Page 17 of House of Bass

I take two steps back, clearing my throat. “Did you need something? Is that why you’re here?”

“Maybe,” he replies, softly.

“Last night was a mistake,” I blurt out, and he freezes . “I just haven’t been feeling like myself recently. I didn’t mean anything I said.”

“You didn’t?” Arden asks. His head tilts, his eyes boring into mine, as I try to look at anywhere but him.

“No, I didn’t.”

“To answer your question, I thought there was something here that I had lost and finally found. Turns out, I was wrong. Things that hide tend to go missing for a reason.”

I finally meet his eyes, and I almost break but hold my ground. “We should just act how we used to with one another. Go back to your girlfriend, Richard. You’re not needed or wanted here.” I slam the door in his face.

7

ST. ANNABEL

There was technically no first day in which I met Arden Thorne, he has always been in my life. I’ve never known a world without him. His mother and mine had been friends, best friends in fact, much to my father’s displeasure considering how much he loathes Arden’s father. He always said, “Katherine was the best thing about that man.”

On the day I was born, Katherine had brought Arden with her to visit my mother in the hospital. She would've left him at home but he was such a mama’s boy. He never wanted to leave her side, he’d wail and wail until he was reunited with her, and she could never handle seeing him cry. It was why he was so spoiled.

I had been laid to rest in the nursery so my mother could have a break, we shared a room for bonding purposes. The birth had taken a toll on her. Her shiny blonde hair was dewy and matted with patches of sweat sticking to various parts of her. There hadn’t been an inch of makeup in sight as anything previously applied had essentially washed away. Ghostly, was how she described herself. Yet, it was the first time in her life she hadn’t cared about looking neither proper nor presentable. Like motherhood had transformed her and the essence of new life made her understand that nothing else would ever be important.

The irony was that due to the birth complications she received the devastating news that she could never have any other children. She had cried into my father’s chest, mourning the loss of the life she promised she’d give him. I said it before, he hates seeing her sad so he made sure to reassure her that I would be enough, despite the fact that they both knew he had yearned for more kids, maybe a son, one day.

Thirteen hours later, when Katherine visited, she’d been so concerned with making my mother feel better she lost sight of her son for a couple minutes as he had wandered in search for something to bite and chew like any child his age. Arden hobbled around until he found his target: me. He latched his tiny hand onto mine and refused to let go, even after his mum had seen him and tried to pry him off. Then he started crying, which woke me up and I started crying too.

Mum said it was the first time she had smiled since the news. It sounded so fictitious and she probably exaggerated certain bits of the story, but it didn't matter. From then on there was no separating Arden from Annabel, we were a set.

He was the eye to my hurricane. No matter how unruly I was when I acted out, he had this unflinching ability to steer me towards a level headed path. Like that day, he held my hand through every disaster I faced, and when you were little, especially when you’re me, it did often feel like the world was ending.

Then one day the world really did. Katherine had died when Arden was fifteen from a car accident. She died on impact, so he never got to see her in her last moments and it eats at him terribly. I don't think I have ever seen him so broken. He was a shell of the person he used to be, so angry, so lost and confused. He barely wanted to come back to school but his dad wasn't someone who would ever let him do that. We had that in common, the two of us. Complicated fathers.

His was a bitter man who never shied away from openly disparaging his son, while mine did the same with false smiles. Arden was back in school the next day after the funeral and things went by like normal, except the boy I once knew was different.

Just after the first anniversary of her death, he left a message for me to meet him at our spot. It was a place, still on the academy grounds, that the two of us often went off to be alone together. Nobody else ever went there because it was far out and secluded by a small lake. Arden had found it during his first week at the school on his quest to be on his own; he was introverted by design but extroverted by choice.

He had been so excited to show it to me when I started at TCA. We usually sat there and read or talked about everything and nothing all at once until curfew, or broke it if we wanted and asked Dan and MJ to cover for us. Over the course of that year, we spent it surviving next one another, a lot of it in silence. I had to put aside the fact that I wasn’t mentally fit myself to be there for him in case he needed me.

Once I was done with classes, I changed out of my uniform and went to find him. He stood by the tree that we had carved our names into, SAB+RAT = Best Friends Always , and smiled when he saw me. For a year those eyes had been vacant and lifeless but this time they shone. I had been so happy to see him lighter and free that I hadn't picked up the signs. There was a picnic basket on top of a red gingham blanket spread across the grass and a bowl of strawberries–my favourite–next to it.

He wrapped his arms around me as I bounced into them. We stayed like that for a moment as we hadn’t seen one another in a couple days as because he had been busy with mocks. I asked him, “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough. How was English?”

I pulled out of his arms, and humorously rolled my eyes as we sat down. “Mr.Hale tried to keep MJ behind because she refused to say the n-word while reading Of Mice and Men . She spent half the class arguing that he was promoting racism, which led to him starting some spiel about censorship.”

He laid down on the blanket and rested his head on my lap as I played with his hair. “Sounds like her. And him. How he has been allowed to go on for this long is utterly beyond me.”

“That would require for people to care,” I stated, “Either way, she said she plans on getting him fired.”

He scoffed out a laugh, “Of course she is. Hope she can pull it off.”

“She’s extra determined, she was trying to call her dad on my way out.”

“Everyone pulls the dad card. Even you have.”

“Yeah, but we all know mine wouldn’t bother.”