Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 69018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
She brushes at her eyes, which makes my insides turn into a storm far more ferocious than the water out there. It's all I can do not to take her into my arms and hold her. I don’t have permission, and right now isn’t the time to ask. I would feel like I’m taking advantage of someone else’s vulnerability. Or… maybe this is how people do it. Connect with another person. It’s ridiculous that I can run through fire or have bullets raining down all around me and feel safer. At least then, I’ll act. It’s not the adrenaline. I have plenty of that coursing through me.
“I guess I’m still kind of haunted, but do you ever get over something like that?” She shrugs, brushes at her eyes again, and sniffles loudly. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you any of this. It’s not like you’re that easy to talk to, and you’re certainly not torturing it out of me.”
I’ve never felt as though I owed anyone anything, or maybe it’s more apt to say I haven’t really cared. The last time I cared was the time it broke me, and I haven’t gone back to that. It’s not like I made a vow against it. The opportunity just hasn’t arisen. It’s hard to get close to people when you surround yourself with a growing legend of a reputation. It serves like a fifty-foot wall, barricading the world out.
Well, I’m about to step outside of that wall. I’m not scared, but I am nervous.
“My people are…back in Tennessee, where I grew up. I was also raised by a single mother. And I’m the oldest of three boys. My mom was always looking for love, and she found it, or what she thought it was, in all the wrong places. We all have different fathers, and it made people look at her like she was trash. It made me so angry my whole life. We could never get ahead. She took care to always keep us safe, no matter where we were living. She made sure the guys she thought she was in love with never looked at us wrong or abused us in any way. In that respect, I can at least say they were half-decent. It was more like they were the type of men who wanted one thing from a beautiful woman—and my mom was and is beautiful—and when they got it, they didn’t stick around for long after. They weren’t father material, and they had no interest in raising kids. Apparently, my father split as soon as she told him she was pregnant, but at least my younger brothers’ fathers paid her some child support on and off from a distance that they wanted to maintain.”
It would be easier if I could tell this to her back, but of course, Ephemeral gives me all her attention, her tear-stained, extra luminous eyes fixed raptly on my face. She’s so close, but she still maintains a distance, her face open like she knows how hard this is.
I’m with her on the I don’t know why I’m telling you this front.
“We never had much money, and when I was sixteen, the payments just stopped. My mom was already working two jobs. My little brothers were ten and eight. Markus has dyslexia, but everyone likes to call him stupid. He was struggling especially and getting bullied, not just by kids but by teachers. We lived in a small town, and once you’re labeled trash, it sticks with you for life. There’s this odor about you that…lingers.”
Her nose wrinkles as if she can smell it, but then her eyes narrow and harden, flashing at the injustice. Ephemeral isn’t the kind of person who would have seen something like that going on and let it stand. Even as a kid, I bet she stood up for justice and tried to make the world a kinder, better place.
I didn’t give a shit about the world. I just wanted to get my family out of that town. I thought if we could go to the city, if we could just leave and start over, maybe things would be easier. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have to work herself to death, and my little brother could get the help he needed.
“I was sixteen, but I was a huge kid. I was popular because I was a jock. Football, especially, is the golden ticket. I probably could have gotten a scholarship, but college and a real job were too far away. My family couldn’t wait years.”
“You dropped out and went to work.”
“I dropped out and paid someone to get me a pretty ironclad fake ID. Some small towns are just that way. There’s enough squirrely shit going on that someone knows someone who knows someone who can do something like that. You can legally join different branches when you’re seventeen, but even that was a year away, so fake ID it was. It cost everything I’d saved from working odd jobs over the years, which wasn’t much. I didn’t tell my mom I was going to do it. She never would have let me. To her, it was so important that we all finish school and go to college if we could and get a good job. She didn’t want us to take the route she’d taken, even though none of us would have called her wrong for it. How could we? All she ever did was work herself half to death to keep us together.”