***
“W-what are you going to do to me?” was the first question she asked after I had her in my car.
It was a ten-year-old piece of junk, held together by rust molecules holding hands. But it was mine, and it always took me where I needed to go.
I didn’t immediately answer. Instead, I asked a question of my own. “What is your name?”
“Rain,” she replied without hesitation.
I looked across the car at her, dubious, while holding a handful of blood-soaked napkins to my face. “Rain? Your name is Rain?”
“Yes.”
I snorted, turning my eyes back on the road. “Wow. Okay. What, are your parents hippies or something?”
“Uh, I don’t think you should be the one making fun of my name,” she fired back with more confidence than before. “Like, hello? Your parents named you Soldier.”
One side of my mouth quirked into a smile. I saw no reason to tell her I only had one parent, and I winced at the pain in my cheek. “Touché.”
“I mean, is that really your name?”
“Yep.” I glanced at her again, noticing her reluctant smile, and I was glad to see her relax in my presence.
She was pretty. Maybe the prettiest girl I had ever seen.
“And by the way, I’m not doing anything with you. I’m just taking you home. So, where do you live?”
“Really?”
She sat up straighter, and I darted my eyes toward hers, startled to find a heartbreaking amount of hope glimmering within those mosaic shards of green.
I didn’t know her. She meant nothing to me, yet the thought that she could lump me in with those other guys in The Pit crushed my spirit. But what hurt even more was knowing I couldn’t blame her.
“Yes,” I replied firmly, looking back to the road before flicking my gaze back to hers for a split second to add, “Really.”
So, she gave me the address and told me how to get there from where we were, and I steered the car in that direction.
The ride was spent mostly in complete silence with my eyes on the road and hers on her hands, nestled over the black fabric of her skirt covering her lap. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking; I didn’t even know if she was truly okay. All I knew was, I felt better, knowing she wasn’t in The Pit anymore. It was no place for a kid her age, and it wasn’t lost on me that I’d started going when I was even younger.
“You shouldn’t go back there,” I finally said as we neared her street. “Those guys want to hurt you. Stay the hell away from them.”
“Do you want to hurt me?”
Shocked, I looked at her. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I replied honestly.
“But you hurt him.”
I shook my head. “I hurt him because he was hurting you. Protecting someone is different. I’ll always pick protecting over making someone my victim.”
I pulled up to the curb a couple of houses down from hers. The last thing I needed was for her parents to see her getting out of a car driven by an eighteen-year-old guy with a bloody face.
“Thank you for the ride,” Rain said quietly. “And thanks for being so nice to me.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I replied, turning to rest my elbow against the back of the passenger seat. “But please swear to me you’ll never go back there or be around that guy again.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “I swear.”
“Good.”
She got out of the car, and I waited the two minutes it took for her to run to her house and get inside the door. Then, I drove myself to the ER, all while cursing Seth and his inability to understand the word no.
***
“Soldier!”
The doctor, who’d just checked my face for any signs of infection, stopped my panicked mother from entering the emergency room bay. “Ma’am, I need you to—”
“Don’t you tell me what to fucking do. That’s my son!” She said the word like she’d spent the past eighteen years playing the part of Doting Mother. She pushed past him and grasped my chin in her hand. “Oh my God, look at your face! What the hell happened?!”
There was panic and affection in her eyes, one I hadn’t seen since I had been small enough to hold her hand when we crossed the street. An unexpected surge of emotion barreled straight through my hardened muscle and into my weary, wounded heart, and I suppressed the need to wrap my arms around her and cry for no other reason than to simply be held by my mom.
“I got into a fight,” I answered plainly, like it was nothing.
Because, well, it was.
I was no stranger to fights these days. But most of them didn’t leave me needing anything more than a few Advil.
She looked horrified, like she couldn’t believe I’d do such a thing. Diane Mason had always been a good actress.
“A fight?!”
I shrugged. “He got me with a broken beer bottle.”
“Did they check for rabies? Or tetanus?”
The gray-haired nurse setting up the metal tray with the supplies to do my stitches smiled reassuringly without making Mom feel stupid. “It’s unlikely that he contracted rabies from a broken bottle. But we did give him a tetanus shot, just in case.”
Mom sighed and sat beside me on the bed. Her hand reached out to grip mine, lacing our fingers together and squeezing tightly. I reminded my heart it meant nothing, that she’d go back to being her usual self the moment we got back home, but, man … I hoped she’d hold on for a while.
“How does the other guy look?”
“Well, his nose isn’t ever gonna look the same—that’s for damn sure,” I muttered while thinking Seth had deserved worse for what he’d almost done to that girl.
Rain. With the pretty eyes and soft hair.
The nurse tried to bite back a laugh as Mom nodded. “Good.”
It was funny that she hadn’t asked what the fight was about or if the cops had been involved. And I couldn’t tell if it was that she just didn’t care or simply didn’t think to ask, and honestly, I didn’t care or think to divulge the fact that I’d stopped an adult man from forcing himself on an underage girl. I wasn’t looking for credit or brownie points from my mom or anybody because knowing Rain had gotten home safe was good enough for me.
No. All I cared about in that moment was that, as the nurse pieced my face back together with fifteen stitches, my mom was there, holding my hand. Humming a song in a voice that was only vaguely familiar, worn and faded, like an old baby blanket.
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”
With my eyes squeezed shut, I imagined how nice life would’ve been if moments like this weren’t a fluke. If every single day of my life since birth had been filled with so much love and affection that there’d have been no chance in hell that things would’ve ended up the way they had. I wouldn’t be selling pink pills to school kids in the hopes that I wouldn’t find Mom on the couch one day, dead or in a coma. I wouldn’t be a high school dropout, spending my days at the grocery store or spending my nights in The Pit with other delinquents like me, just trying to make enough money to keep the lights on.
I guessed Mom was right. The apple really didn’t fall far from the tree.