Page 1 of Another Chance
1
It was less than a week after his eighteenth birthday, and what Theo got as a gift from the universe was to lose pretty much everyone and everything that was important to him. That was his birthday present, and as Theo stared down into the blank, empty hole where they were burying his mother, he saw the way that they tried to cover up the sides of it with a bright, toxic green, obviously fake sheet of plastic grass, as he tried to come to grips with how his life had changed so suddenly, and he found that he couldn’t. He just couldn’t do it.
The sun shone down, obscenely bright and golden and cheerful, warming the cemetery and the group of mourners who stood around the open hole, the wound in the ground over which the coffin, suspended by some mechanical rigging which they also tried to hide.
They were here to celebrate a life, and mourn a death, and it might have amused Theo how people tried to hide that fact. What else were they here for? Why hide any of it?
His mother was dead, the life crushed out of her in a second. One moment, he’d had a mom, the next, he hadn’t. Sometimes, he felt like he could hear the crash of the car, the crunch of tortured metal as the trunk had impacted with that tree. No amount of fake grass or badly hidden machinery could change the facts. She was gone.
With his face feeling numb and cold in a way that no late spring sunshine could melt away from him, he stood there, his father on his right side, his face bleak and empty, just as Theo’s felt.
On his other side, his left side, there was Eric. The best friend that he had ever had, his childhood companion, someone who had been by his side since Theo had been a baby and Eric little more than a toddler. Handsome Eric, who had had girls tripping over themselves to get his attention in high school, the rebel without a cause, the bad boy.
The back of his hand brushed against Eric’s as they stood together, not looking at each other but instead gazing at the coffin, which had a lovely bouquet of white lilies on top of it. How ludicrous to put something so beautiful into the ground to rot.
He had lost his mother, and tomorrow, he would lose Eric. He would lose Eric’s parents, too, who had helped to raise him. He and Eric had been running back and forth across the street between their houses since Theo was old enough to walk. Eric’s house, Eric’s parents, had always been as open to him as Theo’s own. And he was going to lose them, too.
The minister was droning on and on, trying to pin Theo’s mother down with words. Trying to somehow make her death less of a tragedy, though there was no way that Theo could see to do that. She, with her light heart and merry soul, would have laughed and laughed to hear the religious man try to force her to fit inside the confines of his sermon.
The words finally, after far too long, stopped, and there was probably a prayer or something, but Theo didn’t hear it. He’d stopped listening. The minister’s words droned on in the background, and Theo paid more attention to the song of the birds and the rustle of the warm wind.
“Theo?” Eric’s voice, deep and slightly awkward, uncomfortable with the situation but still trying, reached out to him, cutting through the bonds of the paralysis which had gripped him and held him, forcing him to watch as the coffin was lowered into the earth.
Theo turned to look at his best friend, at the person who, if he were completely honest with himself, probably meant the most to him. More than anyone else on the planet. He had to look down to do it, he realized. When had that happened? Eric, being more than two years older than him, had always been taller than him, but at some point Theo had sprung up over him.
Happy eighteenth birthday to him. Maybe he’d win a wrestling match against Eric someday, only fat chance of that because Theo was leaving the very next day. There wasn’t going to be time for any of that.
“Eric.” Theo tried to force a smile to his lips, but it was a huge effort, and he was sure that the result was bordering on grotesque. The look in his best friend’s green eyes held up an unflattering mirror, and anyway, why should he try to smile?
No one could expect him to be okay. Not after losing everything.
There was sadness in Eric’s gaze, in those big, round, green eyes, shimmering in the depths of them. Theo’s mother had been important to Eric, too. Eric had lost almost as much as Theo had, hadn’t he? He’d been a bit selfish in his own suffering, and he reached impulsively for his best friend’s hand and squeezed it lightly, feeling the warmth of Eric’s palm as it caressed his.
He’d never done such a thing before, and he saw the surprise in Eric’s luminous eyes as a result. Quickly, he dropped Eric’s hand and took a careful step back. The crowd around the burial site was dispersing, and to him, that seemed like the best idea in the world.
Get out of there before he cried. His eyes were stinging with tears which he refused to shed already. No one could even blame him, but he broke away anyway. He couldn’t stand to see the befuddled discomfort in anyone’s eyes, inEric’seyes, even if he knew that no one would say a thing.
“You okay, man?” Eric was asking, but there was a loud ringing in Theo’s ears, and he could barely hear the words. People were watching him. He could feel their eyes on him, weighing him down, making his skin tingle and crawl and burn. Everyone was watching to see how he reacted to burying his mother, and they were all judging him for his weakness.
The ringing in his ears only got louder, more distracting, as Theo took a step away from the burial site. Feeling like a cornered animal, with his breath piling up in his lungs and threatening to stifle him, he took another step back, and another, and each movement made him feel a little bit freer.
Maybe he could just run and run and never stop.
Just as he turned away, half intending to do just that, he felt the clutch of cool fingers around his wrist. At first, it made him panic more than ever because he assumed it was his father, or a family friend, someone who wanted to wish him well and to whom he was expected to be polite.
Like it mattered. Like any of it mattered anymore. He would never see any of these people again. His father had made sure of that. For once in his life, it didn’t matter what anyone thought of him because he was going to lose everything that he had anyway.
So he tensed, every muscle in his body on alert, and he would have pulled his hand right from Eric’s grasp if he hadn’t realized that it was his best friend who was holding him.
“I gotta go,” Theo told him, and for some reason, even through the loud roaring of his own blood in his ears, and his selfish misery, he could still hear it when Eric spoke to him.
“Okay. I’ll come with you.”
Sometimes, Eric was a pain in the ass. Often, he teased Theo mercilessly, and when Theo had been younger, he’d actually thought Eric must hate him. When it mattered, though, Eric was there. No matter how much Theo felt like he needed to be alone, right then, he really didn’t.
What he needed was a friend, and he had one. Maybe the only friend he had in the whole world. Some of the guys that he still knew from the high school chess club and yearbook club were there, but they looked even more uncomfortable than he felt, and none of them could even stand to look at him.
Eric was there, though, and still holding his wrist, and it seemed just as easy for him to run with Eric as it was for him to run alone. Maybe even easier, because at least he knew that his best friend would snarl away anyone who said anything shitty to Theo.
