Somebody Else ✔

Dellprix.

TW - drugs

**

Alex.

Edited.

I tossed the football from hand to hand, and listened to my parents scream at each other. "That's not what I said Vassily!" Mum shouted, and they just went back and forth and back and fucking forth until I had the urge to put my head through my fucking bedroom wall.

I glanced over to the photos on my bedside table, of Jace and Cole and Ollie. God, I hated him living in the city. Dealing with this shit alone was doing my head in. My parents screams rose in pitch, and my I could feel them ringing in my ears. I squeezed my eyes shut and cringed every time a door slammed. "Can youse shut up!" I finally shouted.

There was a pause, my parents voices finally hushed and then my mum screeched, "Don't get involved with this Alex, this is between your father and I-"

I threw the ball against the wall, and it ricocheted back into my hand. Groaning in pain, I screamed back at mum, "It's not though! It's not just between you two, cause I can hear every word you're saying!" That got them silent -- if only for a second. They went back to yelling indiscriminately between themselves and me. "Fuck this." I crossed my messy room -- that was half empty to begin with cause all my shit was at Jace's -- to my window. I pressed my hands against the window, a shiver of cold running up my palms. I shimmied it to the side, but mums voice on the other side of the door stopped me.

"You're never home anymore Alex." Mum said, her voice soft and wavering. Well, I wonder why, I thought, all you two do is fight and put Ollie and me in the middle. I clenched my back teeth together. How dare she even say that? I was never home? I was never fucking home cause they made me want to throw myself off the roof whenever I was. "Alex?" Mama asked and I scrunched my hands into my hair, yanking at the roots.

"I don't give a fuck anymore, alright?" Speaking two languages meant I had to think and rethink before I spoke, to get my words straight, and yet I still managed to say the wrong thing. This was one of those times.

"Don't speak like that." Mum hissed, and I jiggled the window further open.

"-You two sort your own shit out and then I'll come back when you're ready to act like adults. Or god forbid, parents." I pushed myself up through the window, and jumped. I landed in the gardenias and peonies below the windowsill, face first.

Picking petals out of my mouth, I maneuvered my way through the branches, falling unsteadily from the garden onto the pavement. I turned down the front passage, hopping over the wooden fence easily. As I was jogging down the driveway, dad caught up with me. "Alex! Son! Wait!" Dad grabbed me by the arm and spun me around. I looked at him - into my brothers blue eyes and fair hair - and my heart sank. "I'm sorry-"

"Do you love her?" I clasped my hands behind my head, my lips trembling. Why did I ask that? Dad stared at the pavement. Why did I ask that? Dad shuffled his weight from foot to foot. Is their relationship all I had to look forward to? That was the only type of love I knew.

"What?" Dad's eyes didn't meet mine, his voice quiet.

"You and mum. Do you two even love each other?" Dad hesitated. My throat began to close, and Dad took a step toward me, his hands raised. His face had gone a shade of grey. "Oh my god, you don't do you?" His face turned from grey to red, and I took several steps away from him. Maybe I could fucking, I don't know, stowaway with Jace next time he went to Canada and not come back.

He sighed, "It's not that easy Alex." No but it is. It is that easy. I looked back at the house, Mum gazing at me with tears in her eyes from the front door.