Evan’s eyes rolled so far back in her head it was pure luck they didn’t get stuck staring at the inside of her skull. “Oh my God, you’re literally ruining my life,” she decreed dramatically. That was her second favorite thing to say lately, how I was literally ruining her life.
“Do your old man a favor, and crack a dictionary, kiddo. Look up what the word ‘literally’ actually means.”
She curled her top lip up in a sneer. “Ugh, how old are you? No one owns dictionaries anymore. You look it up online.”
Was forty too young to have a stroke? Not if it was stress induced, right? “Then google what it means. But do it once you’re out of the car.”
“Jeez! What’s your deal? I’m fourteen, not a little baby. I can stay in the car by myself for a few minutes.”
A bark of laughter erupted from my throat. “Now who’s kidding who here?” Pulling my aviator style sunglasses off, I tossed them into a cupholder and twisted in my seat to face my girl—the light of my life, even when she was driving me to insanity—full on. Bracing my forearm on the steering wheel, I rounded my eyes in bewilderment. “It’s not lost on you why we’re making the move here in the first place, right?”
“Uh, because you want to make my life miserable?” she sniped sarcastically. “Yeah, I kind of got that.”
I pulled in a calming breath, counting down from ten before I dared respond. “No. We’re here because of you and the terrible decisions you were making.”
She threw her arms up, flailing in the seat. “I told you a million times, that whole thing with Kelsey’s mom’s car was an accident!”
That thing with the car she was so casually referring to was that while she and a few other girls were staying overnight at their friend Kelsey’s house, they decided there was absolutely nothing wrong with taking Kelsey’s mom’s car out for a little 3:00 AM joy ride. Only Kelsey had been sucking on a vape pen all damn night that contained more than just nicotine and ended up crashing the fucking thing into a light pole because she was high as a kite. It was a goddamn wonder none of them had been seriously hurt, and that middle of the night call from the police station had shaved a good ten years off the end of my life. I’d had plans for those years, thank you very much, and now they were just gone, replaced with even more gray hairs.
And as catastrophic as that had been, it was only the tip of the iceberg. She’d gone from a straight A student, regularly on the honor roll, to failing nearly every class. She’d stopped spending time with the friends she’d had since kindergarten and started hanging out with a whole new crew that did shit like get high and steal their own mother’s car, for Christ’s sake. She backtalked, she threw attitude. If she decided not to skip school—something she’d started doing with alarming frequency—she was getting in trouble with teachers and the principal for being insubordinate. She’d even started dressing differently, her clothes mainly consisting of varying shades of black and gray, all of which had tears in them I wasn’t convinced were put there by the designer. She bounced between two pairs of shoes, a beat-up pair of Chuck Taylors or black combat boots. She’d even started doing her makeup differently, wearing black eyeliner rimmed so thick you could barely see her beautiful eyes. When I’d put my foot down and refused to let her dye her hair black, you’d have thought I told her I was packing her up and shipping her off to a convent for the fit she threw.
But the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I came home early to pick up some documents I’d forgotten in my home office, and found a half-dressed nineteen-year-old shithead trying to climb out of her bedroom window. The only reason I hadn’t called the cops on him was because it was obvious he’d been lied to. I’d never seen a human being faint before, but that was exactly what he did after I informed him she was only four-fucking-teen. Eyes rolled back in his head, skin turned white as a sheet, and he passed the hell out, hanging halfway out a second story window. Broke a couple bones on the fall, for good measure.
Evan’s mom had written her off months before as being a problem child beyond saving, choosing instead to give full custody to me and pretend she didn’t exist under the guise of tough love. Her last words in regard to her own daughter was that Evan shouldn’t bother to call until she got her act straight. I’d wanted to ring her goddamn neck, and might have actually done it if it hadn’t meant Evan would lose the only stable person she had in her life to prison time.
I refused to give up on her, however. I’d tried everything I could think of to pull her out of this downward spiral: I’d grounded her, I’d taken away her phone and television, I’d enrolled us in counseling—together and separately—but nothing worked. It was as if she’d erected a wall around herself, and I couldn’t get through. I couldn’t scale it and get to the girl I loved trapped behind it. But I wasn’t going to stop trying, damn it. She wasn’t something you could just write off, she was a person, she was mine, and if my parents had taught me anything, it was that you never ever, gave up on the people you loved. And Evan had my whole entire heart. So I’d climb and climb until my fingers bled, never giving up hope I’d scale that damn wall.
This move was my latest attempt at making things better. I hoped that getting her out of the big city and away from the so-called friends she’d started hanging with would help her turn a corner. Only time would tell.
“You know what? The fact that you’d even try to defend yourself after that whole mess just goes to show how immature and irresponsible you are,” I chastised. “So, no, you obviously aren’t old enough to wait in a car by yourself. Now move it.”
She grumbled and bitched the whole time it took her to get out of the car. Finally, after moving slower than any living human could possibly move, she slammed the door and stomped up onto the sidewalk. “There. Happy now?” she snapped.
Not even close, but I was only seconds away from coffee and just starting this new beginning I’d mapped out for both of us. So, while I might not have been happy in that very moment, at least I was hopeful.
As in: Dear Christ, I hope like hell this works.