Page 23 of Butterflies and Hazel Eyes
“My dad, who was sixty-four, died of liver failure. They shipped me off to live with my mom. The problem was, I hadn’t seen her since she left when I was five. She was even less interested in being my mom at fourteen.”
“Damn, what did you do?” he asked. The way his gaze held mine told me he was genuinely interested in my story.
I laughed sardonically. “I did what every bitter, self-educated, angry teenager does.”
“Run away? Get in trouble?”
“Get even,” I answered immediately. “Sometimes the truth hurts when you have to say it out loud.” I wiggled my shoulders uncomfortably while I worked out what else I wanted to say. Gulliver sat patiently waiting, as if he understood this was difficult at best. “I wanted to be an emancipated minor, but I had no way to support myself and no education. My dad claimed I was being homeschooled, but he did absolutely nothing to teach me anything other than how to lift a bottle to your lips. When I arrived at my mom’s house, she had a new husband, and he wanted nothing to do with me either. There was no way I was living with her.”
Gulliver rubbed my arm rhythmically for comfort, but when he touched me, he raised goose bumps of desire on my skin. “I’m sorry, Charity. My family is messed up, but at least my brother and I are still close.”
I stared into the fire, remembering back to those days when everything in my life was so uncertain. I had lived my childhood hidden away in an apartment with little outside contact other than the neighbors, so every new experience was terrifying. “There was no love in my family. I was an inconvenience from the day I was born, and I had to figure out on my own how to make it in a world with the deck stacked against me in multiple different ways.”
“So you got a degree and took off for parts unknown?” he asked, trying to fill in the blanks.
I giggled and leaned back against the log again. “No, I hacked into my stepdaddy’s bank account and stole a couple thousand dollars. I did the same thing to my mom’s account and several other people she worked with at her business. I took six thousand in total.” I held up my hand before he could say anything. “In my defense, I put it in a new account so they could have it back. I didn’t do it for the money.”
“What did you want then? And how did you learn how to hack?”
“One question at a time,” I teased.
Gulliver opened the cooler and grabbed a beer, handing me one. “We might as well enjoy these. We aren’t going anywhere tonight.”
I cracked mine open and took a long swallow. Considering I was about to purge all my demons to someone for the first time since I’d left therapy a decade ago, and allow him to judge me for them, the alcohol would be a welcome addition to the mix. I buried the bottle in the sand so it didn’t tip and let the warm granules run through my fingers. I wanted to tell the story in a way that helped him understand the circumstances behind the desperate plan I’d hatched. If he could understand why I did what I did, he might not judge me as harshly. I had no idea why it mattered so much to me that he didn’t judge me, but it did. A lot.
“I wanted out of her house but running away didn’t work. They just dragged me back each time. Getting in trouble with the courts meant I got a new home.”
Gulliver lowered his bottle from his lips. “Yeah, a new home in juvie.”
“Ding-ding.” I sipped the beer again for liquid courage. “At least in juvie, I got three squares, a bed, and a chance at an education.”
Those amber orbs revealed the exact second when the lightbulb lit. His lips formed an O before he spoke. “Your basic living needs were finally met. That never crossed my mind.”
“Why would it? It doesn’t make sense unless you were in the same situation. I’d never had three meals a day and a bed of my own. I’d never been to school or even had decent clothes to wear. I was in heaven, even if I was technically incarcerated. My first day of juvie was on my fifteenth birthday, and by the time I was released at eighteen, I had my GED and was old enough to be on my own. I had productively honed my hacking skills, as my instructor put it. Which meant I learned the difference between a black hat and a white hat and why it was important not to cross the line between them. I planned to set out and find a job working for a company, and I tried, but it never worked out. I was never the right fit, or the job was only temporary. I moved around a lot in the first three years after juvie to find work. Then I bought Myrtle, and I built the business from just enough jobs to keep gas in the tank to more jobs than I can accept.”
“I’m impressed, Charity,” he whispered. “Not many people would take what you started with and make it work for them.”
I leaned back against the log and stretched my legs out. “I never wanted to use my hacking skills for evil, Gulliver. I’m not an evil kind of person. I was a desperate kid in a desperate situation.”
He grasped my right arm and cradled my elbow in one hand while he rubbed my forearm up and down, as if he were trying to comfort both of us. “I still don’t know how you learned to hack if you never went to school or used a computer.”
“Dad was passed out drunk half the time, so once I was old enough, I went to the library and studied videos on YouTube. Tutorials, actually, on how to hack other people’s computers. I had dreams of becoming a professional, but first I had to learn how to read better. My next-door neighbor had taught me the basics of how to read and write, but Dad wouldn’t allow her to send me to school with her kids. He was afraid social services would take me away, and he would lose my benefits.”
“He wasn’t a father,” Gulliver said. “He wasn’t even a caretaker.”
“How right you are. As I said, I lucked out with my neighbor. I spent a lot of time there learning how to be a normal kid. She taught me proper hygiene, how to eat without acting like a starved animal, and how to socialize properly. Since I spent so much time in the library, the librarian started recommending reading material for me. If I wasn’t on the computer, I was reading a book about coding. After a year, I had absorbed so much information I wanted to put it to work, but I didn’t have a computer. The librarian took pity on me and offered me one they were replacing for the price of organizing old books and preparing them for sale, washing bookshelves, and other odd little jobs. I was happy to do them, considering it kept me out of the apartment and earned me a computer to boot. The first thing I learned how to do was hack into someone else’s internet so I could use it at home. Looking back, I can see that if I’d been left with no one but my father, I wouldn’t be here. If it weren’t for all the people on the periphery of my life, I’d be dead somewhere or wishing I were.”
He put his arm around me in silent comfort. “I’m sorry. It’s not right for people to have kids and not take care of them. It aggravates me to no end.”
I eyed his legs, noticing they both bowed out since he didn’t have his heavy shoe on the left one or the brace on the right. I had never seen his bare legs, but he had zipped off the pants portion after they got wet. He had his legs stretched out and relaxed, and you noticed the issues immediately.
Gulliver sighed as his gaze followed mine to his battered legs. “My mom took care of us the best she could. She tried, but she didn’t have a lot of resources. My health condition is a direct result of poverty,” he explained. “I was a normal kid growing up until I was seven and busted my left femur trying to jump over a log. Don’t ask me how it happened, I don’t remember the incident, but I broke the growth plate.”
“Oh boy,” I said as I tossed another log on the fire to keep it going and to ward off visitors from the woods. Sparks flew up into the night, and it reminded me of the Fourth of July when fireworks light up the sky. “Now I understand why your left leg is shorter than your right.”
“It is. It never grew again, and while they tried several surgeries to lengthen it,” he explained, holding up his shorts to show me pinhole scars covering the leg, “nothing worked. I got infections, and the infections caused even more damage to the bones. We didn’t have indoor plumbing or much hygiene in our home then, if you could even call it a home. My healthcare was free, but after the second infection, the doctors deemed it time to stop before I lost the leg or my life. I was fitted with a shoe lift, and they just kept increasing the height of the lift as the other leg grew.”
“I hate to say I’m sorry, so I won’t. I will say I wish like hell you didn’t have to go through it then, and now,” I whispered, slipping my hand into his.
