“Listen to me, Joscelyn. I want you to really hear what I’m saying. If you don’t believe any other thing I say, believe this. There is nothing, nothing, you could, or would ever do, that would make me hate you. You’re not capable of doing something to cause anyone to hate you. I know that. And I also know that...that I love you.”
I started to cry again, putting my head against the door. It was solid and reassuring, and that was what I needed.
“You wouldn’t if you knew, Dusty. You wouldn’t.” I put my hand on the door, and somehow I knew he was doing the same on the other side.
“Oh, Jos. I just... I want to touch you and hold you so bad right now. Can you please let me in? Please.” I reached my hand up and unlocked the door.
“It’s open,” I said, scooting back from the door as he turned the knob and opened the door slowly.
I looked up and there he was.
“Oh, sweet girl.” He crouched down next to me and picked me up and set me down on my bed, stretching out beside me and brushing the tears from my face. He kissed the tip of my nose and I couldn’t stop him.
“Dusty, don’t.”
“Stop telling me what to do, Jos. For this once, I’m not going to be a gentleman and listen to you.” He pulled me tight against him, and I struggled a little to get free, but his arms were like steel cables and I didn’t really try that hard.
“Let me. Just let me for a little while.” He locked his arms around me and I turned my head so it was against his chest. His heart pounded like the rough beat of a drum, and I listened to it, trying to let everything else go.
Once he was sure I wasn’t going to try to get away from him, his hands loosened on my back and started moving up and down in soothing waves.
The tears continued, but they weren’t as bad as before.
He didn’t sing. He didn’t speak. He just held me and breathed with me and let me cry my tears into his shirt until I was wrung out and didn’t have any left. At least for now.
My arm was falling asleep, so I shifted and he tensed up.
“Sorry. I just need to move.” He loosened his grip, and I turned so I was in a better position. One of his hands went under my chin, tipping my face up so he could look at it.
“I’m a mess. I know,” I said as he brushed some of my hair out of my eyes.
“A beautiful mess I don’t know how I got myself roped into.”
“I didn’t rope you.”
“Yes, you did. It just isn’t your fault.”
That wasn’t, maybe.
“Joscelyn?”
“Mmm?”
“You’re not this upset about the virginity thing, are you?”
I couldn’t lie anymore. “No.”
“It’s something else. Something bigger.”
I nodded with his hand still under my chin.
“Then I have to tell you that you’re not the only one who has something so big and so bad that they can’t tell anyone. You’re not the only one. Do you understand?”
“What?” I’d known there were lots of secrets about Dusty’s past that he would rather leave buried, but I just assumed he had a bad home life, or he’d been abused, or something like that. What was it with people and secrets? I seemed to attract them. First Hannah and now Dusty.
“But you know what? Compared with the thought of losing you, my secret doesn’t seem so big anymore. You’re the first person I’ve told about this.”
I tried to put my hand on his mouth, but he moved it.
“No, I’m going to tell you, not because I want to, but I need you to hear it.” I held on to his shirt. “You saw that picture of me and my brother, right?” Oh, no. Oh, nonononono. I stiffened in his arms, but he didn’t stop talking.
“Well, he died. Nine months ago. And it’s my fault.”
At the exact moment my brain took the things he said and translated them, I was sure my heart stopped.
Chapter 21
I sat up, wrenching myself out of his arms.
“I can’t listen to this. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” I dived for the door, but Dusty stopped me, trying to pull me back.
“Let me go, let me go, let me go!” I screamed. My door burst open and Dusty froze.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” Dusty let go of me and Renee pulled me away from him. “I think you need to get the fuck out of this house and I hope the door hits you on the way out.”
“I’m so sorry.... I just...” Renee held me and turned her body so she was between me and Dusty.
“Get. The. Fuck. OUT.” He gave me one last desperate look and pushed past us and went up the stairs.
“Did he do anything to you?” Renee said, holding my face as if she was looking for bruises.
“No, nothing like that. He didn’t hurt me.”
“That’s not what it looked like from my perspective. Shit, I never should have trusted him, but Hunter was all for it. I swear, I’ll never let him near you again.” She hugged me, and I tried to tell her that it wasn’t Dusty’s fault. That I was to blame. For this, for everything.
But the words were too big and too heavy for my tongue to form, so I just started crying again. It seemed to be my default form of expression lately.
“It’s okay, Jos. It’ll be okay.”
It was less okay than it had ever been.
We both heard yelling upstairs and then the front door slammed so hard it shook the whole house.
“It’s okay, baby girl. I’m not going to let anything hurt you.”
* * *
Renee insisted on putting me to bed and then bringing me soup. No one else came downstairs, but I could hear them upstairs, and even if I didn’t know what they were saying, I knew they were talking about me. I wondered who had taken what side. When Renee left to go make the soup, after tucking me in bed, I checked my phone. Nothing.
I’d expected at least a phone call or something from Dusty, but I finally seemed to have driven him away for good.
So why did I feel like someone had frozen my heart and then smashed it into a million pieces with a hammer? I curled up in the fetal position and tried to stop myself from crying. Seriously, how many gallons of tears could I produce? I was apparently going for the world record.
Renee came back with the soup, and I had some of it, just to appease her. She also handed me some Tylenol PM, and I swallowed it down without thinking. I wouldn’t sleep otherwise. I’d done this routine nine months ago, only that time I didn’t have Renee.
“You just rest. Don’t worry about school or homework or anything else. I’ll take care of everything. Okay?” She kissed my forehead and turned off the light as she left the room, and I lay there in the dark silence.
“Come on! I’ve never been to a concert before. Please? I can’t do this without you,” I said, clasping my hands together. “Please be with me when my concert cherry gets popped.” That made him laugh.
“Fine, fine. But you’re paying for gas.”
“Deal!” I said and threw my arms around him. “You also need to tell me what to wear. I don’t really have concert attire in my closet.”
“I know. What is up with your wardrobe? You look like you just stepped off C-SPAN all the time.”
“I’m going to have to dress like this all the time someday, so I might as well get used to it.”
I tried to shut out the memories, but they wouldn’t go back in the place I normally kept them. They were too big, too close, and I couldn’t shove them away, no matter what I did.
“So, what do you think?” he yelled in my ear as the first act finished their set and the crowd went berserk.
“Amazing!” I yelled and then screamed with everyone else at the top of my lungs.
“This is life, Jossy. This is living t
he day,” he yelled as people chanted for an encore.
We watched the second act, which wasn’t as good as the first, but it didn’t matter. Nathan got a text that made him frown, and I asked what was wrong.
“Nothing. Nothing that I need to deal with. You want to see if we can get closer?” We’d pushed and worked our way to the front by the time the third act took the stage. I was drunk on the music and the atmosphere, and I’d never felt like that in my life. It was too much and not enough at the same time.
“I never want to leave!” I yelled.
“You’ll have to sleep sometime. And they will kick us out eventually.”
He seemed distracted.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah, fine. My head’s somewhere else.”
“Do you want to go?”
He shook his head and smiled.
“No way. I’m not cutting your first experience short. We’re staying until the end.”
“We don’t have to.”
“Are you sure?”
I looked at the stage.
“One more song?” I said.
“Deal!” He put his arm around me and kissed my forehead.
We stayed for that one song, that song that changed our lives.
When it ended, we moved through the crowd and went back to the parking lot. Nathan had volunteered to drive me back to Maine to surprise my stepsister Jessica on her birthday. He’d said he had a few friends he wanted to visit anyway, so it was no big deal. I felt bad for making him drive me all the way to Maine, but he said he didn’t mind and I could pay him back by giving him a ride another time. He was such a good friend. Would have given me the shirt off his back.
“Friends don’t owe friends. You do a favor, they do one back and eventually you forget and you just end up doing nice things for each other. That’s how it should work anyway.” When it came to advice, Nathan always had some, and it was always good, even if I didn’t understand it at the time, or thought he was crazy. In the end, he was always right.
We spent the trip back home searching every station on the radio for new music. Up and down the dial, AM and FM. It was amazing what you could find when you went outside your comfort zone, something I’d always been afraid of. Nathan had held my hand and pulled me into a world I didn’t know existed. A world of passion and music and love. He was just so happy that being with him made me happy, too.
“Call me if you need anything, Jossy, and I’ll be here,” he said when he dropped me off. I’d told him about my family issues, and he’d told me he had some of his own. “So I’ll see you on Sunday?”
“Unless I go crazy before then,” I said, rolling my eyes. From the driveway I could already hear my stepdad yelling at one or another of my siblings and then there was a crash.
“Just call me if you need to.” He gave me a hug and I didn’t want to get out of the car.
Barely a half hour later, I’d already had a fight with my mother and had escaped the house. Luckily, one of my stepbrothers had gotten a letter from the school principal about cutting class, so I’d seized my chance. I felt bad for doing it, but I figured Nathan wasn’t that far away and could come get me.
“Hey, Jossy, what’s up?”
“Hey, Nathan. Can you come get me? I hate to ask, but I can’t stay here.”
“Of course. I just have to take care of something and then I’ll be right there, okay?”
I wiped my eyes and looked back at the house. I didn’t know if I could handle that. Things had been bad lately, and I was pretty sure Mom was on the verge of another divorce.
“Hurry.”
“I’m on my way, Jossy.” He hung up and that was the last thing he said to me.
* * *
I got up a few hours later and put on some music, but I had to turn it off because it seemed like every song was trying to either remind me of Dusty or remind me of Nathan, so I shut it off and put a movie on my computer. Something with a lot of explosions and crappy dialogue that wouldn’t make me cry or think or anything like that. But even those movies have some sappy moments, and I found myself crying for a stupid robot.
“Knock, knock.”
“It’s open,” I said, wiping my eyes and shutting my computer. I would not let anyone know that I cried watching a movie about robots from space.
Taylor poked her head in with a tentative smile on her face.
“I thought you might want something to eat. Or drink. Or company.” I didn’t want any of the above, but it was sweet of her to ask, so I sat up and patted the end of my bed.
“I’ve been where you are, Jos.” No, she hadn’t, but I kept my mouth shut. The reason Taylor had been messed up was because of something that happened to her. Not something that she had any control over. I was messed up because I deserved it. I deserved the torment the universe was visiting on me. I deserved to drown in it.
She said sweet things, and I listened and tried to look like I was listening and absorbing and that she was being helpful.
“So you can’t let the bad things that happen to you stop you from seeing the good things.” It was cute and all well and good for her. I was happy that she was happy and had a good life. I’d never get that.
This was the most depressing pity party ever, which was probably the point of a pity party.
“Renee is convinced he tried to hurt you, but she’s suspicious of everyone and everything. I also know that if I’ve learned anything about you, it’s that if a guy tried to hurt you, he would never survive, and you wouldn’t defend him. So, what I think is that he was trying to tell you something that you didn’t want to hear. Am I getting warm?”
Yes.
“No.”
“Uh-huh. So the question is, what was he trying to tell you and why didn’t you want to hear it?”
Okay, I was really sick of people having theories about me. If I was better at lying, I’d come up with a completely reasonable explanation that everyone would believe. Or I should have just done what I’d considered a few times and run away without looking back. But of course, that plan had a flaw in the form of my sister Renee. If there was anyone who would search the ends of the earth for me and then drag me back from the edge of it, it would be Renee.
“I’m not going to force it out of you. It will happen when you’re ready. Hell, I spent years keeping my secret just as fiercely as you’re keeping yours. So I get it.” She got up and patted my shoulder.
“Things have a way of working themselves out, whether you make the effort or not.” With that she shut the door quietly and left me alone again.
Chapter 22
“You look like shit,” Hannah said when I showed up to Pam’s class on Wednesday. Renee had insisted that I take off Tuesday as well, but I thought it was so she could keep an eye on me.
I sure as hell wasn’t suicidal, but that didn’t seem to matter, no matter how many times I told her. My razor and all the knives in the kitchen and even the aspirin vanished mysteriously, and I suspected her and at least one other member of the house, but I pretended not to notice.
I’d emailed Brett that I couldn’t come for my first day of work because I was sick, and Hannah helped me out by laying it on thick with him as well, so he just said he’d see me next Tuesday.
“Thanks. You’re the first person who’s told me that.”
She pulled a Ziploc bag out of her backpack and held it out to me. “I figured all that candy shouldn’t go to waste.”
“No, thanks,” I said, swallowing a roll of nausea. Candy had never made me sick before, and it was a damn shame, but I couldn’t look at that bag without thinking about Dusty. He had ruined my enjoyment of candy. Honestly, that kind of pissed me off, which made me grab the bag from her and shove a handful into my mouth. No one, not even Dusty, was going to take that away
from me.
“That’s my girl,” she said, giving me a huge smile. “And you don’t look that bad.”
“I appreciate that.”
Wednesday was hard to get through. Mostly because I was so distracted with thinking about the past and Dusty and things I’d struggled for so long to repress and put away. People had to repeat themselves and I was totally off in Pam’s class and the look that she gave me wasn’t pretty. It was worse on Thursday and by lunch on Friday I was so ready for the weekend so I could just hole up in my room and not have to fake it anymore.
“Dude, if you want to come over, my roommate is gone for the weekend.” Hannah had been the missing half of my brain, which was exactly what I needed. “We could do a Buffy marathon and just camp out in my room and order food whenever we needed it. Or we could just live on that bucket of candy. I mean, we are college students. It’s kind of expected.”
“That sounds awesome, but I don’t think Renee is letting me out of her sight. But you could bring all of those things to Yellowfield, and we could camp out in the man cave. I’m sure we can rope some of the girls into keeping the guys away. Actually, the guys have been kind of avoiding me, now that I think of it.” Maybe they thought that I hated all men now, and them by association.
“Good. Then we can do just girl time. Who needs ’em?”
“You’re preaching to the choir.” Not that I’d ever been really boy crazy, but I definitely could do without seeing one of them for the foreseeable future.
My birthday was also fast approaching. I hadn’t forgotten about it, really, but it wasn’t at the top of my priority list. Besides, nineteen wasn’t that great of an age anyway. Not like eighteen or twenty-one. No one had mentioned it much at the house, either, apart from that one time when the girls went out shopping. I still hadn’t found where they’d stashed the results of that trip. Probably in the attic, which I wouldn’t go near if someone paid me. I’d found a mutant spider the size of my hand once when I was a kid and had been hiding in one, and as a consequence I avoided them.