Running Back To Him (15 page)

“I can’t face what happened.” My voice is jagged. “It’s better this way. I can’t. I just can’t.”

I shoot up onto my feet and turn my back to him, ashamed that he’s seeing me like this.

“I know how you feel. You
know
I do.” I hear him stand up, his feet stepping over the turf. “You know my story…my Dad passed. God knows where my Mom is. My troubles reading. I’ve backed away from it for years. And now you’re helping me face it.” He moves up behind me, embracing me with his warmth. “Let me help you face this.”

He lifts up my chin with his fingertips and connects my eyes to his. I’m naked to him; bare, raw. I can’t hide from him. I can’t hide from myself.

I’m breathing harshly from the floor of my stomach through my nostrils and seeing visions of the time my Mom got the call that Pepper and my Dad were killed in a car accident.

It’s the first time I’ve thought of that time in months. It’s a hole growing in me that I can’t patch up. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and eventually it’ll swallow me whole.

“They left me,” I yelp. “They left me stranded. I’m out here in the world without them. I lost apart of myself when they left. I felt abandoned.” Kellen holds my shivering frame tighter. “I feel cheated. Like it was some sick joke. It felt like somebody sliced open my chest and ripped my heart out.” My voice shrill, but filled with a bubbling rage.

“How does that make you feel, Mags?” Kellen speaks to me sternly. It’s pulling something out of me, but I’m fighting to hold it in.

“I don’t know.” I clench my jaws firmer. I can’t let it out.

“Tell me.” His voice pounds like iron.

I have to let it out.

My skull is vibrating and sizzling hot. I open my mouth wide, but I can’t speak. I can’t scream. I can’t cry. Strands of hair become caught on the corner of my mouth.

“Just let it out,” Kellen says to me as my pulse bangs in my throat.

A rush of unbearable pain floods my chest and I groan, all the veins in my throat feel like they’re ready to pop.

“WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME!?” I scream so loud my eardrums become muted. I fall so hard into a fit of crying, a greasy feeling coats my stomach.

I feel the pain crawling up my toes to every inch of my stomach, up to my throat, tightening it to where it hurts to breathe. “They left me! They left me here…alone!” I pull away from him, shivering, humiliated with how naked I feel right now.

Tiny sniffles separate the long stretch of silence that passes.

“Sorry,” I mutter. “I didn’t mean to freak out like that.” I fidget with the hem of my shirt. “I know you probably think I look a hot mess right now.”

Sounding confused, Kellen says, “Why do you always care what people think…what I think?”

“That’s what matters right?”

“Who cares what they think?”

My shoulders slump forward feeling the sour heat of his question pelting my neck.

“I do!” I swing around, yelling, in full fury. I stab my index finger into my chest repeatedly shuffling my feet towards him, until we stand face to face and the rage radiating off my face bangs against his. He stands unafraid, but tender and unprejudiced. “I
care
about what people think about me. They mean
everything
to me. At least they’re something. It’s better than being ignored my entire life. When they left me a hole was left in my heart. I felt abandoned. Okay? Is that what you want to hear? That I changed because I wanted to shed everything that had to do with Pepper and my Dad dying? They took a piece from me and I had to find a way to replace it…with something. I felt like I didn’t have an identity. I don’t know who I am anymore, because who I
was
left when they did. There was a gaping hole in my heart. And I had to fill it. I had to fill it with being somebody…somebody that mattered. I don’t know if you know what that feels like. To be ignored. To be a nobody. To be unaccepted. Forgotten. I filled that hole with a need to belong to something. To be popular. No matter how shallow and how fake and no matter how empty it was. I threw myself into it. I shed every bit of who I was before they left me. Is that a good enough answer? Yeah it’s shallow. Yeah it’s ridiculous. It’s ugly. But I belong. I
belong
now. I don’t feel abandoned anymore. I feel a part of something. No matter how fake and how shitty it is, that hole is filled.”

My jagged breaths calm with each passing second. “You probably think I’m some empty bitch, huh?” I chuckle. I dip my head and I force a laugh to break up the tension.

“I don’t,” he says tenderly, comforting. “You know I don’t.” He seizes my palm and I look up at him gingerly.

His thumb wipes the dampness under my eyes. “I feel so foolish for freaking out like that in front of you.” I lick my lips, salty and cracked. He looks at me, but says nothing. “So there it is. I seek comfort in popularity. There’s a million other things I could be doing instead. I could be popping a thousand pills a day or out getting wasted every night or skipping school. But I don’t. I’m one of good ones. I’ve never used drugs. I rarely drink. And I get straight A’s in school. I’m an honor roll student. If you ask me, I’m doing pretty damn good despite the shitty circumstances.”

“So you hide behind all of this makeup…all of the clothes that aren’t the real you? Lucas, Ashley? All of that so you don’t have to remind yourself of who you used to be. All so you don’t have to relive the past?”

I know he’s being sincere, but his words arrow at the insecurities in my heart. I attack him.

“Oh you know all about me don’t you?” I say sharply. “Kellen, you don’t know me. You know nothing about me. You know the
old
me. You haven’t spoken to me in four years. A lot’s happened since then, if you haven’t been able to tell. We were like this.” I coil my middle finger around my index finger. “We go to the same school and we never say a word to each other. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

My entire body feels like it’s burning from the inside out. I’ve gotten a lot of things off my chest tonight. I might as well let more off.

I back away from him. “Dad, Pepper. Everyone leaves me. That’s what everyone who’s close to me does. They leave. They abandon me. Everyone who means something to me ends up leaving. Dad, my sister. All of them. Including you. Why did you leave me?”

It’s a question that’s weighed heavy on my heart for years.

He breathes heavily, sliding his hands over his head.

“I think about that all the time,” he says.

I thought about it
all
the time too. Albeit, less and less as the years passed by, but the summer after he came out of the cast he was a different person. We seldom spoke after he had a crazy growth spurt, which introduced him to a new friend—football.

How could that ball be a better bff than me; it doesn’t even talk back, let alone have a sparkling personality like yours truly. So one could understand why I was perplexed when I’d come to his house after school and his Grandma would say he was up at football tryouts. And then I’d come by another day and he’d be at practice. He never even told me he made the team or anything. I’d approach him at school and he’d be distant. Slowly, I was being faded into the background of his life.

“We were like brother and sister,” I say. “A brother and sister that didn’t want to scratch each other’s eyes out.” A shaky laugh shoots from my mouth. But he doesn’t laugh or smile in the slightest. He just nods with watery eyes. “Was it something I did?” I fidget with my fingers. “It seemed like once you picked up football, you just forgot about me…your best friend. After that, it was like I was nothing to you.” No matter how hard I grind my teeth or how rapidly I blink my eyes, I can’t prevent another tear from skating down my check. I turn away from him so he won’t see it.

He shakes his head timidly. “It wasn’t you. I…there was a lot going on that you didn’t know about.” There’s a strange note in his voice. “The summer I broke my leg, my Dad took a job in Detroit and was going to move in the fall.” Every other word he speaks, his voice cracks. I can tell these are words he’s never uttered to any soul. “I wrestled for weeks about if I should go with him or not, but I decided to stay with my grandparents here. Because of you. I didn’t want to leave…you.” A breath lodges in my throat and I stand speechless, picking the skin off my thumb. “I knew if I went with him, our friendship would be over.”

I sniffle. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

“I was having a hard time with it all.”

“You could have come to me.”

“I just bottled it up.” He stares up to the sky. “A month before my Dad was to move for the job he told me that he had cancer. It was terminal. Doctors said they couldn’t do anything…gave him weeks. I always knew something was off. They kept it under wraps for the longest because they thought he would beat it. But it was so aggressive that the doctors did all they could do and it still wasn’t enough.” Every vein in his throat is protruding and his face is flushed red. He’s not allowing the tears to fall. “Those last few weeks, after I got out of my cast, my height shot up crazy. My Dad taught me how to play football.” He clears his throat and a slight smile peeks through. “He loved the game. Football was what got him a scholarship to college. He had dreams of going pro but didn’t make it. I just wanted him to be proud of me. I buried my head in anything football and shut out everything else…even my best friend.” His head turns to me, the whites of his eyes filtered red. I blink away a few more tears. “I used ball to take away the pain. My Dad was Superman to me and when he died it was hard for me to let people…in. The only time I didn’t think about him was when I was between those white lines. I bottled up all the anger I had within me and let it loose on the field. It was my escape.”

I gaze vacantly at the field. I knew he was different after his Dad passed but I didn’t know to what degree.

“When Grandma and Grandpa moved close to Grand Blanc, I was so far away from you, I didn’t know how to make the first step to be friends again.”

“I would’ve been there. You know I would have. But you ignored me.”

He paces back and forth and stops suddenly to plant his hands on his waist. “We go to the same school and we don’t say a word to each other. It makes me feel shitty that I’m too much of a coward to even come to you to at least say hi.”

I sniffle. “We’ve locked eyes a few times in the hall.”

He turns around and smiles lightly. “Yeah, I nodded my head at you a few times in the hallway at school.”

I brush a curl behind my hair. “Oh yeah, thanks for acknowledging me!”

“I thought you hated me. Because I started playing football and stopped hanging out with you. Time passed and days turned to weeks, months to years. Things just got weird as time went on. I didn’t know what to say to you. And here it’s senior year and we just started speaking again.”

“How could I hate you? Hate you? I l—” I catch myself. Tonight I’ve said things I never thought I’d be able to say. Things that have haunted me since forever. I’ve said them because he makes it comfortable for me to say it. But I’m still not ready to let him know how I truly feel about him.

“I could never hate you,” I say. “Well you have me now. And whether you like it or not—I’m not leaving you this time.” My cracked lips peel to a smile. I fold my arms. “You’re like herpes, the gift that never leaves.”

He laughs so hard he bends over. His laughter is interrupted by George opening up the gate.

“Kellen, time to go,” he yells. “I have to lock up for tonight.”

“Okay,” Kellen replies. “Time to go,” he says to me. We get to the parking lot and he walks me to my car. “Thanks for joining me tonight.”

“You really have to stop inviting me to your pre game rituals. I beat you in putt-putt and now I had a nervous breakdown on the fifty-yard line. I’m totally scarring you.”

“You’re right. You’ve thrown a monkey wrench in everything. I’ll have to find some new ones.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Let me grab something for you. I think you’ll like it.” He runs to his car, pops the trunk, and comes back with his varsity jacket.

It’s red all over with gray sleeves and has his last name written in cursive across the back shoulders. “I want you to wear this. I think everyone would see that things are official between us.”

“After everything that’s been said, you still want to go through with this?”

“No matter how crazy all this is, I still want to finish what I’ve started. Plus I think we’re too far into it to quit now. We’ve kissed, that’s gotta count for something right?”

“It’s like when Heath Ledger played The Joker, you actually couldn’t tell he was acting anymore. That’s how I feel.”

“Wow. Heath Ledger? You’re really taking this seriously.”

“We’re in this deep. Let’s see it to the end. Homecoming?”

“Homecoming it is then. That’s the biggest game of the year. You sure do know how to make a grand scene don’t you?”

“I’ve always been a bit of a drama queen.”

Kellen smiles and pecks my cheek and then darts off to his car. “Goodnight,” he says.

After his car peels out, I sit in the parking lot for a few moments and think about the earlier events of the night. There really was no turning back now. I let everything out on the table to Kellen—except one thing. And that one thing is the only thing on my mind. It was decided—I
had
to be Kellen’s girlfriend. I had to make the boldest move of my life. I had to tell Kellen how I really felt about him.