Tie Me

He heard the pain in her voice and wished he could see her face. He probably should have encouraged her to find those candles. “What about your siblings?” he asked.

“Only child,” she said.

“Me too. Well, until I met Owen, and his family treated me like one of theirs.” He laughed, because even thinking about the Mitchells brought him joy.

“Tell me about Owen,” she said, her hand tightening on his. “I was homeschooled by the best tutors money could buy, so I never got to be around anyone my own age until I became an adult. Piano isn’t a team sport. More than anything, I would have liked to have had a childhood friend.”

“Your family must be very wealthy,” he said quietly.

“I never wanted for anything as a child,” she said. “Except affection.”

Kellen hadn’t had a surplus of either wealth or affection. His grandfather had been an important part of his youth, but he’d been old and age had done terrible things to his memory. He hadn’t lived long after they’d put him in a nursing home for his safety. Grandfather simply hadn’t thrived away from the brushy wilderness he loved to wander. It was as if taking him away from his land made him give up on life. It wasn’t long after his grandfather had passed that Kellen had met Owen. It was as if destiny had known how much Kellen would need him in the coming years.

“Living in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have any close friends as a child either,” Kellen said. “I met Owen on the first day of seventh grade. We’d gone to different elementary schools, but they bused us to the same junior high. I was hoping for a fresh start. New school. Only half the kids there would know where I came from. Even then, no one would sit next to the poor kid who’d done a really bad job of trying to cut his own hair the night before, and no one would let the pudgy kid in orange and white horizontal stripes sit next to them. So Owen had no choice but to sit next to me. He’d given my bad haircut one long look, but he never said anything. He never made fun of me like the other kids did. Owen sat next to me on the bus every day for a week and we didn’t say a word to each other. We had the same lack of popularity at lunch and sat at the same table, both trying to be invisible, because when you’re thirteen, invisible is better than being noticed for being different.”

Dawn squeezed his hand. “Thirteen is an awful age. So I guess you two finally started talking to each other. Or do you still just sit in silence, trying to be invisible?”

Kellen chuckled. “We started talking after his mother stood up for me in the principal’s office.”

“Principal’s office? Were you a troublemaker?”

“I only made trouble when I couldn’t ignore it any more. And there’s just something in Owen so pure and good that I wanted to preserve it. I hated that those ass**les would walk up behind him in the cafeteria and squeal like pigs as they shoved him against the table. I hated how they treated him far more than I hated how they made fun of my clothes, my shoes, my haircut, and the trailer I lived in with my mother and her welfare check. Owen had never done a mean thing to anyone in his life. Where I came from didn’t matter to him, and he wasn’t upset that he was forced to sit next to me on the bus and at lunch. He seemed grateful.

“So a week after we started hanging out in silence, Owen’s sitting there across the cafeteria table from me, minding his own business as usual, and this f**king ass**le, Jasper Barnes, picks up Owen’s chocolate pudding cup and smashes it into his chest. ‘You still going to eat that shit?’ he said. ‘I bet you will, Piggie. Lick it off. Eat your own shit, Piggie.’ And then he starts making those pig-squeal sounds.”

“That’s so mean.”

“I was pissed, not going to deny it, but I probably would have just sat there and tried not to watch, grateful it wasn’t me being targeted. Then Owen lifted his head and he looked at me. I saw the shame in his eyes. Shame. What the f**k did he have to be ashamed of? That f**king bully was the one who should have been ashamed. When Owen started to clean the pudding off his shirt with a napkin, I f**king lost it. I was a scrawny kid and didn’t have a chance against a big jock like Jasper Barnes, so I went after him with my fork. I didn’t even get the chance to stab him with it before the teachers pulled me off him. I got suspended for using a weapon at school and later got my ass kicked by that bully and half the defensive line of the football team, but it was worth it because Owen started talking to me after that. Actually, he hasn’t shut up since.”

Kellen smiled as he thought about Owen’s ceaseless prattle. He was definitely a talker. And something about sitting in the dark with Dawn O’Reilly made Kellen a talker too.

“I’m glad you became friends. I can tell he means a lot to you.”

“I’d die for him. I don’t say that lightly. Owen’s always saying how I saved him by protecting him from the bullying, but he saved me a thousand times over. No telling where I’d be today if it wasn’t for him and his family. He didn’t see the dirt-poor bastard that everyone else in town saw. He never judged me based on my mother’s poor choices. Owen just saw me. It didn’t bother him that his mom gave me his older brother’s hand-me-downs. Owen said great things like, ‘You have no idea how glad I am that I don’t have to try to squeeze into Chad’s old clothes anymore’ and ‘I can’t believe my mom gave you socks and underwear for your birthday. The woman is so embarrassing.’ The woman is a saint, is what she is. I hit my growth spurt in eighth grade and if it hadn’t been for Janine, I’d have been wearing high-waters and ripping the seams out of my Spiderman T-shirt.”

“Did Owen realize that his mom was helping you?”

“He never said anything, but he had to have known. Everyone knew that I’d never met my father and that my mom took a welfare check because it’s hard for a drunk to hold down a job. She’d given up hope for a better life long before I was born. Our lack of money was what defined me. But not to the Mitchell family. I was Owen’s friend, so I was their surrogate son. His mother is a true treasure. Best woman I’ve ever known.”

“So there’s another woman in your life that I’ll never measure up to,” Dawn said.

Kellen chuckled. “No other woman can measure up to you either, Dawn. You are the only woman who sexually excites me with a mere song.”

She leaned in and whispered close to his ear, “I’ll take what I can get.”