Kya & Xavier: It's Always Been You (Life As We Know It Book 1) by Charelle Mills

yelled,
“Thank’s Zay,” before she disappeared inside the house. I got in the Jeep but
he stood there for a minute just watching the door. I could tell he hated
leaving her but he also knew that he couldn’t do anything about it at least not
right now.
    “She Okay?’ I asked when he got in and began to back out the
driveway.
    “She wants me to get an apartment so that she can come live
with me?”
    “Your dad?” I asked and he gave me the nastiest look because
I said dad instead of Johnny.
    It took him a minute but he finally answered. “Yeah.”
    “She’ll be alright.”
    “I know. It just pisses me off. I don’t have to deal with him
but she does and it’s not fair.”
    “How much longer?”
    “One more year.”
    Xavier was quiet and I could tell that he was deep in thought
so I just left him alone and listened to the radio until he was ready to talk.

 
 

 
    Xavier Lee
    I could see Kya watching me out the corner of my eye but I
just kept my eyes on the road. I needed a minute to get my head right. I hated
leaving my sister because it meant that Johnny had access to her without me
there to protect her. As far as I knew he had never put his hands on her but he
hand embarrassed her more times than she deserved just like he had done today.
I knew from experience that sometimes that hurt worse than anything he could do
to her physically. I had been on the receiving end of both and the broken bones
and bruise eventfully healed but my friends never seemed to forget the
embarrassment that I suffered when Jonny was at his best. The memories were
like a wound that would never heal because every time I felt like I was over it
someone would find it necessary to help me relive it over and over again.
                     Thinking
about it made me miss my mother even more, she always seemed to fix the
disasters that Jonny created. It had been almost four years since she died but
it still didn’t seem real for me most of the time. There were some days that I
felt like I could just pick up the phone and call her. I half expected her to
be there on the other end of the line like nothing had ever happened but then
it would hit me that she really was really gone. I hated Johnny because it was
his fault and that was something that I would never forgive him for. Chronic
liver disease, all because she drank way too much to escape her life with him.
He hurt me to hurt her and it broke her more than the cheating on her ever
could.
    Johnny knew that the worse thing he could do to a son was to
take away his ability to protect his mother just like the easiest way for him
to break her was to abuse her son. He would put his hands on her in a violent
rage and then smile at me as if he were daring me to do something about. Every
time I tried he would prove to me how weak and useless I was against him and
the more he hurt me the more he broke her. I didn’t understand how someone
could find so much pleasure in someone else’s pain.
    Alcohol was my mother’s therapy, it allowed her to survive if
that’s what you can call it. It was funny to me how different they were when
the alcohol took over. Johnny was violent and a tyrant while my mother was
sullen and depressed. Even as a kid I understood what the alcohol did to both
of them which caused me to be angry and bitter. You would think that seeing how
it affected their lives would have kept me away from it but oddly enough it
made me want it more. Maybe because it was always around me and it just seemed
like the thing to do but either way I could drink with the best of them when I
wanted to.
    After my mother died I felt lost for a while. It was like I
couldn’t get it together and everything in my life was spinning out of control.
I drank and got high all the time, only went to school enough to be able to
play ball and skated through with grades that were just barely passing. In fact
the only thing that kept me from totally losing it was Kya and my sister.