Bad Things(123)

That was the last message I left before the waiting began.

I waited.

And waited.

Five more days passed, and I let the black moods take me again, but it wasn’t because I’d given up. It was only that I couldn’t bear how much I missed her, as I bided my time.

I thought that waiting was the hardest thing I’d ever been through in my life, but life was about to prove me very wrong.





CHAPTER FORTY





TRISTAN

I doubted anyone had ever had their worst nightmare come to life and not doubted that it was real. And so my first reaction to the news was denial. This had to be a trick. It had to be some sick prank. Jared couldn’t be gone. He was my baby brother. It was my job to protect him. It wasn’t possible that something like this could have happened to him on my watch…

My mother was sobbing endlessly, but the noise was always somewhere in the background, as though my brain was muting it, to soften the pain.

I didn’t cry. I just sat, blank-faced and quiet, telling myself over and over again that this wasn’t really happening.

A stinging slap to the face was what finally took me painfully out of my own head.

I blinked at my mother, who stood, furious and crying, in front of me.

“This is your fault!” she screamed at me. “It was your job to look after him, and look what’s happened! You shouldn’t have encouraged him to act so wild, you bastard!”

Her words hurt, each one inflicting a deeper wound, and some even opening old ones up wider.

I did the only thing I knew how to do under attack. I went on the offensive. “Me?” I asked her quietly, a lifetime’s worth of contempt in the short word. “Me? You were supposed to be our mother! You fed us pills like candy, you were drinking hard liquor and smoking pot with us by the time we were twelve! And you blame me for this? You blame me for the fact that he was a drug addict, when you’re the one that got him hooked!”

She collapsed to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, and I instantly regretted every word I’d said, even though it had all been the truth, if a hard truth to stomach.

I tried to comfort her, but she would have none of it, and I gave up quickly, going into a numb sort of stupor.

This isn’t real.

This can’t be happening. Not to Jared. He was the sweetest kid, always. Things like this didn’t happen to kids that sweet. Bad things were supposed to happen to bad people, and Jared had always just been good.

He didn’t fight like me. He wouldn’t have hurt another person to save his own life. He didn’t sleep around. He’d been waiting for the right girl to come along, for f*ck’s sake. Every shortcoming I had, he had been above, and I’d always taken a deep kind of pride in that.

People were talking in the background, though I couldn’t have named them. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything that was going on, so I only caught bits and pieces of what they were saying, little snippets here and there, and none of it made any sense to me.

Jared had died of a heart attack. A heart attack? A fit twenty-one year old didn’t just have a heart attack. Did he? But of course that wasn’t all of the story. Even in full on disconnect mode, I knew that. Drugs were the story. The only question was what, and how he’d miscalculated so far that he’d killed himself. Killed himself? No. No. No. That was wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I was in my mom’s house, though I didn’t even remember driving there. I remembered getting the phone call from Cory, and then I’d just been here, my mother’s hysterical cries, her shrill accusations, just background noise.

I’d known lots of siblings that didn’t get along. Dean had a little brother, and all that they seemed to do was rip into each other. Even mellow Cory and his sister hardly spoke.

That had never, never been the case with Jared and me. We had always been best friends. Even when we didn’t agree on something, we respected each other, always, and respect went a long way. I didn’t know how to accept the idea of his loss. I didn’t know how to get past the denial, and face the absolute horror, the utter agony of it.

I only realized that Frankie was there when she knelt in front of me, her face tear-streaked and full of sympathy. She and Jared had been tight, and it alarmed me that she was so worried for me, because it made me realize that she was so right to be worried. I didn’t have a clue how to handle this.

“You think it could be true?” I asked her, my own voice startling me with how it broke on the words. “You think Dean is pulling some shitty prank on us?”