sickly white, especially against Holiday’s healthy glow and brown tone.
My sister looks a lot like her mother, at least in the pictures I’ve seen of Holiday’s mother when she was younger. She was a black woman with dancing eyes and a smile that could light up the darkest night. Holiday’s skin is lighter than her mother’s, but other than that, she’s a spitting image.
Jeremy eases my sister away from Dominic, away from the lights, away from anything good in the world. I can still see them in the shadows, and I consider re-breaking his nose.
“I thought you said she broke up with him.”
“She did,” Axle says. “Six months ago. But then he came crawling back two months ago claiming he’s changed. She took him back last week, and I told her there were rules. I’m going to need you to remember the rules. If she breaks them, then we’ll have to stand firm.”
A twenty-six-year old roofer, attending night school to be an EMT, and me, a seventeen-year-old juvenile delinquent, are now raising a just-turned sixteen-year-old. That’s got to be the picture of dysfunction. “Is one of those rules he can’t be within a hundred feet of her? A restraining order?”
“She swears he’s changed.”
Changed. That’s what I’m supposed to be. In the forest, the therapist talked forgiveness. Does it mean I haven’t changed because I don’t forgive the guy who made my sister cry?
“Did he change?”
Axle’s lips flatten, and he tosses a stick into the flames. Within seconds it’s engulfed and will soon be ashes. Yeah. That answer is a kick in the gut.
“I say too much, I push her away and into his arms,” Axle says.
I’m the living proof of this. I got into it with Holiday over this jerk before I was arrested, and the entire situation exploded in my face.
“I keep quiet, it’s like I’m the one auctioning off her soul. No one handed me a playbook on raising a teenager when Holiday’s grandmother signed custody over to me. Holiday didn’t have rules before. In my house, she does. The rest of it I’m playing by ear.”
I glance at my older brother out of the corner of my eye, waiting for him to explain that’s how he felt about me before I was arrested. Except, I wasn’t falling into the wrong person’s arms. I was the asshole parents hated.
“But you’re back,” Axle continues, “and you can help keep an eye on her. Moving her in full-time means I can finally set some boundaries. Rules. At least limit her time with him.”
“Think she’ll listen?” I ask. “To the rules?”
“She may not listen when it comes to Jeremy, but she listens to everything else.”
Translation—Holiday’s not me. “Are you laying down rules for me?”
Axle snorts. “Do you need them?”
Probably, but I only lift my fingers as a response.
“How about you don’t screw up again.”
“Got it.” At least I hope I do.
“What’s up, Axle. Drix.” A friend of mine from when I used to play gigs at local clubs offers Axle his hand and me a nod. The two of them exchange how are you’s and fine’s. I alternate between watching the flames of the fire licking up and glancing at them as they talk.
My older brother is now my court-appointed guardian. I did too many stupid things while living with Mom, and Dad’s not reliable. Axle is nine years older than me, has a decent job and inherited all the recessive responsible genes neither Mom nor Dad possessed.
Axle and I favor Dad. Dirty blond hair, dark eyes and we both used to be hard-core metal boys. I guess we still are when it comes to music, but not so much with style anymore. He has the tats up and down his arms, and earrings in his ears. Earrings and tats were never my thing, and I used to wear my hair to my shoulders where Axle has always kept his shaved close to the scalp.
First thing that happened when I entered juvenile detention was a shaved head. While mine’s not shaved anymore, it is cut close on the sides, has some length on top and naturally sticks up like I styled it on purpose. As Holiday told me when I walked in, I got the good boy cut with the bad boy stride.
Our friend leaves with a fist bump to Axle and a pat on the back to me. Way to go, bro. You survived time on the inside and then time on the outside in a forest.
“It’s weird not hearing you jump into a conversation,” Axle says.
It’s weird not being in the thick of things. Not being the one telling the story, sharing the joke, or the one in the crowd laughing the loudest. I used to be the guy who drank to get drunk, threw a punch, then threw too many punches, and then dealt with the guilt in the morning.
Thanks to one year of group therapy, I’m different now. Seven months of that therapy was while I was living behind bars, then the other three months of therapy was in the wilderness. Three months of hiking, three months of paddling along forgotten rivers, three months of climbing up and down mountains, three months of being too damned exhausted to remember who I had been before they handed me a backpack that weighed fifty pounds and too damned exhausted to even contemplate if that was a bad or good thing.
As much as I hated parts of who I had become after I went to live with Mom at fifteen, there were parts of me I liked. Don’t mind so much losing the bad, but there’s an uncomfortable shifting inside me at the thought that I also lost the good.
“How does this play out?” Axle asks. “How do I make this better for you? Easier?”
Axle isn’t talking about the party; he’s talking about living here with him and Holiday. He’s talking about how I readjust to parts of my old life and adjust into the new life the plea bargain has created. He’s talking about the thing we never mention aloud after the night I was arrested.
That we both think someone we know and love is the one who really committed the crime.
We both think it was Holiday working with Dominic or Dominic on his own, but neither of them could have survived being behind bars. I’m tough. I could handle the fallout, and all that mattered to me was that my family believed I was innocent. They did, but the police didn’t, and they had a crap load of evidence that pointed in my direction. This is where Axle would say he’s thankful for plea bargains.
“It’ll be good to have you playing again,” Axle continues, desperate to find the easier. “No one can play the drums like you.”
The drums. For months, I’ve dreamed about playing the drums. Being away from my family and the drums was the equivalent of someone chopping off my arms. Part of the reason I didn’t want this party was because I wanted to come home, go straight to the garage, sit in silence on my stool behind my set, then play. Feel the beat in my blood, the rhythm in my heart, the music filling an empty soul. Just me, my drums and the comfort in knowing that at least one good thing about me didn’t change.
But the thought of playing the drums also causes my stomach to dip. If I play again, do I become the same asshole that I was before?
“When is the press conference?” I ask.
