Chapter One

Summer

I was sitting cross legged on my bed, a cosmopolitan magazine opened on my things. My best friend Katie laid beside me on her stomach, chin propped on her laced fingers. Her white blonde locks fan around her, shiny and smooth. I always envy her for her gorgeous hair, which go so well with her laughing blue eyes and stunningly white smile. She is so beautiful that you could easily mistake her for some glamorous model or fabulous actress.

I smile at the thought, because that could not be further from her personality. Katie is a down home country girl, through and through. She is only happy when she is ankle deep in mud with one of her many animals. She does not dream of fame and fortune; her only dream is to become a vet, marry her long-time boyfriend Eric and live on a farm, raising a half dozen little rugrats.

Across the room, sitting on the window seat, is my other bestie Lena. Also blonde, also breathtakingly gorgeous. Where as Katie is tall and curvy, with a figure that could stop traffic, Lena is short and reed thin. She is the one who dreams of big things. Like getting out of our little town and making something of herself. Somewhere far away, where no one knows that her dad is in prison for a trump charge of running drugs or that her mother ran away with his best friend, leaving her kids with her sister, never to be heard from again.

So, Lena studies her ass off, making tops grade at school so that she can get a full ride scholarship to Harvard university where she will study law. She wants to be a damn good lawyer, beating out everyone in her class and earning a name for herself. Then she is going to help every person who is too poor to afford a good lawyer, so they are not charged with crimes they did not commit.

“Oh! Listen to this one! It is so cringe!” I make a face, feeling super embarrassed for the girl in the story.

“Oooh. I'm listening!” Lena declares, watching me patiently. 

“Okay, okay. Stacy. Twenty-three. From Portland.” I say.

Both girls nod in fascination. Lena 'oohs' as if Portland is the most exotic place that she had ever heard of. I smile and roll my eyes, loving her enthusiasm for any place that is not our small town in Alabama. I begin to read the entry out loud.

“Here it is. 'I was dating this older guy, late-twenties, with some important job in a corporation. We'd been going out for a few months when I met another guy at school. He was young and hot, ran around with my friends. One night at a party, we both get wasted and hook up. We keep casually hooking up for a few weeks, while I'm getting serious with my boyfriend, the suit.”

“Skank.” Lena mutters and I laugh. I forgot to mention that Lena's one vice is that she can sometimes be a little on the judgemental side and she has no problem speaking her mind. She tells things like it is. 

“ 'Anyways, my hookup asks me to go to a dinner with him that he's attending, but I turn him down without listening to the details. I have a date with my man, a business dinner where I am going to be meeting his boss, his co-workers and the new employees that will be working under my man on a new project. I dress nice and we go to the dinner. I schmooze with the best of them, playing the supportive girlfriend and kind of enjoying myself. Until we are seated at the table with his employees and across from me is my hook up, talking about how his girlfriend couldn't make it tonight. He looks right at me and his face lights up. He stands up, telling me that he's so excited I could make it. Everybody stops and stares while my boyfriend looks as if he might explode. I was SO embarrassed. I stayed through the dinner, but my boyfriend dumped me immediately afterwards. I kept hooking up with the other guy for a few months until he got another girl pregnant'.”

“Oh. My. Gawd.” Katie says, laughing.

“It's what she gets for being a hoe.” Lena says. “Nothing good comes from being a cheater.” She shakes her head in disgust.

“True.” I agree.

We read a few more funny stories about girls getting their periods at embarrassing times, getting caught hooking up by parents or making fools of themselves in front of their crushes. Between the stories and our commentary, the three of us are laughing our asses off, having a good time. We try to get together each week with the new issue of the magazine to go over these stories. 

A whine from across the room has me tossing the magazine aside and standing up, going over to pick up the squirming child in the crib against the wall. Inside is my little sister who is just waking from her nap. “Lucy..” I smile at her and she stands up, reaching her arms up for me. “Ca- ca.” She chants in return.

I pick her up, cradling her in my arms as she wraps her thin little arms around my neck and holds tight, her face nestling into my chest. I stroke her back with one hand, my other under her bottom holding her up. I note that she needs to be changed. I am going to work on potty-training her soon, but she just does not seem ready yet. I am still trying to get her to talk. She is not even two yet, so I am not really in a rush. “Did you have a good nap, my love?”

“Ess.” Lucy says, still clinging to me.

“Are you hungry?” I ask her, walking over to my bed.

I sit down with her, reaching over for a diaper and wipes that I keep beside the bed. I lay her down and make quick work of changing her diaper. Then she sits up beside me and I reach into the drawer, pulling out pack of crackers that I begin feeding her, not caring that she is getting crumbs all over my bed.

Lena and Katie smile at her and talk to her, but she just stares at them. They don't take offense. They know how shy she is. She clings to me, beyond everything. She won't even have much to do with my other sibling and she seems to honestly dislike our mom. The only other person she will really have anything to do with is my older brother, Wilder.

I don't blame her though, it's hard for anyone to not love Wilder. He is just that kind of guy. He is not only my older brother, he is my best friend. We have been close from the day I was born, him and me against the world, it sometimes seemed. As weird as it sounds, my world revolves around him and I cling to him, just as Lucy clings to me. While Mom was out running around, leaving us alone all the time, it was Wilder that took care of me.

At the age of eight, he was making mac and cheese and frozen pizzas for us every night. When I had bad dreams he would sleep on the floor beside my tiny bed so that I wasn't alone in the dark. He got a job at ten years old, mowing yards, weeding gardens and doing odd jobs around town in order to get money for us.

He was and still is my hero. He goes to college and works two jobs, paying rent for this house since Mom can't be bothered to. I work as well, but mostly he has me stay home and watch the kids. The four of them are a handful, but I don't mind. I babysit the neighbors kids here in our house to make a little money. Like tonight, the first Saturday after graduation, all my friends will be out having fun, while I will be stuck here with my siblings, the Johnson boy, the Calver baby and Margie Shaw's three kids. But for five hours I'll be making two-hundred dollars.

With the money I make tonight I can hopefully finish buying the party supplies for the twin's sixth birthday next month and put a little in the jar to save up to buy new tires for my used car that Grandpa bought me. Thankfully Grandpa pays the insurance on it and paid for the oil change and tune up last week, but he is barely scraping by on his retirement pension as is and he can't afford to pay everything. Not that we would ever expect him too. The little bit he does do to help is way more than enough and we feel bad even taking that.

He would never admit it, but Wilder and I know that Mom goes and borrows money from him all the time, leaving him with nothing. He is so kind and gentle, he can't refuse her anything. She is his only child and she was always spoiled rotten, but since Grandma died, he is so afraid of alienating her that he gives her whatever she wants. What he doesn't know is that it goes to buying her boyfriend liquor or to paying for the motel room that she has been spending most every night in with him, for the last few months.

She can't bring him here because he is mean to the kids and Wilder told him that if he came into the house he would beat the shit out of him. Wilder is six foot tall and has the shoulders of a linebacker and the muscles of a guy who's been doing hard labor since he was a kid. Mom's lush of a boyfriend was rightly intimidated. When you factor in that Wyatt was behind him at the time, standing six foot two and just a little less muscled, her boyfriend didn't return a word, quickly leaving the house.

As my thoughts turn to Wyatt, I smile. My brother's best friend and the secret love of my life. He is twenty-three and sinfully delicious. He and Wilder have been best friends since they were kids, having met when Wyatt's family moved in a few houses down the street from where we use to live. That house was my favorite; a little three room house with a front porch swing and a big yard. It was a quiet street with middle class families, set off of any major roads so there was no traffic except for the parents coming home from work.

Every night the kids would right their bikes up and down the street or play basketball at the Harvey house. I remember so many nights spent on that swing, watching Wilder and Wyatt ride their bikes like daredevils down the street. I remember running barefoot up the road to check on Wyatt when he jumped a homemade ramp put together by two dimwitted thirteen year-old morons. He let me hold his hand and drag him to my porch, where I took a wash rag to his bloodied palms and knees, covering them in neon band-aids. It was that night that he came back to show my the stitches in his knee and the cast on his arm, swinging with me on the swing, when I leaned over and kissed him. I was nine at the time to his fourteen. He gently moved away, gave me a smile and left. I nearly died of embarrassment and avoided him for the next month. Not that it mattered, because he never mentioned it. He wouldn't do anything to make me uncomfortable, that's not his nature. I knew I was crazy for kissing him. He even had a girlfriend at the time, not that I was thinking about that. I hadn't been thinking at all when I made the impulsive decision. But he was so cool about it, which I am still thankful for to this day.

I get a pang in my chest thanking about how just a few weeks later my mom sold that house for half what my grandparents paid for it and moved me, Wilder and our little brother Maverick into her boyfriends two bedroom apartment. We stayed there for a couple years, just long enough for him to smoke and drink up all of the money and for her to get pregnant with the twins. Then he got arrested for aggravated assault and robbery, as well as possession charges and breaking parole, when he knocked off a convenience store a few miles from home with pot and prescription pills in his pocket just a few weeks after he was released from jail for drunk driving.

He got three years in prison that was turned into a thirty year sentence when he got into a fight with a couple of inmates and he slammed one guys head into weight room machine and the guy died. He got involuntary manslaughter charges. We lived with my grandparents for a while after that until they confronted their daughter about her life choices and she cussed them out, packing us all up and leaving right then.

We stayed in her old beat up van for a few days, eating stale crackers and drinking tap water from gas station bathrooms in plastic cups. After that we couch surfed a few of her skeevy friends places before she got us a little crap house outside city limits. The floor was falling through, there were holes in the wall and it might have been a crack den or the home of a grizzly murder for all we knew. She didn't care. It was cheap. Besides, she was hardly ever there so it didn't bother her that it had no heat in the winter and that the water in the toilet froze each night do to the crappy insulation. We stayed their until Wilder was fourteen and he got work as a bus boy at a restaurant and a bag boy at the grocery store.

He worked as many hours as he could, while I still weeded gardens and raked leaves. A friend of grandpa's from church had this house that he was fixing up from previous tenants abuse. Grandpa Mick and Wilder negotiated a deal with him where they would repair the house in return for us getting to live there rent free and when the house was done, Wilder and I would pay what rent we could afford.

Grandpa's friend took the deal and we spent nights and weekends wiping down moldy walls with bleach, painting the walls and ripping up stained and smelly carpet. Mick, Wilder, Wyatt and Wyatt's dad Brian slowly but surely replaced the wiring and plumbing fixtures, laid new flooring in most rooms, reinforced the stairs and built a new porch and deck since the old ones wear falling down.

I look around at my room that Wyatt and Wilder worked so hard on. For my fifteenth birthday they painted the room a pale yellow, my favorite color. The old wood dresser that Wilder had bought me at a yard sale was repainted white with new shining handles. He bought me a matching white bedside table and Wyatt bought me a new bed spread and matching pillows. They hung lights around the room and put out vases of flowers. They even had Grandpa Mick make me a little bench in my window alcove so that I could sit there and watch the world. I literally cried when I saw the room, hugging them both until my arms ached. I loved them both so much in that moment that I felt like my heart would burst.

Now there is a baby bed shoved in here and boxes of toddler clothes and diapers that I have no where to put. Wilder shares a room with our younger brother Maverick, who is now eleven. The twins, Valentina and Vader, take up the other room. My mom, when she is home, has a small room on the main floor, but it's mostly just where she keeps her things. Wilder has been talking about turning it into a room for Val, since the twins are getting too old to share a room anymore. I agree with him: It's not like Isolde is using it.

My friends bring me out of my musings when Katie lets out a squeal of excitement. I snap to and notice that she has a smiling Lucy in her arms. “She reached for me! Look! She's letting me hold her!”

I smile at her fondly, reaching over to touch Lucy's soft dark curls. She looks like she might cry for me but Katie hands her a cracker and she turns back to my friend happily. Lena strokes her back and coos at her. “I am so jealous. Can I hug you next?”

To my surprise Lucy reaches out her arms and Lena scoops her up, snuggling her. “Oh. My. Gawd. Can you freaking believe it? She's letting me hug her!”

I laugh at my friend's joy in the simple act of my little sister letting them touch her. I am about to respond when I hear the front door slam open and the sound of yelling.