The Fire Between High & Lo
Page 7

“A lot about the stars. If there was a good enough place in this town I’d show you the stars without all of the light pollution, and show you a few of the constellations. But sadly, there isn’t.”
“That’s too bad. I would love that. I’ve been thinking, though. You should make a documentary about your life.”
He laughed. “No one would want to watch that.”
I tilted my head in his direction. “I would.”
He gave me half a smile before he wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into the curve of his body. His warmth always sent sparks flying through me.
“Lo?” I whispered, half awake, half asleep, and secretly falling for my best friend.
“Yeah?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but instead of words, a quiet sigh left me. My head fell against his chest, and I listened to the sound of his heartbeats, counting each one. One... Two… Forty-five…
Within minutes, my mind slowed down. Within minutes, I forgot why I was so sad. Within minutes, I was asleep.
Chapter Three
Logan
Ma and I didn’t have cable in our apartment, which was fine, I didn’t mind much. When I was a kid, we had cable, but it didn’t seem worth it because of my dad. He was the one who paid the cable bill, and he always complained about me sitting in front of the television watching cartoons. It was as if he hated that I was somewhat happy for a few moments during the day. Then one day he came into our home, took the television, and canceled the services.
That was the day he moved out of the apartment.
That was also one of the best days of my life.
After some time, I found a television in a dumpster. It was a small 19-inch television with a DVD player, so I’d check out a bunch of documentaries from the library and watch them at home. I was the person who knew too much about everything: baseball, tropical birds, and Area 51, all due to the documentaries. Yet, at the same time, I knew absolutely nothing.
Sometimes Ma watched them with me, but most of the time, it was a solo gig.
Ma loved me, but she didn’t like me much.
Well, that wasn’t true.
Sober Ma loved me as if I was her best friend.
Drugged Ma was a monster, and she was the only one who lived in our house lately.
I missed Sober Ma some days. Sometimes when I shut my eyes, I’d remember the sound of her laugh, and the curve of her lips when she was happy.
Stop, Logan.
I hated my mind, how it remembered. Memories were daggers to my soul, and I hardly had any positive ones to hold on to.
I didn’t care though, because I kept my mind high enough to almost forget about the crappy life I lived. If I stayed locked in my room, stocked up on documentaries, with some good shit to smoke, I could almost forget that my mom stood on a corner a few weeks ago, trying to sell her body for a few lines of blow.
That was a call I never wanted to get from my friend, Jacob.
“Dude. I just saw your mom on the corner of Jefferson and Wells Street. I think she’s um…” Jacob paused. “I think you should get down here.”
Tuesday morning, I sat in my bed, staring at my ceiling, while a documentary on Chinese artifacts played as my background music, when she shouted my name.
“Logan! Logan! Logan, get in here!”
I laid as still as I could, hoping she’d stop calling me, but she didn’t. Pushing myself up from my mattress, I headed out of my bedroom, to find Ma sitting at the dining room table. Our apartment was tiny, but we didn’t have much to put inside of it anyway. A broken down sofa, a dirty coffee table with stains, and a dining room table with three different chairs.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“I need you to clean the windows from the outside, Logan,” Ma said, pouring herself a bowl of milk and placing five Cheerios inside of the cracked bowl. She said she was on a new diet, and didn’t want to get fat. There was no way that she weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and being five foot and nine inches tall, I thought she was almost skeletal.
She looked exhausted. Did she even sleep last night?
Her hair was a mess that morning, but no more a mess than her entire existence. Ma always looked broken down, and I couldn’t think of a time when she didn’t. She always painted her fingernails on Sunday morning, and always chipped it off by Sunday night, leaving little spots of color remaining on her nails throughout the week until the next Sunday morning when she repeated the task. Her clothes were always dirty, but she would spray Febreze on them at four in the morning, before ironing them. She believed that Febreze was a decent replacement for washing our clothes at the local laundr0mat.
I disagreed with her technique, and snuck her clothes out whenever I could, to wash them. Most people probably walked past spare change on the ground, but for me, it could’ve meant clean pants that week.
“It’s supposed to rain all day. I’ll clean them tomorrow,” I replied. I wouldn’t though. She’d forget soon enough. Plus, cleaning our third floor apartment windows without a balcony seemed a bit ridiculous. Especially during a rainstorm.
I opened the fridge door to stare at the bare shelves. It had been empty for days now.
My fingers stayed wrapped around the handle of the refrigerator. I opened and closed it, almost as if food would magically appear to fill my noisy stomach. Right then, like the wizard he was, the front door opened and my brother Kellan came in behind me, holding grocery bags in his hand, and shaking the rainwater from his jacket.
“Hungry?” he asked, nudging me in the arm. Maybe Ma was only eating Cheerios because that’s all we had.
Kellan was the only person I’d ever trusted—other than Alyssa. We looked almost like twins, except he was stronger, more handsome, and more stable. He had a classic buzz cut, designer clothes, and no bags under his eyes. The only bruises that ever showed up on his skin were from a tackle during a college football game—which didn’t happen that often.
He lucked out with a better life, simply because he had a better dad. His father was a surgeon. My dad was more of a street pharmacist who dealt drugs to the neighborhood kids, and to my mother.
DNA: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
“Geez,” he said, looking into the refrigerator. “You’ll need more stuff than what I bought.”
“How did you even know we needed food?” I questioned, helping him unload the bags.
“I called him,” Ma said, eating one of her Cheerios, slurping on the milk. “It’s not like you were gonna feed us.”