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Chapter 27

“Now you choose to talk to me?” I asked him, closing the door. I stood there, staring at the back of his head. He brought a beer bottle up to his lips and tipped it back, swigging it. I recall seeing the six pack in the fridge when Lukas was here. I guess he didn’t bother to do something with it.

“Well, I am under the influence, aren’t I?” he told me. Even drunk, he’s a sarcastic little idiot. But I like this sarcastic little idiot.

“What do you want?” I inquired in an annoyed tone. The idiot had me worried sick that he’d done something rash all because he was too drunk to answer a phone.

“Can you help me upstairs to my room?” he requested in quieter voice.

“What?” I asked him in shock.

“I keep stumbling and falling. I almost whacked my head on the table about ten minutes ago,” he murmured.

Sighing loudly, I walked over to him, grabbing his extended hand and throwing it around my shoulders. I ignored his intoxicating smell and the way he leaned on me as if I was the only thing keeping him up, as if I was his pillar. Literally, I am, because if I were to take one step forward, he would probably fall down the steps thanks to his impaired motor skills.

“You’re frustrating,” I muttered once we reached the second floor. I continued to bring him to his room, planning to drop him on his bed and leave the house immediately.

“I know,” he responded once I opened the door to his bedroom. Practically dragging him in, I dropped him on his bed and he smiled a tightlipped smile. “Thanks,” he muttered.

“You smell like alcohol,” I told him as I leaned over and rested my hands on my knees. That was a taxing adventure.

“You smell like coconuts,” he told me.

Blushing, I pointed to the door. “I’m going to go. You should get some rest. You’re going to regret drinking all of that in the morning.”

“I didn’t drink a lot. I had a shot or two of whisky, and three or four beers,” he told me. “I just can’t keep myself up.”

“Well, no offense, but you look like you need some sleep,” I replied as I started walking towards the door.

“Can I ask you a question?” he hastily asked before I could escape the awkward environment.

Slowly, I stopped walking and stood still, turning around nervously. “Uh, sure.”

“Were you serious? You know, about what you said?” he questioned.

About what I said- by that, does he mean my confession? “Yes.” He laughed quietly and I stared at him. “What?” I asked, prepared to be shot down. Crossing my arms, I glared at him. He sat on the bed with his legs dangling off, his elbows rested on his knees. His left hand limply held the beer bottle that he occasionally drank from.

“You can’t like me,” he muttered as he shook his head. Placing the beer bottle on the table beside his bed, he wiped his hands on his sweatpants. “You don’t know me.”

“I know what you allow me to know,” I responded. “And I like what I know.”

He shook his head silently and I just stared at him, taking in his bleak expression along with his glossy eyes. “Are you okay, Noah?” I asked as I stared at him. He laid down, putting his hands behind his head.

“Does it matter?” he responded. His eyes were trained on the ceiling.

“Of course it does, why wouldn’t it?” I asked him, taking a cautious step forward.

“Because…I’m Noah,” he told me.

“What?” I said as I stepped closer. The only light in the room was coming from a lamp on his bedside table.

“I don’t have feelings, and being okay is a feeling. And since I don’t have those, I can’t be okay,” he answered.

“What? Of course you have feelings,” I frowned, staring at him. I walked to the other side of the bed, sitting down lightly. Turning fully so I could face him, I sat with my legs crossed.

He shook his head, not bothered by me sitting on his bed. Instead, he placed his hands on his face, muffling his voice. “I don’t. I’m just the coldhearted guy with a popular sister.”

“I don’t think you’re coldhearted,” I told him honestly, clasping my hands together.

He let out a quiet laugh, but it wasn’t filled with humor. I couldn’t place a name to the emotion, but it wasn’t happiness. It sent a shiver down my spine and I never wanted to hear him laugh like that again. “Why not? I’m a jerk. I know that. I know you think that.”

I quickly shook my head, even though his eyes were covered by his hands. “I don’t think that. I thought that, but I don’t think that anymore.”

“I have feelings,” he told me. “I do.”

“I know,” I replied as he uncovered his eyes.

They slowly drifted from the ceiling towards me and I blinked a few times. His eyes locked with mine. He was just staring, his blue eyes drilling holes into mine. As much as I wanted to look away, I didn’t. “I feel a lot of things,” he practically whispered.

I nodded. “I know.”

He shook his head as he looked away from me. “You don’t know.”

“I miss my mom,” his voice broke. “I miss her so much.”

I didn’t want to ask what happened to her. That’d be taking advantage of him. And if he remembers this, he’ll remember me pushing into his personal life when he obviously doesn’t want me to know. I was voiceless as I stared at him.

“Do you want to know why I was mad at you after you brought me to that party and I got drunk?” he asked. I nodded my head slowly and he continued: “Because you stopped me. You stopped me from saying anything. Do you know how bad it’s felt keeping it all in? Anyone who knew found out because they were told by my father- Floyd, his family, Marissa, Ethel, and my therapist. I haven’t told anyone about it. They all knew before I even arrived. And none of them can relate. Floyd has both his parents and so does Marissa. No one can even try to talk to me because they always start with ‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through.’”

“My mom was the only person there for me. She would tell me that I was the only reason she was alive, that I was the most important thing in her world,” he whispered, looking me straight in the eyes.

He moved over slightly, allowing me to have more space. He still didn’t break eye contact; even when I looked away in order to move closer to him. “As an eleven year old, I didn’t know what that meant. Even at thirteen, I just thought that she loved me a lot. She did, but…it wasn’t enough to keep her around.”

I feel as if I should tell him to stop talking, that he’s drunk and is going to regret telling me in the morning, but the curiosity got the best of me. It’s been burning a hole in my stomach for the entirety of my time knowing Noah. “She still took those pills. She still killed herself and I did nothing to stop it. I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

My heart wrenched at the expression at his face. It took me a moment to comprehend what he had said. His mother had swallowed pills to kill herself. “She was sad. No, sad is an understatement. She had depression, really bad depression. Ever since I could remember, she had depression. She quit taking her antidepressants. My aunt said that it was because she was always tired, but I didn’t believe her. My father left us and she didn’t want me to see her dosed up on pills all the time, even though I was just two years old at the time. I wouldn't have remembered.”

“She never started taking her pills again, not even after I could take care of myself. I didn’t bother saying anything because she seemed okay to me. The way she was, was the way she always was. I didn’t see any drastic changes, probably because I was too young to see her before she became depressed, to see how she was when she was truly happy. And, I mean, she smiled sometimes but now that I think about it, they were never real. I figured that she was happy enough to take me to the park on Friday afternoons, and to watch television with me after I finished my homework,” he explained, pressing his hands against his eyes to stop the tears from falling.

“She always told me,” his voice cut off for a moment as he let out a few shaky breaths. He breathed deeply, causing his chest to rise and fall slowly. He let out a final sigh before continuing. “She always told me that I would be something someday. She told me that she might not be there to see it but that I would be something. And I was so stupid; it was a sign. What she was saying was a sign! It was obvious but I couldn’t comprehend it. God, I was so stupid!”

I wanted to say something, to say that he wasn’t stupid and that he couldn’t have possibly known- he was just a kid, but my throat was closed up as I blinked away tears. “And I found her. I found her pale and unconscious on the floor of the bathroom. Her hair was still wet from her shower and she was in her pajamas, even though it was barely five in the afternoon. I called the ambulance and she died on the way to the hospital.”

“She died in an ambulance,” he shook his head as his voice broke and he turned on his side, facing away from me. His shoulders shook and I knew that he was crying. I laid down beside him and wrapped my arms around him, even though he was facing away from me. I hugged his back. It was the only thing I could think of doing. It was the only sense of comfort that I could provide him.

“It’s okay,” I whispered quietly, pressing my forehead to his back. He shook his head.

“It’s not okay. It will never be okay. She died because I was too stupid to say something, to ask someone for help.” His voice was coated with pain and anger, but most of all, sadness.

“You were a kid. You didn’t know what was going on,” I told him, tightening my grip around his torso.

“I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t look into it,” he replied. “I should have done something.”

“It will be okay,” I told him.

“Don’t lie to me,” he told me. “Everyone else lies to me, but not you, okay? Don’t you lie to me. Don’t. It won’t be okay because it’s never okay.”

“Noah,” I began, unsure of what to say. What am I supposed to say? What can I possibly say during a time like this? Thanks to my social ineptness, I can’t even comfort him.

He sighed, turning on his side. He pulled my arm from under him and I twisted our fingers together, not bothering to care what he’d think when he was sober the following morning. His eyes were glazed over as he looked at me. “And Ethel was the worst of them all.”

I was silent as my lips curled into my mouth. “I went to my father’s house a month after my mother died. I knew Marissa was alive but she didn’t know that I was. Ethel did, though. She told me to get over my mother’s death, that my mother wasn’t anything special. She was just another woman who ditched her priorities but in a more…permanent way. She said that my mother was selfish and left me to fend for myself at such a young age.”

My lips parted as I exhaled loudly. Ethel said that? “I just miss her,” he concluded.

“What was she like?” I asked him, trying to divert the subject.

He looked at me and his eyes connected with mine once again. The blue looked as if it was melting; his eyes were glassy. They were red from tears that just stopped falling, and his cheeks were tinged pink from his constant wiping at them. “You really want to know?”

I nodded slowly as I stared at him. “Yes.”

“She was a middle school math teacher,” he sighed.

“Did she like her job?” I asked him, my eyebrows furrowed.

He nodded. “She loved children. I was teased a lot because my mother was a teacher in my school, but I didn’t care. She taught me math at home and introduced me to the world of reading and writing. And she took pictures all of the time; she loved photography.”

“Did she teach you how to cook?” I asked him and he nodded, a sad smile on his face.

“She cooked a lot, every day. She made me breakfast and dinner and snacks. She loved to bake. I knew how to bake by the time I was seven,” he told me with a light laugh.

I was on my side, as was he, and his left hand held up his head, as did my right. Our other hands tangled together tightly. I drew circles on his palm with my thumb. “What did she look like?”

Disentangling our hands, he dug his shaky fingers into his pocket, retrieving a wallet. He pulled a picture from one of the slots and handed it to me. I stared at it, my eyebrows furrowed. A small baby, with long, dark brown hair, large blue eyes, and lengthy eyelashes, was snuggled up in a lady’s arms. The lady had a white, straight smile. Her eyes were the same shade as the baby’s, and she had dark brown hair that was wavy and pulled over one of her shoulders.

“This is you, right?” I asked him, running my fingers along the picture. He nodded, his eyes watching my expression as I examined the picture once again. “She was so pretty.”

He nodded. “I know.”

I handed him the picture after another minute of examination and he put it back into his wallet, returning it to the safety of his pocket. He stared at the sheets of his bed for a moment before I drew his attention back to the conversation, trying to keep him from drowning in his sad thoughts. And I was genuinely curious about his mother. “What else did she like?”

“Country music, it was terrible,” he told me, the sad smile still etched onto his face. “I would come home from school and country music would be blasting in the house. It was embarrassing when I brought friends over.”

“My dad played Green Day,” I chuckled, offering a smile myself at the memory.

“At least he liked good music,” Noah replied. We stared at each other before I sighed quietly.

“I miss my dad, too,” I murmured.

Slowly dropping his left arm, he laid on his back, closing his eyes. “I guess we’ll see them one day, won’t we?”

“Yeah, I hope so,” I responded.

“If we do, I’ll introduce you to my mom. I’m sure she’ll love you,” he told me, glancing at me.

“I’ll introduce you to my dad. I know he’ll like you,” I said to Noah. I was too scared to tell Noah that I already told my father about him, several times in fact. Sometimes through prayers, other times through visits to the cemetery. I told him that Noah was a good person and that mom likes him; but that he’s constantly misjudged and he keeps himself guarded, so he can come off as mean.

I stared at the ceiling, listening to his almost inaudible breathing, as it was the only thing left in the room to focus on. “And Kennedy?” he piped, breaking the silence.

“Hm?” I replied.

“I’ll understand if you’re not here when I wake up. I get it if you change your mind about liking me. You probably don’t want to have a crush on a guy with a lot of baggage, so just know that I understand,” he told me and I stared at the side of his head. When I tried to talk, he cut me off. “Just go to sleep. You look like you need it.”