Excerpt: That Which Keeps the Stars Apart

From Chapter One:

The room I was in was very cold. It was dark, too, but I didn’t really notice it because for some reason, I could only see directly ahead of me. I wasn’t scared, but I knew that that wasn’t normal. I should be scared. I should be terrified, but I could barely manage to remain alert. It wasn’t as cold now, and a growing fuzziness in my head was accompanied by a growing light.

“I thought you said you knew me? I’m always in trouble.”

“And that, kiddo, is why I know you are the one he waited for.”

I woke with a start. My sheets were tangled around my legs, and the t-shirt I had on was soaked with sweat. There was an eerie glow seeping through the curtains over the window on the far side of the room, making my desk and chest of drawers cast misshapen silhouettes across the bare wooden floor. The house was quiet, which meant that my mom and her shitty excuse for a husband were out partying—or participating in something illegal. Probably both.

I sighed and shoved the covers off my legs. My mother hadn’t always been a neglectful nurturer. She got this way when my dad died. I was only eight at the time, but I remember the way we were. The three of us were happy. We had been a family. And mom hadn’t even minded the fact that dad had been married before—they were in love, whatever the hell that was worth. She told me later, after she met Victor, that she wished she’d never met him…that marrying a firefighter who’d been married before had been the worst mistake in her life. And that had hurt like hell, too, because it was clear that she didn’t want me either. So I decided then that if she was going to give up on what was left of our family, then I was going to my damndest to destroy it.

I got into fights, I broke expensive things—I screamed and raged against Victor at every opportunity. But, for all the hate I felt towards him and what my mother had become, I could never bring myself to runaway (not that a sixteen-year-old boy with a bad reputation had any options anyway); somewhere, deep down, I think, I still clung to Mom because I couldn’t ever stop loving her completely. There was a little boy inside me who still wanted to have everything be okay. I squashed him as much as I could, but since I had just woken up in the tangled sheets of my bed, it was still obviously an ongoing battle.

I fisted my hands in my messy blonde hair in frustration. It felt slick and oily with sweat and I was filled with a sudden urge to take a shower. I growled under my breath as I rolled out of bed.

I yanked my t-shirt up over my head, letting it drop to the floor by my feet. I stood for a moment, shivering as the chilly March air coming through the crack in the window pinged of the sweat on my chest. I had on sleep pants, but they were thin and soaked with sweat too. I hurried to the chest of drawers and grabbed a clean set of pajamas before rushing out the door and down the hallway to the bathroom. I didn’t worry about being quiet, though I did keep the lights off until I got there.

I looked at the mirror first, which was a bad idea. Part of the reason that Mom had such trouble being around me was that the older I got, the more I looked like Dad. Sometimes, even I could see his ghost looking back at me. Tonight, he was glaring disapprovingly at the mess I’d become. My face was pale, my blue eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, and my hair was stringy and limp.

“God, Dad, we really screwed the pooch with this one.” I glared back at him, but instead I only myself again. “How did we get to this place? How did I get to this place?”