Next-Door Nemesis

“For the next few days, it was a crapshoot if she’d come home or not. The groceries she had stocked up were starting to run out and I was lying to my grandparents more and more about how things were going. It wasn’t great, but it was only for a month and I thought I could tough it out.”

The story already has me so angry that I can’t imagine it could get worse, but somehow I know he’s barely scratched the surface. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to tell me the rest, that I understand and we can move on, but something is telling me he needs to get this out as much as I need to hear it.

“One night, I can’t remember how long I’d been there, she got home really late. I was sleeping, but I guess she lost her key or something so she just started banging on the door, yelling at me to let her in. As soon as the door opened, it was like someone hit me over the head with a bottle of whiskey.” His voice is flat as he stares unseeing straight ahead. “She stumbled inside and the smell of alcohol filled the entire apartment. When I tried to get her to lie down, she started screaming at me. Telling me that getting pregnant ruined her life. She said my dad was the worst mistake of her life. How he tried to trap her in Ohio to keep her small like him and I was just like him, pulling her down, and it was a mistake to have me visit her. She said she should be a star and it was everyone else’s fault that she wasn’t.”

It’s hard to breathe.

My first year in LA, I bruised two ribs.

I became friends with this girl in my dorms whose cousin was a stunt double. Her cousin had just landed a role as a stunt double in a major action film and invited us to train with her one day. I was eighteen and an idiot who didn’t think anything bad would ever happen to me. So when her cousin asked if we wanted to learn how to look as if we were getting hit with a baseball bat, my dumb ass didn’t think twice. Of course she accidentally hit me. Because I never did the whole team sports thing, I’d never gotten a serious injury before. I’ll never forget how painful it was to do something as simple and necessary as breathing. I vowed I’d never do something stupid like that again.

Yet, here I am, sitting in Nate’s kitchen, feeling as if shards of glass are tearing me apart every time I inhale.

“I waited until after she passed out to call my grandparents. They bought me a train ticket back to Ohio the next day,” he says quietly. “The train ride was almost twenty hours and I don’t remember much of it, but the one thing I remember vividly is how fast the sadness morphed into anger. I spent the next two weeks at my grandparents’ farm and my mom didn’t call me. Not once.”

The urge to track the woman down and beat the living daylights out of her is almost too much to handle. I can’t imagine anyone treating anyone that way, but your own son? It’s unfathomable.

“I’m so sorry.” It’s not enough, but it’s all I have. There aren’t any words to make what he went through any less terrible. “But I’m still not sure I understand why you didn’t tell me any of this.”

“I know it’s not fair, but I was mad at you.” His grip tightens and he prevents me from pulling my hand away. “I spent all that time alone on the train and then two weeks with my grandparents just stewing on everything. I was pissed, but my grandma kept telling me how I only get one mom and although she may not be perfect, I had to love her anyways.”

“You know that’s not true, right?” I’m still not sure how this is going to end, but I won’t be able to leave here unless I know he’s created healthy boundaries in his life. “You don’t have to accept anyone hurting you. Even your mom.”

It might not be a popular opinion, but I’m of the firm belief that nobody is deserving of space in your life if they only cause harm.

“I know that now, but I didn’t then and I needed my anger to go somewhere. And you know what they say.” He pauses and takes a deep breath before looking at me. “You hurt the people closest to you. For me, that was you.”

He’s getting closer to the answers I wanted, but now I don’t know if I want to hear them anymore.

“Nate—” I try to stop him, but he keeps talking.

“You were still texting and calling every day. You’d record those ridiculous three-minute voicemails you used to leave all the time.” He rolls his eyes and I decide this isn’t the time to inform him that I still leave those voicemails. Ruby’s voicemail box is always full because of them. “You’d tell me about what shows you were watching and about the book you were reading. Those were fine, but then you’d complain about how your parents were driving you crazy. Or you’d talk about how you ran into someone from school that you hated and how you couldn’t wait to move to LA.”

“Oh fuck.” Realization finally dawns on me. Guilt that I didn’t expect to feel hits me like a freaking dump truck, which is fitting because boy oh boy do I feel like trash. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I—”

He cuts me off again.

“Don’t apologize. You didn’t know, and even if you did, you were allowed to complain about your parents. I’m pretty sure that’s your job as a teenager,” he says. “And looking back, I don’t think you could’ve done anything right. I was so embarrassed, my ego wouldn’t have let me tell you anyways. But also, everything my mom said penetrated deep. I knew you wanted to move to LA and I figured it was only a matter of time before you left me just like she did.”

And I did.

I close my eyes and fight back tears on the verge of falling. Not only did we lose out on so many years together, but in trying to protect ourselves, we confirmed everything we already feared. That we weren’t good enough or deserving . . . when in actuality, we were both.

I understand why he stopped talking to me, but I still have a couple of questions that I need answered.

“Why were you all of a sudden best friends with the football jocks? And why, out of all the people in our school, did you have to date Rachel?” The football guys I kind of understood. They were assholes, but they were funny. Plus, the quarterback’s parents were loaded and they were always taking him and his friends on vacations. But Rachel? She was a bitch and Nate hated her. She made my life a living hell in middle school and even as an adult, I can’t think of one redeeming quality about her.

When I saw them holding hands in school together for the first time, I almost threw up.

“Because I knew you hated them. I knew if you saw me with them, you wouldn’t ask questions I didn’t want to answer. You’d think I changed and you’d be pissed, but you’d stop trying to figure out what happened.” He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Plus, they were safe. They were too into themselves to notice if something was wrong with me, and I knew they weren’t going to up and leave me. They were happy living in Ohio and you resented it. If it makes you feel better, though, Rachel never stopped being awful and I was miserable when we dated.”

“That does make me feel a little better.” I try to smile, but I don’t do a great job.

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