Rattled, стр. 5
“Read?”
“Yeah. Brandon insisted that we’d never get anywhere in life if we didn’t educate ourselves. He planned on saving for school. When I was old enough we were going to get our GEDs and enroll in college.” I shake my head. “It was silly, I’m sure, because we would have never had that kind of money, but it was a dream.”
“What did you read?” Alex asks while he keeps sketching. His questions make me feel like I’m back with my therapist again.
“Anything and everything. Brandon would go through the garbage every day and bring home magazines and books, whatever he could find.” I chuckle as I remember his favorite save. “One day he came home more excited than I had seen him in a long time, and he had this big fat book. ‘It’s a dictionary, Kels,’ he said. ‘Now we can look up any words we don’t understand.’ The place where he’d found the book—which I later found out was an old school that was closing down—had also tossed out an entire set of encyclopedias that were printed sometime in the 1970s, but he hauled all of them to the apartment and we took turns reading them from A to Z.”
Alex waves a tissue in front of my face. “Here.” His eyes are kind. Much kinder than they ever were in school. I take it and wipe my nose, and the back of my hand brushes against wetness. I didn’t even realize I was crying.
“Things were going good. At least, as good as they could for two juvenile runaways. And then it happened.” I have to look away from Brandon and the camera. For a minute I forgot it was there and I hope this doesn’t make it on the air. Telling Alex this story is one thing. The entire world? Well that’s an entirely different matter.
“What happened?” he prods.
I swallow past the lump in my throat. I don’t want to tell him, but maybe after I do he’ll understand. Not that I care one way or the other if I have Alexander Douche-Dosek’s approval or not, but maybe he will learn not to judge without full knowledge of the situation.
“I was on my way home from the diner and was bringing Brandon a piece of pie to get him through the rest of his shift…when I heard the gunshots. As I came around the corner, two guys wearing ski masks were running out of the place where Brandon worked. When I got to him he was lying on his back, blood everywhere, but he was alert. I held his hand as his life slipped away. Before he was gone he told me that I was the one beautiful thing in his life and that he loved me.”
Alex pushes the box of tissues toward me. I pull one from the box. “Thanks.”
“Take your time,” he says gently.
One of the crew places a glass of water on the table and then disappears behind the camera. I swallow and try to gain control of my emotions.
“The cops soon learned who I really was and my age. I was such a fucking mess. I’d been with Brandon for over two years. He was my family. Hell, he was my world.” I wipe my eyes again. My heart aches as if it happened just yesterday. “They sent me to children’s services again, but this time I wasn’t afraid to tell them anything and explained in no uncertain terms why Brandon and I ran away. They had me see psychologists, therapists, and put me in a home with other delinquents, even though I’d never broken a single law. That’s where I met Mr. Smythe. He just observed, all the time, but not in a creepy way. He was trying to figure me out, because after I told them why I ran away, I refused to talk about Brandon or anything. Then, someone donated an old piano to the home I was in. I couldn’t stop playing it to the point that I was banned from the piano from ten at night until eight in the morning.”
“I do remember you played beautifully.”
Alex’s words shock me and I look up at him. He isn’t mocking me.
“I used to listen, when I was painting. In the summer, when the windows were open, music would flow from your building into the art building and I always knew when you were at the piano.”
My face heats. I’d had no idea, not that it mattered. He’d still treated me like shit.
So why the fuck am I telling him all this?
“That explains why you ended up at my school.” His smile is lopsided.
“Mr. Smythe had me do a bunch of testing and my academics were good so I got admitted.”
“Well, you had read an entire set of encyclopedias.”
I shouldn’t laugh, but I do. “Yeah, and a lot of books. Brandon was right about that. You can’t go anywhere without some education.”
“What did Brandon think of the baby?” Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I want to know. It’s not just the moms who abandon their kids that I hate, but the dads too. The ones who disappear after knocking a woman up and leaving her to raise the kids alone without any kind of support. They are lower than scum.
“He didn’t know. Hell, I didn’t know. When I got to the school, they did a physical and all the normal testing and that’s when I found out.”
How could she not know? I know that there are stories about women delivering babies, never knowing they’re pregnant, but I don’t buy it. How the hell can’t they know? Then again, I am a guy. Maybe there is more to it than a missed period.
“I figure I got pregnant shortly before Brandon was killed. After that, everything was so fucked up, I didn’t even notice