Page 68 of Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit
But first, I needed to know what I was saving him from.
“Matt,” I said, my voice full of warning. “Don’t make me get mean.”
He smirked at that, at least partially calling my bluff, and shook his head. “I don’t think you have it in you, Lila, but I don’t want to push you. I’ve seen the way you look at him. Yes, it’s about Missouri. Yes, it’s about what happened to him there. And he’d kill me if he knew I was about to tell you what I’m about to tell you.”
“I won’t tell him if you don’t. Now talk.”
And he did. He started with how he, Rivers, Noah, and Hudson knew each other. They’d all been in the same orphanage as kids, though each of them had landed there in a different way. Matt’s parents were killed in a car crash, and he hadn’t had any other family to take him. Hudson’s mother had also died. Noah had been taken away from his mother, who was a drug addict.
Rivers’ mother had taken him to the orphanage and turned him over. Deserted him with only the clothes he was wearing and pair of shoes that were three sizes too small for him. He was dirty and underfed and had burns on his arms that made it into his permanent records as signs of abuse.
Matt and Rivers had been younger than Noah and Hudson, who had taken the boys under their wings and sought to protect them. But the kids had been cycled through foster families throughout their time in the orphanage, and those foster families hadn’t always been good. Rivers had been in some ofthe worst, according to Matt, and had always come back to the orphanage with haunted eyes and hollowed-out cheeks.
Eventually he’d started setting fires to guarantee that he didn’t have to stay at those homes very long.
“What did they do to him?” I whispered, horrified.
Matt gave me a long, searching look that said he wasn’t going to tell me, even if he knew. “Those aren’t the sorts of things we talked about,” he said quietly. “It didn’t happen to all the boys. Some of us had easier paths. I never got into a foster family that did that, and when I was ten, I was adopted by a family that loved me and treated me right. Rivers, Noah, and Hudson, though...”
“They didn’t have an easy path,” I guessed. “And they...”
He cast a look at Noah, who was standing against the wall and scowling like someone had just insulted him. “They’re carrying a lot of that with them still.”
Right.
I guessed a person probably would carry that baggage.
I tried to understand what he was saying—starting with the idea of a mother actually turning her child over to strangers—but it didn’t make sense to me. It was like he was speaking Greek. My parents had been so loving, so supportive of everything we did. They’d made sure I had whatever I wanted—within reason—and that I was always safe and well-fed. I’d never doubted that they loved me or wanted the best for me.
I couldn’t fathom not having that.
Even worse was the thought of doubting that the people who were supposed to take care of me loved me enough to do their jobs.
But Rivers...
God, he’d been deserted. His mom had left him there, and according to Matt he’d been old enough to remember it happening. Then he’d been passed from home to home, beingmistreated in ways so horrible Matt wouldn’t even tell me what they were. The people whose job it had been to care for him had proven to him that they didn’t.
Again and again.
No wonder he had so much trouble accepting love when it presented itself to him. He’d been trained to believe he didn’t deserve it. People had been telling him since he was three that he didn’t deserve the good things in life.
My heart cracked clean down the center at the thought, and I wished with everything in me that I could fly back in time to that little boy. Find him and hold him to me and tell him that everything was going to be okay and that I’d love him so much that it didn’t matter what anyone else did.
Which was insane, obviously. I was smart, but I had never even thought about building a time machine.
Still.
Maybe I could still prove to him that he deserved better than what he was giving himself.
I turned without saying anything else to Matt and ran from the room, my brain darting ahead of me to my room and already making plans. I didn’t know where Anna was, but I was guessing she’d be at the party for much of the night, and that was perfect. It would mean I had the room to myself and plenty of peace and quiet.
Hopefully I’d also have plenty of luck.
Because I had some research to do, and given Rivers’ current mood, I didn’t think I had a whole lot of time to do it.
36
RIVERS
