Saving Rain(17)

She turned away to face the ripped cushion beside her head.

“Mom! Did you look under my bed?! Did you take something from me?!”

Her silence told me everything I needed to know.

“Oh my God.” My eyes flooded as I lifted my hands to my hair. I stared down at her limp form, shaking my head and taking one, two, three steps backward.

What the fuck am I going to do now?

How the fuck are we ever going to get out of here?

I gasped, choked by a blinding panic I’d never felt before in my life. I knew we needed to get the fuck out of this hellhole. We needed to leave if there was any hope of us getting better and turning shit around for ourselves, and she had taken every last shred of hope for that from me—from us. She had taken every last penny I’d saved—and for what? More drugs?

Jesus fucking Christ, didn’t she have enough?

Angry and upset, I spun on my heel and headed straight for her bag on the floor beside the buried table. I knelt and opened it up for the first time without a care if she saw or not.

“What are you doing?!” she shrieked, sounding like a scared little animal as she tripped from the couch. “Get out of there! What are you doing?!”

There were four full bottles of pills. Four whole, large bottles. I shook my head as I pulled them all out and stood slowly, staring at the little pink pills through the translucent orange plastic.

“Give those to me!” She grappled with my arm, but I was too strong, too tall, and she couldn’t get the bottles away from me. “You fucking bastard! Give them back!”

Feeling simultaneously powerful and helpless, I brushed her off of me easily and barreled for the door as I said, “No.”

“Soldier! Stop! Those are mine, you piece of shit! They’re mine!” She was crying, begging, and pleading. “Where are you going?! What are you going to do?!”

“What am I gonna do?!” I looked over my shoulder, seething at the woman who’d had the nerve to bring me into this fucking world twenty-one years ago to the day, and shook my head. “I’m gonna go save your ass. Like I always fucking do. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll thank me for it one day.”

***

“Hey, man, I’m heading to The Pit. Just thought you might wanna come,” I said over the phone, steering my piece-of-shit car through the darkened streets, barely lit by the dim streetlamps in need of new bulbs.

“Ah, jeez, I don’t know … Jessica wanted me to head over to her place tonight, and Mom was saying she has some shit for me to do around here tomorrow morning.”

Billy liked his drugs—he liked them a whole lot—but he at least still had a handle on his responsibilities. That was one thing I could give him—more than I could say for my mother.

For now.

“Tell Jessica to meet us over there.”

“Dude, you know she hates The Pit. She doesn’t like it when I’m high.”

Neither did I, but I never pushed the point the way his on-and-off girlfriend did. “All right. It’s fine. I just—”

“You know,” Billy cut me off, already talking himself out of being the responsible one, “maybe I can go for a little bit. Then, I can just swing by her place afterward.”

I smiled despite the gross feeling in my gut. I was grateful I wouldn’t have to do business alone. Ever since Tammi had gotten back with Levi, I’d been flying solo a lot of the time, and most days, it sucked. It got lonely, and if I was being real, I was starting to feel like a creepy piece of shit, surrounded by a new batch of high school kids with so much potential and hope—if only there weren’t guys like me and Levi around to take it all away.

Hell, if we were being really real here, I hated myself.

So much.

But what could I do?

After I pulled up to the curb outside of Billy’s parents’ place, his mom waved out the window as he climbed into the passenger side. Both of us were losers, still living at home, but we both had reasonable excuses. He was in school, too busy with classes and drugs to get a job, and me?

Well, you know what I was doing.

I forced a smile and waved back to Billy’s mom as the little boy living in my heart cried and screamed, pressing his hands against the frosty window and begging her to rescue him from a life he’d had little choice of living.

Then, we drove away, and Billy reached for the orange bottles in the center console.

“Holy shit! What did you do, hit the fuckin’ jackpot?!”

“We’re not selling them all,” I warned him, flashing him a pair of narrowed eyes. “But I need to get rid of them. I dunno … maybe I’ll, uh … I dunno. Maybe I’ll throw them in the lake or something.”

“Fuck, no, don’t waste them! I’ll take whatever you don’t get rid of tonight.” He popped one of the tops off the bottles. “God, how much did she buy?!”

Billy was the only person on the planet who knew where I got my supply from—and who the hell knew who Mom bought them from? It was a question I never asked because I knew she’d never say. But I had my suspicions.

“I’d say nine thousand dollars’ worth,” I grumbled as I begged the anger nagging at my nerves to settle just a little. Nobody wanted to buy from a guy who sounded like he was two seconds away from choking the life out of someone.