Untamed Hearts(4)

I listen to the voicemail message five times over, and then delete it before I can listen five hundred times more. There’s a pain in my chest so tight I feel like I might explode, a hot stab of anger and bitterness and desperate ache.

She does this. Every few months, like clockwork. Just when I’ve forced myself to forget, mom calls and leaves some bullshit message, and it all comes flooding back: that she just took off and left me alone here, with nobody but my brothers to watch out for me.

That everyone I love always leaves me in the end.

“I’m going to meetings again..”

I know too well not to get my hopes up, that her promise to be home soon is nothing but a temporary plan. Soon, too soon, she’ll slip, on pills or booze or worse, and then she’ll drop off the face of the earth for another few months, leaving me to lay awake in bed at night, wondering if she’s even alive anymore.

You can’t do this again.

I bite down against the swell of tears rising, but I refuse to cry for her—not when I’ve wasted so many tears already. Instead, I grab my purse and take one last look in the mirror.

This dress is dangerous, even for me: a flimsy red scrappy thing that dances around my bare thighs. I run my fingers through my choppy dark hair, and smudge a line of black liner around my eyes. The desperate ache in my chest is building, and I need to go find some way to block it out. Lose myself for an hour, a night, just get the hell out of my own skin for a while and quiet the dark thoughts whirling in my mind, and the emptiness crying out in my soul.

I clatter down the hall and find my big brother, Emerson, just coming in from working at the bar. He takes one look at me and shakes his head.

“No way in hell are you going out looking like that,” he vows, glaring in determination.

I push past him. “You don’t get to tell me what to wear.”

“Jesus, Brit, you look like... like...?” Emerson struggles.

“What?” I shoot back. “A slut? A whore? It’s what they’re saying anyway,” I shrug, even though it stings coming from him. “Why should I care what anyone thinks?”

“Because you don’t know guys.” Emerson’s jaw clenches. “You’re only sixteen, can’t you act it, just for a night?”

“You mean invite some girls over and watch The Notebook?” I snort. The last time anyone invited me to a sleep-over was in eighth grade, when Marcy Hampton accused me of stealing her charm bracelet and then spread I’d confessed to fucking half the basketball team. I had to put up with whispers and stares for a month after that. And Emerson wonders why I don’t have any girlfriends. “Yeah, never gonna happen.”

“I’m worried about you, Brit.” Emerson’s glare slips, and I can see my brother is genuinely concerned.

“We both know I can take care of myself.” I sigh, then reach up on tip-toes to land a kiss on his cheek. “Relax, Em, it’s just a party on the beach. I’ll be back before dawn.”

“Midnight.” He demands. I laugh.

“Or what, you’ll ground me? See you tomorrow!”

I head on out before he can say another word. I love my brother, but he can’t talk. Odds are, he’ll be hooking up with some skank in a bar in the city tonight—still trying to forget the epic heartbreak he suffered at the hands of his last girlfriend, Juliet.

That’s another reason I won’t believe in fairy-tales: I’ve seen up-close the damage love does when it’s over, when somebody walks away and all that’s left is the wreckage of a broken heart.

The empty ache in me twists, and I find my resolve slipping. The truth is, part of me wants to stay home tonight: to curl up on the couch with Emerson, order pizza, and watch bad TV. To stay safe in the embrace of what little family I have left.

But then I’ll go to bed, and turn off the light, and all the dark, desolate thoughts will take over. The loneliness, the bitterness, the anger. And that one, dangerous, awful question:

Why did they leave?

I can’t take it, not tonight. So I keep walking, out in search of some distraction, and a way to soothe this pain that cuts deeper in my chest with every heartbeat.

In search of just a single moment of peace.





“Brit, baby. Looking good...” A guy from school whistles at me the moment I approach the crowd on the beach.

I roll my eyes. “Keep dreaming, Jimmy.” I call back, making my way through the crowd. It’s the last night of summer, and Beachwood Bay is sending it out with a bang. Everyone’s here, girls dancing in the light of the bonfire, guys downing beers from red plastic cups. Music blasts from the speakers someone’s rigged up in the back of a pickup truck, and I can smell the sickly sweet drift of dope on the salty sea breeze.