Page 6 of Avenged

“You don’t look okay.”

“Honest, I’m just tired,” I answered back.

He didn’t look like he believed me. He wouldn’t be the first or the last to not believe me, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting home. Getting to bed. Getting to curl up and try to sleep away the pain.

I pulled the door, and he finally let it go. I turned the car on and backed out of the driveway while he watched us leave. Violet hadn’t noticed. She was texting on her phone and hardly looked up.

“I can’t believe you embarrassed me like that,” she said.

I groaned internally. I didn’t have it in me to fight with her tonight. We didn’t fight often. More lately, but that was normal teenage defiance, wasn’t it? “It wasn’t my intent,” I told her.

“I’m not a baby, and you’re not my mom.”

“But in the eyes of the law, I’m responsible for you,” I replied.

“Maybe I should file the emancipation papers after all,” she said, still not looking up from the phone.

It stung, but I knew she didn’t mean it. Violet and I had survived a lot together. This squabble was never going to come permanently between us. It was an old discussion, but it usually only came up when she felt bad that I was the one providing for her.

“There’s really no point in filing,” I responded with the words I said every time it came up. “You aren’t working enough to be financially responsible for yourself.”

“It’s kind of hard to get a job when I don’t have my driver’s license.”

Another old squabble I wasn’t sure I had the energy for with pain dragging at me. I didn’t respond anyway, because there was nothing new to add. It was expensive to pay for driver’s education classes, and it would be even more expensive to add her to the car insurance. I could barely pay now, let alone with a teenage driver added onto the premium.

She sneezed, and my heart lurched. She looked over at me. “Don’t.”

“Just take the extra antibiotics when you get home.”

“I’m not sick. It was just a sneeze.”

“And you know the protocol.”

“I’m not running a fever. It was a freakin’ sneeze.”

“It doesn’t hurt to take them,” I said quietly.

She didn’t say anything. She pushed her phone under her legs and then leaned with her head looking out the window of the car. We drove the last couple minutes in silence. Mandy and Leena’s house was at the edge of town on a hill that afforded a view of the sea from the very top windows. The best view was from the attic. I’d only found that out after Leena had sent me up there to get an old rug she’d decided she needed to put back in the library.

Tonight, the house was lit up inside and out. It made my heart leap a little, dragging me out of my melancholy. It felt like it was welcoming us home. The twinkling lights hanging from a trellis that led to the backyard were lit up, making the manicured garden at the front of the house a fairyland of bushes and flowers. The lights made me think of the ones Mom had hung from my bedroom wall once upon a time.

“I can’t wait till I’m eighteen,” Violet said, a momentary lapse into self-pity. She had a right to it, but she hardly ever went there. Even right after the accident, in the hospital, all battered and bruised and sore from surgery, she’d hardly ever sunk into it.

Having her spleen removed had meant lots of antibiotics. Ones that she was on daily until she was eighteen, and some for the rest of her life. Ones that she’d have as a part of her life for the rest of her life. She’d never be able to fight things off like people who still had all their body parts. The guilt filled me with almost as much pain as the real pain twisting through my pelvic region. It caused me to jerk the steering wheel slightly. It caused Violet’s eyes to journey from the window to me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Cramps?”

I nodded again.

She reached across and squeezed my shoulder. “Let’s get you home to bed.”

That was the plan. Antibiotics for her. Bed for me. We were quite the pair. Our lives, our health, our issues never seemed to leave us alone for very long. But I was eternally grateful I had her to go through it with me, and I knew she felt the same. We were in this thing together. This thing called life. And someday, we’d look back at these times and know that, while hard, they were the base of the beautiful future we’d made ourselves. That we hadn’t been handed anything. We’d earned every second of every achievement that was coming our way, the town be damned.

Truck

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