Here Comes the Sun | ✓

Chapter Twenty-Five - Liam

Chapter Twenty-Five - Liam

Pulling out the cardboard box from the top of my closet, I carry it to my bed with shaking hands. Once sitting down, I open the flaps and find the stack of photos I'd been aiming to find, taking them out and pushing the box to the side.

On the top of the stack is a picture of us - my family.

No, I correct myself. My old family.

Mom's brunette hair was blowing in the wind, her blinding-white teeth reflecting the camera's flash. It was winter, considering their wool coats wrapped snug around them as well as the snow their feet were trapped under. Dad's light brown hair was in its same position as it was earlier that morning inside, as it was gelled back with some kind of smelly mousse. His smile was forced. I hadn't noticed that all those years ago when it was stuck in a picture frame on the wall, but now I do, and I wish I had been a smarter kid back then.

So many mistakes... so many bad memories.

Flipping to the next photograph though, I come face-to-face with the one mistake that turned out to be the greatest thing life had ever brought me: Jeremiah Tucker Nottes. Her hair was a dangerous shade of brown, and those eyes - those damn eyes that showed you the sky and the old possibility of an infinity farther than the future - they killed me.

Her skin was a pale white, and her eyebrows were lost in a forest that fit her persona perfectly. The perfect complexion; the jaunty smirk that played on her lips. Everything was so... confusing about her. There was the girl with the never-ending energy, her constant insistence to do risky things, her timeless skills of showing me things I was centuries away from ever stumbling upon....

And then, there was the girl who was intimate and vulnerable; the girl everyone else was too busy and distracted to ever take the time to find behind that big facade of hers. And maybe that's why she chose me - the one to recognize me as not just any other freshman in high school.

Sure, I could have a good time and laugh at her jokes and join in on her dangerous games she always loved to play, but I was also a good friend. Not in a vain way, but in a self-aware way. I would be there when no one else was; I would listen to her when no one else would. And maybe that's why, when disaster struck, she ran away.

She was scared of something that she couldn't understand - something that she couldn't handle.

Her parents pressured the abortion option, but she hurriedly denied every time. She refused to take the baby in, though. She couldn't have a baby, much less raise one. The only resort: me.

It's when something hits the picture when I realize that I'm crying.

How could a person walk out on something - someone - so incredible? She never even gave him a chance - not even more than one glance before bawling and saying in a pained voice, "Get that thing away from me."

Mom didn't want Jere to be a part of the Nottes' picture. She would lie to her friends about me being a fourteen-year-old father, always laughing and saying, "Kids these days, making up the strangest of tales," while I hid in my room, rocking Jere to sleep to the sound of my erratic heartbeat.

And Dad... never acknowledged a thing that happened. Even when Jere was in his booster chair in the kitchen, bawling because he didn't want mushed peas that morning, Dad wouldn't look up from the news section of the newspaper.

The girl - Rose - never returned to our school after the birth of our child. She moved to Manhattan apparently, although I don't know for sure. All contact with her was lost - not that I reached out at all. Despite me understanding why she would leave us, the morality of the situation is what makes me think at night.