I Promise

17

I smile. And I realize, maybe I let on more than I expected. When he found me crying by the soccer nets, he was probably confused. And when he asked me about my parents, I said it was complicated. Maybe he pieced two and two together.

I dig into my tourist food; all sorts of sandwiches that lay on a plate before me. Matt eats his, and before I know, the plates are wiped clean and the only sound is the ocean waves.

"So your sister, she lives in New York, right?" Matt asks, breaking the silence.

I nod. "She is at some big shot university studying engineering I think," I say. I get a small pang of guilt in my stomach because I don't even know what Courtney is studying; she is my older sister after all. But I'm just glad that as soon as she left, the screaming and insults she always hurled my way went away with her.

"So you're an only child like me. Boring, isn't it?" Matt asks, resting his elbows on the table.

"Actually, I have three other siblings," I say, and Matt whistles as I laugh at the absurdity of what I said. I've never met anyone at my school who has more than four siblings. I guess a first time for everything. Maybe I'd go in my final yearbook as "Girl who beats Junior record for most siblings" or something like that. I almost snort the stupidity of that title.

"Three other siblings?" Matt asks, his eyes a bit wide, feigning shock.

I nod. "Two twin brothers who are three, and one sister who is eleven."

"Wow, you must never get bored," Matt says, and I chuckle.

"You don't even know the half of it," I answer back honestly, smiling down at my plate.

"I wish I had another brother or sister," Matt says, sighing.

"It sucks being in an empty house all the time, what with my parents always gone for business trips and lawsuits," he admits.

"I'll give you both of my brothers if you want," I say jokingly, and we laugh.

"But seriously, you're lucky. They're not the best people to share a room with," I say, smirking.

Matt looks up from picking a crumb off the table. "You share a room with all three of them?" he asks, and I almost flinch at the way his voice sounds so incredulous. Somehow, I know that he isn't being overdramatic right now.

I shrug. "I share a room with them in my mom's apartment, but I have my own room at my dads," I say. It sounds so weird, not referring to my parents as one. Now it's "at my mom's" and "at my dad's." I don't think I'll ever get used to saying that. It was always just "home" for me. Now, I have two homes and it makes me feel a bit lost. If I said home now, which home would I be referring too? My dad's, or my mom's?

Suddenly, I feel overwhelmed. I can't be out with Matt, horseback riding and climbing mountains while my mom is doing god knows what. I can't pretend like nothing has happened and everything is okay, because it isn't. It's nice to believe that for at least a second, things are okay. Because even if it's just a fraction of a minute, you feel able. You feel like you can enjoy the simple things in life, like lunches by the beach or adventures in a 1990 Ford crossover. And when reality hits you back again, it's a plummet into the real world, and the wind gets knocked out of you. No one wants to live in a shitty reality, because maybe, it wasn't our doing to choose the path we were on. Shit just happens, and now you have to deal with it.

I guess I stopped talking because Matt grabs my hand, putting me back to reality, and it almost knocks the breath out of me.

"Rynn, are you okay?" he asks, and his eyes look concerned, worried. I realize that he called me just Rynn, and it for some reason it doesn't sit well with me. It's like my name was stripped from his tongue, and I was just another Rynn in a world full of them. Like I was a nobody.