It might've been coincidence that brought our mothers together.
Or maybe it was something like witchcraft and a whole lot more irony than was of the norm.
My mother came home that day, gushing on about a woman that she'd met at her yoga class. Just the thought of my mother doing yoga with a bunch of other middle aged women made me uncomfortable. She'd come home and told me that the woman's name was Melissa Monroe, and I'd just about stomped away from her when she told me that she was inviting her for dinner.
So when the dark haired woman walked into our house just after five in the afternoon, a bright smile on her face and a cloth basket of bread rolls in her hand, I decided that she couldn't be too bad. Maybe this time, my mother wouldn't bring up the topic of my future. Or me at all, preferably.
She always seemed to enjoy bringing me up in conversation each time she had dinner with another human being. I understood that she cared, but just about each time she opened her mouth, I longed to grab all twenty of the cigarettes from one of the packs hidden in my room and light each one, letting their smoke drift up around me and swallow me whole.
Fifteen minutes after – yes, I was watching the clock and counting the minutes as they passed by – Krissy walked in, and the relation clicked inside of my head and I just about had an epiphany. This was West's family, his mother and his sister, sitting at my long kitchen table with plates of my mother's spaghetti in front of them.
But West was absent from the family, and that made me wonder where he was. I'd just learned his last name, and I almost wanted to leave the table to find him and ask all the questions that I could think of. His mother seemed nice enough, although there was an air about her that made me wonder what had happened to her.
At one point in the conversation, my mother mentioned my father and his business trips, and I could have sworn that her eyes turned sad for a second, and then the light seemed to bounce off of them and then the look was gone before I could process it.
It only took fifteen more minutes for my mother to piss me off enough to leave the kitchen table and inevitably leave the house altogether.
“My daughter's been struggling with a bit of a problem lately, but she's been getting better. I'm so proud of her and her efforts.” She said, reaching a hand over to me.
Before I could rationalize why I was mad or why her sentence had set me off, I shoved my chair back and walked from the table, grabbing a clear lighter from the basket beside the candles where my mother kept it for emergencies.
“North! Where are you going?” She called after me, but I continued to walk away from her, ignoring each question she shot my way, her words increasing in volume and her tone becoming angrier with each syllable that left her mouth.
I grabbed my pack of cigarettes from my room and then I left the house, slamming the door behind me. I would've felt bad for leaving like that, leaving West's family – of all people, really – with my mother and her irritating words, but I couldn't find it in me to care enough about that.
I knew my anger was irrational, but I couldn't help it. My anger was bubbling in my stomach and working its way up my throat, causing me to wonder if I'd let out a scream that would explain all of my feelings if I just opened my mouth.
I pulled out one of the cigarettes from my pack, lighting the tip and pressing it between my lips. For something so ready to kill and take another life, it sure left me feeling more calm than anything else did. Not even the booze I often consumed could make me feel quite like the nicotine in the little white cigarette. Nothing I could think of had ever compared to the way the smoke wrapped around my face after escaping my mouth, the smoky tendrils seeming to linger just long enough to drag the anger and stress from my body.
Even if only for a short while.
I walked for a bit then, my sneakers occasionally making faint sounds when I came into contact with a stone or some other kind of object that had been there before me. It occurred to me that even the smallest things – even pebbles – had some sort of purpose.
If something as seemingly insignificant as a small rock could be used to fill the tiny cracks in a fissure, then why couldn't I find the purpose that I had in life?
My thoughts only continued to consume my conscious mind and I hadn't realized that I'd ended up at the park until I was really there, my feet standing in the grass and my eyes scanning the surroundings for anyone else.
Sometimes, I just enjoyed the feelings that solitude left me with.
I made my way over to the nearest swing, taking a seat on the dingy seat. The park had been around since I'd been a kid, so it had plenty of years on it. When I pushed my body forward to get the swing moving, kicking up a bit of the dirt beneath my feet along the way, the rusted chains creaked and I felt my mind wandering back to the days when I'd been merely a kid.
I could remember my father standing behind me, his large hands pushing against my back as I laughed and told him that I needed to go faster, to go higher. Even now, I knew I needed to go higher, somehow I needed to go above and beyond the goals I'd once had because they just didn't seem to matter anymore.
Sometimes I just felt so melancholy, like a blanket of despair had been wrapped around me, bringing all the bad and shitty feelings that I suppressed to to the surface and forcing them to life. And each time it happened, I had something to drink beside me.
But this time, I was only left with my thoughts and a pocket full of regret. Each time I drank and came home, I always hid myself in my room. At first, my mother had chalked it up to teenage hormones but then she'd started smelling it on my clothes and my breath, and she'd seen the way that my body was bending beneath the weight of the things I was piling on top of it to keep myself from thinking; because god, when I did, nothing seemed worse.
“You look like you're trying to discover the cure for cancer.” West's voice came from beside me, his masculine voice enough to drag me from within myself.
“I'm pretty sure there's already a cure for that. You think they want to stop that flow of income? Nope, the government's fucked up.”
West chuckled, taking a seat on one of the creaky swings beside me. “Each time you talk I find myself unable to guess what you're going to say.”
I wasn't sure how to respond to that. “I'm beginning to believe that you're stalking me.”
West raised his eyebrows. “I'm pretty sure you were the one who came up to me at Kevin's.”
“You're the one who was watching over my shoulder at the library,” I pointed out, “Oh, and you're suddenly at the same park that I am. Without an invitation.”
“Hm, I'm sorry your majesty, I didn't know you owned the public park.” He said, adding emphasis on the fact that it was a public park.
“There's plenty of things you don't know about me.”
“I'd like to know them,” He said almost immediately, and I could have sworn my breath caught in my throat for a moment. I'd never had someone tell me they wanted to know me, especially not with such a serious tone, and I wasn't sure how to respond yet again.
The fact that he could render me speechless with a simple sentence was seriously becoming ridiculous.
So I changed the subject.
“So, Monroe's your last name, huh?”
He looked over at me, and then nodded, a few pieces of his dark hair falling into his eyes when he did so. He lifted a hand to brush them away, and I had to tear my eyes away from his gaze.
“Your mother and sister were at my house. Apparently our mothers have become the best of friends.” I told him drily.
“You didn't stay long.” He said, but it came out sounding more like an observation than a question.
“You didn't even show up.”
“You've got me there.”
I decided not to press him and we lapsed into a silence again. It surprised me each time that we did because it wasn't uncomfortable or awkward like it should've been. It was almost too easy being around this boy, and I found myself wondering why my guard often slipped around him, as if even my defenses knew he wasn't a threat.
I noticed him move from the corner of my eye, and when I turned to look at him, he was pulling a silver flask from his jacket's pocket. He always seemed to be wearing the ragged looking jacket, the elbows and shoulders looking as though they would pull apart at any moment. As if wearing something that looked so beat up wasn't enough to raise questions, I also wondered why or even how he could still wear it, even in the warm summer sun.
He lifted the flask to his lips and took a sip. After screwing the cap back on, he unscrewed it half way off and then held it out to me.
I debated on it for a little bit, the thought of recovery and words of encouragement ringing in my ears, before I gave in and took it from his hand. I raised it to my lips, not expecting it to be as strong as it was. If I had been new at it, I would have spit it back in the flask, but I simply screwed the cap back on and focused on the slight burning in my throat.
“Thanks, West.”
He simply nodded in response, before tucking the flask back into his jacket's pocket and kicking his feet out to get his swing moving. He was still wearing the combat boots, I noted with interest. West looked like a boy with too many secrets and even more problems, but I'd come to discover that he just about told me anything I wanted to know.
“So how's your family take it?” I asked, looking over at him and enjoying the breeze in my hair. I realized, with a small smile, that West looked like an overgrown little kid on the swing. Instead of looking out of place, he seemed right at home among its aging metal bars.
“Take what?”
“Your addiction.” I told him, gesturing with my head toward the flask in his jacket.
“I don't have an addiction.”
He said it quickly, sort of like he almost didn't believe the words himself and was trying to convince not only me, but himself, too.
“Then why are you carrying around a flask?”
“It makes me feel safe. It's better knowing that it's there for when I really need it. I don't abuse it, North. It's a precaution.”
His reasoning made sense to me, but I still didn't believe him. I'd read in some brochure about addiction – my mother had found it in the doctor's office on one of those plastic racks where they kept an array of them for the overprotective parents like my mother – that denial was a sign of addiction and that it only prolonged the problem.
If admitting that he had a problem was the first step, then I was going to find a way to help him, even if I didn't really give a shit about myself and my road to recovery.