The Price of Popularity (BoyxBoy)

{10}

His mother hadn’t been built for suburbia. She had too much ambition and she stood out from the other mothers in a way that Asher never understood, like she didn’t really belong. The American dream was not one that she shared, even in the slightest. Even though her son lay in the next room and her husband would come home to kiss her cheek, she didn’t enjoy the life that she had lived. Asher’s mother would read him bedtime stories, but these had no heroes or monsters. She read him tales of exploring the world and poems that he had no sense in understanding. His mother spent hours and hours looking out of the living room window. He never knew what she had been looking at, or looking for, but perhaps she was dreaming.

Asher stood in his bedroom, the dresser drawer open and a usually hidden photo in his hand. A family photo. Three people dressed up, a mother, a husband a son. He looked up into the mirror that hung above the dresser and he saw someone that only vaguely resembled the child in the photo. Well, he considered, a lot changed in ten years. He looked back down at the photo, his father’s smiling face, his mother’s grin; one that didn’t quite reach her eyes. 

His mother had been beautiful. Not the kind of beautiful that mothers should be, he supposed. Her beauty was one that was meant for exploring the world and discovering places of wonder that ordinary people never got the chance, nor the want, to see. He supposed that was why she had left all those years ago, to discover what she couldn’t here with him, to live a different life. His father told him that she wasn’t stable, that her mind was scattered and she would come back when she was ready. It was ten years later, and apparently her mind was still in the same shambles it had been when she had left because she was still gone, off somewhere unknown.

Asher had promised himself the day that she left that he wouldn’t become his mother. He promised himself that he would be stable and truthful and reliable. He refused to hurt his family like she had and yet, as he lifted his gaze to the mirror, he wondered how much of his mothers’ son he really was. Had he been lying to protect Danny this whole time, to keep him from worrying, or was there a part of this that he enjoyed? The feeling, the rush he got when people praised him, when he was the centre of attention, coveted by those around him, was that the real thing he was trying to protect?

He shook his head, sliding the delicate photo underneath the pile of socks that protected it all these years and pushed the drawer shut. He told himself that it wasn’t true, that he was trying to protect Danny. Yet, he wasn’t sure if he was protecting Danny as much as he was protecting himself. Telling the people around him the truth would mean showing weakness, being vulnerable and risking the life that he had built to protect himself.

'Asher,’ his father stood in the doorway. ‘You’ll be late for school if you don’t leave now.’

He nodded, reaching over to grab his backpack off of his bed. ‘I’ll leave now,’ he started to walk past his father, but a hand clasped his arm gently, stopping him.

‘I know that you’re thinking about her,’ he said quietly.

‘It is the anniversary. Ten years,’ Asher mumbled the last two words as if he was afraid to hear them, that saying it out loud made it truer and almost tangible.

‘Do you want to stay home from school today? We can talk about her?’ he offered.

‘Why waste my time thinking about a woman who hasn’t thought of me in ten years?’ Asher asked, hating the fact that his eyes stung as the words passed his lips.

He half expected his father to tell him that she really had loved him and that it wasn’t her fault that she was gone. Years ago, he would have needed to hear it but he wasn’t a child anymore. Coddling wasn’t going to make this day any easier. His father apparently didn’t know what to say to that and so he nodded, his gentle grasp on his arm released.