“Jaxsen!” Jaxsen turned at his name to see Melissa trying to get through the throng of students to catch up with him.

“Hey, Melissa. How you doing?” She smiled. Her smile was beginning to brighten again, the loss of her father not always at the forefront of her mind. She was beginning to live again outside her grief. 

She shrugged slightly. “My mom is still a mess. I…think I’m…well…some days are harder than others, you know?”

He nodded. He did know. “If you need anything…”

She smiled at him. “Thank you, Jaxsen. You’re very sweet.” She paused, worry overshadowing her smile.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you know what’s wrong with Basil?”

“Only a bit. But I can’t discuss it. Why? Did something happen?” Jaxsen felt worry creep up his spine.

“Well, we were in class and out of nowhere he jumped up from his desk and ran from the room. I grabbed his backpack for him, but I can’t find him.” She held up his pack for him and dropped her arm in exacerbation. 

“He just ran from the classroom? How long ago?” Melissa looked over his head to the mounted clock.

“Maybe…fifteen minutes before class ended.” She told him as she squinted against the sun.

He nodded. “I think I know where he may have gone. I’ll take him his bag.” She nodded and handed it over.

“I gotta get to class, Jaxsen. Send him my love when you find him.” Jaxsen watched her walk away before turning the other direction. He opened the stairwell door, the same Basil had taken him and looked around. He almost didn’t see him before spotting him under the stairs.

“Basil?” Jaxsen knelt down in front of his friend. “I brought your bag. Melissa brought it to me when she couldn’t find you.”

Basil half grinned. “Thanks, man.” Jaxsen sat flat, crossing his legs at the knees.

“How you doing?” Jaxsen grimaced at his own question, but asked for a lack of what to say.

“I couldn’t sit in there anymore. The room just kept getting smaller. My chest,” he lightly pressed his fist into the center of his chest. “I couldn’t breathe.” Basil met Jaxsen’s eyes, a pained and lost expression filling them. “Why doesn’t she love me anymore, Jaxsen? What did I do to make her not love me anymore?” Two tears slipped slowly down and Basil angrily erased them as Jaxsen scooted up next to him, instead of across from his friend, and gingerly slipped an arm around his shoulders.

“There’s nothing a child can do to force away a parent’s love, Basil. If something like that happens, it’s the failing of the parent, not the child.”

“Still doesn’t answer as to why. This has been happening for some time now, Jax…I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m tired of being alone all the time. Sometimes…” He sighed and wiped his face. “Sometimes I don’t think she goes to work like she says.”

Jaxsen frowned slightly in confusion. “Where do you think she’s going if not to work?”

Basil hesitated. “A few weeks ago I was doing laundry while she was at work, or so she said anyway…and I checked her coat pocket before washing it and found a receipt from a bar from a couple nights before…when we got into that argument?” Jaxsen nodded. “It was about that. We got into it before I left for school. I asked if she could stay home, or come home early, ‘cause I missed her and she…got all mad…and then she got really mean and said…” He stopped not wanting to repeat those hurtful words. “Th-that she ‘should have gotten rid of me when she had the chance’.” 

He sniffled and looked at Jaxsen. “Why would she say something like that? And what does that mean?” Basil shook his head sadly and said nothing more. They sat together, silent, each lost in thought until the end-of-school-bell sounded.

Sebastian waited in his usual spot for the boys to appear among the mass of the student body. He tried his best to smile as they approached him, their faces drawn and tired.

“Hey, boys, how was school?” Jaxsen looked to Basil who watched his feet.

“We missed last period,” he said without preamble.

“Oh? Why is that?” Sebastian asked as he took Jaxsen’s backpack and they headed for the car.

“It’s my fault, Bastian. I ran out of one of my classes and Jaxsen found me and wouldn’t leave.”

Sebastian smiled. “Okay. I’ll handle the school when they call.” Jaxsen nodded and climbed into the truck, the boys sitting in the back. The conversation faded and died. Basil wanted to ask after his mother, but the answer that awaited him scared him into silence.

Sebastian knocked on the bedroom door before slowly pushing it open. “Hey, boys,” he said with a light smile. They sat on the floor, their backs against the side of the bed, appearing to pause in whatever topic of conversation they were engaged in.

“It’s about my mom, isn’t it?” Sebastian sat down across from them, folding his legs under him, matching the boy’s positions. 

“You want me to leave, Basil?” Jaxsen inquired gently, though in truth he didn’t want to leave.

Basil shook his head. “No. Please stay.” Basil braced himself for what was to come and looked to Sebastian. “What did she say?”

Sebastian watched the boy for a moment before answering. “I went over there after I dropped you two off at school this morning.” He paused. “Basil, do you know at all about what’s going on with her?”

He nodded minutely. “I have my suspicions,” he said. “She’s drinking again, huh?”

Sebastian nodded. “Again?”

“When my dad left us. She did this then, too. Became mean. She would always leave me with someone-usually my Grandma…sometimes she’d be gone for days.”

“Well, I paid her a visit today. She wasn’t…in the greatest shape.” He phrased it as delicately as he could. He couldn’t tell the child his mother was still too drunk to be hung over, or how she reeked of stale booze and cigarette smoke. He could not inform Basil of all that had happened, so he decided for the abridged, Cliff’s notes version.

“What did she do?”

“She…had just woken up, it appeared, when I knocked. I told her…well…let’s just say you’re going to be spending the month here and she’s--”

“Going back to rehab,” Basil said, his voice resigned to the inevitable.

“Yeah.” 

Basil shook his head mournfully. “I wish you could be my dad, too, Bastian. I wish I could just stay here.” Feeling like the walls were closing around him again in light of this new information, suddenly he jumped up and ran from the room. Jaxsen began to go after him, but was stopped before he could fully lift himself from the ground.

“Let him be for a moment,” Sebastian gently commanded with a hand on his forearm. Jaxsen looked worriedly in the way his friend had gone.

“His mamma…why is she hurting him like this, Daddy?” Sebastian smiled lightly. Even after all he’d been through he still couldn’t conceive the evils that a parent could deliver to their own flesh and blood.

“I don’t know, Jack. Some people just…can’t deal with things in a healthy manner. They’re angry or hurt for whatever reasoning and lash out at those closest around them. It doesn’t mean it’s right. Or fair. But people don’t like to be in pain alone…even at the cost for something like this. 

Jaxsen nodded in understanding. “She hurt him, Dad. She hurt him really bad.”

“I know she did, Jack.” Sebastian sighed and stood. “Stay here. I’m gonna go check on him.”

“Daddy?” Sebastian paused in the doorway.

“What?”

“What if you could be Basil’s dad, too?”

Sebastian smiled lightly. “We’ll see how things play out.”

Sebastian found Basil sitting at the bottom of the stairs, his head bowed, fingers laced around the back of his head. Sebastian sat next to and a step down, turned slightly so he was half leaning on the railing, and studiously lucubrated the boy next to him.

“Bastian?” he whispered, befuddled by the thoughts whipping around his mind in a whirlwind of entropy and chaos.

“Yeah, Basil?”

“Can I ask you something?” Basil sniffled before bringing his head up to meet Sebastian’s scrutiny.

“You can ask or tell me anything you need, son.”

“Is there anything that Jaxsen could ever do, or say…or…be…that-that would make you love him less?”

Sebastian frowned at how he structured the query. “No,” he said, simply not needing to elaborate.

Basil nodded. “She doesn’t love me, does she, Bastian?” The question broke his heart. How a parent could make their children question their love, something that should never be questioned, he would never understand.

“I can’t answer that, Basil. I hope she does, I really do. What makes you believe that she doesn’t?”

Basil snorted with derision. “Other than that she doesn’t tell me anymore? She’s…she’s mean to me…I…I think she blames me for my dad leaving. Or she hates me because I look like him. She told me she should have gotten rid of me when she had the chance, Bastian. She tells me that a lot and I don’t understand what I did for her to hate me. I try to be good. I make good grades and I don’t get in trouble. Why can’t she love me? Am I bad, Bastian? Am I so bad I don’t deserve love anymore?”

Sebastian didn’t answer. There was nothing he could say to alleviate the pain that ran bone deep. In lieu of words he simply pulled the boy unhaltingly into his arms and held him while his world crumbled around him.

Sometime later Basil reentered the bedroom he was currently sharing with Jaxsen. He was quiet, his head down so as to hide the redness in his eyes, and quietly closed the door. Jaxsen didn’t know what to say to make the other boy feel better, so he said nothing. Instead he watched Basil close the door with a soft click and amble over and onto the bed.

“Basil?

“Yeah?”

“Do you want a hug?” Basil nodded and embraced him.