20. Memphis

CHAPTER TWENTY

memphis

I t was never that I tried to be the problem child for my parents.

I wasn’t after attention. I didn’t cause issues just to be seen. There was no grand scheme involved in any of the troublemaking that I did.

It was the invisibility by itself which seemed to continuously land me in that position.

There were a thousand small wrongs that required righting.

And no one else seemed to be interested in making it happen.

When you just existed in the background, always watching, you were in a much better position to see the full view for what it was.

You can’t see the entire forest when you’re in the thick of the trees. That’s the whole point of that saying. You don’t have a grasp on the vastness of the field when you can’t see beyond the cornstalks right in your path.

I smiled to myself after that thought. Indiana was changing the way my brain functioned. But the smile didn’t stay.

The dick pic fiasco from my younger years that my misfit corn crew friends found so amusing was anything but funny while it was happening. It hurt to have someone truly believe he was too good for me just because I preferred to wear black and didn’t have even an ounce of athleticism in my body.

Just like it hurt to be able to see our teachers keep a closer eye on my friends than they ever did the jocks. The music we listened to was cause for concern. They were constantly preoccupied that we were the ones messed up on drugs just because our musicians were louder than they would’ve liked, while the entire football team had an alcohol problem before we started high school. They wondered if we hurt ourselves and just used long dark clothing to hide it, while the cheerleaders bullied one another into skipping meals in an effort to try to stay the same size as we all battled puberty.

Something deep inside me couldn’t just sit back and watch while these things played out. It made the kids on the outskirts want to become the things that everyone accused us of being anyway. Because why the hell not? And that only furthered the problem in the long run. It widened the void around us all.

Plastering some boy’s junk all over the school probably wasn’t the mature decision, but it ripped the pedestal out from under him, so he had to play on our field for a while. He had to experience what the rest of us lived every day. The judgment. The sideways looks. The whispers.

While I never got in trouble as far as the school was concerned, my parents knew I was behind it. They couldn’t prove it. But they knew it was me, just like I knew they were aware of it.

Just like no one was ever able to prove it when I removed all the funding for a homecoming dance because the girl who was a guarantee to be the queen of the night copied my answers on a test when she didn’t bother to do any studying herself. When someone had to be accused of cheating after our teacher realized our tests looked the exact same, no one even looked twice at the picture-perfect girl with the trendy clothes and the airbrushed face. It was obviously the girl who’d had her belly button pierced without her parents’ knowledge or approval, the one who was quiet and kept to herself. No one ever seemed to notice that the exact dollar amount taken from the homecoming dance had magically appeared in the funding gifted to our town’s public library.

My parents knew about that, too.

It wasn’t hard to imagine they could feel the weight of being the parents of the weird girl. And I could also imagine the fear that they must have felt to know they had a second daughter coming up behind me who might take an interest in being exactly like her big sister.

Dropping both their daughters off at a mall and never coming back for them set my parents free in a big way.

“Memphis?”

My whole body jolted at his voice.

“Where’d you go?” Utah asked.

“Nowhere,” I said quickly and shook my head.

“You’re trying to skin me alive with your nails, sweetheart.”

I looked down to his forearms where my own fingers were very clearly digging into the muscle that covered his arms. I let go as fast as I could and dropped my hands down into my own lap. I laid my head back against his chest and sighed.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “I generally can’t be trusted to behave like a regular human.”

After that, I had to put an absurd amount of effort into just watching a movie that I usually loved. Where my heart normally pounded hard enough to make me worry about it exploding every time Utah touched me, no part of me paid attention to the arms that stayed wrapped around me. All of my energy was redirected into avoiding the thoughts of that mall, of the men who’d picked us up when our parents never returned. The ones who said our parents sold us to them.

I felt like such an asshole by the time Utah was gathering up the blankets and I was dismantling the cart with the projector on it. He’d gone so far out of his way to make this into an adorable little evening, yet I’d spent most of it buried in my own head. If it upset him, he wasn’t letting it show while he followed me back into the house. I couldn’t handle the possibility of him wanting to kiss me if he were to walk me to my own room in this house, though. Not after the kinds of memories I’d sorted through while we sat out there. That wasn’t his fault, but if he was going to kiss me, I would’ve rather had it happen with only him in mind.

I parked myself at the kitchen island rather than risking the walk down the hallway with Utah. He stopped to look at me, and I about buckled right then under the weight of his eyes. I put my elbows up on the countertop and dropped my face into my hands to hide from him. I heard him chuckle, then I felt an arm wrap around my chest to squeeze me back into him.

“I don’t know how to help you through it if you don’t tell me what it is, sugar,” he whispered to the top of my head.

“I didn’t ask for help,” I mumbled into my hands. In his defense, if the man knew even half of the things I’d already managed to survive at this point in my life, he’d know I didn’t really need help.

“And I’m offering it anyway, so your outrageous pride doesn’t have to take the hit from asking, you little sasshole.”

Daddy Utah.

I smiled at that and moved my hands from my face down to hold onto his arm for a second.

“Thank you for my books. And for the rest of this night. I promise I won’t ruin whatever you plan next time.”

“ Next time ,” he repeated and chuckled. “Are you asking me out again?”

“ Again ? I didn’t ask you out this time.”

He laughed and kissed the top of my head. “Good night, angel.”

Even once I was alone for the night, there was no peace to be had from it.

The memories were like demons, forever waiting in the darkness to pounce on a broken soul at its weakest moment. Tonight, my heart was the host for several of them.

Checking the house in Tupelo and the banking information only made it worse, but tonight more than ever, I needed to be sure that she was still safe.

Every time I managed to fall asleep for even a little while, I woke up sweating shortly after. So many of the things that I’d put an effort into ignoring until I forgot them seemed to resurface on nights like this one. By the time the sunlight was coming in through the curtains, I’d decided I was done ignoring and done trying to forget. It was time to take the details that haunted my lowest moments and use them to uncover what really happened. That would be the only way to help anyone else who might’ve ended up in the same position that my sister and I had been. If I was going to carry these demons with me anyway, I might as well put them to good use.

I spent the next morning very absentmindedly taking all my books from the totes to organize them into little stacks along the back wall of my room. This was never actually my house or my room, so there weren’t bookshelves readily available for me anywhere in it. I definitely felt more at home having them here with me, though.

My thoughts were focused hard on the kinds of questions that I had for Tennessee while I stacked the books along the wall. Until I was able to experience the demise of the last bit of my sanity as my hands reached for the last item in the tote I was unpacking. If my regular existence hadn’t already been marked with the palest skin to ever grace a human, all the color would’ve drained right from my body at the sight of the little black box that remained in that tote.

“He didn’t open it. He didn’t open it. He didn’t open it,” I repeated to myself while my hands shook as I reached for the damn thing. It wasn’t locked. I’d spent all of my adult years living alone. There was no need to put a lock on the very wide range of toys that I kept in this box.

I dropped that bitch so fast when someone knocked on the door to my room. I should’ve screamed at him to leave the second that Utah opened the door. Instead, I stood there while my whole body caught on fire in embarrassment.

“You didn’t come out, so I brought you—” he started to say but paused to look down at the box that now sat right in the middle of the floor. “Breakfast,” he finished and smiled.

He opened it.

Of course, he fucking opened it.

That’s why he brought it back to Indiana for me.

Because he knew what was inside it.

“Did you open this?” I forced myself to ask and nodded toward the box.

“Nope.”

“You answered that way too fast.”

“Nooope?” he tried again in a very frustrating drawn out fashion.

“Utah.”

“Memphis.”

“I know you opened it.”

“No, you don’t. Because I didn’t.”

“I don’t think I like you very much right now.”

“Sounds like a pretty average day around here then,” he laughed before he held a plate of food out toward me. “Come out here when you’re done. Indy and I are going over things for Tennessee and Akron. And I have some demands this time.”