Better When He's Bold

When I parked in front of the cookie-cutter trilevel my parents had built before everything fell apart, I had to really think about whether or not I wanted to keep the engine running and just continue driving until I was somewhere else, until I hit a different life. Two years ago, everything in my world had been cheery and full of color and light. I was living in an apartment with girlfriends, attending college, fending off boys with only one thing on their mind. I was silly. I was carefree, and I never thought about any of it going away.

Now I was living back at home, taking care of one parent suffering from a crippling bout of depression and with a tendency to self-medicate, and another who was a workaholic and obviously burying himself in his job to avoid the troubling things going on at home. Mostly I came back to keep my little sister, Karsen, from being affected by the sadness and the darkness of it all. She was sixteen, a straight-A student, and bound for college in just a couple more years. I could tough it out until then. After all, my parents had always worked hard to keep our family on the fine line between the Hill and the Point, and I felt like it was the least I could do to repay them. We had never been obnoxiously wealthy, but we had never been forced to try and survive on the battleground that was life on the streets of the Point either. I really felt like I owed them for that at the very least.

Sighing, I made my way inside. There were no lights on because Karsen wasn’t home and my mom was undoubtedly passed out in bed. I swung by the kitchen to grab a beer that was actually cold and puttered by my dad’s office on the way up to the floor where my room was. He was seated behind the computer, like always. His balding head bent down and his eyes locked on whatever was on the screen. I frowned a little and twisted the cap off the neck of the bottle.

“Hey.”

I saw him start and his gaze jerked away from the monitor. “Brysen Carter, you scared the piss out of me.”

“How was she?”

He cleared his throat and returned his attention to the computer. “Fine. Everything was fine.”

That was highly unlikely.

“Did you even check on her tonight, Dad?”

“Brysen, this is very important. Can it wait?”

Not really, but everything came second to his job. I didn’t say anything, just pulled off my shoes and wandered around the corner to where the master bedroom was located. The door was cracked and the TV was on. I pushed the door open with the flat of my hand and hissed out a swearword.

My mom was sprawled sideways across the bed. Her head was hanging over the edge and the same whitish-blond hair that I had on my head was in a tangled mess, touching the floor. An empty bottle of vodka was resting on the pillow and light snores were coming from her. I put the bottle of beer down on the dresser and went in to set her to rights. Clearly Dad hadn’t bothered to pull himself away long enough to make sure she was all right. He had just left her to her own devices, and this was always the end result.

She peeled one watery eye open to look at me and mumbled my name as I wrestled her under the covers. I snatched up the empty bottle and resisted the urge to smash it on the floor. Just barely. She hadn’t always been this way. She was always a little off, struggled with emotional ups and downs, but then a car accident, a horrible back injury and endless amounts of pain, plus the inability for her to go back to work, and my mother had become this drunken, sad shell of a woman. It always made my heart twist and my guts tug because it didn’t have to be this way. She could get help, my dad could support her, and maybe my life could go back to some kind of normal, but that wasn’t happening, and for now I just had to make do until Karsen was old enough to get out on her own.

I flipped off the TV and shut the door behind me with a thud. It would take a tornado to rouse my mom from that kind of drunken slumber anyway. I sighed heavily and finally found my way to my own room.

Living back at home as an adult was so weird. It wasn’t like I had a curfew, or the same rules and regulations to follow as I had when I was a teenager, but everything about this childhood room felt wrong. I felt like I left some part of myself outside the door every time I resigned myself to another night, another day, spent here.

I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and pulled up the last message I had sent to Dovie asking her to go to the party with me tonight. Now that she had a full-time job at a group home for all the kids lost in the system, I hardly saw her anymore. Add in the fact that she was living with and involved with the only guy in the Point I considered scarier than Race meant I rarely went by her house or saw her outside of school anymore. Tonight she had declined the invite because she had homework to do, but I secretly wondered if Bax had told her not to go.