Hate (8 page)

Changing directions, I headed for the other side of the house.

I was starting to get worried so I took the steps up to the second floor two at a time and made a beeline straight for her room. My legs worked quickly and the sound of my pounding footsteps mirrored the frantic nature of my heartbeat.

“Gram!” I called out again, this time with a large note of desperation.

Sliding my way into her room, my eyes searched the space expecting the worst, but once again, came up completely empty.

“Where the hell is she?” I asked myself aloud.

Her hearing was lacking, but at the decibel I was calling for her, she should have been able to hear me.

Kicking my feet into the highest gear possible, I threw myself in reverse and launched my way back down the stairs. This time, I took so many at a time, that I couldn’t remember my feet actually touching any of them.

To an outsider, it probably would have looked more like a controlled fall down the stairs than any kind of planned descent. But to me, it was just necessary.

I ran back to the basement door, flung it open with absolutely no care for the neighboring wall, dinging and denting it with a loud bang, and made a similar controlled fall down fifteen more steps.

“Gram!” I screamed once more, the cry in my voice making my throat feel scratchy.

My eyes bounced from one space to another, stopping on each and every horizontal surface including the floors, both in front of and behind every single piece of furniture. But I worked quickly, wasting no time and moving efficiently from the bottom of the stairs to the one and only closed off part of the basement. My room.

With no preamble I knocked the closed door open and pulled up short at the scene before me.

Gram, tucked into the covers of my bed with my laptop resting on her legs over the covers, and my headphones muffing the entirety of her ears.

She had a bowl of salsa on the bed next to her, and there was a trail of crumbs leading from the bag of chips straight to her mouth.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shrieked, finally loud enough for her to hear past the sound barrier my headphones provided.

Pulling my headphones from her ears, she questioned, “What?”

“I said, what the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

Shaking her head like I was the one who’d lost their mind, and maybe I had, she responded, “What’s it look like, NeeNee? I’m watching my Soaps, just like I told you I did.”

I stared, stunned and unable to find the words.

NeeNee was what my family used to call me when I was younger. I thought I’d convinced them to leave it behind, but obviously not.

Finally, I managed to break some words through my stupor. “On my computer?”

“Yeah, your dang mother thinks she’s clever. Blocked all my soaps with that damn parental control garbage on the television. I guess she didn’t think her old bag of a mother was resourceful enough to navigate the cyberweb.”

“You mean the internet?”

“Um, that’s what I just said, NeeNee. Jesus, keep up. You’d think you were the one who was hard of hearing.”

“Please, for the love of all that’s holy, stop calling me NeeNee,” I pleaded.

Looking at her mess once more, I couldn’t hold my tongue. “And have you looked around yourself at all? How in the bajeebus are you this big of a slob?”

Glancing down around her, she surveyed the mess I was referring to.

And then shrugged.

“I’m going to have to wash all of my bedding before I can sleep tonight!”

“You really need to loosen the screws on that stick up your ass, girl. Sit down, eat some salsa. Tell your Gram what really has you in this mood.”

“You have me in this mood!” I argued, trying as hard as I could to stop the unwanted flow of emotion. “I was worried about you when I got here because you didn’t answer me for, like, forever!”

I spoke in half truths. She had worried me. But it was everything else going on that led me to the very worst conclusion when I couldn’t find her.

Tears broke free at the corners of my eyes regardless of my efforts to stop them. I wiped furiously with shaking hands to rid my cheeks of the evidence, but not before Gram noticed.

“Come here,” she whispered more gently, moving the salsa and chips to my nightstand and making room for me to cuddle under the crook of her arm. Her eyes were soft, and I didn’t hesitate to crawl into the space she created.

“Everything is so messed up,” I murmured once I was settled. Gram’s arms wrapped around me tighter, embracing me much in the way Blane had Franny.

The comparison in my mind only made me cry harder.

“It seems like it won’t end, like nothing will ever be the same. No one will ever be happy again.”

Settling her delicate palm onto my head just above my ear, Gram took a deep breath. The sound of her still playing Soap Opera rumbled softly from my headphones in the background.

“Well, baby. Nothing ever will be the same. Some things have happened that we can’t change. And these events affect a
change in people
whether we want them to or not. But you have to remember that just because things can’t ever be the same,
does not
mean that they can’t ever be
good
again.”

“I don’t know how to make any of it good again, Gram. Tell me how to make it good again.”

“Oh, my sweet girl.
You
can’t. Only time can.”

I clawed manically at the tracks of wet trailing down my face, eager to erase their existence and quiet my screaming heart in equal measure.

“Shh,” Gram comforted. “Let them flow, Whitney. Their presence may feel heavy, but the release those tears create will lighten your load.”

Forcing my hands away, I followed her direction. I cried, and I did so without inhibition.

And I did so for quite some time.

Seconds turned into minutes, and those minutes filled up an hour. Bless the woman, she sat still through it all.

And much as Gram had suggested, it started to feel good. Cathartic.

Necessary.

When the sobs subsided and normal oxygen flow once again passed through my lungs, Gram spoke again.

“No bottle is big enough for human emotion. Love, hate, anger, happiness, and deep melancholy. Each one exists for a reason. Emotion is
real
. It’s meant to be released. It’s meant to be
lived
.”

Her words rang soundly in the silence.

“I love him, Gram.”

“I know.”

“I love her too.”

“I know, Whitney.”

Pulling myself from the warmth of her body, I replaced it by holding her sincere eyes with my own and soaking up their compassion.

“And I love you.”

A smile just barely ghosted her lips.

“If you only knew.”

I knew. And I loved all of them more.

BY THE END OF OCTOBER, Gram had become my only real friend. The degree to which I was pathetic was only rivaled by my sorrow.

But I’d been living by Gram’s suggestion. I had to believe that, if given enough time, all wounds would start to heal. They’d be scabby, and surely have an annoying itch as a reminder, but the pain would subside. I hoped.

Franny was back in school, which I supposed was progress of some sort, but it was clear she was just existing. And only barely at that.

She was emaciated from lack of eating, and the dark bags under her eyes looked like the heaviest part of her body.

Blane did his best to take care of her, putting her favorite foods on her plate and making sure she made it safely from class to class.

But he had enough of his own problems.

His mom had finally decided to go forward with the memorial for his dad (tomorrow), but they had yet to find a body and questioned if they ever would. All they had to cling to were the numerous first hand accounts from people there that day. Several of those survivors reached out to them, intent to thank the family of the man who saved them.

According to their descriptions, something I’d seen on the news rather than hearing it directly from Blane, his dad had been below the actual impact zone. But instead of going down, exiting the building like everyone else, he went up. To look for survivors. To get as many people out as he could. And when he couldn’t help any more people above him, he went floor to floor to make sure all the people below got out.

The last person who had seen him and lived to tell about it said they had made the journey from the sixty-seventh floor, and exited the building just a few short minutes before the building collapsed. He said William was on his way back up, talking to a fireman about a person he’d found trapped but alive on the seventy-eighth floor in the sky lobby.

It was presumed that he was still in the building when it collapsed.

He was a hero.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t gone.

And it was hard to watch Blane deal with it. Or maybe, to say that I was watching him
not
deal with it would be more appropriate.

To the naked eye, he carried on. He gave smirks or smiles to those who knew him, and he always mounted a normal assault for his time with Franny.

I kept trying to give him openings to let it go, but he wouldn’t let me in.

Don’t get me wrong. He was himself. Kind and helpful. He even engaged in civil small talk from time to time. But any attempt to go deeper, to act as a support system, was met with direct resistance. His technique was almost always avoidance.

An appointment to get to.

Something to do for his mom.

A need to meet Franny at the door to her next class.

Something. Always something.

If I was honest, I’d have to say I was even a little disappointed in Franny. I knew she was in her head, and I knew the depression she was feeling was a real thing. A living, breathing disease that twisted her thoughts and held her tight in the clutches of melancholy.

But by now, she knew the depth of Blane’s heartbreak. She
knew
that on top of dealing with what she was dealing with, he was dealing with
more
.

And yet, she didn’t fight to offer him somewhere to ease his load. She just added to it.

Again, I knew the stakes. And I knew the reasons for how she was feeling. But no matter how justified she was, I, as the friend to both, couldn’t find it in me to completely silence the building resentment. She was human. She was allowed to do the “wrong thing”. And so was I.

I tried to keep perspective, though. To be understanding of the power of depression and the loss of a child, especially by your own making. To remind myself that it wasn’t something she could control. She was already drowning in guilt, struggling to keep even her mouth above water, and the last thing I needed to do was shove her below the surface.

Costumes smattered the cafeteria, as today was the day the school allowed students to dress up for Halloween. I hadn’t participated, though I normally had a strong fondness for this holiday, and the lone occupant of my lunch table hadn’t either.

“Where’s Franny?” I asked softly when I got to the table, Blane sitting opposite of me.

“She had a meeting with one of her teachers,” he said while looking down at the table between us. The label wrapper of his Fierce Grape gatorade had obviously been picked within an inch of its life. “She told me I didn’t need to hang around.” His eyes glanced up at mine. “I protested, but she was pretty adamant.”

He didn’t sound happy, but I thought it might be a good thing that she do some things for herself. I didn’t say that, though. He wouldn’t have agreed.

“Oh, okay.” I cleared my throat, anxious about the opportunity to talk to him one on one. “How are
you
?” I whispered cautiously, fiddling with the chips from my lunch bag.

“I can’t do this now, Whit,” he ground out, the tension in his jaw sharpening it even further.

Snapping the chip in my hand, I lifted my eyes and fought to capture his. “You know what? That’s fine. But I’m not going away. You’re not letting any of it out, and it’s already starting to swallow you whole. You’re not the Blane I know. And I’m gonna ride you just as hard as you ride Franny until you come the fuck back.”

I stood up and grabbed the remaining scraps of my lunch, wadded them up, tossed them in the nearby trash, and swept my books off of the table top swiftly.

My timing was bad, the day before his dad’s memorial, but I had a feeling it would never be a good time to start a confrontation with my best friend. Or the shell of where my best friend used to be.

“Tell Franny I’ll see her in Calculus,” I bit out as I moved away from the table. And once I left, I didn’t look back.

I knew my anger didn’t solve anything, and I wasn’t even sure it was warranted. But I was tired. Tired of living every day like a ghost. Tired of feeling lonely and vulnerable, and like nothing would ever be right again. But mostly, I was tired of watching my friends live that way.

I was there, willing to take on some of their burden, and
they just wouldn’t give it to me.

There was only so long I could take feeling completely useless and afraid without reaching some kind of breaking point.

And I just broke.