A/N: Hey everyone, thanks for reading! This is a one shot short story I just wrote for a class. It’s an emotional little story about coping with the battle that is life, youth and unconditional love. The rating is just for a few drug/alcohol references. It was written with lots of help from Jimmy Eat World, Radiohead and about twenty clementines. Reviews would be greatly, greatly appreciated! Enjoy!

Summer Street

Nate was still sitting slouched on the top of the picnic table when Marley hurried back to him, snapping her cell phone shut. He was sucking the last of his soda from the ice of his yellow fast food cup and staring out at the stagnant pond.

“Hey,” Marley called before she was ten feet from him, her sneakers crunching against the gravel of the little park path, “I need to go to my brother’s apartment, would you mind dropping me off?”

“Huh?” He turned and didn’t take the straw from his lips. “We just got here!”

“Yeah, well—whatever—I’m sorry.” But she didn’t look very sorry as she stood, twisting one of her sneakers into the dusty rocks, and pushed her frizzy brown hair from her forehead. She held her hand there and said, “I just need to get over there now. Can you bring me or what?”

“Why, what’s up?”

“Nothing—God! Can we just go?” Nate drew his skinny neck back like an affronted turtle and lowered the cup at this outburst, so she added in a mumble, “He just called, he’s all messed up, I don’t know.”

His thin lips twitched in a tiny wave and the knobby-knuckled hand resting on his knee flexed. He stood and tossed the cup in the nearest rusted green trash barrel, then said, “Yeah, ok,” and started walking up the gravel path toward the car. Marley followed him, slipping her cell into her pocket and crossing her arms over her zip-up sweatshirt. She tried to ignore the painful flutter in her chest, but her anxiety was already making her light-headed.

The walk was quick and quiet. As dusk gave way to a purplish darkness, their footsteps echoed across the sickly brown surface of the pond.

“Do you think it will take long?” Nate ventured to ask when they had made it halfway and were passing through the blackened shade of a few random oak trees. Marley shot him the same withering look she used to give him when they were dating, and he would try and rush her out of a restaurant before she had finished her soda. Clearly, he had not forgotten it. “Ok, ok, I’ll just see you at Brian’s later. You’re still gonna go, right?”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know. Probably.” They reached the splintered fence of the tiny, pot-holed parking lot where a single streetlight buzzed, casting a stained yellow glow over Nate’s lonely green Corolla. As they clambered over it, Marley couldn’t resist asking, “Is Abby going to be there?”

“I don’t know where Ben lives now,” Nate said loudly, clicking the locks and escaping into the car. Marley allowed herself a savage smirk before she climbed in too. In a better mood, she would have kindly avoided the topic of Nate’s twittering, country-music-loving girlfriend, for the sake of enjoying his company. But, once again, Ben had soured her.

“He’s on Summer Street. You know, off Dean, near the old preschool?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He avoided looking at her as he pulled his seat belt across him.

“It’s a two family house.”

“Ok.”

He started the car and the ‘Jimmy Eat World’ CD they’d been listening to erupted from the speakers. Nate quickly turned it down to a murmur and zipped out of the lot with his hand on Marley’s headrest. She clamped her teeth together and tried to appear calm. She failed.

“So, is something wrong with Ben?” Nate asked after a few tense minutes, flicking his thumbs against the wheel and staring determinedly out at the oncoming traffic. “Or do you just not feel like hanging out?”

“Ben’s fine.” She had said this so often lately that it came out without her even thinking about it.

“So, it’s me then?”

Marley felt an uncomfortably tender lurch in her stomach at the way his voice changed when he said this, which, combined with the panicked pounding in her chest, left her disconcerted. For a moment she considered reassuring him; but she was already feeling far too helpless to allow anymore vulnerability to penetrate her day.

Instead she said, “Self-absorbed, much?” and turned the radio up too high for them to speak again.

Outside, their rapidly growing suburban town rolled by the window; brightly-lit, two-story houses with SUV’s in the driveways; a drive-thru Dunkin’ Donuts with a line of crawling cars wrapped around it; a pizza shop with teenagers eating behind painted windows; a hair salon with posted photographs of beautiful women with even more beautiful hair. In high school, it had been their playground. But now, two years later, as a townie commuter at the nearby community college, Marley felt she had outgrown it. Or perhaps it had outgrown her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Marley saw Nate tighten his grip on the wheel and, scowling, say something he knew she wouldn’t hear. She did feel guilty abandoning him. They had been having so much fun over the last two months, since they had discovered that the anger, pain, blame and confusion of their breakup had dulled enough to be stored away and ignored. It was a relief not to hate him anymore; Marley had never known how utterly incapacitating real hate could be until she had to see him out at a party or sitting on a bench outside the library. It was so much easier to acknowledge him and how much he had meant to her, and to talk to him about everything else in their lives and to laugh again. It was a tightrope friendship, to be sure, but it was filling the unfortunately Nate-shaped hole in her life.

Despite this, she could not bring herself now to recount the phone call she had just received, and the way her brother’s haggard voice had sounded when he slurred goodbye to her. Besides, Nate had no real idea what was going on with Ben lately, and she was not in the mood for any lengthy explanations.

Nate’s phone exploded beside her, vibrating violently against the filthy change in the middle plastic console. They both flinched then pretended they hadn’t. Marley watched as Nate scooped it up, looked at the flashing caller id, hesitated, and then turned down the music and slid it open. She was certain it was Abby, but when he answered, he lowered his voice slightly and said, “Hey, man, what’s up?” He mouthed “Tom,” to her and she nodded. Without the music, she couldn’t ignore the conversation.

“Yeah, dude, I’m going…Yeah, a little later …What? …Nowhere… No, no, I’m at home.” He turned quickly to look out his other window as he said this. Marley rolled her eyes, though the surge of annoyance this provoked in her was admittedly unjust; she had told her friend Kristen she was spending the evening visiting her grandmother for Mother’s Day. Since Kristen had dismissed Nate as an antichrist in blue jeans, and Abby’s heavily make-upped eyes flashed whenever she saw Marley, the decision to keep their new friendship a temporary secret had been mutual. “Yeah… Yeah, I’ll call you… Hell yeah… Yo, I got to go… Yeah… Yeah, peace.”

He used Marley’s shoulder to gently slide the phone shut and hang up: a Nate-style apology.

“Tom and them are going over to Brian’s in a bit,” he said, grinning with his boyish, square teeth.

“Cool.”

“It sounds like there’s going to be a lot of people there.”

“Awesome.” She turned back to the window, sure to let him see her uninterested expression in the dim blue glow of the radio controls.

Tightening his thin shoulders, Nate capitulated to her mood once again and instead began to focus far too intensely on finding the right street. He flicked on his blinker and anticipated the turn. “So it’s Summer?”

Summer Street was only about seven duplexes long and all the driveways only fit two cars, side by side. In the front yard of one, a man in a suit was watering a little bed of red and orange marigolds by the light of another, slightly less yellow streetlight. The calmness that Marley hadn’t noticed she felt disappeared as the Corolla made the turn and her palms began to sweat and shake.

“It’s the gray one,” she said, slightly hoarse, “forty-three.”

Forty-three had two long windows on either side of the two front doors and four separate windows upstairs for the bedrooms. The neighbors had all their curtains open and could be seen on the far side of the first floor, eating dinner. All Ben’s windows were heavily curtained.

The Corolla’s breaks squeaked slightly as Nate slowed the car to a stop in front of the duplex. He leaned over to peer out at it through Marley’s window, but she had already popped open the door and leaped out.

“Thanks,” she said, suddenly dizzy now that she was upright. She made to slam the door shut.

“Wait, do you want me to wait? How are you going to get back?”

“No, go to Brian’s. I’ll just call my mom,” she lied. The walk home wouldn’t take too long.

“Marley, what’s—”

But she had already slammed the door and turned to jog up the cracked concrete path. The darkness was much more solid now and the front steps were lit only by a faint orange glow floating out from the neighbors’ front window. Noting dully that Nate still hadn’t driven away, Marley rang Ben’s doorbell.

There was no answer from inside.

She rang again. Nothing. She knocked. Still nothing. Knocked again. Silence. She tried the handle. Locked. She began to pound the door as hard as she could. She heard the voices and clanking silverware next door falter.

“Ben!” she called. “B—!”

“Is there a back door?” Nate had appeared behind her, his hands tucked nervously into his tan cargo shorts, his tight, blond curls glinting in the light from the window.

There was. It was a sliding glass door that led onto a scrubbed wooden deck with splintered lattice on the sides, and it was locked. Frantically, Marley tugged at the metal handle and felt her throat begin to close.

“Maybe we should break it,” she said, surprised at how collected her voice sounded. She tapped the glass with her finger to see how strong it was.

“Break it? If something’s up, maybe we should just call the—”

“No!” Marley said, jumping away from the door. “What about that window?” A few feet from the gnarled deck railing, a square window above the sink overlooked the kitchen.

“Marley…” Nate lifted both of his hands to his hair and tried to peer through the adjacent neighbors’ window as Marley scrambled up onto the railing. Luckily, the casual diners hadn’t yet noticed their break-in attempt.

“It’s open!” Jamming her palms against the glass, Marley managed to lift the window a half an inch from the frame.

“You’re gonna climb in the window?”

She didn’t answer as she exerted all of her strength against the glass. When it didn’t budge, she released it and nearly toppled off the railing.

“Move, you’re going to break your neck. You’re too short.”

Marley allowed Nate to shift her off the railing, partly because the shock of having his hands on her waist and his face at the nape of her neck left her immobile. There was a tense moment when, back on her feet, she accidentally looked up into his face at the same time he was looking down, but they left this unacknowledged as usual and he hastily replaced her on the rail. Gangly as he was, his long torso gave him a lot more leverage as he leaned against the pane. He soon pried it open.

“Now let me just—” Marley started to climb the railing again, but Nate had already stuck his head inside and begun to shrug his body through the frame. Carefully, she put a supporting hand on his abdomen, but he must not have been expecting it because the muscles under her palm flinched, his knees left the top of the railing and, as gravity took over, he tumbled head-first over the sink and disappeared. There was a thunderous crash of cans from inside, and then the heavy slap of a skinny young body hitting fake tiles.

“Ow,” she heard from within.

“Sorry!” Marley jumped to the slider and saw him sprawled across the floor, covered in beer cans from a box he had knocked over. “But let me in!”

He got up unsteadily, the cans clanking as they rolled off and away from him, and limped to the slider. When he opened it, Marley raced past him and inside.

“Ben!” The kitchen was connected to the living room by a cramped hallway, and Marley flew through it and up the narrow staircase on the other wall. There were two bedrooms on the second floor, Ben’s and Ben’s roommate Dan’s. Marley stopped in front of Ben’s door, while Nate tripped up the stairs behind her. “Ben!”

“Yea?”

As the panic rushed out of her, Marley felt like she had suddenly stood up after sitting for a long time. But it left hot, tingling anger in its place and she kicked the door open.

“Woah,” Nate said as he looked inside.

Ben was in bed, fully clothed and lying on his back. His face was the color of sour milk and covered with greasy black stumble. A lit cigarette dangled precariously from his fingertips, hovering over a little pile of ash on the carpet. His eyes, once a beautiful shade of green, had been taken over by the black holes that were his pupils, and now gazed up at the ceiling through a glassy film. His room was littered with soiled plates and cups, paper bags, plastic wrappers, a few beer cans and two half full bottles of whisky. A yellowing bong stood impishly in the corner of the room beside a pile of dirty t-shirts, boxers and sweatpants. A few orange pill bottles were clustered on the bedside table, beside a credit card, a razor blade and a little glass pipe. The table surface was covered in little green stems and a barely visible layer of brownish powder.

Marley stepped quickly into the room and snatched the cigarette out of Ben’s fingers.

“Wh—hey!” he protested, his voice low and far away. He sat up slightly.

“What did you take?” Marley demanded, putting the cigarette out in an ashtray and picking up the pill bottles. “How much?”

“Who cares,” he said gruffly, falling back onto his pillow again.

“Ben!” she shouted. She held out the pill bottles. “What are these?”

“Just pain killers.”

“How many did you take? Have you been drinking?”

“No, Marl, it’s the middle of the day!”

“It’s seven-thirty, Ben. How many pills did you take?”

“Just three. Then one more a little after that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yea.”

“What else?”

Ben gave a great, exaggerated sigh.

“What else?”

“Some heroin.”

“From a needle?” she asked, glancing around for one.

“No! What do you think of me? I just snorted it.”

“How much?”

“Calm down, no more than usual.”

Marley rubbed her eyes. “So you didn’t try to OD?”

“No.”

“Then why did you tell me on the phone that you were going to?”

Ben closed his eyes and let his head loll on the pillow. “Because I wanted to,” he said flatly, “It’s the right thing to do. I’m just too scared.” Marley closed her eyes too, to fight the hot, irritating tears.

“What’s he doing here?” Ben suddenly growled. Marley opened her eyes to see Ben sitting up, glaring at Nate with his yellow teeth bared. “Get the hell out of my house!”

Nate stood in the doorway, looking just as pale as Ben, though more lucid. His gray eyes were wide, his hands still defenselessly in his pockets.

“Come on.” Marley grabbed the sleeve of his T-shirt, pulled him from the room and shut the door.

“Is he going to be ok?” he asked immediately.

“He hasn’t been ok for a while now.”

“Marley, I didn’t know—”

“That my older brother is a drug addict? Well now you do. Just go to Brian’s, everything’s fine. This is nothing new. I don’t know why I even bothered.”

“Maybe we should—”

“What? Don’t you think my mother and I have done everything? The hospital, some rehab; they can’t hold him against his will. He’s an adult. There’s nothing we can do.”

Nate swallowed and bounced back and forth on his feet, glancing from Ben’s door to the stairs, torn between enduring something unpleasant and fleeing the scene. She had seen him like this once before, when they had broken up and he stood teetering in the doorway while she sat on her bed and wept. She was not surprised when he said now exactly what he had said then.

“I guess I should go.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

He hesitated sincerely on the top step. “You’ll be ok?”

“Yeah.”

“You should call your mom.”

Marley bit back her retort, that maybe in his family it was that easy to solve problems, but her mother had seen more than enough deteriorating drug addicts to last her a lifetime. “Yeah, maybe.”

When she heard him close the front door, she went back into the room.

“You’re back with him?” Ben asked. Marley started to gather the dishes.

“No. We’re friends.”

“He cheated on you with that Abby girl.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you friends with him?”

Marley paused while bending for a plate covered in hardened maple syrup. “I have no idea.”

She brought the dishes down to the kitchen, rinsed them in the sink, loaded them into the dishwasher and started it. She picked up all the cans Nate had knocked over and dropped them in the recycling bin. She found Windex and paper towels in the cabinet under the sink and wiped down all the counters and the table. She had never been enthusiastic about cleaning before, but she knew it was what her mother would have done if Ben had called her instead.

When Marley came back in, Ben was crying silently on the bed. She handed him a large glass of tap water. He held it and didn’t drink.

“Where’s Dan?” she asked, sitting down on the filthy carpet.

“Visiting his girlfriend upstate.”

“Oh.” She began to contemplate taking the pill bottles and the rest of the heroin with her when she left. She knew it would be a struggle. She wondered if she was a bad person for rejecting the idea because leaving them would just be easier.

“Do you hate me?” Ben asked.

“No, I love you,” she said automatically.

“Mum hates me.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“She kicked me out of the house.”

“You threatened her. And you’ve been selling her jewelry to buy drugs, Ben.”

“I think I hate her.”

“Then you’re ungrateful and selfish.”

Fresh tears dripped down his temples and he made a horrible sobbing sound in the back of his throat.

“You don’t understand.”

“Of course I do.”

“It was so hard growing up without Dad. She depended on me. She put all the responsibility on me. I was too young to handle it. It’s her fault.”

“It’s Dad’s fault.”

“Don’t say that.”

“He left us.”

“He died!”

“He could have stopped. He chose not to. He chose drugs over us and that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

Ben slammed the glass of water on the bedside table and rolled onto his side, facing the wall instead of his sister. “That’s why she hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you, she loves you. She just can’t watch you kill yourself like she watched him. And it’s heartless to make her.”

In the movies, this would be when the young, selfless heroine bursts into tortured tears for her father and for her mother and for the grim fate of her brother, but Marley didn’t. She couldn’t. She felt emotionless as she spoke, not empty, but calm and reasonable. It had happened before during these weekly traumas. After the initial shock, she would fall into a kind of numb trance. She would speak the truth, cold and logical, and she would mean it.

At first, she used to wonder whether this made her a hard-hearted person, but soon she began to understand the fruitlessness of grief. If tears could make her brother save himself, then she would cry until the oceans overflowed and the whole world was swept up and drowned. It would be worth another great flood, worth the end of the world, if she could just see him smile again like he used to when they were children, laughing while they sprayed the hose and carved muddy canals into their grandmother’s old sandbox. But Marley had learned very early in life that tears did little more than wet the front of your shirt, so she tolerated them as little as possible.

Ben rolled on his back again. The tears had slowed slightly and his forehead was creased. “You don’t understand him like I do. I understand why he couldn’t stop. It’s not possible to stop and survive at the same time. The pain of not having it…it would kill you.”

“Having it kills you faster, I bet.”

“No. Not if you do it right. Dad couldn’t do it right, but I can. I don’t have to stop. I just need to control it.”

Marley stood up. “I won’t listen to that.”

“Then leave.” It was a sharp but predictable blow. Reason wasn’t a welcome guest in Ben’s room, not when Denial and Desire took up so much space.

“Fine.”

“Please don’t tell Mum I called you.”

“I wouldn’t.”

She hesitated, looking at the bottles on the table. “Ben? Are you going to kill yourself tonight?”

“No.”

“Do you promise?” The absurdity of the question was like a drug itself.

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“I love you, Marley.”

“I love you, too.” And without thinking she leaned down and kissed his forehead. The skin was clammy against her lips. She ran her knuckles along the stubble on his cheek and then left the room. She paused on the stairs to breathe and stop herself from shaking, pulling the mass of her hair back and holding it at the nape of her neck. She reminded herself that it was the right thing to leave him alone in his anguish, that he needed to understand what his choices were costing him if he was ever going to quit making them. Still, she felt cruel as she reached the front door and opened it.

The green Corolla was still parked in front of the house.

Nate was lying on the hood, looking up at the bulbous and shifting purple clouds. He still did not look much like a man as he hopped off the car, his T-shirt fluttering in the gentle summer breeze, but he squared his shoulders and tried.

“Ok?” he asked.

“No. But alive.”

Distracted as she was, she noticed with horror his big hands come out of his pockets and lift slightly, about to reach for her. Falling back into the atmosphere of ‘normal’ life, it was taking all her strength to hold her form together and she knew that contact, especially from him, would send her careening to pieces in a moment. As tempting as it suddenly was, she knew she would not forgive herself later if she fell apart in his arms now. Thankfully, his hands quickly fell and he contented himself with looking grim and contorting his eyebrows.

“Do you want to go home?” he asked instead.

“No.”

Since everyone was home for summer break, Brian Dolan’s parents’ house was overrun with happy, drinking college students by nine o’clock that night. They scurried from room to room with their red plastic cups, shouting, flirting and rubbing their oily hands all over Mrs. Dolan’s clean, white walls. They slouched all over the tan leather furniture and danced in front of Mr. Dolan’s brand new sound system. On either end of the finished kitchen table, triangles of red cups had been strategically placed, and boys in basketball jerseys and cotton winter hats were tossing Ping-Pong balls into them, concentrating like surgeons while they swayed like buoys.

As Marley walked in the front door and removed her sweatshirt, Kristen called her over to the corner of the living room where she was sitting on the fireplace, fingering her own red cup.

“Where have you been?” she demanded as Marley fell onto the bricks beside her. “I’ve been calling.”

“My grandma’s,” Marley answered, with a convincing smile, “Remember?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, belated Mother’s Day or something, right?”

Just then, all the boys who had been surrounding the game at the kitchen table started cheering.

“Nate, dude, there you are!” Tom called, as Nate appeared at the back glass slider door and strode into the kitchen. “We’re up next in Ruit.”

“Yeah, cool,” he said, taking his hands out of his pockets as a few of the boys reached out to high-five him. But he was not as talented as Marley at composing his face, so it still looked tight and distracted as he turned and leaned against the counter. He scanned the living room and gave her a little nod when he spotted her on the fireplace. When Marley had insisted on them entering separately, to avoid an unnecessary confrontation with Abby, he had been annoyed but complacent. She neglected to mention that Kristen would be just as furious to see them walk in together.

“What an ass,” her best friend said now, glaring over at Nate in the way only good best friends can glare at cheating ex-boyfriends. Of course, Abby had just joined him and lassoed his skinny waist with her chemically tanned arm. Nate straightened as she spoke to him and stared at the wall. Aloof and uneasy, he conceded a few not-so-furtive glances over at the fireplace.

Marley laid her frizzy head on Kristen’s bare shoulder and allowed herself a hollow laugh.

“You ok?” her friend asked, putting an arm around her.

“Meh. Alive.”