When I say there was nothing to do in my hometown, I mean there was literally nothing to do. That’s why the teenage pregnancy and drug overdose rates were so high. What else were kids supposed to do?

We had no mall, no good parks or attractions, no decent bars, or even a semblance of nightlife. Do drugs. Have sex. Watch TV. The good kids went to the one shitty movie theater on Friday night and snuck into rated-R movies.

That was the best you got here.

Drugs were out of the question, especially with my teenage niece around. Besides, with all my bad choices, nothing stronger than shrooms ever made it into my system, and I was okay with that. I’d trained hard not to ruin my body.

Not until it was ruined for me.

Sex was… preferable, but hell if I was going to check out a dating app in this town. I don’t want to see what singles my age in this area were up to because I probably knew most of them in high school and I purposely never spoke to them again.

Streaming services it was, then. I’d never considered myself a binge-watcher. A few times a year I’d sit down and stream a whole season of something when I wasn’t feeling well, or my injuries decided they hated me today.

Otherwise, I’d rather be out doing something.

I was embarrassingly excited at 9:30 PM when Sky and her friends came into the house. I rolled off the back of the house, giddy to greet a bunch of teenagers who were way too young to think I was cool, but damn was I bored.

“Hey, Sky. How was the party? Anyone hungry? I think Mom and Dad have some snacks around here somewhere. What are y'all planning for the night?”

Sky was stopped in the doorway, one eyebrow raised. She looked at her friends. "This is Mikkie, they're usually cool, but when they aren't, I find it best to ignore them." The two other kids giggled while she turned back to me, “We’re going to go play board games upstairs. You okay?” Her words asked if I was okay, but her face said, “Please don't embarrass me,” so I toned it down.

“Ah. Board games. That sounds… safe.” That wasn’t how I would have spent any time with my friends after a party, but as my parents had told me seventy-seven thousand times: I wasn’t the best role model.

The weird thing was, back in my day, I could tell who the nerdy kids wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons after school were by looking at them. This group that Sky brought home looked more like the kids that would go to their rich friend’s house with the hot tub and steal from their parents’ beer fridge.

Times, they were a-changing.

“Come on, we gotta get the whole thing set up before midnight,” said one blond guy with a fully-tailored suit and perfectly styled hair. He was the kid whose parents had a hot tub. No doubt in my mind. He clamored up the stairs with the other girl—a petite brunette—in tow, leaving behind only Sky to tear through the fridge for snacks.

“Your friends seem nice,” I said even though I had absolutely no idea how nice they were. I did know how hard it was to make friends being the genderqueer kid in a small, conservative town, and I was happy she had any at all.

Sky pulled out several boxes of frozen pizza snacks and fries and stacked them in her arms. “Yeah. They have been. We only started hanging out a few weeks ago, but they’ve been nicer to me than my old friends were after, you know…”

I knew. Didn't make me any less sad about it.

“Are Mom and Dad home?” Sky asked after every edible frozen snack was pulled from the freezer.

I pulled myself up on the counter and sat with my legs crossed like I did when I was ten, and my mom yelled at me for touching my socks where we prepared food. “They didn’t even tell you, huh?”

Sky’s eyebrows scrunched as she took out a plate of cut veggies.

“They left for Florida. I’m your long-term babysitter.” I dipped a carrot in the container of ranch in the center and crunched it in my mouth.

Sky dropped the plate on the counter and her eyes lit up. “Holy shit, no way!” Her smile couldn’t have gotten larger without ripping her face in two.

“Hey. Language!” Like I had room to talk, even at her age.

“I’m fourteen, not four.” She pressed one of her fists into her hip. “But actually, this is awesome. Maybe they’ll never come back, and it could be the two of us.”

I rolled my eyes and shoved Sky so hard she hit the fridge with her shoulder. “Ack. Please. You and I know I am not responsible enough to take care of us both. And you are not responsible enough to be responsible if I’m not… responsible.” I shut my eyes trying to replay my words to see if they even made sense. “Besides, I could never afford us both to live in LA and like hell I’m staying in this town. I don’t think I have a single good memory from here.”

Sky paused for a moment before chuckling. “Oh, speaking of old memories,” she pulled out some leftover chicken tenders from a local fast-food restaurant and added them to the pile, “Do you remember Damien Matthews?”

The room went cold. My heart stopped beating for nearly a minute. My jaw froze, not allowing me to respond as that name echoed in my head over and over again.

Damien Matthews.

Damien Matthews.

That was a name I'd spent a long time trying to forget, and never quite succeeded. Hearing it out loud brought back every single memory I worked hard to repress. It was like getting smacked in the face with icicles.

Luckily, Sky was digging in the fridge and didn’t notice my hesitation before I pulled myself together. Did I remember the guy I dated through all of high school? The guy who was my best friend for eight years before he betrayed me at my lowest moment?

All I said out loud was a sarcastic, “Yes, Sky, I think I might remember him.”

Soda was the new addition to the pile that Sky pulled out. How was she planning on getting this all upstairs, exactly?

“He was at the dance tonight. He’s substituted at the school a few times now. I talked to him a few times,” Sky said like it was no big deal.

Why was she even bringing this up? She knew about what he did. I knew she knew.

My blood ran like fire and ice at the same time. “You talked to him? Please tell me you didn’t say anything about me.”

Sky bit her lip and pulled out her ridiculous puppy dog eyes like she did when she really didn’t want to get in trouble.

“SKY! DID YOU—”

My phone beeped like it did when it received a text message.

That... that could be anyone. Mom. Dad. Someone I hooked up with a few weeks ago trying to get back in contact. When I glanced back at Sky, her face looked ready to pop.

She released her mouth and blurted out, “I told him you were in town and to message you.”

“Sky! You little—” The phone beeped again and a smile crept over Sky’s face. An evil little smile from an evil little girl. I knew what she was planning to do, and I had to beat her to it.

At once, I leaped off the counter, and she pushed off the fridge, both of us sprinting to the couch to be the first one to the phone. Sky, being a nimble teenager, rolled right over the couch and landed beside the coffee table, while my broken body had to swerve around.

Needless to say, she reached the phone with time to spare. One glance at the screen and her grin only widened.

She shoved the phone into my face and said, “Speak of the devil.”

I’d never wanted to be struck down by a force of nature so badly then when I saw the name “Damien” above the messages with three heart emojis and a kissy face.

Three different phones since we broke up, and that just had to carry over. Fuck me.

“I haven’t spoken to him since we broke up. Why would you tell him to contact me?” I didn’t like being stern with Sky, as she had enough problems for a kid, but this was out of line.

I was not ready to even think about Damien Matthews again, let alone speak to him.

Sky lowered the phone and shrugged. “Grandma and Grandpa are always talking about how lonely you sound. I thought…I don’t know, maybe…” She trailed off and lowered her head.

God damn that kid could look sad if she wanted to. I could only blame her so much.

She didn't know.

“I’m fine being alone. I don’t need you matchmaking for me.” I put my hand out to receive the phone, and Sky reluctantly placed it in my palm.

“Thank you,” I said, fully intending to stick my phone in my pocket and ignore the messages, but I couldn’t. Some kind of morbid curiosity or straight-up masochism forced my hand to put the screen in front of my face and read the two messages below the message he'd sent to break up with me that I'd read and reread a thousand times in the past. That message was utter bullshit and I couldn't even look at it anymore.

The new ones, however, said:

“I heard you were in town.”

“We should catch up.”

My heart leaped and jumped in all sorts of ways I couldn’t explain.

Part of me wanted to slam the phone into the ground and break every piece and bit that generated those messages, another wanted to hug my phone tightly and pretend I was still eighteen, unbroken, and delusional to the realities of relationships.

I knew I never really got over Damien Matthews, despite what he did to me.

But it'd been nice to pretend I had for seven god-awful years.

Sky leaped back over the couch and started to stack all the snacks into her arms. “You should, by the way.”

I couldn’t move my stare from the message. “Should what?”

“Catch up. Go grab drinks tonight or whatever it is old people do.” The stacks of cardboard boxes and soda cans teetered and weaved as she grabbed the final bits, but they stayed in her arms by the grace of some miracle.

At least the spectacle of her absurd balance skills pulled me away from the phone. “I can’t. In case you didn’t hear, I’m babysitting my annoying niece and her friends on a Sunday night. Who's dumb idea was it to have a school dance on a Sunday, anyway? It's a school night.”

“We don’t need a babysitter. And we'd just be up playing games until midnight anyway. That’s Daisy’s curfew,” Sky said as she wobbled to the stairs. I managed to meet her eyes for a moment, even behind all the boxes, so she could see the accusatory stare I wore.

I’d been fourteen once. I knew what fourteen-year-olds did.

“Oh my god. We are just playing board games, I swear. No alcohol. No drugs. Everyone’s hands will keep to themselves. Okay? Yeesh. Not everyone is as irresponsible as you were.” She started up the stairs one carefully placed foot after another.

"You know half of those are frozen right?" Sky didn't respond so I ran to the stairs and yelled up, mostly just to get the final word in, “Well none of that matters, because I don’t even know if I’m going to text him back!”

“Huh, sure,” Sky yelled back as she disappeared around the corner with the food. She never let me get in the final word. Why did I even bother?

Silence took over the downstairs with only the echoes of giggling teenagers upstairs to break it. The phone burned a hole in my hand. I didn’t want to respond even a little bit, and yet every part of me wanted to respond more than anything.

What the hell, brain? Make up your goddamn mind!

The day Damien and I broke up was the worst day of my life, for more reasons than just him leaving.

It was the fact that he left me when so much other shit had gone wrong. That was why I never wanted to speak to him again. Yet, the fact that I had never spoken to him again was exactly the reason I wanted to.

I had to know why, even if I didn't want to hear it. I needed to see him again. I needed to take control of a situation my chaotic niece unbottled for.

If nothing else, I'd learned many ways to take control in the past seven years.

I only needed one of them tonight.

Which one that was, only time would tell.

I texted back only one word:

“Drinks?”

Not even a minute later, my phone beeped again.

“I’ll meet you at Brimstone’s in twenty.”