🏆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.
For a moment, Lee freezes. Sinks like a stone. Cracks open and falls apart like fragments of shattered glass.
Then the rational part of him takes over: Nah. This is a joke. Allie's always loved kidding around. She always used to joke around with me last time, and I guess she's picking up right where she left off. A strange sort of calm settles over him, peppering every pore with the jagged shards of broken beer bottles. Lee forces himself to think clearly, to think everything through for once in his stupid fucking life. That's right. It's just a joke. A cruel, sick joke, but a joke nevertheless.
"Wow, Allie," he replies dryly, the words bitter on his tongue, lemon juice and battery acid diluting his bloodstream and pooling in the tips of his fingers. "Very original. Got to admit, you really got me there for a moment. When did your jokes get so bad?"
It's a joke. It has to be. Because his mother's not dead. She's in Spain, still carrying the face Lee wears, all starry dark eyes and ebony curls borne along by will-o-wisps and the autumn wind. She still holds dreams in the nightlife of her blood, dopamine under her skin, flirting with the flighty, fragile chase for happiness she'd always insisted on following.
His mother can't be dead. She's too alive to be dead.
"Lee," Allie gasps out. He can practically feel the pounding of her racing heart, thudding through the ancient receiver like a whipcrack of lightning. Something curls in the bottom of his belly, a dark, festering thing that sinks into his stomach and roots his organs in place. "I'm not---"
Frustration smacks Lee in the back of the head, fogging up his mind with water and wind, the wind his mother loves so much. If she were here, she'd kiss him on the forehead, tell him to hunt the unknown before it hunts him, to keep up the grand chase---it's a mystery, my darling boy, she'd say in response to Allie's jokes, one tanned, slender hand pressed to her thin lips. It's a mystery, and you've got to solve it. Think of finding me as an adventure. A treasure hunt. Allie's just giving you the clues.
But she's not here, because she didn't want him. Not because she's dead.
His mother can't be dead. She's too alive to be dead.
"This is fucking sick, Allie," Lee growls into the phone, letting the dark, angry thing in him decay and grow, infecting every vein with rage and liquid heroin the way it had when he'd seen the burn Danny had tattooed onto Jack's skin. At his side, his fist curls itself into a ball, an electric shock against the xylophone of his ribs, the water in his lungs burning his throat. He's tired of playing games. Tired of looking for answers. Tired of dreaming. "There are other things to joke about other than my fucking mom. Where is she? If she told you to never talk about her again to me, then just tell me! You don't have to fucking joke about her being dead---"
"Lee, she's---"
And maybe I AM angry, Lee thinks. Maybe I'm angry and the therapist was really right. Maybe I'm angry because Dad can't even stand to look at me, and Mom left me behind to find a dream that'll never become real, and Allie is so fucking annoying with her sick jokes, and Jack, fuck it, Jack... "I just want to speak to her, Allie. Just one sentence. I just want to know why she stopped picking up my calls! Please!"
