Stay Vertical (The Bare Bones MC #2)
Layla Wolfe
CHAPTER ONE
JUNE
I saw a thousand fresh new beginnings in Africa—and ten thousand and one violent endings.
There would be one more casualty soon—but not if I could help it. This one was within my power to prevent. This was America, and it was my mother who was about to die. If you can’t save your own mother, well, then, what’s the point of trying to help all those other faceless, nameless people?
Having completed my original two year contract with the Peace Corps in Benin, I had returned home to Arizona only to discover I really didn’t fit into the modern, fast, flashy world. Returned Peace Corps volunteers, so they say, will always long for the crazy, unpredictable, haphazard and downright violent world of their adoptive country. They say we become accustomed to the nomadic, wild danger of third world countries, that we sort of begin to thrive on the menace and risk, like some kind of “flight or fight” reaction.
I believe it. When I came back to Cottonwood after my first tour in West Africa, I was completely lost. I didn’t even bother staying with my mother Ingrid. We’d never been close. To be honest, she was pretty much a candidate for the next Mommy Dearest award. Because she suffered from some post-traumatic agoraphobia, she would never leave the house. Due to this, she never got a job. Well, children can’t get jobs. We had no food, no clothing, and Ingrid would scream the roof down if one of us three kids so much as flushed the toilet. The water bill, you know.
So I spent most of my formative years staying at the houses of supportive friends. I thanked my lucky stars for them every day. Children are incapable of assigning blame to their parents. They turn it on themselves, believing themselves responsible for all predicaments. How can an unformed psyche look from the outside in and form a realization that “hey, my mother pretty well sucks”? It’s in our nature to trust our parents, to rely on them to do what’s right, to depend on them for nurturing.
When that doesn’t happen, we think it’s all our fault, right? I’ve spent my entire life trying to fix people—to fix myself. Sometimes it actually works.
Ingrid never admitted she was agoraphobic. We probably didn’t even know the word for it back then. She would just say how being around people stressed her out, but this didn’t stop her from dealing crystal out of our suburban mid-century style Cottonwood home. It was the only possible occupation for someone who refused to leave her house.
So I stayed with friends who were better off than us—which is to say, everyone in Cottonwood—while my older sister Madison squeaked by, sleeping up in Coyote Buttes in the great outdoors, I guess. We weren’t terribly close. Nor was I close with my own twin Bobby, who just became like a dark, gothic character, hiding in his darkened bedroom. It must have been the height of mortification that we were too poor to afford internet. Bobby managed to steal a laptop somewhere, but we had no cable, so he couldn’t even play video games like any good juvenile delinquent. What can you do on a laptop with no Wi-Fi? Design spreadsheets?
In retrospect, we should have banded together. We could have helped each other out by—I don’t know, by stealing food for each other. Instead, we sort of turned against each other. The few times Madison and I were home at the same time, we’d just bump each other with our shoulders while passing in the hallway, and yell at each other to get out of the bathroom.
Because we both wore size ten shoes, once Madison must have stolen my ultra-cool hobnail boots that were as heavy as a mountain. Well, I found her wearing them and a knock-down ensued. That strong bitch wound up braining me time after time with a boot so hard I probably had the impression of the actual hobnails against my temple. Ingrid encouraged this sort of adolescent drama, yelling “Hit her harder!” from her seat on top of the dryer.
Of course I knew that most families weren’t like ours. My friends all had normal parents. My BFF Emma Flantz, her mom was even still a housekeeper. A housekeeper, in today’s day and age, can you imagine that? She was perfectly satisfied to go to the gym, drive her kids around, and do her charity work. In fact, from this lofty angle over a decade later, I can actually see where Emma’s mom might’ve inspired me to do well, too. “Those who can, do.”
I guess my friends were nerds too, not cooler-than-thou hipsters and delinquents like the friends of Madison and Bobby. I fell in with the science crowd at high school. We didn’t quite design yearbooks, but I was definitely a mathlete, winning both the Whitney and the Stanfield awards in my junior year. I didn’t only stay with Emma. I knew that would put a stress on her family’s finances, but I had plenty of other friends willing to shelter me. Their parents knew I was a good tutor, and hey, let’s face it, we were nerds. I had standing invitations among all the mathletes to stay at their houses and help their children out.
I felt sorry for Madison sometimes. She was a rough and tough chick who took pride in her steely exterior. She was also a slut, and I was envious of that, to tell the truth. I knew she was giving a pantload of blowjobs up there at her camping spot in Coyote Buttes. Word got around the school, but it didn’t tarnish her image. Instead, it elevated her in our dorkwad eyes. It even elevated my own status that my sister had allegedly swallowed ten guys’ swords all in a row one night while singing “Kumbaya” around her fire. Sure, she later straightened up to become an RN after running away to Flagstaff. But back then, she was the shining star of the pipe job in Cottonwood.