The Fire Between High & Lo (Elements #2)(9)

I laid as still as I could, hoping she’d stop calling me, but she didn’t. Pushing myself up from my mattress, I headed out of my bedroom, to find Ma sitting at the dining room table. Our apartment was tiny, but we didn’t have much to put inside of it anyway. A broken down sofa, a dirty coffee table with stains, and a dining room table with three different chairs.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“I need you to clean the windows from the outside, Logan,” Ma said, pouring herself a bowl of milk and placing five Cheerios inside of the cracked bowl. She said she was on a new diet, and didn’t want to get fat. There was no way that she weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and being five foot and nine inches tall, I thought she was almost skeletal.

She looked exhausted. Did she even sleep last night?

Her hair was a mess that morning, but no more a mess than her entire existence. Ma always looked broken down, and I couldn’t think of a time when she didn’t. She always painted her fingernails on Sunday morning, and always chipped it off by Sunday night, leaving little spots of color remaining on her nails throughout the week until the next Sunday morning when she repeated the task. Her clothes were always dirty, but she would spray Febreze on them at four in the morning, before ironing them. She believed that Febreze was a decent replacement for washing our clothes at the local laundr0mat.

I disagreed with her technique, and snuck her clothes out whenever I could, to wash them. Most people probably walked past spare change on the ground, but for me, it could’ve meant clean pants that week.

“It’s supposed to rain all day. I’ll clean them tomorrow,” I replied. I wouldn’t though. She’d forget soon enough. Plus, cleaning our third floor apartment windows without a balcony seemed a bit ridiculous. Especially during a rainstorm.

I opened the fridge door to stare at the bare shelves. It had been empty for days now.

My fingers stayed wrapped around the handle of the refrigerator. I opened and closed it, almost as if food would magically appear to fill my noisy stomach. Right then, like the wizard he was, the front door opened and my brother Kellan came in behind me, holding grocery bags in his hand, and shaking the rainwater from his jacket.

“Hungry?” he asked, nudging me in the arm. Maybe Ma was only eating Cheerios because that’s all we had.

Kellan was the only person I’d ever trusted—other than Alyssa. We looked almost like twins, except he was stronger, more handsome, and more stable. He had a classic buzz cut, designer clothes, and no bags under his eyes. The only bruises that ever showed up on his skin were from a tackle during a college football game—which didn’t happen that often.

He lucked out with a better life, simply because he had a better dad. His father was a surgeon. My dad was more of a street pharmacist who dealt drugs to the neighborhood kids, and to my mother.

DNA: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

“Geez,” he said, looking into the refrigerator. “You’ll need more stuff than what I bought.”

“How did you even know we needed food?” I questioned, helping him unload the bags.

“I called him,” Ma said, eating one of her Cheerios, slurping on the milk. “It’s not like you were gonna feed us.”

My hands formed fists, and I pounded them against my side. My nostrils flared, but I tried to contain my anger from her comment. I hated that Kellan had to step in and save us so often from ourselves. He deserved to be far, far away from this lifestyle. “I’ll pick up some more things and drop them off after my night class.”

“You live an hour away. You don’t have to drive back out here.”

He ignored me. “Any requests?” he asked.

“Food would be good,” I grumbled, along with my stomach.

He reached into his backpack and pulled out two brown paper bags. “Food.”

“You cooked for us, too?”

“Well, kind of.” He took the bags and dumped them on the countertops. Random food items, uncooked. “I know when you came to stay with me for a bit we watched a lot of that cooking show where they just give you random supplies and you have to make a meal. Alyssa told me you thought about becoming a chef.”

“Alyssa talks too much.”

“She’s crazy about you.”

I didn’t argue that.

“So,” he smirked, tossing a potato my way, “I have a bit of time before I go to work. Make something happen, chef!”

I did too. He and I sat eating my fancy grilled cheese with ham, three kinds of cheeses, and a garlic aioli sauce. On the side, I made homemade hash browns with a spicy, bacon flavored ketchup.

“How is it?” I asked, my eyes glued to Kellan. “Do you like it?” Without thought, I placed half of my sandwich in front of Ma. She shook her head.

“Diet,” she murmured, eating her last Cheerio.

“Dang, Logan,” Kellan sighed, somehow tuning out Ma’s comment. I wished I could do that. “This is amazing.”

I smirked, a spark of pride. “Really?”

“I bit into the sandwich and literally almost died from how good it was. If I believed in Heaven, it would’ve been solely due to that sandwich.”

My smile widened. “Right?! I kind of outdid myself.”

“Fucking brilliant.”

I shrugged my shoulders with that smug look on my face. “I’m kind of amazing.” I couldn’t thank Kellan enough—that was the most fun I’d had in a long time. Maybe someday I could go to college… Maybe Alyssa was right.