Sunbound

☀ The Beetle and the Pothole

C H A P T E R   17:  The Beetle and the Pothole

☀ ☀ ☀

It was early in the morning. It couldn't have been any more than 7:30, and it was raining. Hard. To Skylar, the lightening shot across the sky like the wires in a light bulb, and the thunder sounded like glass exploding into the atmosphere.

Skylar was sitting on the steps to the office of V&L's Motel. His elbows were propped on is knees, and his chin rested heavy in his hands. He was safe and dry beneath the awning, until he stuck a hand out and the muggy rain pelted his palm. He watched as the bigger droplets exploded into smaller particles against his palm, and within a moment he felt like he was having a breakdown.

This is wrong. Everything is wrong. I can't do this, he thought.

He wasn't supposed to stay anywhere this long, or have dinners with families, and take girls out to restaurants, or confide in them with anything that even remotely reminded him of his old life. He could feel the ghosts he believed lived in the air crawling beneath his eyelids and into his head, where they pulled all of those memories to the front of his mind. He thought of Matt and the twins and Leah. He thought of how disappointed they were when he left, and the guilt that strangled his heart was almost enough to make him walk the thousands of miles back to them. But then he thought of how many times he had almost ruined their lives, and how much more damage he would've caused if he had stayed. He would have probably overdosed, and he couldn't bear putting them through that. He couldn't bear the people who once loved him the most having to bury him like he buried Jackie. The thought of Jackie still burned his throat and the back of his eyes to this day, and, my god, if he had stayed, they probably would've ended up running like he was now, and this was no way to live. This wasn't even living. This was a suicide as slow as a pack of cigarettes a day.

"Hey, kid," Violet grunted through the screen door of the office.

Skylar signed heavily. He couldn't handle any social interaction, especially with someone as difficult to handle as Violet. She was the last person he wanted to see. He just wanted these people to leave him be and stop making everything harder than it had to be.

"Oh-ho-ho," she snickered. "Don't sigh like I'm inconveniencin' you."

Skylar's back was to the door, but he already knew she looked annoyed.

The hinges screamed as she pushed her way through the screen door. Her stained, blue slippers that she wore more often outside than in scuffed across the porch until she was standing beside him. She couldn't see his face. His head hung low, staring at the black, horned beetle drowning in a pothole flooded with rainwater.

Violet's hips popped as she bent over, placing a long, silver chain over Skylar's head. She dropped it around his neck and it made a quiet slap against his chest.

"Found this in the bottom of the washin' machine from the last time I did ya laundry."

Skylar looked down at his chest, his eyes following the tarnished silver to where it hung the heaviest in the middle of his chest. The chain wasn't exactly silver anymore. It was a shade of penitence in brass, suggesting it had led a life more unfortunate than Skylar. But no thing could feel as unforunate as Skylar, not as he sat there a thousand days into this pursuit of nowhere, watching his reflection in the pothole of the drowning beetle.

Hanging around his neck was the silver five-point star an old friend, Jake, had given him the Christmas a few days after Jackie's death. He hadn't seen that necklace since March of 2008... and he never wanted to see it again.