Page 13 of Letters to Lily

Memory lane was not letting me off that easy. I found out later that night why Sasha had been crying and it gutted me. I went to her house to find out if someone hurt her, because there was no way it could have been me, like Kristin had accused. Before I could knock on the front door, I saw the flicker of firelight coming from around the back, and took off around the house to meet them back there.

Hearing Sasha’s sniffling stopped me in my tracks by the tree at the side of the house. I stood there, watching her interaction with her mom. Ashley was stoking up a fire while Sasha sat in a lawn chair clutching tightly to some shimmery material. “Tell me everything, and once it’s told we’ll burn the damn dress, erase the pictures, and pretend the night never happened.” Sasha’s head bobbed back and forth a couple times on her neck.

I clutched my aching chest as I listened to her sob her way through the story of her ruined senior prom. “I turned them all down,” she was saying, “I was waiting on him.” Her voice cracked on that last word, the pain it caused was obvious. Surely, she didn’t mean me? I had wanted so desperately to ask Sasha to prom, but she never let on that she wanted that. No hints or blatant requests like all the other girls lobbed my way. In the end, I’d chickened out after seeing her turn down offer after offer. I wasn’t sure whom she was waiting on, but it depressed me enough that I finally had to pull my own head out of my ass and get myself a date for the prom. Hell, all the girls I would have been interested in aside from Sasha were already spoken for, so I had to come up with a flashy way to get one of them to ditch their date.

“He sang to her, and you know what? I’ve never actually heard him sing like that before, and I’ve known him since the fourth grade. I guess he must really like her to have done that. It killed me to watch it,” Sasha was saying. Oh, god no! Please, don’t be talking about me.

“Then I didn’t want to go, and you wouldn’t let me back out, because he’d already bought the extra ticket. The pity ticket…”

‘If she only knew,’ I thought to myself as I listened to her speaking. I purchased two tickets, one for me and one for her. I had to scramble to get the third ticket at the last minute for Andrea. My heart was aching in my chest as I continued to listen to how I failed her all night long. How no one got her a corsage, because she didn’t have a date. The corsage Andrea was wearing was the one I had picked out for Sasha. I guess she hadn’t known that it matched her dress and not Andrea’s. Then she talked about the painful limo ride where two couples were interacting intimately while she was left alone in the shadows. Suddenly, I was seeing the night in a whole new way. She told her mom about the dinner, which now that I thought about it, I didn’t remember her eating a thing. I didn’t even bother to ask her why, or what was wrong, because Andrea kept distracting me by feeding me her dessert and pressing me to feed her mine.

I swallowed down the thick emotion that was threatening to choke me as I allowed the tree to hold me up while I waited for the final nail in the coffin. I just knew what she’d been waiting for all night now. The same thing that I had been looking forward to. It was the dance that Andrea had stolen from both of us. I was really the only person to blame for that though, because I allowed it to happen by stupidly thinking that this gorgeous creature – my best friend – wouldn’t want me in that way.

She finished her story amidst more sniffles and tears, and I watched as she draped the shimmery material over the fire and then let it drop into the flames. It was her prom dress, and man, did that kill me to see. She had looked like magic in that dress, like shimmery moonlight dancing across water. I had to remind myself how to breathe when I’d caught that first glimpse of her in that dress tonight, and now it was turning to ash before my very eyes. “It’s not easy being a boy’s best friend at this age,” her mom said to her then.

“No, it’s not,” was her response before she turned and wiped at the moisture that was flowing down her cheeks as she moved to go inside the house. Her mom stayed outside; I assumed, to tend to the fire. The problem was that she wasn’t as unaware of my presence as Sasha had been.

“Did you hear all of that? The whole day’s events?” She asked out loud. When she finally looked up at me, I simply nodded from my perch in the shadows. “I’m not sure what went wrong, or why you chose not to ask her, but I suggest you take a few days to figure out what it is you want to salvage between the two of you before you talk to her again. I like you, Kaden, I always have; but if you hurt my little girl like this one more time, I promise I will write you off without another thought.” She turned to put the cover over the burn barrel that would help kill the fire. “The only reason you’re getting this second chance is because I think you honestly didn’t realize. It’s a damn shame that you didn’t, but there’s no changing what’s already happened.”

I nodded my head again without saying anything and turned to walk away. It took me two hours to get back home that night because I walked, very slowly, while I thought about every word Sasha and her mom had spoken.

Kristen and Ashley, the two people who were closest to Sasha - besides myself - had put me in my place about her that night. For some reason, my mind kept going back to their warnings and how that night played out as I thought about our current situation. Was it possible she was cheating on me? If she thought we were over, it wouldn’t have been cheating in her eyes. Especially, since it probably seemed like I didn’t want to bother getting a hold of her personally. Even if Jason had delivered the original message, I didn’t think he’d bother with updating her after that. He knew I was about to ditch him, in a way, for her. I imagine that didn’t endear her to him.

Still, how the hell did I get a hold of her? Something had to happen to make her change not just her phone number, but her e-mail address too. After thinking back on how a week in my life had brought about such drastic changes, I had to wonder what it could have done to hers as well. My life had spiraled from a simple disagreement, more of a miscommunication with my girl, straight into crazy family drama hell. It was unnerving to think how easily you could lose touch with someone in this day and age. Suddenly, I was wishing we had been the type of people who were social media hounds, but neither of us had been. Sasha used to have a Facebook, but she deleted it last semester for some reason, saying the only people she really needed to keep track of were Kristin, her mom, and me. Everyone else was just there or gone. Hell, I had felt pretty much the same way, and ended up deleting mine too. Of course, once I decided to go after Sasha as something more than a friend I cut the social media off because it kept the girls at school from thinking they had an easy way to contact me on the sly.

It didn’t hurt that I hadn’t ever used it much to begin with. Having my dad involved in a sex scandal when I was in high school pretty much told me who my friends were or weren’t. The girls that clung to me did so for the shallowest of reasons. While I didn’t mind getting in some experience and blowing off some steam with them, none of them could come close to touching the epic proportions a person would need to reach to take my mind off of my best friend.

Even then, when I was still in denial and trying to work through my own demons, I knew she was my forever. Somehow, I’d managed to screw that up if Jason was telling the truth, and hell, pictures didn’t lie. That was the toughest thing. I could sit here in denial. I could fail to believe it. I would rally against the idea of someone even thinking it was a possibility if I hadn’t seen those damn pictures of her wrapped up in another guy’s arms.

“Kaden Miller?” A woman’s voice called out as I looked up from the breakfast I’d been avoiding. Getting lost in my thoughts apparently meant eating cold eggs and dealing with strangers who somehow knew who I was this morning.

“Yeah?”

“I thought it was you,” she smiled my way then, and something familiar washed over me. “I don’t know if you remember me, but my name is Sandra Crawford.”

“Holy shit!” I spit out without thought.

“I see you’ve maybe learned a few things about me then?”

“Just the other day, as a matter of fact.”

“So, Brad found you then?” She smiled hopefully.

“Brad? What? No, why would he be looking for me?”

“Oh, I thought maybe that was why you were here. Brad took off for school in North Carolina, Northbrook University.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me?” So, my half-brother was currently in the one place I wish I could be, and here I was back on his home turf talking to his mom. If my life got any weirder, I was going to have to start looking for hidden cameras, because someone had to be masterminding this clusterfuck.

“Nope. He wanted a chance to hunt you down and explain your connection. I didn’t tell him until he turned 18, as per the agreement your parents made me sign.” She didn’t look so happy about that, but she parked her butt at the table across from me anyway. “If Brad’s news didn’t bring you out this way, then what?”

“My parents. Dad lives here with the latest girlfriend. Huh, excuse me, wife, I guess. I just found that out too. Also, there’s a daughter. So, Brad and I have a little sister. I think she’s two or maybe three.”

“Jesus, I guess he never learns, huh?”

“Not in the least, and neither does my mom. She came out here to help him financially. He had her convinced they were getting back together. Turns out, he just needed a check to give the builders for the house he just built for his new family. He wasn’t above fleecing it out of my mom.”

“That poor woman,” Sandra expressed. When she saw the look of disdain that I was throwing her she nodded and continued. “I get that you’re looking at me like I am part of her pain, but I never knew he was married, or that he had a kid on the way either. Hell, I don’t even think he knew he had a kid on the way when he got me pregnant. Brad is only a couple of months younger than you.” She smiled. “Feb. 25th is his birthday. So, I guess there is probably right at two months difference.”

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