“Mom, just stop!” Mackenzie screamed bitterly as she slammed the phone back on the receiver. Mackenzie and her mother had been torn apart for the past two weeks since Mackenzie came home. They had done nothing more than fight and bicker between the two of them. That and the rest of Mackenzie’s family didn’t know how to deal with it from the beginning. “God just kill me,” Mackenzie whispered. “Just take my damn life. You’re about to anyway.” At that, Mackenzie pulled herself out of bed and in thirty minutes was walking into Dr. Williamson’s office.
Mackenzie checked her watch as she waited in line at the pharmacy for more medication. Ten minutes later she was on her way home, tears of anger streaming down her face. “Why the fuck do I have to take this bullshit. I’m gonna die anyway…fuck this!” By the time she got out of the car, Mackenzie was wishing that she could kick the door in, but she obviously refrained. She checked her messages…there was one from Brian and AJ, one from Jack, Mackenzie’s best friend since 2nd grade, and then there was one from Haylee, Mackenzie’s little sister begging for Mackenzie to spend the day with her. Mackenzie refrained from calling any back and when she finally decided that she had composed herself, she dialed the number for home and got Haylee on the first ring.
“Hello?” Haylee asked.
“Hayls?” Mackenzie said, trying her best to act upbeat. “How are you?”
“Macky!” Haylee screamed into the receiver. “You’re back! Mom told me that you had gotten home from tour but you haven’t really been feeling well. Is that why you’re home early?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.” Mackenzie said, plotting the way to tell Haylee, her 10 year old sister, about her cancer. Mackenzie thought that her mother surley would have told anyone and everyone about the cancer…
“How’s everybody? How’s Nick?”
“Nick’s fine,” Mackenzie lied. “And everyone else is great too. Anyway Hale, I was calling to ask you out to lunch, does that sound like a plan? You get to pick the place.”
“Peter Pipers!” Haylee exclaimed. “Remember when you, me, and Nick all ate there and Nick spilled the pitcher of Pepsi all over the pizza and then ate it anyway?”
“Yeah,” Mackenzie said, faking excitement. “Anyway, I’ll be there in 10 minutes.”
“Ten minutes…so you’ll be here in an hour, right Macky?”
“Shut up Haylee,” Mackenzie laughed. “I promise I’ll be there on time.”
“On time huh?” Haylee laughed as she slid into the passenger seat of Mackenzie’s car.
“Hey, old habits die hard.” Mackenzie said, giving her little sister a hug before starting the ignition. “Anyway, how have you been?”
“Pretty good. I’m gonna get crap from this though?”
“What?” Mackenzie asked, not understanding what her little sister was saying.
“Corey, Jack, and Natalie.” Haylee said simply referring to her three other siblings. “They are mad at you.”
“Why?” Mackenzie asked. “They know that I take each of them out for lunch separately when I get home from touring. Why are they mad at me?”
“Oh, “ Haylee said. “Not about lunch. They know that. It’s about something that they talked about with Mom the day before she picked you up from the bus station. Mom won’t tell me though, I don’t know why. Anyway, Corey and Jack are ignoring me because I’m not mad at you and Natalie always goes along with anything they do anyway.”
“Don’t worry though,” Haylee reassured. “They never stay bad very long. They’ll be fine.”
“You’d be surprised,” Mackenzie sighed. She picked a parking space at Peter Piper’s. “Anyway, let’s go.”
Brian yawned as he checked his watch. “1:00…is he gonna show?”
“I wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t,” AJ said. “But sitting here in a hotel lobby at 1:00 in the morning is just kinda strange…you know?”
“This is Nick that we’re talking about…especially since after…well, you know…”
AJ nodded in understanding. As expected, Nick had thrown himself into his singing and withdrawn from everyone. Rehearsals, if Nick ever showed up, were a complete mess and concerts were horrible. Just when Brian and AJ were about to give up and go to back up to their rooms, Nick stormed through the doors to the hotel and breezed past the two of them with a simple. “Shouldn’t you guys be in your rooms instead of out here in plain sight?”
AJ’s eyes narrowed and mouth tightened as he sighed deeply and shook his head. If it hadn’t been for his control, AJ would’ve punched Nick out. “You told us to meet you down here you idiot,” AJ snapped. “And, we’ve been down here for two fucking hours. The least you could do is show a little respect.”
Nick ignored them. He didn’t want to hear it. Sure he has asked them to wait for him, but now that he had, he didn’t even want to talk to them about the topic he had planned. Fact was, Mackenzie had screwed up, not him…
“You know what?” AJ practically yelled. “Fine Nick, Brian and I will take your shit yet again this week but you know what, you’re the one who’s wrong and now I can see why Mackenzie didn’t want to talk to an inconsiderate asshole like you. I’m just glad that you are so damn ignorant that you can’t see that. Aren't you happy?”
Nick pivoted around on the staircase. “Shut the hell up AJ,” he returned sharply. “You don’t know anything! Not one damn thing!”
AJ walked up to Nick as though to challenge him. “I’ve known Mackenzie ever since she auditioned to be a dancer. You may have started dating her two months after that but she and I became good friends. Now I’m not fucking blind Nick. I know that Mackenzie screwed up, but you’ve basically thrown everything out the damn window. Can you see that? Can't you see that you love her and she loves you and you slammed the door on her when she needed you the most?”
Nick rolled his eyes. “That’s bullshit AJ and you know it. She was the one who was dying the entire tour and didn’t have the guts to tell any one of us…”
“Think about what you would’ve done Nick… and just for one second think about what was going through Mackenzie’s mind.”
Nick didn’t even respond. He made his way up the stairs two at a time, unlocked the door to his room on the ninth floor and slammed it shut behind him.
"She was wrong," Nick mummbled to himself as he angerily paced the room. He sat on the edge of his bed and gazed at the floor. His eyes began to water at what he saw: A picture of Mackenzie on his back smiling. That brought back memories of happier times when the two of them went up to Yellowstone for a week along with AJ and his then girlfriend Tina. "Things change," Nick huffed as he picked up the picture and stared down at it. The sparkle in Mackenzie's eyes was captured in the picture more than Nick had ever seen it before. A single tear slid down Nick's face as tore the picture in half and threw it to the ground. "That's all over now..."
Chapter Eighteen
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