All Broke Down (Rusk University #2) (28 page)

And knowing Silas, he’ll fight back rather than lie down.

“Well, we were just chatting about classes, but now that you guys are here . . .” I step closer to my parents, and meet Silas’s gaze for the first time. His expression is blank, almost stony. And I can’t read anything in his eyes. “I’ll see you around, Silas.” I offer a smile and hope that he can read the apology through my eyes. I’ll hang with my parents for a little while, and then feign a stomachache and come find him.

My parents turn to walk away, and I follow, but not before mouthing
be right back
at him.

I follow behind my mom, and we stand off to the side while Dad shakes hands with a few of his friends. Mom smiles and follows his lead. I just give a little wave. When Dad is fully immersed in conversation, Mom turns to me.

“Have you seen Henry?”

God, she’s stubborn.

“No, Mom. I haven’t.”

“Really? I spoke to his mother, and she mentioned something about the two of you running into each other at that construction project you’ve been doing.”

Crap. I wonder how much Henry told his mother. Did he mention Silas?

“Oh. Right. I forgot about that. We didn’t really talk.”

“Gloria says Henry is under the impression that you’re already dating someone else.”

Crap. So. Much. Crap.

I press my lips together and hum. “Hmm . . . nope. No new boyfriend.”

She doesn’t look back in the direction of Silas, but she does slant her body ever so slightly in that direction.

“You’re sure?” she says.

“Pretty sure I’d know if I was dating someone, but who knows.”

Her eyes narrow, and I know I’m being a smart mouth. I don’t think I’ve ever been anything less than 110 percent respectful. I can see the moment where she decides what must have caused my bit of rebellion, and she looks back at the wall where Silas is standing.

Was standing.

He’s not there anymore, and my stomach sinks.

Mom looks back at me, studying.

“I don’t have time for a boyfriend,” I tell her. “Classes start tomorrow, and I’m still trying to get support to keep the homeless shelter downtown open. I’m busy. Too busy for a guy.”

“I thought the shelter was a done deal.”

I shrug. “Done deal or not, doesn’t mean I just have to accept it. I refuse to accept it.”

“Darling, sometimes you have to be realistic and admit when you’ve lost.”

“When we’ve lost is when it’s the most important to make sure our voices are heard. So that maybe we don’t lose next time.”

There’s a truth you learn early on in the activism scene . . . most protests are lost before they even start. We hope for change. Beg for it. But even when we know it won’t come, still we stand with our signs and say our chants. Still we show up. Because to lie down and say nothing means the cause dies with us, and a little piece of
us
with it. So we chant. And we chant. And we say the same words again and again and again. Louder and louder. We do it to put words to the ache we feel in our hearts. And there’s this small, innocent hope somewhere in the back of our minds that even if there’s no point, even if it’s a
done deal
. . . we hope that if we say something enough times, people will listen. Or that if we say it enough, it will finally make sense.

And what doesn’t make sense to me in this moment? The fact that I’m standing here with my parents, pretending for them all over again, instead of finding Silas.

“Mom, I’ve got to go.”

“What?”

“Tell Dad I said bye. And that I want to talk to him about the shelter sometime this week.”

“Dylan . . .”

I don’t stay to hear whatever it is she’s going to say. Instead I head for the wall where Silas had been, stop, and scan the crowd. He’s not by the food table. He’s not anywhere I can see him. I walk through all the smaller rooms, waiting to see his head towering above all the shorter, gray-haired ones. But he’s nowhere.

And when I go outside hoping to find him at his pickup, it’s gone.

I
T TAKES ME
fifteen minutes to walk from the library to my apartment, and my feet feel like I’ve been treading on nails instead of just walking across campus in heels. I switch into flats and grab my keys.

On my way out, Nell asks where I’m going.

“To Silas’s.”

She looks up from the couch, where she’s packing her book bag for tomorrow, and says, “So you’re like dating him or something?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.
Or something.
”

“Don’t stay out too late!” she calls out as I head out the door. “First day of class tomorrow!”

God, last year I would have been sitting on that couch right beside her, getting prepared like doomsday was coming instead of college classes. Crazy how things have changed.

I duck into my car, and I’m at Silas’s house in just over five minutes. Pulling into the driveway, my headlights flash over his front porch, revealing a girl with peroxide-white hair, standing by his front door smoking.

I switch off my car and try to squint at the front porch to see the girl again, but now that my headlights are off, all I see is the orange glow at the end of her cigarette.

He wouldn’t hook up with some other girl already, would he? She has to be a friend. Or maybe she’s here for Torres or Brookes. It can’t have been much longer than half an hour since I saw him last. She’d have to just be a booty call to be over here that fast and . . .

And that’s exactly the kind of thing that Silas could do. He’s probably got fifty numbers in his phone from girls willing to just be a quick tumble and toss out the door.

Part of me thinks I should just go. Restart my car, and get the hell out of here. Cut my losses before any damage is done.

But I’m not the kind of girl who walks away. I don’t keep my mouth shut when I’m upset. And I’m not about to start now just because the thought of some other girl hooking up with Silas makes me want to throw up.

I push open my door and slam it behind me when I’m out. I stalk up the driveway to his front porch, and before I can say anything she asks, “Who are you?”

“Dylan,” I answer.

I almost return the question. Almost. But then I decide I don’t want to know the answer. This girl is pretty, no doubt, but her clothes are skimpy, and she wears so much mascara and eyeliner it looks like there was an oil spill around her eyes. She’s older than us. Not because I see any major wrinkles or signs of age, more because she looks like what someone not in college thinks a college girl looks like. When I look closer, there are other clues, too. Her hands, for instance. When I look at the cigarette she’s holding, her skin is more weathered there, and it makes me look at her again through a whole new lens.

It seems so comical to think that this would be the girl Silas would call. A woman who’s probably at least a decade older than us, if not more.

“Is Silas home?”

I don’t know why I asked. He is. I can see his truck.

She snorts. “Oh yeah. He’s home.”

I cringe. I so don’t want to know the subtext of whatever she just said.

I’m about to ring the doorbell when she bangs on the door a few times, hard, and yells, “
Baby!
You’ve got company!”

I hear the creak of the floorboards on the other side, a pair of stomping feet, and the door is ripped open while the blonde calmly takes another drag on her cigarette.

“I told you to—” Silas stops, his eyes widening when he sees me. “What are you doing here?”

I frown. I don’t understand this. Any of it.

“You left. I went to find you, and you were gone.”

“Yeah, well. You were busy. I didn’t think I was needed.”

“I told you I was coming right back. I just had to—”

“Lie about us?”

The woman beside me blows out a column of smoke and says, “Aw. Lover’s quarrel. How sweet.”

Silas turns on her. “Shut up. And leave. I’m not going to tell you again.”

“Maybe if you learned how to talk to women, you wouldn’t be fighting with her now.”

“That’s it. I’m calling the cops.”

He pulls out his cell phone, and suddenly she shoots past me, trying to force her way inside, but Silas is too strong and keeps his hold on the door.

“You bastard! I haven’t asked you for anything in your life, and you can’t give me this one thing?
One thing.
”

“I told you. I don’t have the money. And even if I did, why would I give it to you?”

“Because I’m your mother!”

I must gasp because Silas’s gaze flicks to mine, his eyes wide like he’d completely forgotten I was here.

“Dylan, you should go.”

I can’t believe this girl . . . this woman who I thought might have been a hookup is his
mother.

“Don’t want your girl to see this? See you turn away your own mom?” Something in Silas snaps, and he steps forward, slamming the door behind him. He takes hold of his mom’s arm and starts marching her across the lawn, toward a car parked on the street. But she doesn’t stop. “You’re too good for me now? Is that it? You have your new life here. Fancy school. Fancy sports. You’re ready to forget all about me. You won’t even know my name when you’re off making millions a year playing some stupid game that you never would have played without me. I
let
you play. You could have been spending all that time after school working, making money so we had a place to live.”

She rips her arm out of his grip, stumbling a few feet away in the grass.

I can’t see Silas’s face when he answers, but his voice sounds harder than I’ve ever heard it.

“You forgot about me and Sean long before I forgot about you, Ma. If you wanted to be part of my life, maybe you should have actually come back like you said you would after you dropped us off at that joke of a house.”

She takes one last drag on her cigarette and then throws it at his feet. “Sean? You think I wronged you both? I’ll have you know when your brother got out, he came straight to me.
I
was the one who took him in, who took care of him. You were too busy here to even
write
him or visit.”

Silas freezes and his voice is softer when he asks, “Sean is out? I thought he had another year?”

She laughs bitterly. “Out on parole last year.”

“Last year?” For the first time, Silas sounds wounded by this conversation that’s been full of barbs from the moment he opened the door. “Where is he now?”

“Back inside. Decided to rob a liquor store three months into his parole.”

Silas swears, and looks back at me. I can’t read his expression in the dark, but I have a feeling he doesn’t want me to hear any of this. This is the past he left behind, the one he refuses to talk to me about.

His mother’s voice actually breaks as she says, “I know I left. I’m
sorry
about that, baby. I am. But you left us, too. If you’d been there when Sean got out, maybe he would have stayed straight.”

It’s a long time before Silas answers, and the tone he uses is completely unfamiliar to me. Low. Hurt. “Listen, I’m sorry your boyfriend is in jail and you don’t have the money to make bail,” but I can’t help you. You or Sean. You’ll just have to learn to take care of your own problems, like I always had to.”

“Don’t you look down on me. Like you’re better than me when I
made
you. A better man would take care of his mother. A better man wouldn’t cut ties with his family. Don’t come crawling back to me when you end up like your brother, like your father, like every damn man I’ve ever known.”

“Last chance.” He lifts his phone in warning, but he sounds tired. So tired. “I don’t want to call the cops on you, but I will.”

“You ungrateful—”

“Goodbye, Mother.”

When he starts dialing, she walks away cursing. He stands there in the yard until she starts her car and pulls away.

I wait for him to come back up to the house, but he doesn’t. He stays, rigid and still. And even though he’s a full-grown man, tall and broad, he looks so small to me then. Like a boy. A boy who had to grow up entirely too fast.

I go to him. And when I place my hand on his back, he tenses and jerks away from my touch. He turns, and he looks similar to the night we first met. He’s not bruised or bleeding, but he’s locked up tight. Angry.

“You should go.”

Then he takes off, striding toward the door fast enough that I have to jog to catch him.

“Silas, wait!”

He jerks to a stop at the top of the porch stairs, and spins around to look down at me.

“You want to know what I’m afraid of?
That’s
what I’m afraid of. That’s what’s waiting for me if I can’t make football work.”

“No, it’s not—”

“Yes, it is. I can clean up, play nice with you at animal shelters and construction projects, but that’s just me pretending. I’m always going to be the guy who wears jeans to fancy parties and who gets in screaming fights on his front lawn. My first inclination will always be to work things out with my fists. I might do my damnedest to hold it back, but it will always be in me. And I don’t fit in your world. You couldn’t even introduce me to your parents tonight, and that was before all this.”

“I thought—I thought I was doing you a favor. I thought it would freak you out to meet my parents. You don’t do relationships, and that—”

“You’re right. I don’t. I thought maybe I could, but it would only have been a matter of time before I was the one suffocating in your world. Let’s face it . . . you and I, we don’t match. Never have. Never will.”

This is all spiraling out of control faster than I can keep up with. And I feel the urge to grab him, to hold on tight because I’m losing him, but it feels like I’m losing so much more. Something too big to name.

“Silas, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for any of it to come across like this. I’m sorry.”

He gives me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and there’s this racket in my chest called a heartbeat and it’s so wild, so frantic I can barely hear over the sound.

“Still so damn polite.”

Then he crosses to his front door, walks inside, and closes the door with a quiet, calm click.