All I Have to Give

“Don’t cry baby, it’s going to be okay,” Johnny said, reaching up to gently wipe away the tears that were falling from my eyes.

“I don’t see how you can be so confident. A year is a long time, a lot could change.”

I had always been a bit of a pessimist and something like this just brought out the worst in me. I was scared to death that everything would change when I got in that car and left California.

“I’m confident because I love you, Melanie. It would take a hell of a lot more than a year to change how I feel about you. A year is a very brief period of time when you compare it to the years we’re going to spend together when you move back here.”

It was finally here, the day that most kids looked forward to their entire teenage years. It was finally my eighteenth birthday. I wasn’t celebrating it the way most people did, with a big party and probably a bunch of alcohol and tons of other kids passing out all over the floors.

No, my idea of celebrating was packing up everything I owned and heading back to California. The last year had been hell. Transferring schools midway through senior year was never an easy thing to deal with. I had found it extremely hard to fit in at my new school.

The new school was far from what my school back home was like. In California, everyone got along with each other for the most part. There wasn’t as much petty drama as most people would expect. In Richardsville, Ohio, it seemed as if drama was what made the school function. I couldn’t walk the halls without getting sneered at and called as many different names as people could come up with.

That mixed with not being able to see Johnny made the first month or two so depressing that I’d had a brief bout with cutting. Thankfully, I shook that off pretty fast. The scars were still there, but I was a lot happier than I’d been at the beginning.

Eventually, I found a small group of people just like me. They weren’t the most straight-laced kids, so I was in and out of trouble all the time. I’d even been arrested twice. Once for beating the shit out of girl that pushed me one too many times and the second time for having pot on me. It belonged to a friend of mine that was decent enough to step up and say it was his, so I got off pretty easy on that one.

Long story short, I was far from the person I was when I left California and I was scared to death to go back. I had no idea where things stood with Johnny and I. When I first moved away, it seemed like we were calling each other every five minutes. We exchanged emails and text messages hundreds of times a day. I had even received a few handwritten letters. The last time I heard from him was over two months ago. It was an email telling me that he missed me like crazy and couldn’t wait until I came back to him. That was it. I had tried calling him a few times since then, but he was always busy doing something else.

The only person I had been in contact with recently was Zacky. I guess that just showed how strong our friendship was. He was still my best friend even though I’d moved away and changed more than I had ever thought I would.

From what Zacky had told me, Johnny didn’t hang out with him and the other guys as much anymore. He wanted to tell Johnny that I was coming back, but I told him not to. I wanted to surprise him myself, in person.

With a small smile in place on my face, I closed the trunk of my black Nissan Altima and made my way back into the house to say goodbye to my mom. By the time I made it back inside, my mom had tears in her eyes. It amazed me how she could still love me as much as she did after all the crap I’d put her through in the past years, especially the last few months. I guess a mother’s love was really stronger than anything.

“Please be careful, honey. Call me as soon as you get there. I want to know you made it.”

She held her arms out, asking for a hug. I gave her a smile and stepped forward, into her arms. As we hugged, I felt tears coming to my own eyes. Wow, this was harder than I’d ever imagined.

“You know I will, mom. I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetie. I can’t wait to hear all about the apartment your dad got for you.”

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, my dad felt so bad about being the reason I had to move in the first place, that he had told me if I ever wanted to move back, he would pay for an apartment for me to live in. Pretty awesome, yeah?

After one last hug, I turned and picked up the pet carrier that held my black poodle puppy, Zoey. She had been an early birthday present from my mom. I had fallen in love with her instantly.

“Bye, Melanie. Good luck.”

“Bye, mom.”

I went back out to my car, safely situating Zoey on the passenger seat before climbing in myself. As I pulled away, I watched in the rearview mirror until my mom was just a tiny little waving dot on the horizon line behind me.

~x~

After hours and hours of driving, and multiple bathroom breaks for both me and Zoey, we finally made it. It felt so good to drive the streets of Huntington again. It had been far too long. After the last bathroom stop, I’d taken Zoey out of the carrier so she was now standing up against the window, looking at everything around us.

As promised, Zacky’s house was my first stop. He’d promised that if I picked him up as soon as I arrived, he would use his ‘manly muscles’ to help me with my boxes. I was happy that the majority of those boxes fit in the trunk and backseat of my car. The rest had been shipped ahead of me, courtesy of dad. He was happily stepping up to pay all of the expenses; I guess it was his way of saying sorry for tearing our family apart.

With a deep breath, I pulled into Zacky’s driveway. I had no idea why, but I was beyond nervous. I was afraid that I was fooling myself thinking that we were going to be able to carry on being best friends after all the time away from each other. What if he didn’t like me anymore?

I didn’t have much longer to stress over that because all of a sudden with a loud thud, Zacky threw himself onto the hood of my car with a very large smile plastered on his face. I jumped out of the car, trying to pretend to be mad, but I couldn’t help but smile at him. It had been too long since I’d last seen him.

“You got snakebites!” I exclaimed, grabbing his face between my hands to examine his new piercings.

With a laugh, he jerked his face away and pulled me in for a very enthusiastic hug. I was fighting to breathe, but I still couldn’t stop myself from laughing.

“Put me down, dude. I can’t breathe!”

With a final squeeze, Zacky lowered me back down to the ground and released me.

“Looks like you got a few new piercings yourself, and look at your hair!”

I laughed and smoothed by black hair with neon blue streaks in it and then reached up to touch my eyebrow piercing. I had let one of my friends pierce it, which wasn’t such a good idea. It had all turned out okay in the end so it was no big deal to me anymore. Since he’d last seen me, I’d also gotten my nostril pierced and my belly button. I lifted the bottom of my shirt to show him and he gasped.

“I thought you said you’d never do that,” Zacky said, laughing at me even more “you better not have any tattoos to go with those piercings.”

I looked down at my feet and didn’t say anything. We’d promised each other when we were eleven that we’d get matching tattoos as soon as we were old enough. I didn’t want him to be mad that I’d gotten one without him.

“You bitch! You did get one, let me see!” Zacky practically screamed, making an elderly woman working in her flower garden across the street stand up and look at him sternly.

He blew the woman a kiss which made the two of us nearly collapse to the ground in our laughter. Once I calmed down, I lifted up my shirt again to show Zacky the black stars that ran down my ribcage on the right side of my body.

“That’s fucking awesome. Do you have anymore?” he questioned eagerly.

“No. Well, there’s more to that one, but I’m not lifting my shirt up that high out here.”

“Damn, you’ll just have to show me some other time then. Shall we go to your new humble abode then?”

“Let’s go.”

I forgot to warn him about Zoey so when he opened the door; he was attacked by a very hyperactive ball of fur. He caught the small dog before she fell and she repaid him by licking every inch of his face she could get to.

“Oh yeah, I have a dog,” I said, laughing as he tried to make the dog stop licking him.

“I noticed.”

I watched him struggle with her for a few moments before I finally decided to take pity on him. “Scratch the back of her neck, that’ll calm her down.”

Zacky did just that and I laughed as the tiny dog stiffened and basically became paralyzed in his lap. He looked up at me in shock, but I just laughed, letting him know that it was completely normal. Once I was sure she was finally calmed down, I shifted into drive and pulled out onto the road.

The exhaustion from the trip had suddenly hit me out of nowhere and I couldn’t wait to get unpacked so I could take a much needed break.