It’s midday when my door opens again. There’s no voice. The footsteps are quiet until they stop by the bed. For a second I think it’s Casey, that he’s back and I’m not alone, but then I get this feeling in my chest, and I know it’s not him. I pull the blanket away, and Stray’s there, standing beside me. His face is black and blue, and he has a few bandages on it. His blue eyes are dull, but a small smile curls his lips. Not a happy smile, but one that says he’s trying.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says, but he’s not late. He didn’t have to come, but he’s here. “They had to take me to the hospital for some tests. The foster parents wanted to bring me home, but I needed to come back here.”
I start, “Rosie—”
“I know.” And then Stray’s climbing into bed with me, as close as he can get, the way he did the other night. It feels like a lifetime ago, so much having happened since then. I think we’re both different guys from the last two who lay here together.
We keep the blanket over our heads, because it’s kind of our thing. It’s our own little upside-down world.
“How do we survive without Rosie?” he asks, but I know he doesn’t expect an answer.
“I loved her.”
“I did too. She was my best friend. From the second I met her, she was my best friend.” I want to tell him it’s my fault. That I gave her the metal, but then he’ll feel like it’s his fault. If it’s not his fault, why is it mine…?
“I don’t know where Casey is,” I tell him, but part of me knows…. Casey is gone too. Not dead like Rosie, but gone like Bethany. Even if he could have handled Stray getting attacked the way he did, he would never be able to stay here without Rosie.
“It’s just us,” Stray whispers. We’re on the same boat, lost in the same ocean, just the two of us. There’s no shore in sight as we drift together.
Stray starts to cry.
I do too.
Our friends are gone.
I make pictures on his body with the tip of my finger. At one point, he winces when I touch his ribs, under his shirt. They must have hurt him there, so many more bruises and cuts and broken pieces of Stray to add to the others.
“They hurt you,” I say as I touch his face. It’s stupid, but it’s the only thing I can think of.
“Yeah.”
“For me.”
“No….” He shakes his head. “For me.”
“Did it make you feel better?” The thought corrodes my heart, dirties it, and breaks it.
“No. I didn’t want it before either. I didn’t feel that need. I haven’t since the night you found me in the bathroom, but it’s always there, hiding and waiting. I knew it would hurt on the inside more if they did it to you than if they did it to me. Hurt on the inside is always worse than the outside.”
That’s wrong and all kinds of screwed up. It shouldn’t be that way. Not for him or anyone else. That’s not how I want him to live. It’s not how I want to live. “You have to get better… we have to get better.” We all thought Rosie was better than the rest of us. She didn’t need to be here. She was wild and untamable, but there was nothing wrong with her. We thought she was okay, but maybe she was more broken than all of us combined. More lost and alone and afraid, only we didn’t take the time to see it. We let Rosie show us what she wanted, and didn’t look deeper. Because of that, we left her alone.
Stray rolls onto his right side, and I’m on my left. He puts his arm over me, and I do the same to him. We get as close as we can on our little lifeboat, lost in the sea. None of us can do this alone.
I tell him about my last conversation with Rosie—what she said and how she felt. I leave out the kiss. That was ours; no one else needs to know about it. Maybe Rosie needed it at that moment. I wish I could have given her everything she needed.
“We let her down,” he says.
And we did, but… “We can change it. We can never stop loving her. We can never stop telling the world about her.” The world needs to know about Rosie. It would be a tragedy if they didn’t.
He smiles, his fingers digging into my side. “She’d like that.”
“She would,” I say. But that’s not all either. In some ways, Stray is Rosie, and so am I. This whole time I’ve been here, all I’ve wanted to do is pretend everything is okay and forget anything happened. I wanted to hide, keep everything inside. Everyone knew I was doing it, but I didn’t care. No one knew Rosie was doing it, and it destroyed her.
She was hiding in plain sight, and none of us saw it.
Sometimes the ones who smile the widest might be the people who need us the most.
I can’t become her. I can’t lose myself, and I can’t lose Stray either. It’s like Dr. Harrison said, I’ve been using a Band-Aid and telling myself it’s strong enough. It’s not. Rosie used a Band-Aid, and it didn’t stop her from bleeding out.
“We have to fight to get better. We have to work hard, be who we’re supposed to be, for her.” For Bethany and Casey too.
“For us,” Stray says, and then we both close our eyes, and hold each other. We’re still in our boat, but now we’re approaching the shore, together, when I see them: Rosie, Casey, and Bethany, dancing and waiting for us.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
SLEEP DOESN’T last very long, maybe an hour at most, when the door to my room opens. “Hunter, we need to talk.” It’s Mrs. Spencer, so I pull my head out from under the blanket. There’s no way to hide that Stray’s here with me. I have to give her credit, because she doesn’t look surprised. Of course I’m sure it’s probably in my record that I’m gay, even though it’s not something that’s ever been a problem for me.
Still, I’m pretty sure Stray and I aren’t supposed to be in bed together, clothed or not. This is what I wanted to avoid, so they wouldn’t try to separate us, but I’m not sure if I can hide it anymore.
And as much as I’ll miss it, I’m not sure if the sneaking into each other’s rooms at night is a good call either. If we’re going to do this, we have to be able to stand on our own.
Stray sits up. I don’t have to look at him to know he’s embarrassed. “I’ll go to my room.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Mrs. Spencer tells him. “I’ll be in to talk to you soon.”
As soon as Stray walks out, she says, “I wouldn’t let a girl into another boy’s bed, so we can’t allow Stray in yours. You understand that?”
I nod and then say, “I want my mom to come, her and Holly both. Please, tell her I need Holly.”
This time when she smiles at me, there’s something else there too… pride. “I think that’s a very responsible decision. I’ll go call her.”
“Wait,” I say, and she does. “Casey?”
“We’ll discuss it soon.”
It’s not until she leaves that I realize she said she came in here to talk to me, but didn’t. Maybe it was about Mom, and I beat her to the punch.
The rest of the day is heavy. I feel it in my bones and my head and my heart. A sadness hangs over us. In some ways I feel the way I always thought of when people said depression. Not angry, but sad.
I try to pull myself out of it but then think there’s a healthy kind of sadness too. One of the brightest lights in the world has gone out, Stray was beat up, and Casey is nowhere to be found. Other people are leaving as well. I’m guessing having someone commit suicide here doesn’t make some people want to keep their kids here.
I get it, but I’m staying. Even if Mom tried to drag me away, I wouldn’t be able to go.
For the first time, I really see that I need to be here. I want to be.
If I want to get better, I have to fight. I have to talk.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
IT’S THE next day before I’m sitting in a room with Mom and Holly. Not just them, but Dr. Harrison is here as well, and Mrs. Spencer, because I asked her to be.
Just like last time, Mom hugs me so tight, I can hardly breathe.
Holly seems too nervous to even look at me.
 
; My first instinct is to shut down, to turn off and walk away, but I can’t do that anymore. Not if I ever want to be okay. It’s so easy to say I’m going to get better and say I’m going to start doing something, but what matters are my actions. Last time I sat in this room and didn’t say how I feel; that’s who I’ll always be if I don’t do it now.
“Hunter, since you’re the one who asked for your family to come, would you like to start?” Dr. Harrison crosses her legs, but her hands are empty. There’s not a tablet or a notepad in front of her either. This is our moment, mine and Holly and Mom’s, and I’m going to grab it.
My leg starts bouncing, becoming jittery. It hasn’t done that in a couple weeks. It’s still hard to look at them, especially Holly, so I keep my eyes tilted down, watching my leg go crazy. “I just…,” I start, but don’t know where to go from there.
“Are you mad at me?” Holly’s soft voice is a loud screech in my ear, in my head, in my whole body, so sharp my heart nearly explodes.
“What? No.” For the first time since before, I look at her, really look at her, and see the sadness in her eyes. The worry, the fear, the shame. I always knew she was hurting, of course, but I didn’t know the fear was there—fear about how I see her.
“Is that why you didn’t want to come last time?”
Just like mine her leg bounces. “I thought… you never talk to me anymore. I thought you hated me. That you were mad at me, which is why you did all that stuff.” Her voice gets softer. “Like maybe you thought I was gross now.”
Everything inside me explodes, breaks, shatters, incinerates. This is what I let my little sister think… this whole time while I blamed myself, she thought I was blaming her. “No. Not at all… I….” Spit it out, Hunter. Do this. Grab this moment. “I felt like I didn’t protect you… like you should hate me… I hated me.”
Holly’s eyes are watering. Mom’s are too. Neither of them look embarrassed by their tears, they just let them free. “How could you know? I didn’t tell you….”
My body is swaying now, rocking back and forth, and I notice Holly does the same thing. “I got mad at you when you said stuff about him.” The words get trapped in my chest, in my throat, but they beat their way free, unwilling to stay inside anymore. “I felt like I took his side. I should have asked why. I should have listened. I should have stayed. You asked me to stay with you, and I didn’t.”
“I….” Holly sniffs, wipes her nose. “I didn’t tell you. It’s not your fault. I didn’t want you to blame me.”
Holly pushes her thin, light brown hair behind her ear, and I realize she’s not dealing as well as I thought. She needs to know it’s okay. She needs to know her big brother is okay. That it isn’t her fault. That she’s not gross or bad.
Mom’s told her, and I’m sure doctors have told her. Lawyers and family too… but not me. I was too busy blaming myself. Too busy dealing with how I felt.
Maybe I’ve been leaving her alone the way we did Rosie.
Fault. We all try to take the fault for so many things, even when it doesn’t belong to us. Maybe that’s what it means to love someone. Maybe it’s what it means to care. But there’s a line there somewhere, a place where we have to realize sometimes things are our fault… and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re someone’s fault, and other times, fault can’t be pinned on any one person, but rather a collection of unfortunate events. This whole time I’ve been worried about what I didn’t do for her before, that I left her alone. I didn’t think about what I could do for her now.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Holly. It was him… just him…. It’s not your fault. It’s his. Everything he did is on him. And my actions are on me. I’m here because I couldn’t deal with things, because I kept letting myself get angry over stuff I shouldn’t, not because I don’t love you. I’m lucky to have you for a little sister. You’re such a cool-ass, kid.” No one calls me on my language. It’s then that Rosie shows her face in my head again… what happened with her wasn’t my fault either. I loved her, even if we didn’t know all she dealt with. Sometimes, that’s just life.
Holly almost knocks the wind out of me when she runs into my arms. I hug her tighter than I’ve ever hugged my little sister before. Again, I tell her I’m sorry, and she says it’s not my fault. Still, I ask for her forgiveness, and she gives it. I tell her I love her, and she says she loves me too. She says she missed me and that she thinks I’m the best big brother in the whole wide world, and I tell her she’s the best sister.
We talk about the night I found her, my feelings and hers.
When we’re done we call Mom over, who hugs us both. We repeat most of the same things over to her, and her to us.
We’re not perfect. We still have a long way to go, but we’re finally on the right path. We’re finally starting to really understand our place in the world.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
THE LAST couple weeks at Better Days are nothing like the first couple. It’s crazy to me when I think of everything that happened and measure it with time. In weeks, I feel like I lived a life full. So many changes. So many things that hurt or felt good. So many discoveries. I think about how Stray said how long you know someone has nothing to do with anything, and it makes me wonder if time matters at all. Anything can happen in weeks, a day, an hour, a minute.
Sometimes I get sad, because it’s just Stray and me. Sometimes I feel Rosie kissing my forehead or slipping her arm through mine. There are days I think I hear Casey playing his clarinet or see Bethany drop her head on his shoulder.
But other days are better. I guess that’s the point of being here—better days are right around the corner, like the motto says. Even though Stray and I can’t sneak into each other’s rooms at night (they pay much more attention now) we spend most of our free time together. I color his hair, and draw memories of the people we’ve loved and lost on his skin.
We got a letter from Bethany… she heard about Rosie, and she’s devastated. She gave us her information so we can contact her, but she’s not sure her parents will let her see us. She also says she got a message from Casey. He never told us he knew how to get in touch with her. Casey told her to tell us good-bye. He couldn’t contact us, and said he couldn’t contact her again either. Not because he didn’t want to, he did, but it was all too much for him. He wanted us to know he loves us, and that he’s trying to get better.
Bethany is working toward the same thing.
Everything is harder now. It’s crazy how things can feel harder yet better at the same time. That’s kind of how this is, because I know that I’m really giving it my all this time. I want to heal, and even though I still get pissed some days, and I don’t always sleep well, I know I’m moving forward instead of standing still. I’m making Mom and Holly proud, Rosie, Bethany, and Casey proud.
Stray and I are both proud too.
Before I leave I decide to write my dad a letter. It’s not something I ever would have considered before, but somehow I know I need to do it to heal. There’s been no decision made about it. I’m not sure if I’m going to mail it or not. Maybe it’s for his eyes, maybe it’s for mine. Time will tell. Regardless, I needed to say how I feel—that I’m angry at him, that I hate him, that he hurt us—not just Holly but all of us. That I’m disappointed in him, but that I sometimes remember the good times as well. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to or how I feel about that, but I do.
I also tell him I’m scared of being him—that the fear is always in my mind, but that I will do everything to fight against it. To keep myself from hurting people even if it is in a different way than he hurt people.
On my last day here, we’re doing a good-bye for Rosie. They wanted to give us a little time to heal. It’s not something that’s for everyone at Better Days—there are already new people here who didn’t know her (I feel sorry for them) and some people who did are gone. Leaving here without saying good-bye to her isn’t something I would be able to do. When Stray and I told them, Mrs. Spence
r agreed.
There’s a small group of us who are participating. Mom and Holly are coming, and Stray’s foster parents as well. He still doesn’t believe they’re around to stay, but I do. I have to believe that.
It’s just him and me right now. We’re waiting for our parents to get here. When we get to the small lake on the property, I reach out and thread our fingers together.
“You have less than a week to go. We’ll see each other when you get out.”
It takes Stray a minute to reply. The longer the silence goes on, the more on edge I become. We’ve been through way too much together to let anything screw with us now.
“I asked if I could stay another month,” he finally says. “I’m not sure I’m ready to go—not after everything that happened.”
Maybe they should, but his words don’t come as a surprise to me. Well, that’s a lie. Stray wanting to stay isn’t a shock, but the fact that he would ask his foster parents is. That’s a big step for him. “That’s the first time you’ve asked them for anything, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d they say?”
“They said yes.”
This place isn’t cheap. They wouldn’t be putting out all this money on Stray if they didn’t really love him. “You’re not a stray anymore. You’ll see that soon.”
He stops, wrinkles his nose a little as he looks at me. “We don’t know that.”
“We do.” I shrug. “They love you… and even if you didn’t have them, you’d have me.”
Stray holds his free hand by his ear, pretending he can’t hear me. “What was that? Say it again. Did you say you love me?”
I roll my eyes at him. “Whatever.” But then, “You said before that you gave yourself that name so people would know they couldn’t hurt you, to tell them you know who you are. That can’t be fully true. You can’t want to be a stray.”