Sometimes I wonder if things would have ended up the same way had Julian stayed with his cousins in Montgomery instead of going back to Puerto Rico. My dad loved Julian like his own son and when he never came back I know he felt as if he had lost two children that day. Not only that but he lost one of his closest friends when Howard was killed. My dad had nobody but my mother to hold him together and she had her own pain to contend with, her loss was equal to his, both of them losing close friends and a son in a single day.
My mother was the more interesting of the two, always smiling as if nothing happened. But no matter how many fake smiles she plastered on her face I knew she was dying inside. I felt it with each middle of the night hug, and every second that my own pain went unnoticed. I never got to mourn Nicolai’s passing and I never got to miss Julian. My heart was completely broken, the world as I knew it was gone and nobody seemed to care about anyone but themselves. Thus began my never ending struggle with putting my head up my own ass because it seemed for a long time I was the only one I could lean on. After a while I had no idea how to put faith in anyone, Brea being the only person I would let in.
When my father murdered my mother, Brea became my rock, my sunlight on a cloudy day. My aunt did her best to comfort me but she was never exactly the motherly type. Brea was honestly the best thing that ever happened to me. When she came along I finally had someone I could call my own and even though we were only children she listened and comforted me in ways nobody had before.
“Do you have brother or sister?” she asked on the school playground the first day we met.
“My brother is dead,” I said innocently.
Brea looked up from the fort where she had been twirling the fake stirring wheel, and matter of factually blurted out “That sucks!”
After a second she thoughtfully put her arm around my shoulder and said “Well, you got a sister now K, cause I ain’t got no brother or sister either, and everybody needs a brother or a sister don’t ya think?.”
And from that moment on she was the best sister a girl could have. She offered me a shoulder to cry on, she cheered me up when I was sad and she made me chocolate chip cookies on Nicolai’s birthday and the anniversary of his death every year.
“I tried to tell my mama chocolate chip cookies had magic healing powers but she wouldn’t listen me none. I think once you get to be all big and stuff you can’t see magic no more. When I get big I am always gunna see magic cause I’m never gunna grow up. Growing up is stupid!”
When my mother passed away she did nothing to commemorate either day. Not because she didn’t want to, she wanted to do anything that included chocolate chip cookies, but because she knew it would simply be too much for me to handle.
To this day she still lived by the motto that chocolate chip cookies were magic and baked them at least once a week but she loved being a grown up. Ever since she met Mark Jones a few months into our second semester of ninth grade she discovered the beauty of kissing which was a good enough reason to no longer be seen as a little kid.
“That boy has lips like strawberries; I like strawberries...A LOT!”
I myself had tasted Brandon’s strawberries for months so I knew all too well how awesome it could be wearing big girl panties.
I had tried to call Ford early that morning without realizing the time and when he didn’t answer I determined that he was most likely still in the air so I tried to call him again after lunch and got his voice mail. I left a message letting him know how cold my bed had been without him in it and that I could not wait until I saw him again.
I know I probably sounded pathetic, everything seemed to be moving so fast and unreal but from the moment we met, even before I realized who he was there was a connection between us. I was never one to believe in love at first sight and I am not saying that is what these feelings are but if ever there was a time to believe it was now.
For the first time in my life I truly wanted something other than my brother to have never been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everyone in my life who had known me when I still had joy in my heart was gone, it felt good to know there was someone out there who remembered that there was a time I was lively and carefree.
Not Brea, Brandon or even Aunt Tilly ever knew me as anything other than a fragile piece of glass. Between the three of them I often felt as if they were handling me with such care because they feared me so delicate that I might shatter into a million tiny pieces. There was a time that this might have been true, but not anymore, they simply did not understand. Ford knew my pain, he knew how much I could handle and not handle because he had been through most everything I had and understood what it takes to make a person the way they are. To make us like we were, though he seems to have handled things much better than I had.