Say You'll Remember Me

“She is not out of your league.” Holiday hounds me. “She smiled at you. I know when a girl likes what she sees, and she liked what she saw in you.”

Tension builds in my neck. Yeah, the girl smiled, but she didn’t know what she was smiling at. I’m a pretty façade on the outside. On the inside, I’m a house of cards teetering on a bad foundation.

Axle throws an arm around Holiday’s shoulder and edges her away. “Let’s get some food. Drix is going to have to talk soon, and we don’t want him to do it on an empty stomach. Passing out on TV isn’t a great first impression.”

Wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?

“Hamburger?” Axle calls as he walks backward for the food truck. “With everything?”

I nod. My brother knows me...at least who I used to be.

“I’m agreeing with Holiday on this,” comes a deep rough voice to my right. “Pathetic.”

I do a slow head turn toward my best friend and cock an eyebrow at an even slower rate.

He smirks at my expression. “We picked a game we always let you win, and you didn’t even try.”

They picked that game because I used to kick their asses at it, and they were trying to get me to be the old Drix. But I only offer one sloppy lift of my shoulder because I don’t know how to explain that it’s tough to engage.

“It’s creepy hanging with you,” Dominic continues. “It’s like you’re the Walking Dead. I’m half expecting someone to jump out with a samurai sword and slice out your heart.”

“Brain,” Kellen corrects as she adjusts the Spider-Man beanie on her head. It’s a hundred degrees outside, and she wears that hat like it’s thirty below. “They’d take out his brain.”

“That, too.”

Dominic and Kellen stand side by side. Siblings who look and act nothing alike, except for their attachment to me and my family.

Kellen’s barely sixteen, the baby of our group. She’s blond braids with black bows at the ties, and she wears her beloved fitted black Captain America T-shirt and worn jeans with rips. It’s weird seeing her with lip gloss and eye shadow. I’m betting that would be Holiday’s doing, but at least Kellen’s somewhat the same.

Since we were kids playing baseball in the street, Kellen’s been a sucker for a comic book hero. It gives the possibility to her that the world might make sense. Good guys in one corner. Bad guys in the other. It’s how Kellen found her way to survive in a very gray household.

Something about her makes me feel protective. Maybe it’s how Dominic hovers over her. Maybe it’s because Kellen still has the limp from a bad bone break she got when she was eight. Maybe because playing hero to her might make me redeemable.

“I’m the Walking Dead because I didn’t play a game?” I ask.

Dominic jerks his thumb toward the game. “Because you didn’t hit on the girl.”

The girl no longer needs to be part of our conversation. I liked her. She liked me. I’m on parole for a crime I didn’t commit. A plus B doesn’t equal C in this equation.

“And you only played after we lost. How much did we lose? Three games, five dollars a shot. That would be...”

“Fifteen dollars,” Kellen says, the math freak that she is. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the hell out of her for it. I’ll also admit her nonstop ticking brain scares me. Someone that smart is going to take over the world—in a lab-coat, stroking-a-cat, manic-laughter type of way.

“Fifteen dollars,” Dominic echoes. “Times five.”

“Seventy-five dollars,” Kellen pops in.

“Seventy-five dollars in total. Just to get you to play.”

“I never said I wanted to play,” I say.

“But I wanted that snake. That girl is walking away with my prizes. You’ve been gone a year, and you can’t help a brother out? That would have completed my collection.”

“He needed the pink one,” Kellen adds.

“See, my world is now incomplete.”

Dominic grins, and I can’t help the automatic grin in return. It feels strange on my face, especially when joking with him used to be as natural as breathing.

Where Kellen makes me feel like I need to clear the path, Dominic is a category five tornado; a broad-shouldered brick wall. He has to be for the neighborhood we grew up in. He has to be because his home is even worse, and he considers himself the protector of him and his sister.

The deep scar across his forehead tells one of many war stories. So does the long one on his arm from a surgery when he was ten. He has black hair, blue eyes and is a good guy to have in a tough spot. My best friend is cool on the outside, but deep down he’s two pieces of uranium always on a collision course. He’s volatile. Too many emotions and nowhere safe to store them. They stew until there’s an explosion, and Dominic hates explosions. He hates fallouts. Most of all—he hates tight spaces.

But he loves a guitar, loves music, and from all the letters and emails he sent while I was gone, he loves me. Kellen, Dominic and I are more than friends. We’re family, and I’ve missed my family.

“You let us down,” Dominic continues. “We got beat by some little blonde, and she was a sore winner. And the worst part? I didn’t hit on her because she smiled at you, you smiled at her, and I thought you were settling in and returning to playing the game.”

“You didn’t hit on her because she would have laid you out flat with her no.” I mock a jab to his jaw. “That girl was fireworks.”

Kellen smiles at the dig, Dominic snorts, and a heaviness avalanches onto me. There’s a pause they’re waiting for me to fill because that’s what I used to do: announce what’s next, but I don’t have a next. This should be easier than what it is, and I hate that it’s not.

“Dominic,” Axle calls from a food truck. “Get over here and help.”

Kellen starts before Dominic does because where she goes, Dominic does, too.

Dominic steps forward then stops. His shoulder next to mine. Us facing two different directions. It’s the first time we’ve been alone since before I was arrested, and I lower my head as the two million things I’ve wanted to say to him become stuck in my throat.

With the way he sucks in a breath, he’s feeling the same.

My heart beats faster at what he might say and what I might say in return. Did he do the crime? If so, will he confess? What about beyond the crime? Will he bring up how he screwed me over the night I was arrested? Does he have the balls to explain how he left me high and dry, and will he apologize for that? If he does, can I forgive him? Because I’ve struggled with that—forgiveness. It’s not something that occurs naturally for me.

Dominic angles his head so he’s looking at me, waiting for me to lock eyes with him, but I can’t. I watch the blonde as she walks the midway. She’s beautiful. Possibly the most beautiful girl who’s talked to me. When she smiled at me, it was like I was being warmed by the sun, and I was her only planet. What I envy is that she seems to know where she’s going, where she’s headed in life. I’ve never been so jealous of anyone.

“I’m going to make this up to you,” he says.

Sharp pain in the chest. Of all the ways I saw this moment playing out, those weren’t the words I imagined. It’s not an apology for leaving me behind. It’s not an admittance of guilt. It’s a promise.

In my final therapy session in the woods, sitting next to a bonfire I created, my therapist asked what would help me transition back into the real world. I told him I needed the truth. He told me there’s no such thing, but he did tell me that forgiveness was real.

Forgiveness. In my mind, forgiveness and the truth go hand in hand.

“Why did you leave me behind that night?” I ask because I’ve waited a year for that answer, and I can’t wait anymore. Not if Dominic and I are going to be friends again. “We had a pact—never leave one of us behind, and you left. Why?”

“I thought you went home.”

“I didn’t, and you need to admit you didn’t try to find me. Something big had to have happened for you to have ditched me. What was it?” Or did he really think I was gone from the store and saw that as his opportunity to rob it?

“Dominic!” Kellen calls, and she’s juggling several drinks. “I need help.”