Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
22, These Mistakes are the Better Ones, I Hope
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Steve knows he shouldn't, but he does anyway. It's like a feeling that's built into his system, permanently. This feeling, this care, it rots him alive. (He can't help it. He's built to fail. He's a boy. A teenage boy. He's his father's son. He will fail.) He finds himself, at odd moments of the days, wondering if Lowen's okay. Wondering if she's done something with her life? He wonders a lot if she's dead? If drugs had finally beaten her in that sick game she's constantly playing? If she lives on the side of a road somewhere, a few towns over maybe? That probably isn't the case. Steve knows her, well. She doesn't give up that easily when it comes to herself. Giving up on others is a different story, she's fucking great at that one. Lowen Odette would never let herself live on the side of a dirty street for onlookers to see her disparity. She's probably done horrible and saddening things to keep herself up right. Steve is glad, glad Violet's with him. Lowen would be a horrible mother, and he knows that with everything he's got. And he doesn't have much to begin with. Thanks to her and a bunch of girls after her. (Maybe that's unfair of him to think.)
He loves his fucking kid. Even if she makes him cry late at night when no ones around, when she's finally fallen asleep with blotchy red cheeks and a swore throat from wailing. He doesn't cry over girls, but the Odette's seem to be a different story. He's always crying over the Odette's.
Steve wonders if Nancy would fit in with the Odette women. She's made him cry. Called him bullshit. It was Halloween, maybe she was pretending to be Lowen.
No, Nancy's not an Odette. She never could be. She's too kind. Despite what she told Steve. She was drunk and sad and her best friends dead. Her best friend died in Steve's pool. An Odette would've laughed at the chances. Made him cry. Nancy did not laugh. She did not make him cry, she made him angry. Odette's make him cry. Nancy had been the one crying, very hard. Steve had just stared in disbelief, anger crawling up his veins like spiders spilling from hatched eggs. A million of them in Steve.
Nancy is crying very hard, right now, in someone else's arms. And Steve doesn't even care to think of her.
If he thinks of her, more spiders come. They'll come out of his mouth and eyes. Maybe even his ears.
