All Chapters of Sink or Swim: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The cab rolls down the street, my body rocking with each advance the car makes toward my family’s home. Three houses down, I spot the herd of family members waiting for me on the front lawn.I spot my Nana first, waiting with his hands in his pockets to take my bags – and my life – inside. My Nani has her arm interlinked with his, the look on her face one I’ve never seen before. It scares me.The taxi stops closer to the neighbors’ yard, giving me a moment longer to take in my family before facing them. Khala Willa and her husband are with my grandparents, and so are their sons. Mausi Aarna and her husband wait in the driveway, both of them looking anxious. Before the funeral, I hadn’t seen them in years.The cab’s door is pulled open and a hand grabs my arm, pulling me out of the car and against a warm body. My grandmother is quick for her age. She presses my face into her chest, running her hand up and down my back in soothing motions. I wriggle out of her grip and my hand goes to f

He’s here.From my bedroom, I hear the car pull into the driveway. Couldn’t he have waited until after I’d left for work? I think about disappearing through the back door and sneaking into the garage to get my bike but ultimately decide to get it over with.Pulling off my durag, I make my way downstairs. The sound of hushed voices spill from the living room, where he’s asking Aunt Maggie where I am and if i plan on coming downstairs. She tells him that I’m upstairs and then there are footsteps headed toward the stairs.“Xavier,” she says, stopping him. “Be nice to him,”“He’s my kid, Margaret,”“Yeah? Who raised him?”A smile stretches across my face. Aunt Maggie rarely stands up to him. He doesn’t answer her, of course. To do that, he’d have to admit to all the ways he screwed up as a father. And he wouldn’t do that.I make my way into the kitchen at the same time he does. Our eyes meet and his eyebrows raise, likely because of how different I look since the last time he saw me. That

Breakfast is quiet. Aunt Maggie sits across from me like she always does, and my father sits next to her. No one has said a single word since we sat down. This is highly uncomfortable.Aunt Maggie and I almost never sit in silence. She’s a talker. She tells me about her plans; plans to renovate the house, plans with friends, plans for the diner’s menu. And now that he’s here, she’s quiet.“Lucas,”I try my best not to grimace. “What?”“Luke,” Aunt Maggie says, a warning.I take a breath. “Sorry. Yes, Xavier?”“Luke,” she says again.“It’s fine, Margret,” he says, giving me a hard look. “Lucas, I’d like to continue the conversation we had yesterday,”“No,”“Lucas,”“I already told you that I’m not moving in with you,”“You’d rather live on your own than with your own family?”I resist the urge to laugh. “What family? My family’s in this town. In this neighborhood. Or are you forgetting the part where you tossed me aside like I meant nothing to you?”The reminder does nothing. Absolutel

Lucas pulls my hands from his shoulders and wraps my arms around his torso, pulling me flush against his back in the process. My God, he has grown. So much.The realization, paired with the feel of his muscles under my hands, does something to my insides. Okay, now that is a strange, foreign, unwanted feeling.I push the feeling and thoughts away, telling myself that the lapse in judgment is due to the lack of food in my stomach as well as the lack of sleep I’ve gotten this week. I’m simply sleep deprived. Yes, that’s it.At the ice cream parlor a few minutes outside of the town’s limits, Lucas stops his bike in the street. I’m not entirely surprised that Lucas chose this shop. When he got his first bike, we rode out here almost every day before we went to hang out at Devon’s.He goes inside to get the ice cream while I sit on a bench where he’s bike is parked in case someone thinks about stealing the thing. I don’t think anyone would, but Lucas has his reservations.While I wait, I t

One especially infuriating thing about Kieran Darjee is that she thinks she knows every fucking thing. She thinks she knows exactly how I feel and what I think. If she’d bother to ask every once in a while, she’d know just how wrong she is.Disregarding however I might feel about her, why would I not want her to be at the celebration? She’s been my best friend since we were kids and we’ve always gone to the celebration together, so why would that change now? We’ve let bygones be bygones and are choosing to ignore the fact that we were estranged for two years, so ideally, nothing has changed between us. Or am I expecting too much?I shake my head. “It’s none of my business,”“What isn’t?”I release a sigh and shake my head again. If I tell her what I know, she’s going to tell her best friend about it, who is then going to break up with Devon, as she should. Devon will be pissed at me for airing out his business, though. And while I don’t agree with what he’s doing, I don’t think I coul