Page 60 of Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit
God, I basically had. She’d asked me if I was okay, and I’d reacted like she was poison.
“You’re going to lose her,” Matt said softly, his face turned after her as well.
I snorted. “Haven’t you heard? That’s not real. She was never actually mine in the first place.”
I knew it wasn’t true. I’d seen her that first night and known immediately that she could be mine if I wanted her. I’d talked her into stealing a car with me, telling her that we’d return it. I’d made out with her in a hallway when she was wearing nothing more than a big t-shirt. Held her against me as she slept and breathed her in like some idiot from one of those movies girls were always watching.
I’d let myself open up to her.
And then I’d closed off again. Because it was better for her if she didn’t see the real me, and it was better for me if I didn’t get used to having someone like her around. So yeah, I was going to keep telling myself that she was never mine to lose in the first place.
She disappeared around a bend in the hallway with a flash of dark red hair, leaving nothing to show she’d even been there, and I let out the breath I’d been holding.
Then I turned back toward Matt and prepared to tell him exactly where he could stick all his concern about Missouri. Because he was right: There was a problem. And I already knew how I was going to solve it.
Regardless of how anyone else felt about it.
31
RIVERS
Iwoke up the next morning like I was going to war, my hands in fists and my blood rushing with adrenaline. I sat up quickly and nearly jumped out of bed, positive that there was somewhere I had to be or something I had to do—or run from. Once I glanced around the room, though, trying to figure out where the danger was, I started to calm down.
This was a hotel room. I recognized the ugly couch in the corner as the one I’d almost crashed on last night, and the equally ugly quilt scrunched up around my feet right now. The window in the corner letting in too much sunlight. The glimpse of the standard hotel bathroom through the other door. White counter. White floor. Stand-up shower.
No bathtub.
Not that I cared about that sort of thing. I definitely didn’t take baths when I felt stressed and in need of some water therapy.
Either way, hotel room. Not the room I’d been dreaming about.
I didn’t know what had brought on the dream. Maybe a smell or the feel of scratchy, cheap hotel sheets. Maybe the section of the country we were in.
A sudden dinging started, and I nearly ducked for cover right then, shocked into even more anxiety by the sound.
“Right,” I breathed, staring toward the window. That was what had given me the dream. We’d pulled into this town late last night, and I hadn’t had a chance to do anything more than grab the key to my room and head up to start drinking. But when I got up and slid my fingers through the blinds on the window, I saw a train station right across the street.
Honestly, I was surprised it had taken until this morning for the sounds to wake me up. Maybe this was a small enough town that they didn’t have many trains come through here. Or maybe it was one of those places where the trains didn’t generally blow their horns to warn pedestrians that they were coming through. I’d seen that before; small towns where the trains only passed through and didn’t stop. Bare-faced signs that said trains were coming and to keep the hell off the tracks.
The town where I’d spent time living next to a train station had had one of those signs.
I’d thrown rocks at it when I was locked out of the house and didn’t have any place to go. I’d also thrown rocks at it when the house was open, and I didn’t want to go into it because I knew what I’d find there: a man who liked to hit the kids who stayed with them and a woman who liked to look the other way because it kept her from getting hit. I didn’t know how the hell those people had been approved as foster parents, but over time I’d come to think it was probably that the people who oversaw the system itself hadn’t had the time or capacity to care about such things. Their job was to make sure kids cycled out of the group home for a certain number of months every year. Lived in a real house. Got a taste of family life.
The problem was, kids who cycled into some houses didn’t get anything like a normal family life. They got the people who were playing foster parent only for the check it brought in and didn’t give a single fuck about the kids themselves. Worse, they were people who actively wanted kids they could beat up on or abuse. Or use as servants.
Or sell to their friends for purposes I’d never experienced personally but had heard about.
Our drummer Noah had been through that. And he’d told me about it precisely once, one night when we’d had way too much to drink and had started talking about the worst families we’d ever seen. He’d been handed over to a single mom who seemed to have a good history—she’d had multiple kids, and they always came back to the group home healthy—but he’d learned pretty quick that her record wasn’t as clean as it looked. It was just that the kids she’d hosted had been too scared and damaged to tell the people who ran the place what went on in her house. They’d been starved and beaten, and when they complained about it, they found out that things could get even worse. She had neighbors who paid to have access to kids.
It didn’t matter how old they were.
I hadn’t known Noah at the time, but he said he’d come back wanting to kill the world. And he’d never lost that chip on his shoulder. He was the angriest person I’d ever met, and he didn’t bother to hide it unless our favorite roadie, Molly, was around to calm him down. She’d grown up with us—on the girls’ side of the home, of course—and had somehow wormed her way into Noah’s heart early. He’d never truly let her go.
His story, though…
The train rushed by the window, breaking through my thoughts, and I shook my head. I didn’t want to be thinking about these things. I didn’t want to remember anything about the places where I’d grown up.
The problem was, my brain seemed to know that I was within miles of Missouri. And my subconscious was intent on reminding me that this was where it had all started.
