once she’s in your life she becomes life like. She becomes real. She becomes human. She takes root in the very souls that try her.
She claims their souls.
Their families’ souls.
Their home, their life, their friends, their livelihood, them.
She robs everyone around her of everything.
I hate her.
I hate heroin.
And if I could I would hate my parents, but I can’t, I love them and not by obligation but because I remember.
I remember them as one. They were happy and deeply in love. We were whole without her. We loved without her. We were a family without her. I was loved, without her.
I wish they didn’t need her so much.
Anson
She’s hurting and there’s nothing I can do to help her.
She’s cried more times than I can count. Before this she only cried once and that was when Drew pushed her off the swing at school during recess when we were kids. Felt like she was ten feet high in the air, he’d been pushing her so she’d gain some height and boy did she. But then he pushed way too hard and she just fell right off the swing and landed on her back. Drew got in trouble even though it was an accident, Lyk was sent to the nurse’s office, nothing was broken but she was hurting and I had to stay on that playground wondering if she was okay.
Our teacher refused to let me leave. I didn’t see her all day because she got sent home, but once I got home I ran to her house next door and knocked until her parents let me in. She cried as soon as she saw me. I didn’t think she would’ve been hurting still but she must’ve because she had real tears.
Like last night and today. Real tears that took her breath away. I’ve never cried that I can remember, I don’t think I’ve felt any kind of pain she has and maybe that’s why I don’t cry because whenever I do I think about her. About how she has so many reasons to cry but never does, but if I were to cry, today would be the day. Not because I’m in any pain but because she is.
I want to take some of her pain away.
Lyrik
Anson’s mom hates me.
I can see it in her eyes every time I enter the room. Whether it’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner or I’m coming and going she gives me this death stare like, “Keep your filthy hands off my son and I don’t want you here.”
I don’t want to be here either but I do want your son.
I wish I could tell her that, but Anson was helping me by asking his parents to let me stay here. I would’ve been sent to Foster Care and I would really rather be here, as close to Anson and my parents as possible.
The hospital won’t let them see me. Apparently, the County put them into an in-patient rehabilitation program and they can’t have contact with anyone during the first two weeks. It’s a critical time they say, I want to argue back, demand to see them but I’m not a professional. What if I somehow fuck up their sobriety?
What if they get kicked out of the program and have to go back?
“Think you’ll be able to see them after school?” Anson asks as we sit at the counter eating breakfast while his mom looks on.
“I’m going to try. They said after fourteen days I could see them providing that they’re doing well. My fingers are crossed,” I smile.
“I wouldn’t count on it, as bad as your parents were, it’s probably going to take them months to rehabilitate, then they’ll have to deal with the repercussions in putting you, their child in danger and using drugs. I’m sure they’ll end up in jail or something so you have to figure out what you’re going to do but you can’t stay here forever,” Anson’s Mom jumps in.
“Mom!” Anson reprimands her.
“No, she’s right. I can’t live off your parents forever. I’d like to just go back home to my own bedroom. I don’t want your parents having to support me and like your Mom said, what if they do go to jail? What then? I won’t be eighteen until August. I still have six months– I don’t want to end up in foster care. I’m going to have to get a part time job or something. I could pay some of the bills at home. Keep the lights and heat on at least.”
“You don’t have to get a job Lyk. You can stay here until they’re out and free and sober. Mom and Dad wouldn’t kick you out. Right, Mom?”
“Of course we wouldn’t kick her out, but she is going to have to get a part-time job if she wants to stay. You know that we have expectations. If she isn’t in any after school clubs or sports then she works. We instill ambition in this house. You want to be a part of the family? Then we expect drive and motivation. You can stay here as long as your grades are B’s or above and you have an after-school job.” His mom caves.
Maybe she’s warming up to me after all.
“I can start job hunting today after school. I know a few places that are hiring so it shouldn’t be a problem. Thank you, Mrs. Blake.”
“If you’re going to be a part of this family you have to call me Sid, not Mrs. Blake. Also, I know your parents don’t own a car because they sold it, probably to fund that drug habit of theirs, but do you have a license?”
“I don’t.”
“Okay. So, we’ll work on that for the time being Anson can pick you up from work when your shifts end. No need to walk home, it wouldn’t be safe. I guess it’s safe to say that you’ll be here fo
r a while so instead of you sleeping on the couch I’ll get that extra room cleared out this weekend and we’ll get your stuff in there.”
“Thank you, Sid, it means a lot to me that you’ll let me stay. I mean, I know that you don’t like me or want Anson to be friends with me but thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Your thanks isn’t needed. Just work hard and be good.”
Anson
“She’s not kidding about the working hard thing, she’ll call the school to check in on your grades. She’s bat shit crazy like that Lyk,” I say to her as we’re driving to a pizza shop that’s not far from home. We saw a ‘now hiring’ sign in the window on our way to school today.
“That’s fine, all of my grades are above a B anyway. She can call, hell I wish she would, maybe then she’d stop looking at me like I’m my parents and I’m bound to debauch you at any minute.”
“But aren’t you?” I laugh.
“I happen to believe I’m the good one in this friendship. You’re the bad influence always trying to get me to do horrible things.”
“No. You’ve confused me with yourself. Who’s the one who told me that smoking corn silk would get us high? We were too scared to try the real thing so you spent a week drying out the silk from a corncob. We poked a hole in a soda can and smoked it. Never having smoked a day in our lives. I remember that like it was yesterday. Worst migraine ever, on top of an extremely sore throat it did nothing! Horrible decision Lyrik.”
“In my defense, someone who had smoked the real thing suggested it as the best alternative. They were very convincing. I didn’t know that the only high you’d get was regret. How about the time you convinced me to dive into the public pool? You said that because I was short I’d never hit the bottom of the four foot deep pool. I hadn’t tried diving before that! I hit the left side of my face on that concrete, all summer I had a huge scab. And you say that I’m full or horrible decisions?”
“Okay, okay that one wasn’t wise. I actually did feel bad about that. Every time I looked at your face I cringed knowing that I’m the one who told you to dive. But I’m still convinced you’re the bad influence, you’re always talking me into shit show choices and then I’m the one getting blamed for shit I never did.”
