Forbidden With Me - Leigh Lennon Page 0,9
brought old bread, and I made the mistake of feeding the seagulls. Cabe and I were surrounded as the vicious birds had often plucked the bread from our hands. Gracie and Annie sat on the bench, farthest away from the fiasco, doubled over in hysterics. I’d been so mad at them for laughing at us, but it was like that with them. Gracie and Annie were thick as thieves, only two years apart. Cabe was three years older than me and was my ally in the family. But when Cabe was outside shooting hoops with his friends, Gracie and Annie would bring me into their fold, painting my nails or letting me watch them put on makeup.
Annie was seventeen when she died, Gracie was fifteen, and Cabe was only twelve. The pangs of thunderous agony have me grasping the wall of my dorm. I’m happy my roommate has gone out with her parents for one last goodbye before they make the trek back to their hometown thirty miles north of Seattle.
Greenlyn Kelly is the typical American sweetheart with platinum blonde hair and bright aqua eyes. She’s not only tall but also thin with beautiful curves, but not too curvy, not like mine.
As I watch Greenlyn’s family and how her mom takes care in unpacking and showing her the most efficient ways to make a small space work, I know Maria Strickland would have taken all the same steps. And like Greenlyn, I probably would have gotten irritated with my mother just as my new roommate has with hers.
I have nobody with me today. Even Aunt Mally couldn’t be here for this. I saw her breathe her last breath six months ago as her body succumbed to cancer. I had wanted to yell at Greenlyn, shake her, show her loss is so immediate, so final, so destructive. Losing Aunt Mally, the second mother in my life, is something I had been prepared for, but being orphaned at the age of twenty is not a situation I’d open up to about with virtual strangers.
“So tell me, Malia, how are your parents adjusting to you moving away?” Mrs. Kelly had asked earlier.
There are two ways I avoid this. I can tell the truth, and the awkwardness will be thick and dense, and a blanket of pity will surround me anytime Greenlyn is in the room. Or I just avoid it with a little white lie. In that moment, I had chosen the little white lie.
“Ah, they’re used to it. I’m the baby.”
It’s the truth, if Martin and Maria Strickland were still alive, they’d probably welcome the peace and quiet of empty nesters until Annie, Gracie, and Cabe brought their families to visit, and then they’d love every moment of chaos. When the subject of my age came up, I simply said I’d taken a couple of gap years. I wouldn’t divulge one year was repeating a grade due to the PTSD, and the other was watching my aunt die before my very eyes.
The four small walls of my dormitory are closing in on me. I don’t rely on the tried and true coping mechanisms from my therapist for the past ten years. I pull my keys down from the rack Greenlyn’s mother insists will keep us organized and slam out through my door, sprinting through the hall. I have no place to go, and no one to see. It doesn’t stop me. I take the steps two at a time, darting to my little Nissan, the one thing Aunt Mally left me—to start my life over.
The university is in the middle of the city, but with all the blaring horns and bumper-to-bumper traffic, I enter the freeway which instinctually takes me to the exit of the one place I’ve not seen since the police angel carried me out of my home. He’d instructed me at the time to bury my impressionable eyes into his shoulders. I’d not understood then, but his insistence about closing my eyes to the carnage was one of the many gifts the strong policeman had given me.
Keeping in contact with Jules Montgomery throughout the years, I’d often perused her social media for pictures of the man who’d shielded me from my family’s massacre. At the time when the pantry door was opened, my eyes connected with the virtual stranger in front of me—I looked past him at Matt Montgomery, the person I had recognized. I knew right away, Wells was my safe place. Throwing myself into Wells’s arms seemed