Far From Home - Chapter 7: Chapter 7

Jake's Birthday, August 29th
Jake's birthday was anything but a remarkable occasion. He had spent the day in class, failing to tell anyone that today meant something more to him than yesterday did, caught up writing down notes and proactively planning his homework schedule so his entire weekend would be free. It was as ordinary as any day could get. Well, besides the slew of messages from random people—most of whom were distant relatives he couldn't remember ever meeting—and the yellow post-it note on his door that made him stop dead in his tracks.
'happy birthday' and then below it, a perfectly drawn sun.
He took it off the door gingerly, balancing the weight of it against his fingers as if it were assigned some secret value that no one but Jake could see. His first birthday present, and it was a note. Not only a note... a note from Connor.
It was the lazy way the letters ran together, mimicking cursive, but not quite. It was the black ink pressed deep into the paper, indenting each letter like it was written with purpose, not as an afterthought. Most importantly, it was the sun—smaller than the tip of his pinky, drawn with a childlike nature that made Jake run his finger over top of it to see if he could feel its texture through the paper. The drawing was Connor's signature, a subtle identifier that only Jake would catch.
Sunshine. His lips curled up in a smile.
You remembered.
He slipped it into his back pocket, and unlocked the door.
As he entered his room a part of him wondered why a text wouldn't have sufficed. It sent his mind reeling for an answer. Did he really delete my number? If he did, why did he even care to tell me happy birthday at all? If he hates me, I'd rather him commit to it.
What if he doesn't hate me?
What if he wanted me to know he was thinking about me?
Fuck, Connor. Why did you give me a note?
Jake had made a promise to himself the first night he sat in his dorm bed alone. He promised that he was going to get over Connor Morgan. He wasn't one to 'get over' anything, but this was going to be the first. Letting Connor move on was letting himself move on, the sooner he got that through his own thick skull the better.
But this hurt.
This rekindled some distant feeling in the pit of Jake's stomach that he had ignored since the day he cut things off. It felt like hope, but hope was tricky and something he certainly couldn't afford if he had any will to move on. He wanted it to go away, to push it aside for another day, to let those flames turn to embers, and once he failed to feed them, to ash. Connor had to have known how much Jake would think about this. He had to have known how much he would second-guess his own feelings. He had to have known the minute he stuck it to Jake's door that Jake would fail to get any sleep that night thinking about the gesture.
It was compassion.
Or, Jake thought, it was revenge.
Neither option gave him much comfort.
Newly frustrated, he rubbed his hands over his face, hoping to scrub away the wrinkles of question written over his features. It was too early in the day to be having a mental breakdown over something so stupid. He knew that, but his heart and his brain had somehow ended up on different fields somewhere between walking down the hallway and where he was sitting now at his desk.
Fucking Connor.
His phone buzzed on the table—a single notification that lit up a message rectangle on screen with the name 'Anderson.'
Congrats on being legal bud
God, now Hunter too?
But it didn't seem to have ill-intent. Hunter was one of his closest friends for years, a birthday wish didn't have to hold any malice. Especially given the context of their last encounter before Jake left, he didn't think such a simple text was set out to hurt him. It was still a pesky reminder that Hunter Anderson existed out there a hundred-or-so miles away, living life like high school never ended, and Jake was stuck wracking his brain over a relationship that Hunter had trashed just like everything else.
It's not his fault. He knew it wasn't, but blaming him felt a whole lot easier than blaming himself.
He left the message on read.
Before he was even able to slide out of his text feed, his phone started buzzing again, consistently this time as his sister's name popped up on the screen with a FaceTime call. He didn't give himself time to think before he had accepted it. At least his sister wasn't an unknown.
The screen cut to her in Jake's bedroom, her hair spread out under his navy bed sheets.
"Hey." She angled the phone over top of her face.
"Are you in my room?" He squinted to make out his wooden bed frame as his sister shrugged it off nonchalantly.
"Can I have your Xbox?"
"Did you really just call me on my birthday to steal my shit?"
She smiled, something playful and sarcastic. "Oh, happy birthday."
"Why are you in my room?" Jake rephrased his question.
"To take the Xbox." She shrugged as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Jake pondered it. There was no way in hell his sister wanted a gaming console. She spent most nights watching marathons on the TV downstairs, he knew her free time spent watching crime documentaries was much too valuable to waste on video games. Whatever her reason was, it wasn't her own self-interest.
"You trying to impress your new boyfriend?" Jake guessed purely out of speculation.
"Who the hell told you?"
Her confirmation made him smirk. "No one, surprisingly. I'm a little upset Aaron didn't mention it though."
"Aaron's fuckin' weird." She curled her nose up. "You know what he said when he came over yesterday?"
"What?"
"He told Chad that his hands were too soft."
That's my boy.
"His name's Chad?" Jake grimaced. "That's your first sign."
"Your name is literally Jake, I don't want to hear it."
"That's not that bad."
"You share a middle name with a leader of the Confederate Army." She threw out disinterested, tilting her head over like she was trying to prove a point.
Shit, I guess I do.
"You're named after a boy." Jake countered, pursing his lips together with a fake smile.
"Go fuck yourself." She flipped him off with a pissed-off grin.
Jake let his smile fade as he switched back into older-brother mode. "Tell me about him."
"I don't think I will."
"Riley, seriously?"
Jake leaned back into his chair, setting his feet down flat on the floor while he rocked the chair back on its legs. His sister seemed to contemplate his request as her eyes darted to what Jake presumed was his ceiling. He half wondered if she saw the stain directly above his pillow from where Aaron threw a chocolate chip pancake on the ceiling to see if it would stick, and surprisingly, for two seconds, it did. That was the last time they ever ate in bed. Jake painfully learned his lesson after his mother went on and on for a week about cleaning it off.
"He's a sophomore." She mumbled.
Jake didn't know anything else about him, but he sighed his disapproval. "Do better."
"He's really nice, okay?"
"That's why he has soft hands."
"What the fuck is up with you two and the soft hands?!" McKenna glared into the screen with annoyance, and for a moment, Jake felt like he was right there at home, perched over the kitchen counter watching her frustration in tiny facial expressions.
Jake knew he had no room to talk. He had also fallen for someone with soft hands. Connor didn't spend countless hours in the summer sun with roughened skin and dirt under his fingernails from a hard day at work, but his hands had just as much worth—if not more—than Jake's did. Aaron needed something to pick about, but Jake knew it didn't mean a damn thing. Connor's hands were once one of Jake's favorite things about him. His soft hands, his soft hair, his...
Goddamnit. No.
"He play sports?" Jake had to distract himself from letting his mind wander to Connor again.
"No, he's normal."
"Eh, normal is relative."
"Relative to being a jackass."
He scoffed. "I'm not a jackass."
"Your definition of jackass is deeply subjective." McKenna rolled her eyes.
Nice word. Jake found a little comfort in knowing his sister hadn't lost any of her spite. It felt like he never even left. McKenna was never interested in playing nice with him, but Jake had always come to expect it. In their conversations, he could never take anything personally—she didn't mean any of it, it was just who could roll off the better comeback. He played her game with a smile.
"Your definition of a 'really nice' guy is deeply subjective."
"He is!"
Jake heard McKenna's hand swat down onto the bed even though he couldn't see it.
"Yeah, okay. We'll see." Jake nodded to humor her.
His sister sighed as she shifted on the bed, rolling over onto her side to let her phone rest along her arm instead of hanging above her head. From this angle, Jake could see one of the walls of his bedroom. Nothing looked different, but it was somehow haunting to think of his sister sitting in that big open bedroom alone, the shadows of their abandoned bathroom and closet lurking behind her. The door into the room was closed, the hook where his Carhart jacket would've been on the back of it empty from it being on a hanger behind his head instead. He didn't miss it, but to say it wasn't a tad melancholy would be a lie.
"How are... things?" He watched McKenna's face for any of those little clues to her emotions—a lip being chewed, a crinkle of her nose, eyes darting away, brows being furrowed.
None of them came. Only a deep sigh over expressionless lips.
"Our family?"
Jake nodded.
Half of her mouth frowned. "Yeah, not having a good time."
"Why?"
Her words hit harder when he was so far from home. To know that there was something wrong and that he wouldn't be there to fix it. He couldn't shield her eyes, or avert his father's anger. He couldn't play peacekeeper with his mother, or hold together any semblance of a family unit for McKenna. It was all out of reach, out of his control. It killed him to think that he left her behind in it. She's too young. She doesn't need to be worried about this.
"Dad's on a bender again." Her eyes drifted out his bedroom window. "Hasn't been home in... mmm... four days and counting."
Jesus.
"Where's he at?"
"My guess is the Kellers'. That's where he was two nights ago when Aaron came over, but who the hell knows now."
"Don't worry about it." Jake shook his head. "He'll be back. Enjoy the silence while it lasts."
"It's too quiet." She whispered.
He could hear the pain in her voice even though she tried her best to hide it in the way it fell silent to avoid showing emotion. Jake watched her face through the screen—tired, but not necessarily sad. He chalked it all up to a rough week of school and figured it was best not to pry because it was unlikely she would tell him even if there was something that she had been losing sleep over.
"How's mom?"
Jake didn't miss the way she glanced over her shoulder at the door, reminding herself that she had closed it behind her. She swallowed something down as her eyes rested somewhere below her phone.
"Weird." She mumbled. "It's freaky."
Jake knew his mother's behavior well enough to have been waiting for the shoe to drop. He hadn't expected it to come so soon. His estimation set his mother about a month into his departure before her sanity cracked, but at only two weeks into being gone, McKenna had already noticed something was different. He cautiously readjusted his prediction to three weeks.
"What's going on?"
"She's sad. It's like you died or something."
She's grieving a son she didn't lose. Jake half wondered if she was setting herself up for cutting him off, but he didn't dwell on it. Her pain was likely equal parts denial of his identity and mourning his leaving. Even in the month before he left, they didn't talk about it.
They didn't talk about the Fourth of July. After that hellacious week, he knew she didn't forget, but it was almost like she wanted to. She never brought it up again, and he never dared to open his mouth and risk asking questions he couldn't take back. They carried on wordlessly through the same daily rituals, ignoring any inconsistencies in the mother-son relationship they had crafted his entire life. The version of Jake that left was a figment of her imagination. She ignored any signs that her perfect child wasn't so perfect anymore.
And now that he was gone, she had to let it sink in. No more pretending.
College was real. His sexuality was real. The reality of an empty bedroom and the words both said and unsaid were real, and she didn't know how to cope.
Jake must have inherited her inability to let go.
"Yesterday she got mad at me because you were late to dinner." McKenna mumbled. "Her face went so pale when I told her you weren't here anymore."
His heart dropped. "Oh."
"She hasn't left the house in days... not even for Mrs. Martin. I had to drag her to church by promising I would wear a really pretty dress and sing."
God, she's so much worse than I thought.
"It's kinda scary. She cried when I said I would watch a movie with her yesterday."
That's because I always did.
"I just wish dad would fucking come home, you know? At least when he's here she gets out of their room."
I'm so sorry, Ken.
"You should try baking with her." Jake suggested the only thing he could think of to bring his mother joy.
When her father died, she went through a similar wave of depression—although admittedly for good reason. It lasted a couple months, but Jake often found himself begging for little things to eat, and whenever he would ask with the pleading smile of an eleven-year-old boy, she would oblige with warm eyes and a tender 'sure, honey.' He would sit on the island countertop and watch her work while reading from a cookbook, and in those rare moments of domestic bliss, she would smile at him—tapping a flour-covered finger out on his nose as he mispronounced words to make her laugh.
A tremendous amount of guilt fell deep into his chest, and with it, the feeling of apology. I should apologize. For a moment, Jake thought tears might have welled in his eyes, but he took a deep breath as he shook away the constraint on his focus. I did nothing wrong.
He had repeated the words in his head over and over again until maybe he started to believe them, but it didn't come as easy as he thought. He was guilty. Guilty of breaking his mother's heart. Guilty of leaving his sister there to pick up the pieces. Guilty of abandoning the people that needed him the most for some self-absorbed dream of a future...
His father was right.
No, fuck. No. I did nothing wrong.
I did nothing wrong.
"I think it'll get better." McKenna sighed. "She's not like senile, right? She'll come to her senses."
Not without coaxing.
"Yeah." Jake faked an encouraging smile that negated the concern in his eyes. "Give her a couple days."
His sister seemed to take his statement at face value, but he didn't have the heart to tell her it was a lie. He could give her this—a small reassurance of peace to come, not knowing whether it would be coming tomorrow, next week, next month, or God-forbid, next year. It'll happen soon, he could tell her. Everything could be okay.
'Everything' was not in Jake's control anymore.
Nor was it okay.