“I know,” I said. “Don’t listen to them. They don’t know anything.”
“Goddamn right they don’t know anything. Who the fuck even says things like that about someone? Who the fuck are they, acting like she was beneath them?” There are tears streaming down her face, and her face is waging a battle between anger and sadness right in front of my eyes. I take a step forward, raise a hand to reach out to her, but she opens her mouth and lets out a fucking wail, and reaches over to the table, snatches up one of the heavy metal soup pots we’d set there earlier and whips it against the wall. It clangs and ricochets off, just like the frying pan.
“Goddamn them. And her. And this fucking stupid useless house!”
She turns away from me and starts grabbing the mason jars off the counter and smashing them into the sink. As soon as I realize what she’s doing, what damage she could do, I race forward and grab her. But it’s too late.
There’s already blood trickling down her hand.
“Fuck!” she spits, and grabs at it just as I catch her in my arms.
“Hey. Hey hey hey, it’s okay.” I pull her hand away from her wound. I need to see the damage. She’s shaking in my arms, her chest heaving with sobs, and she leans back against me. “It’s okay,” I tell her again, and wrap myself around her as best I can, pressing my mouth against her ear through her hair. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” she says, and turns around in my arms. She presses her face against my shoulder.
“No,” I say, bringing my arms up around her, pulling her close. “But it will be.”
I’ll make sure of it.
Chapter 15
Ash
“Hey,” Star whispers to me, and I turn from my seat on the front step to look at her. She’s all wrapped up in a hoodie now, the sleeves tugged all the way down to cover her hands. Only the dark-painted tips of her fingers are visible. She shifts from foot to foot, and I can see the muscles shifting beneath the tanned skin of her long, fucking gorgeous legs.
“Hey,” I say back and take another drag of my cigarette. I’m down to my last one. I blow out the smoke slowly, watch it as it dances in the night air.
“Can I . . . I mean . . . Is it okay if I join you?”
God, she looks so scared now, like she expects me to say no.
I don’t think I’m ever going to say no to this girl.
I slap the palm of my hand down on the step next to me. “Pull up some wood,” I tell her, and turn back out to look at the road. I only barely hear her footsteps as she approaches. She sinks down onto the step next to me, and stretches her legs out in front of her. Her feet are bare, I notice. Her toenails painted white, her star tattoos dancing up her left foot. I want to reach out and touch her, but I won’t.
I can’t.
So instead I tuck my own hand into the pocket of my hoodie, leaving only the left one, the one farthest away from her free to hold my smoke.
We sit there in silence for a few minutes, watching as the streetlights start to blink on as the darkness finally arrives, covering the neighborhood. I hear Star’s intake of breath beside me, and I know she’s about to speak, about to talk about what happened. And I’m just not ready for that yet, so I spit out the first thing that comes to my head.
“How’s your hand?”
She kind of blinks at me for a second, as though she has no idea what I’m talking about, but then she looks down and tugs up the sleeve, and I can see the stark white of the gauze against the black fabric of her hoodie. It’s tinged a little with blood. I shove my smoke back between my lips, and reach out for her hand. “Let me see.”
“It’s fine,” she says, but holds out her arm, anyway, sitting quietly as I turn it this way and that. It’s only bleeding in that one spot, and by the looks of it, it’s slowed way down. So that’s good. When she’d first cut it, I’d been worried she’d snagged an artery or something, or that she’d need stitches, it had been bleeding so bad. She’d stood there, wincing and swearing as I held her hand under the running water of the tap—thank god that hadn’t been turned off like the power had been, otherwise I’m not sure what I would have done. When I’d been certain it was clean, I’d pulled it away to examine it, only to have the blood just well right back up again.
I had grabbed a stack of paper napkins out of the package we’d left on the kitchen counter, and pressed them against the cut, telling her to hold it there good and tight, as I went rooting around for the first-aid kid we’d found earlier and had thrown . . . somewhere. I finally found it in the dining room, sitting on one of the tucked-in chairs like it was a guest at some fucked-up dinner party. I’d gone a little overboard with the gauze when I began wrapping her up, but it wasn’t like I had any stellar first-aid skills. Plus, I figured that too much was better than not enough. At least it looks like the bleeding has stopped.
I tell her so, and she kind of smiles at me, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and pulls her hand back.
“Is it still hurting?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“It’s a little sore,” she says, picking a little at the edge of the gauze. “But I’ll be fine. It’s my pride that has taken a beating more than anything.”
I can believe that. She’s always been so cool and collected. Having me see her like that must really be messing with her head.
She lets out a sigh. “I’m really sorry, by the way. About what happened in there.”
I take a long drag on my cigarette and reach over to tap the ash into the little empty soup can that Star gave me when we couldn’t find a single goddamn ashtray in the house. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” I tell her. And it’s the truth. “It’s those assholes who should be sorry for talking about your mom like that.”
“Yeah,” she says, and turns away from me to look out at the street. It’s quiet right now, not that this block ever really bustles with activity. I suppose people pay a premium to live in a neighborhood like this. Not that the one I grew up in was so different. The houses were a little smaller, the cars a little older. But overall, not so different. “But the worst part about it is that they were right.”
I turn to look at her. She lets out a breath and tugs the sleeves of her hoodie back down over her hands, covering them completely this time. She wraps her arms around herself, and pulls her legs up, planting her feet on the step directly in front of her. She leans forward, and it almost looks like she’s curling herself into a ball. God, she was really affected by that shit.
“I loved my mother. I really did. It’s just…when I was little, things were great,” she says. But she’s chewing at her lower lip, and staring off into space, like just the act of remembering is wearing on her. “But then my dad died and…my mom, she just stopped, you know?”
“Stopped?”
She sighs and reaches up to tug at the end of a lock of hair. It’s distracting, all long and half-curled. I keep wanting to bury my hands in it, to see what it feels like for myself. “Stopped being a mom,” she says. “I mean, she was there. She didn’t abandon me or anything. I was still fed and clothed and dropped off at school on time. But it was like she’d just checked out, you know? She was there, but at the same time she wasn’t.” She drops her hand back down, and her fingers curl into fists. “That’s when she started bringing home the stuff.”