18

Lark

I bared my soul to him.

Lying beside me, now he bares his to me. “My aunt called Lucas the golden child of the family.” He glances at me as I lie beside him. “My mom isn’t the type to argue about such things, as she puts it, but it always stuck in her side.” He grins as if the memory invokes it. “She would tell us that she was gifted with four beautiful children, so she wasn’t looking to get into a fight over her sister-in-law’s only child.” He looks back at me again, the smile still on his face. “She loved Lucas like one of her own, so I think she just let it go.”

“Your mom is nicer than I would have been.”

He gives me a wink and then rolls to his side to face me. “Lucas was my age, so we were always directly compared to each other. It’s like what they do to twins. There’s always one deemed an angel and the other a devil. That was true for Lucas and me, too. But with his mom always campaigning for the top slot, she pegged me early on as the troublemaker.”

The lighthearted tone weaving through the story has disappeared, and I have a feeling this is where truth and lies get confused.

“The thing is,” he continues, “I wasn’t trying to be an angel. There’s not a bone in my body that struggles with confrontation. But sometimes, trouble knew how to find me. Nothing big. It was petty shit, like a pack of gum that was too tempting not to nick behind my dad’s back. Or trekking muddy shoes in the house and blaming my younger brother.” He shakes his head. “I always got busted. They matched the soles of our shoes to the footprints.” A light chuckle rocks his shoulders but then stops. “But Lucas, despite the angelic reputation his mother had built, he looked for trouble.”

“Maybe she knew, and that’s why she petitioned so hard for that perception.”

Reaching over, he finds my hand between us, and our fingers fold together. “I always had a similar thought, but it’s nothing I could prove.”

“What kind of trouble did he get into?”

“He was stealing liquor from his house at fourteen, smoking weed at fifteen. When he got a car on his sixteenth birthday, he drove us straight to Beacon . . .” Harbor stops, seeming to shuffle through notecards in his mind that will detail the memory.

“What did you do in Beacon on his birthday?”

He exhales and looks down. I’m naked next to him, but he doesn’t ogle me or do anything that makes me feel vulnerable or exposed in an uncomfortable way. I’m treated as an extension of him, our hands exchanging energy between us.

His hands slide over my shoulders and then up my neck until I look him in the eyes. “He found the trouble he was looking for, but I made the mistake of being there. We were best friends. Wherever he went, I went. When he drank, I drank. The first time I ever smoked weed was from a blunt he handed me. That’s just how it was with us. We were like brothers but almost closer.” He suddenly sits up and puts his back against the wall. When he scrubs his hands over his face, I can already see the toll this is taking on him.