[trigger warnings: suicide/suicidal thoughts]
LOGAN
As they rode to the graveyard, Blake hung onto Logan with one arm and mapped directions with the other. Once Logan understood the directions, the two were silent until Blake said, "Hey, that's weird."
"What's weird?"
"I typed in barmaid, death, and Madame Cobra's, and someone else's name came up."
"Are you seriously going to tell me that she was living a secret life with a different name?"
"No, it's someone else's picture in the obituary. Her name is Alyssa Henderson. She died a few weeks before Mom."
A chill ran down Logan's back. He glanced in the rear view mirror, but the black car hadn't moved an inch. "Maybe it's just a coincidence."
"Maybe," Blake said uneasily. "She died in a car accident here in town."
Logan glanced at Blake in the rear view to see why his voice was suddenly much clearer and saw that he had slid the chin of the helmet up to the bridge of his nose and was peering down at his phone. Logan elbowed him hard in the ribs. "Blake, keep your fucking helmet on!" he snapped.
He heard the helmet slide back down his face with a thump. In a small voice, Blake said, "Are you okay?"
Logan adjusted the rear view, pushing it all the way to the right so he could see down the street he had just turned from, but he couldn't see the black car anymore. It was gone.
She died in a car accident here in town.
"Just keep your helmet on, okay?"
They rode the rest of the way to the graveyard in silence. When they got there, Logan left the bike at the gravekeeper's office, and after asking him where Maria Jones's grave was, they spent a few minutes walking to it.
The grave looked identical to the hundreds of other graves there. Logan didn't know what he had expected, but it felt awkward standing at just another grave among the sea of headstones. The epitaph was a generic one, something the neighbors or her coworkers had probably paid for.
Logan shoved his hands in his pockets and waited as Blake crouched on the ground and whispered something he couldn't hear. The name on the gravestone brought back memories of a sweet, small lady who always had the time to help him with his homework and tuck him in at night.
Maria Jones had been their stepmother, had married their father two years after Blake was born, but Logan could hardly remember a time that he had consciously thought of her as a mere addition to the family instead of an original part. He couldn't remember their biological mother very well. Maria was the only mom he knew.
When he stood up, Blake asked, "Do you want to say something?"
Logan turned away from the headstone. "I have nothing to say."
"She was your mom too."
Despite the warm memories being at the grave had brought him, there were still so many bad ones. "I didn't have a mom," he said shortly.
"Why would you say that?" Blake demanded. "She said we could call her anything we wanted, and we still called her Mom. She loved us."
"That was before she left us with Dad," Logan snapped. "What kind of mom leaves her kids with her abusive ex-husband?"
"She tried to stop him. He would hit her for things he was mad at us for. She tried to protect us."
"And in the end, she still left us."
YOU ARE READING
The Rules They Broke
Teen FictionOlivia Jones barely remembers her brothers. When her mother divorced her father and took Olivia with her, the memories of who they were to her slowly faded. Despite that and everything that's happened within the past year, Olivia agrees to the adopt...
