Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Jack's hands shook from the cold as he pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He offered Kathy one out of habit and she shook her head, scrunching up her nose in that cute way she had.

"I'd thought I'd forgotten about it, you know – about that night," she said softly, pulling her legs up, wrapping her arms around them and resting her chin on her knees.

"I don't think I ever remembered it," he admitted. "I was kind of messed up."

"You don't say." She laughed softly but she was staring at the ground, her mouth drawn into a frown. She looked small and alone and Jack inched a little closer to her on the couch. She leaned to the right, letting her shoulder rest against his. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

Jack shook his head. "Kathy, you have nothing to be sorry about. I fucked up. I fucked up big time."

"I should have stood up to her." Kathy hooked her finger in her shoe lace, twisting it around her finger.

"Huh?"

"My mother. I should have stayed your friend. Maybe …"

"Maybe I wouldn't have worn that shirt to prom," he said lightly, hoping to make her smile. It didn't work and apparently there was no way to avoid the big fat elephant in the room that had plopped its ass down into the middle their night. "Maybe I wouldn't have fallen apart in high school?"

She shrugged and nodded, hugging her legs tighter and shivering slightly. Cursing himself for not thinking of it sooner, he shrugged off his leather jacket, draping it over her shoulders. The cold air seeped through the thin army surplus jacket and t-shirt he had on underneath, but the cold sharpened his focus and he figured he'd need all the focus he could get to make it through the conversation they were about to have.

He studied his cigarette for a minute, watching as the embers slowly ate away at white paper, inching closer to the filter, leaving ashes in their place. He flicked them onto the sidewalk, watching aimlessly as they drifted onto the snow, melting into the white until they disappeared completely. He'd felt like that in high school – shit, he'd felt like that his whole life – like someone had struck a match and lit a slow fire that ate away at him until there was nothing left but the ashes and the ghosts of a broken childhood.

"Kathy, I was falling apart long before I met you." He hated how his voice trembled slightly, betraying his need to sound nonchalant about the whole thing. Maybe she didn't notice, but one thing he'd figured out that night was that no girl had ever known him as well as Kathy did.

She looked over at him and he could see the pain in her eyes. "No, you were just a –"

"Kid?"

He remembered when Kathy first came into his life. He'd been with Evelyn for a while, felt safe and protected. Felt like he had a chance at a normal life for the first time in a long time. He wore it like a costume - the façade of the typical kid with the usual set of problems and worries and hopes and dreams. He pretended that passing math and finding enough change in the couch to buy a pack of cigarettes were the biggest hurdles he had to overcome in his life. He was so good at pretending and fooling others that he began to believe it himself and he started to forget.

But at some point, it was like someone had jerked the steering wheel out of his hands and crashed him headlong into a wall and everything he'd thought he'd put behind him came spilling out. He sucked at handling it – the feelings and memories too real, too raw. So he did the only thing he could think of, the only thing that made sense at the time – numbed his mind until he didn't give a damn what his past, present or future were. All that mattered was that floaty, hazy nowhere that he escaped to with alarming frequency when he hit senior year.