Page 101 of Not Made to Last

“Ollie, Ollie, Ollie,” Dom mumbles.

I glance over at Olivia standing out on her front porch now, arms crossed. Tank top. Sleep shorts. Hair a complete mess. Even when she’s not trying, she looks good enough to eat. I say, “She’s waiting for you to get in the house, bro.”

“I couldn’t pronounce my V’s,” Dom stammers, half drunk, half sleeping. “I would say Olibya or Libby. Then I just started calling her Ollie… Ollie, Ollie, Ollie. We’re fighting, you know? She hates me because I’m a fuckup… and I could’ve ruined everything.”

Oscar’s sigh fills the entire cab of the car. “We need to at least get him in the house.”

I push open my door. “I know.”

Dominic barely makes it up the porch steps with Oscar and me on either side of him, so when Liv looks at the staircase, then me, I shake my head. “No chance.”

Oscar’s phone rings, and he shuffles his hold on Dominic to answer it. There’s only one person who would call him at this hour, and my assumption’s proven correct when I hear his mom’s shrill scream through the phone. “Mamá!” Oscar yells, followed by groveling in Spanish. Once he hangs up, he practically pushes Dom into my arms. “I gotta go!” He leaves on foot, and swear, I didn’t think it was possible for someone under the influence to flee as fast as he does.

And then it’s just me and Olivia, standing in her entryway. Well, me, Olivia, and her drunk brother. “You think he can make it to my bed?”

I shrug. “We can try.”

Olivia replaces Oscar, and we guide him to her room and up the step to her bed. “Lie down and sleep it off,” Liv tells him, clearly done with his shit. Dom turns to her, then proceeds to empty his stomach all down her front and the floorboards by her feet.

“Fuck, Dom!”

Dom flops onto the bed, face-first, feet off the edge, mumbling, “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie.”

I step back, holding my breath, and Olivia looks down at her puke-stained clothes. “What the fuck did you eat?”

Dom snores.

Olivia faces me. “Can you stay while I shower? Just make sure he doesn’t choke on his own vomit?”

Last thing I want to do, but… “Sure.”

After getting Dom onto his side and wiping the puke from his chin, cleaning as much as she can off herself and the floorboards, then opening the windows, Olivia finds a bucket and hands it to me. “Just in case.” Then she goes into her bathroom, closes the door, and a moment later, the water pipes clank when the shower turns on.

I pull up her desk chair and sit beside the bed, bucket in hand, just in case. If you’d told me a year ago, I’d be sitting at Dominic’s bedside at five in the morning, somewhat taking care of him, I’d have told you to kick rocks.

Dom groans, shifting onto his back, his eyes opening just the slightest. And then he… helaughs.

“These fucking posters,” he mumbles, and I glance up at the ceiling—space, forests, coastlines—and I’m reminded of what she said all those weeks ago.

“I keep them there as a reminder that the world is vast, filled with so many singular objects, and we, as individual humans, are just one of those things. We’re so small. All of us. So insignificant.”

“She put them up after she found out her mom left us. Or maybe it was when she found out her ex-boyfriend was seeing her best friend. The motherfucker didn’t even break up with her.”

“The fuck?”

“Right?” Dom rolls his eyes. “He used to come here on weekends just to screw her. I guess… eventually, he figured he could get the same thing without traveling over two hours for it. He just stopped coming ’round, stopped answering her calls.” Dom peers over at me. “Makes you want to punch something, right?”

I don’t respond, just keep my lips pressed tight while I imagine a younger Olivia having to deal with that on top of everything else.

“She tried to play it off,” he says, his eyelids heavy. He’ll be out soon, but until then, he keeps talking. “She says she wasn’t in a good place back then… that she had nothing else to offer him.”

My initial thoughts on the guy remain the same.I hate him. But… the story sounds familiar because she felt the same way with me. The difference is that I wasn’t enough of an asshole to take advantage of her because of it.

“Anyway…” Dom says, shifting to his side as his eyes lose the fight to stay open. “That’s why she put the posters up… She wanted a daily reminder that she was nothing more than a single object amongst millions of other things. Things so small and insignificant…. She felt like if she gave herself more importance than that, then she’d be forced to believe that these things happen for a reason. To her. And then she’ll take things personally.” He sighs, ending his ramble with, “How fucked up is that?”

Again, I don’t respond—too busy replaying his words in my mind.

“You got a sister, Garrett?”

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