🏆Featured on TeenFiction | Head Over Heels
To Leroy 'Lee' Hiew, home's never felt like home. He has a huge mansion, a big car, and more money than he could ever spend. And yet, the idea of home always seems to elude him.
Armed with his dog, Socks...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The next morning, Lee crumbles.
"She's a sweetheart. You'll love her," his father's saying, sounding happier than Lee's heard him sound in years, and all Lee can think is, I am not the one making him sound this happy, and it hurts like a punch to the gut. He's tried to be a good son---he really has---and it stings never hearing this kind of joy pouring from his father's lips over something he's done.
His palms feel clammy, clutching his phone so hard he's worried it'll break. The four dozen walls seem to close in on him, brick and mortar puncturing his lungs until he runs out of air. Socks pokes at his feet with a comfortingly damp nose ever so often, as if sensing the call's not a good one. (For Lee, at least. He's sure his father's over the moon.)
"Who's she?" Lee manages to get out through dry lips and the shattered rhapsody of his chest, even though he already knows the answer. Crack, crack, crack, goes the little ivory bits of his heart, like gaping fractures splintering across hard ice, snapping and popping and hitting the ground in a thousand poppyseed pellets.
Some questions don't need answers, but Lee wants one anyway. It's easier to hurt himself instead of hiding the truth, so he digs the knife deeper into his ribs, over and over again.
"Her name's Katie. She's one of my employees, and she's been a great help ever since..." His father doesn't finish the sentence, but Lee already knows what he's going to say---since your mother left. For the first time, a pinch of hatred for his mother bubbles in his chest. For leaving. For moving to Spain. For the fact that it's been four hundred and five days since she's stopped picking up his calls, and he should stop counting, but fuck, he can't help it, because she'd always taught him to hope, and he hates it hates it hates it---
Lee swallows thickly and forces as much air as he can into his straining lungs. "Congrats?" It comes out as a question. He doesn't mean it to be a question. He doesn't even mean it to be an actual congratulations. He gulps again. "Congrats!" Better. Be happy. Be happy for him. Even if he's never happy for you.
The statement stings more than it should, even if it's just in his head.
"Thank you, Leroy." His father hesitates, and Lee thinks about how much his father doesn't know about him. All the memories he'd missed, water pouring over his head as he'd drowned in the ocean of his job, his divorce, his life. It makes Lee sad, but Lee's sad more often than he'd like to be nowadays, anyway. The seconds turn into minutes, hours, days. "I hope you're not upset?"
My dad hasn't had time to eat dinner with me in years and yet somehow has time to get a new girlfriend. But of course I'm not upset. "Of course not," Lee fibs, the lie pushing the weight of the world down on his shoulders. Hanging in the threadbare web of false niceties and poised civility, the universe seems a little too fragile, ready to bend and crash and break. Ready to spew fire over the device in Lee's hand until he burns alive.
