terrible things - ashton irwin

forty eight

After a delicious dinner of lasagna, garlic bread, and salad, during which there were more tears and more fits of laugher than I could count, Ashton took my hand and led me to the back of the house.

"I wasn't allowed to have girls in my room," he said, "but I'm going to assume my parents are over that by now." He pushed the rather rickety door, but instead of opening into a bedroom, it led to a porch, with windows on all three sides. The painted wooden floor was scuffed and pitched; there was q wicker love seat along one wall and a double bed against another. A beautiful 8 piece drum set and guitar were arranged in the corners, alongside neat stacks of CDs.

"This is your bedroom?" I asked, thinking of my dark closet of a room back home.

"It's the old sleeping porch. This place was once a boarding-house for TB patients," Ashton said. "People with tuberculosis were supposed to sleep in fresh air, so there are rooms like this all over Asheville."

"I love it," I said, running my finger along the windowsill.

Ashton sunk down onto the bed. "I slept on the floor out here for two weeks," he said. "Staking my claim. Finally, they said it could be mine."

I sat down next to him. The sheet were clean and the pillows freshly plumped; either someone had sneaked in to make the bed, or Ashton's mother had kept up his room as if he's only gone for a walk. "Your parents are amazing. Why weren't you with them all along?" I asked.

Ashton frowned. "We went to Portland because of the experimental immunotherapy program with Dr. Suzuki. She's the best there is, right? But my parents were living in this terrible motel and going to the hospital everyday, and it was just awful. It was too hard on them. I said, 'Please go home. This isn't what I want. I don't want you to see me go through this.'"

"And they just left?" I don't know why it shocked me as it did, considering the way my own father split town.

"They didn't want to, believe me. But I made them. I said of things got really bad, obviously they could come back. But things didn't really get bad, they got better. The immunotherapy was helping, and I got discharged from the hospital."

"The same day as me," I said, smiling at the memory of that perfect morning.

"Right. And I'd planned to come back here, but then there was the problem of you."

"The problem?" I asked.

He smiled. "The problem of having a giant crush on you and you not knowing it," he said. "But conveniently, my uncle had just moved close to your hometown. You were going to K-Falls, and I decided to follow you. I wanted to be with you." I flushed. I'm glad you did. But still, I can't believe they let you do it."

"I told them I'd come back here in the fall. Do senior year at my old school. They understood, I wanted to pretend like I was normal, at a school where no one knew I had cancer. I was just a kid who got to study somewhere else for a while." He smiled. "A semester abroad, in bucolic K-Falls."

I snorted. "You'd better look up bucolic in the dictionary." 

"I don't have to, because I have you," Ashton said, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, right," I said, nudging him with my foot. But his story still didn't entirely make sense to me. "Why wouldn't you ever talk about your family? Why were they such a huge secret?"

Ashton sighed. "I didn't like talking about them because I felt so guilty. I knew it was selfish of me to be away from them. But I wanted to see things, Lav. I wanted to have a bigger life." He reached up and twisted a strand of my hair around his fingers. "I wanted to fall in love."