Knock Him Off His Feet

Before

FOSTER

The silence between my mother and I is tolerable. It's the arguing, the loud yells and screams that aren't.

She stares at the road ahead, reaching down to shut off the car radio. The quietness that comes after is unbearable, only because it means she's about to say something next.

I cross my bare arms feeling goosebumps over my biceps and shoulders.

"Did you bring a coat?" my mother suddenly asks, nearly startling me in my seat.

"No," I reply truthfully, knowing it'd never matter. "I'll be sweating anyways."

"Foster, it's the middle of December—" She interrupts herself with a cough, and I know she's trying to remind herself that I'm almost 18. She doesn't need to tell me. "Just be careful."

It has always been difficult to talk to my mother, though I don't exactly know why. Maybe it's because I look the most like her, maybe because I know she can't handle herself most nights, because she smiles during the day and cries herself to sleep.

She'd thought she was a bad mother after hearing about my fighting. She still thinks that, even though she continues to let me do it. Even though she lets me live in danger.

I don't blame her; I'd much rather have her let me brawl then not let me do anything at all. But she thinks she's a monster, and maybe she thinks that I'm one too—

"Xavier was asking if he could come with you," she starts. Maybe she thinks the silence between us is toxic, while I think it's peaceful. "I told him he couldn't. I didn't want him to see the outcome of the fight."

Anger for Aline Prescott explodes from my hands and my mouth, poking the surface of my skin and tingling my lips. I run my tongue over my bottom lip and clench my jaw so tight I'm afraid it might break.

"He's allowed to come if he wants to." She feels me staring right at the side of her face, though her eyes stay pinned to the road. "He's old enough for it."

My mother lets out an eerie laugh, though it ends in calm giggles and a soft smile. "He's fourteen. You don't get to decide what's best for him." She spits her words at me bitterly, maintaining the mom tone she's always had since I was Xavier's age.

"And you do?"

"I'm his mother!"

I slouch frustrated in my seat, looking out the window even though there's not much to see. There are a few cars that pass by us, a few bright headlights shining in the dark of night.

I lean my head against the window and let the sound of the wheels rolling on the road sing me out of whatever moment is now, whatever trance I must be in.

"I haven't heard much about that girl you were hanging out with earlier. What was her name?"

A pang hits me chest as I breathe out her name. "Michella."

Something clicks in my mother's brain as she nods her head once. "Hm."

She doesn't like Michella. Not many people do. I don't understand why, what makes her so unlikeable, what makes her so distasteful from the heart.

She's beautiful, her favourite colour is yellow, she visits her father in Miami every summer to watch the baby turtles leave for the ocean, she has chestnut skin and a dabble of freckles across her nose and a smile brighter than a thousand suns.

Even if I ask myself the question a million times, I know the real reason no one likes her. I just wish she didn't believe it.

"Michella is a very interesting girl," my mother starts, acting like we haven't had this conversation before. "Your father and I, we just don't think she's a very good influence on you—"

"Bullshit" I spit, feeling something within me snap to light like a glow-stick. "There's nothing wrong with her. You're just saying that because you think what everybody else thinks."

My mother closes her eyes for a quick moment before flicking them open again, attention snapped to the road. "Foster-James Parker, don't speak to me—"

"You're just like the kids at school, hung up on rumours."

"She's the town slut, Foster!" my mother seethes, leaning closely to the wheel of the car. "Being with a girl like that does nothing for a boy like you."

It's like a punch to the face when I hear the words "girl like her" and "boy like you". It's like she's talking about the two of us as if we've never met, as if she's on the other side of an unclimbable wall, as if I've never even breathed her name.

That's a lie, and we both know it.

"She's not a slut," I growl. "A mother who calls any girl a slut is no mother at all."

I don't know what comes over me, whether it's the many times of arguing or the anger built up inside of me for my very own mom, but it's like a bomb dropping. My mother and I explode like fireworks in the car, inaudible over each other's screams and yells to overtake one another.

It hurts my heart to yell at her but it hurts even more when she insults her, Michella, wrongly called a slut for someone else's behaviour.

It wasn't her fault someone had done that, someone had stole her in the middle of the night and never gave her back.

She shouts at me to calm down, but at the same time her opinions mix into her screaming and now all I hear is the sour melody of pain and frustration. It, too, claws at my throat and rushes out of my mouth like dragon fire, scalding hot and burning us down to the ground.

I hope she doesn't see it, but my eyes glaze over with dangerous tears. Tears that feel like acid rain, running down my cheeks and peeling at my skin. In the bright beam of car headlights, my face turns red with man and rage.

Wrapping hands around the locks of golden hair on my head, I tug and pull until the pain of tearing is stronger than the pain of crying. My mom continues to yell at me while I sulk in my seat, staring at her with both my eyes brows knitted together.

There's a loud honking of a truck horn in front of us but my mom doesn't hear it. I don't hear it much either, because I'm just as insane to think that it's simply a product of my imagination.

Shattered glass explodes, and the entire world goes black.

__

And then, he was gone.