All I Wanted Was You

“Hey, kid, turn around,” Frank scolded Mikayla, who had twisted around, within the confines of her seatbelt, to coo at her sleeping cousin.

Mikayla settled herself neatly back into the seat, “I thought you weren’t babysitting me.”

“I’m not. But...” he grasped, “I’m kinda still the adult here and if you died while I was driving I’d feel pretty guilty so…yeah.”

“I wouldn’t have died.”

“If I drifted off the road, you would have. Probably.”

“Why would you drift off the road?” she questioned with a mock-accusatory tone.

“By accident, of course,” Frank responded, sighing and pushing some of his shaggy charcoal hair back out of his eyes, “Whatever! Just stop arguing and be safe!”

“Fine,” she rolled her cobalt eyes in jest. “So how are you planning on spending the afternoon? I figured playing with Bandit would make this less awkward, but she’s asleep. Maybe I should wake her.”

“Don’t wake the baby, Mikayla,” Frank warned, chuckling at her antsy behavior, “She only dozed off, like, five minutes before I left to pick you up and I hear those things cry really loud if you wake them prematurely.”

Mikayla laughed, glancing across the front seat at him. “-ly,” she amended.

“Huh?”

“They cry loudly.”

“Oh,” he chuckled, “Sorry, Smarty.”

“It’s all good,” she smiled brightly.

The first time she had ever met Frank, she’d been eleven or so years old. She’d flown out to stay with her aunt for a few weeks while Mindless Self Indulgence was opening up the Project Revolution tour. This was around the time Lindsay and Gerard started dating, as My Chemical Romance was one of the headlining bands on the same tour. So, while Mikayla was there, she and her aunt spent a good deal of time with Gerard, Frank and the band.

At the time, MCR had been touring with this concept album and, every night, they played in these black soldier-style costumes. Frank had actually been wearing a good deal of makeup onstage back then, Mikayla remembered – bright splotches of red or purple around his eyes, sometimes eyeliner. Back then, he had been this sort of odd, very rambunctious guy who played guitar in a band; sometimes made out with his lead singer on stage even though neither of them were gay; wore makeup; swore like a teenager and was hardly much taller than she was, even then. That was five years ago and, though he’d tamed a bit since then, he hadn’t grown an inch; now, only about two or three inches taller than her own fully formed body.

“So, really, what are we supposed to do for the afternoon? Is Mikey here?” she asked as they unloaded from the car. Frank grabbed Bandit, still in her car seat, and Mikayla collected the diaper bag and a few of her school things, following Frank up to the door. Despite the fact that Frank had been in her life since she was a preteen, he was still only her uncle’s band mate. She’d never been to the house he shared with Mikey and couldn’t really see how an afternoon spent with him would turn out as anything other than awkward.

“I don’t know and I don’t know. I guess, we’ll have to figure that out together,” he responded. “Mikes?” Frank called as they entered the front door, “Hello? Is Alicia still here?”

“Nahh, I drove her home,” Mikayla heard Mikey’s shouted response from the back of the house.

Mikayla followed Frank through the front door. It was a pretty modest cottage: a cheap table and chairs set to the right of the entrance with two waist-high bookshelves against the wall and, to the left, an outdated kitchen with bright yellow laminate floors.

Frank kicked his vans off by the door and set the car seat down on the kitchen table, calling back to Mikey, again, “You two all better now?”

Mikayla put the bags down onto one of the kitchen chairs and stood, awkwardly, in the middle of the house. Beyond the kitchen-dining-room-foyer, a narrow hallway split the house in two, leading back to, as it appeared to Mikayla, some sort of family room – cluttered with guitars, open CD and DVD cases, comic books and magazines, dirty socks and other miscellaneous items.

“Yup,” Mikayla could hear Mikey’s voice growing closer as he emerged from his own bedroom in the back of the house, “Solved it with some kinky shit; we tied each other up and I drove her home afterwards. That girl is a – ” Mikey stopped abruptly when he rounded the corner, spotting Mikayla, “Whoa! I didn’t know you were here. Uhh… Sorry…”

“Chill. It’s whatever,” she said flippantly, “It’s not like I’m any stranger to a little S&M, myself.”

Frank and Mikey both looked at her.

“Really?” Mikey asked with a furrowed brow, his lips twisting uncomfortably.

“No, not really,” she shook her head humorously.

“Oh.” He said, “Well, okay. I was actually just leaving,” he turned back to Frank, “I’m taking Alicia out.”

“Have fun!” Frank waved sarcastically at Mikey’s back.

“Eff off,” Mikey brushed this off, then added, “Bye Mikayla,” and shuffled out the front door, shoving his palms into the pocket of his skinny jeans – held up around his bony hips by a brown leather belt and shaggy around his long, perfectly snap-able legs.

“What was that about?” Mikayla asked. She and Frank left Bandit asleep in her car seat and made their way back to the family room which, Mikayla realized when she got back there, was merely a sunroom with three glass walls and a screen door that led out to the back deck. The guys had thrown a desk in the corner, a couch and recliner against the wall, and hung a flat-screen on the one wood-paneled wall adjacent to the rest of the house and called it the living room. She brought her book bag back with her, ready to churn out some school assignments using the timed fashion Lindsay had implemented.

“Alicia’s kinda weird,” Frank explained, falling back into the couch, “Honestly, Mikey is such a nice sweet guy and, it’s weird, it’s like she gets mad at him for being cuddly and picks these weird, really loud, fights with him ‘cause she wants him to fuckin’ dominate her or some weird shit. Then, they have really kinky sex to makeup. That’s actually why I was over Gee’s earlier when he asked me to pick you up. They’re really fucking loud.”

“Oh,” Mikayla nodded awkwardly and moved a stack of Rolling Stone and Spin magazines over to the coffee table so she could take a seat beside Frank on the musty brown sofa.

“Lots of awkward sex-talk today. I know; I’m sorry,” Frank offered.

“It’s…” Mikayla began, looking around at the room, “I don’t know, actually,” she laughed. Frank watched her meek smile. She had this almost cherubic face – bright, rosy cheeks; long brown eyelashes; and plump lips. But she sat there in this velour number that was actually pretty mature and alluring by comparison – with silver hooks up the dress's front binding the material tightly to her chest. Beneath it, she wore these badass, ratty black tights.

She had "innocent" and "good" written all over her. He knew this, especially as he watched her pull various textbooks from her bag and begin working on a relentless heap of schoolwork. Still, she didn't seem very childlike to him. She didn't seem like someone eight years younger. He took note of her funky outfit and the Black Keys and The Bouncing Souls patches on her backpack and, to him, she just seemed so fucking interesting.

“I feel bad,” he piped up after a while of sitting there with Pawn Stars on the television, beside Mikayla furiously scribbling away in her various notebooks, “You’re working so hard and I’m just sitting here on my ass.”

“Well, I guess I could put you to work.” She said, half-kidding, her daunting smile dancing on her lips.

“Sure,” he laughed, “As previously established, I’m not nearly as smart as you, though. So give me something easy.” He said, referencing how she'd corrected his grammar back in the car.

“Seriously?”

“Why not?”

“Uhh… okay, here,” she said, offering the thinnest of her textbooks to him – Economics. Shit, he thought. Economics? “If you really want to, you can take notes from pages 341-359. Just write down the bold words, really. It’s an elective, so he really only checks to make sure there’s words on the page.”

He took the book and a few pieces of paper, waiting patiently for her to hand him a pen, asking, “You took economic as an elective? When I was in school I got like art and computers for that, easy shit.”

“The teacher’s hot. I had him for history last year,” she replied, placing a black pen within his outstretched palm.

“Well that about sums it up!” Frank laughed, but instantly felt like an awkward old man at the phrasing of that last sentence, inwardly cringing at how dumb he must have sounded trying to talk to a seventeen-year-girl. “I don’t remember having any hot-for-teacher incidents in high school,” he mused, “Then again, I wasn’t really there a lot.”

“Why not?” she asked, looking up from the history book in her lap.

“I skipped a lot.”

She looked at him with this pure, perplexed expression. Mikayla was a good girl who’d sooner shake herself into nervous convulsions before even considering skipping a class. She didn’t quite follow what Frank was referring to initially but soon realization spread through her face and she smiled a shy smile, “Yeah I don’t do much of that.”

“You don’t say?” he chuckled.

Bandit’s newly conscious babbling down the hall broke their eye-contact and Mikayla set her school things aside to go retrieve her waking cousin. He sighed, watching her go, her backside swaying beneath the loose skirt of her dress.

She returned a few minutes later, Bandit on her hip and a rolled-up old diaper in her hand, “Where’s your trash?”

“Oh!” he shot up, “It’s in the closet,” he followed her back into the kitchen, directing her towards the garbage can inside the small closet. “I feel bad now. I didn’t know you were out here changing diapers and shit. I would’ve done that. That’s kinda what I’m supposed to be doing, isn’t it?”

“No,” she laughed, “From what I understand, you’re just supposed to keep me occupied until Bandit’s parents are done getting it on and we can hang out over there again. Besides, I really don’t mind. I don’t have a job because Auntie Lynnie and Gee pay me to babysit Bandit all the time. I’m practically her nanny. So, I really don’t mind.”

“Well, okay,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, “I still feel bad. You have homework to do and now you’re picking up after the kid I’m supposed to be watching. I suck.”

“Seriously, it’s all good,” she laughed, bringing Bandit with her back into the living room and setting her down on the floor. She made goofy faces at the baby in her lap and clapped the toddler’s hand together for her.

Frank watched from the doorway. “So, Mikayla, how are things?”

“Things?” she looked up at him from the floor.

“Like, life. I know you’ve been having a really shitty time at school and then there was the whole incident on Thursday. I don’t want to rub on a sore spot, but I’m just checking in.”

“Oh,” she said, looking back at Bandit, “Things are…things are shitty,” she answered with a misplaced laugh and Frank knelt down on beside her on the carpet. “The school work is inescapable and nobody wants to talk to me since my best friend turned on me. I’m alone a lot. And I spend so much time at my aunt’s house, which is cool,” she began to ramble, “but then I realize my only friend is my aunt and that’s pretty fucking pathetic. Everybody keeps telling me things will get better once I’m not in high school anymore, but it’s like my worst fear is that nothing ever changes. Nobody knows for certain that things’ll ever get better…” she trailed off, then added, “Um, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said with a sympathetic chuckle, “You’ve got a pretty shitty plate right now. That’s why I asked.”

“Thanks,” she smiled weakly, “Sometimes it’s just too much.”

Frank noted the new crack in her voice and directed the conversation, with an awkwardly obvious transition, elsewhere. “You ever listen to Deftones?”

“Yeah. My cousin showed them to me a few months ago, actually.”

Frank looked at her for a second, confused.

“I have more cousins than just Bandit. On my mom’s side.”

“Right.”

They talked about music, finding that they actually had pretty similar tastes, until leaving to head back to Gerard and Lindsay's. "I don't want to harp," Frank said as they made it out the door, "But I know you're having a crappy time and I just want to say that you're not pathetic and you're aunt isn't your only friend. I'll try to be around if you ever need someone to talk to."

"Thank you," she glared down at her feet, adjusting the strap of Bandit's diaper bag at her shoulder.