Page 8 of Reckless At Raleigh High
My father stands in the doorway, dressed in a formal black button-down shirt and heavily pressed suit pants. The thin black tie knotted around his throat shirt looks like it’s trying to strangle him. He’s never exactly been tan, but his cheeks usually hold a little more color than they do right now. At his feet, Nipper sits, his black coat scruffy and wiry, his dark eyes sad. He whines softly as he gets up and limps across my room, giving my foot a little lick with his raspy pink tongue. Like me, he’s recovering from his ordeal with Jake, but he will probably bear the scars of his injuries for the rest of his life.
“I sang Sweet Home Alabama all the way up the stairs to let you know I was coming. You were in your own little world,” Dad says.
Jeez. Poor guy. He could have been blowing into a tuba and banging a drum as he approached my room and I probably wouldn’t have heard him. The world’s been slipping away a lot recently. “I don’t think it’s right, you two heading over there on your own. I think I should come with you,” he says, propping himself up against the door jamb. He looks like he dressed accordingly this morning, just in case.
I huff down my nose, trying to smile and failing miserably. Reflected in the mirror, my face looks comically contorted. If this is the best I can do at forging a simple smile, then it’s a good job I never wanted to pursue a career in acting.
“Stay here, Dad. Get some work done. I feel bad that you haven’t been able to make any progress on the book in, well, weeks now.”
“Book? What book? Fuck the book.” He laughs quietly. “This is big, Sil. You’re so grown up, way too grown up, but this is bigger than you. It’s definitely bigger than Alex. Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe having me there will help.”
My eyes prick, burning the way they’ve been burning for the past week, every time I think about the knock on the door that echoed through Alex’s apartment. I’m barely holding onto the strands of my sanity right now. I’ve unwittingly found myself participating in an unwinnable game of tug-of-war, and every second I have to fight to keep my hands wrapped around the rope, to keep pulling, to drag myself back over an imaginary line in the sand, where I might be able to think and breathe and exist without feeling like I have a knife plunged into the fragile meat of my heart.
Sometimes minutes, even hours will pass in a day, and the pain will dim. I won’t forget. Ican’tforget. But, for brief snatches of time, my exhausted nerves become numb, anesthetized and I trick myself into thinking I can handle this. That I might finally have my shit together. And then someone will say something about Alex, or Ben, or offer me help, and the rope will tear through my hands, drawing blood, dragging me off my feet and pulling me into the chaos again.
And Alex…god, Ben wasn’t even my brother. It goes without saying that Alex is a train wreck. I know it’s stupid, he’d never do it, but I get scared at night, when I’m alone and he’s sent me away, that I’m going to wake up to a text message telling me that he’s fucking killed himself.
Dad doesn’t mean any harm—he’s only offering to come with us because he loves me more than life itself, and he cares about Alex, too—but his kindness has inadvertently taken me out at the knees. I close my eyes, blowing out a steady breath, pleading with myself.
Don’t.
Don’t do it.
Don’t you fucking dare, Silver Parisi.
You arenotgoing to fucking cry.
I’ve had to reapply my make-up twice already; if I start crying again now, I’m still going to be bloodshot and sniffling when I arrive to pick Alex up, and I can’t. I can’t fucking do that to him. He’s been strong for me so many times before. I need to be strong for him now.
Absently, I collect the black headband that’s clipped over the top of my mirror, running my fingers over the cluster of small black silk flowers that adorn it. My throat throbs as I look up, finding my own eyes in the reflection. I don’t look at Dad. If I do, I’m definitely going to lose my shit. “Alex didn’t even want me to go. I think…” God, damn it. This is so hard already. How the hell am I going to get through today? How am I ever going to be able to look my boyfriend in the eye again without bursting into tears?
Not too long ago, he said something that stuck with me.“I can’t bear for anything to happen to you. I can’t see you hurt and not feel it. I can’t see you suffer and not have something wither and die inside me. I can’t see you wounded and not feel like I’m fucking failing you.”The emotion in his voice had startled me. I could see that he really meant what he was saying, that he was suffering because I was suffering, but I thought it was a gesture, some token of affection. An attempt on his part to try and shoulder some of the misery that was crushing me. I understand now, though. I wasn’t entirely wrong; I want to take on the crippling burden that’s grinding Alex into the dirt, but this feeling inside me is more than that. It’sworse. I feel like I’m dying. I feel like Iamfailing him, because nothing I can do or say will ever temper this pain. Whatever measure a soul is weighed in, I feel like mine is seeping away, piece by piece, ounce by ounce, whisper by whisper. Every second that Alessandro Moretti has to live with the knowledge that his little brother is dead, I feel like I will die from the hurt of it.
From the moment I met him, Alex has been the light that has lifted the shadows. He’s been the strength that’s held me up. He’s been a sheer force of nature, incomprehensible in his complexity, who has astonished and amazed me at every turn. When his mouth crooks into that lopsided, suggestive smirk, I fall in love with him all over again, and I can’t bear the thought that perhaps he’ll never be able to smile again.
If Max died…
Christ. No. No, no, no. I can’t entertain the thought, not even for a second. There’s no room left inside me for any more hurt, theoretical or otherwise. I’m already brimming over, too full and swollen with grief to house one drop more.
Steeling myself, I place the band of black silk flowers onto my head, quickly arranging my hair around it. I look so fucking normal. Even with the bruises, I still look like me. How is that even possible, when I feel like I’ve morphed into someone completely not myself? “I appreciate it, Dad. I really do,” I say stiffly. “But Alex is… he’s…”
What is he, exactly? Traumatized? Mourning? I can’t tell. I’ve been searching for all of the usual signs of grief a normal person might exhibit when they lose someone close to them, but it’s been hard to pin-point signs of anything with Alex. He seems empty. Null. Hollowed out. When he looks at me, he doesn’t see me. He stares through me, into some dark, forbidden void. He was sucked into that void a week ago, a place where I can’t follow after him, and he hasn’t been able to find his way back out ever of it since. I’m beginning to think, beginning to worry, that he might notwantto surface from the inky black depths of it.
“Okay. You know him best. If it has to be just the two of you, then it has to be just the two of you. But...”
I turn around and face my dad. “But you’re worried about me? You’re scared that this will be the final thing that sends me spiraling into a nervous breakdown?”
He huffs out a laugh on an exhale, looking down at his feet. “Nah. You’re stronger than the rest of us combined. A wrecking ball couldn’t put a dent in you, kid.”
He’s playing. I know this, because I know him well, and I also know that heisworried about me. “All you need to do is call, Silver,” he says. “You know I’ll come. You know I’ll be there if either of you change your minds.”
My chest pinches tightly, not with pain this time, but with love. To look at my father, you wouldn’t peg him as the knight-in-shining-armor type. His glasses are always just a fraction lopsided, the lenses perpetually smudged by fingerprints. His hair typically looks a little wild, his waves refusing to lay flat and be tamed. The beard he’s been sporting of late isn’t the well-manicured hipster kind that he believes it to be, nor is it the beard of a woodcutter or some sort of cabin-dwelling lumberjack. It’s the kind of beard a writer grows when he’s been crouched over a laptop keyboard, hammering away, living off caffeine and bagels for six months, trading in every spare second of the day in return for a handful of precious words.
That violent, hard spark inherent in many other men doesn’t exist within him. It isn’t in his nature to lose his temper or throw his fists, which is why it’s all the more impressive when he leaps to the defense of those he loves without a second thought to what it might cost him, or how much it might hurt. I know what he was planning with Alex the night Jacob Weaving came to the house and took me. We haven’t spoken about it, but the truth has lain heavily between us all the same. He went with Alex to hurt the bastard who hurtme. He went to draw blood…and he went there carrying a gun.
Cameron Parisi, the architect.
Cameron Parisi, the novelist.
