“That’s a good one to hold onto, Lo.”
“Yeah.” I gave her a tight smile, never really letting anyone know how much I missed my mom, but knowing that she understood, because she missed her dad, too. “What’s a beautiful memory about your dad?”
“You know the vinyl record player in my bedroom?”
“Yeah.”
“He got me that one year for Christmas, and we started the tradition that every night we’d listen and sing a song before I went to bed. Then, in the morning, we’d wake up and sing a song, too. Modern music, oldies, anything. It was our thing. Sometimes my sister Erika would come in and sing with us, sometimes Mom would yell for us to turn down the sounds, but we always laughed and smiled.”
“Is that why there’s always music playing at night when I come to see you?”
“Yeah. It’s funny how I play all the same songs that he and I used to, but now the lyrics all seem so different.”
We kept the conversation going all night long.
I fed her raspberries while she fed me her dreams.
She fed me raspberries while I fed her my fears.
We stared out at the night sky, feeling safe and free for a while.
“Do you ever think about how insane people are?” I asked. “There are over three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Three hundred billion specks of light reminding us of all that is out there in the universe. Three hundred billion flames that look so small. Yet they are literally bigger than you could ever imagine. There are all these different galaxies, all these different worlds that we have never, and will never discover.
“There’s so much wonder in the world, but instead of giving a damn, and taking the time to come to the realization that we are all very, very, small in a very, very miniature place, we like to pretend we are the alphas of the whole universe. We like to make ourselves feel big. And we each like to make our way seem like the best way, and our hurts seem like the biggest hurts, when really, we are nothing more than a tiny burning dot that makes up a part of the giant sky. A tiny dot that no one would even notice was missing. A tiny dot, that will soon enough be replaced by another speck which thinks it’s more important than it actually is. I just wish people would sometimes stop fighting about stupid mundane things like race, sexual orientation, and reality television. I wish they would remember how small they are and take five minutes a day to look up to the sky and breathe.”
“Logan?”
“Yeah?”
“I love your mind.”
“Alyssa?”
“Yeah?”
I’m falling in love with you…
“Thanks for tonight. You have no clue how much I needed this. You have no clue how much I needed you.” I lightly squeezed her hand. “You’re my greatest high.”
Chapter Five
Logan
“Lo! Lo! Lo!” Alyssa screamed a week later, running toward me in the pouring rain. I was on the highest stair of the ladder, working on cleaning the third floor windows from the outside. Obviously Ma only asked me to clean them when it was pouring rain outside. Alyssa’s voice rattled me, making me send the bucket of water (which was mainly rain water) crashing to the ground.
“God, Alyssa!” I shouted toward her.
She gave me a slight frown, holding a bright yellow polka dot umbrella over her head. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Cleaning the windows.”
“But it’s raining.”
No shit, Sherlock, I thought to myself. But then I realized it wasn’t Alyssa’s fault that I was cleaning the windows and she didn’t deserve my bad attitude. I climbed down the steps of the ladder and stared at my friend. She took one large step toward me and held the umbrella over both of us.
“Your mom made you do that?” she questioned with the saddest looking eyes I’d ever seen.
I didn’t reply.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, slightly angered. I didn’t live in the kind of place that Alyssa did. I lived in a shit neighborhood, and it wasn’t the safest place for any person, especially someone like Alyssa. There was a basketball court down the street where more drug deals happened than games. There were the individuals who stood on the street corners from morning to night, hustling each other, trying to make an extra buck. There were the prostitutes who walked up and down the streets, strung out. And there were the gun shots that were always heard, but luckily I never saw them hit any targets.
I hated this place. These streets. These people.
And I hated that Alyssa showed up here sometimes.
She blinked a few times as if she’d forgotten her reason for coming over.
“Oh yeah!” she said, her frown turning into a full blown grin. “Ass-Crack called me! I wanted him to come to my piano recital tonight, but he didn’t call me back, remember? Until now! He just called me and said he could make it!” She squeaked. I blinked, unmoved.
Ass-Crack was known for making these kinds of promises to Alyssa and he always had a way of backing out at the last minute.
“Don’t do that,” she said, pointing a finger at me.