Drowning in You (33 page)

“
Friends?”

“
You were
there at KFC that night. Not anymore, none.”

“
Liar. What
about Elliot?”

“
If he’s still
my bud then, yeah. He’s my friend.”

“
No
more?”

“
We’ll get
over it.”

A silence fills the air between
us. She knows why I can’t call any other guys my friends, but I
don’t want to go into any more detail. She’s got more than enough
shit to deal with.

“
Not even that
Raych girl?”

How does she remember her? Oh,
fuck. Charz should not be thinking of her now, ever. “A bad memory.
She’s definitely not a friend.”

“
This one,”
Charz says, fingering the scythe on my arm. “You goth or
something?”

“
No, relax.
It’s just for someone, is all.” Before she can ask who or why, I
point to a few more. “Same as this thorned heart, but this
jellybean is me. It kills Mom that I almost always forget or refuse
to carry candy on me for my hypos. I dunno, I just hated being
controlled by something. I had a jellybean inked there symbolizing
my diabetes, yet also to give a
fuck
you
to my body. But since what happened at
your pool I always carry sugar with me.” I tap my pocket. “I can’t
risk never seeing you again.”

She flips to
face me and fingers the lines and drawings, tracing the way the
forest climbs over my muscles and veins. Her fingers are like a
golden touch, seeping liquid pleasure through my skin, and it makes
me want to melt. I close my eyes, drop my head back against her
pillows, just
feeling
it. Her fingers snake into the space just above my top button.
Then,
pop.
She
opens the first button and the next, until cool air coats my entire
chest.

Looking at her is like watching
an artist paint. She traces down my chest, down my snail trail.
With both fingers, she follows the “V” down my waist, then back up,
stretching her hands up and over my shoulders.

“
They’re
everywhere,” she says, more of a surprised exclamation than
anything else.

“
Yeah, lots of
stories and memories, I guess.”

“
Tell me
one.”

“
Charz.” I
trace her face, outlining the curve of her lips with my finger. “We
don’t have to do this all tonight. I promise I won’t keep anything
from you. I’ll be open. I—”

Whoah,
Dex!
I clamp my lips together just in time
before I slip out a stupid “I love you” that’ll inevitably be
exactly what gets me kicked out. Too much, too soon.

I’m rushing nothing with
Charlee.

“
But you’ve
lost someone you love. I can see it in your eyes, Dex.” Charz
touches the side of my eye with her knuckle, stroking my face. “Who
is she?”

“
She, he,
them. Long story. Can we talk about this another time?”

“
Is she the
reason why you have all the tattoos? Are they for her?”

“
No, that’s
not who they’re for or why I came here.”

“
So you came
here to use me or my house or something?”

“
God
, no.”

“
The
yearbooks,” she says. “What’s going on?”

“
I
don’t—”

“
Now. No lies.
No anything else. What’s in my dad’s yearbooks?”

“
Both of
them,” I yell.

We both jolt back, surprised by
my voice. I try to keep her in my arms but she slithers from my
grip, slinking off the bed and back to the books. “Show me.”

“
Charz, I’m
sorry. Will you let me—”

“
Here, no
lying excuses. Just show me why you came here.”

I find the picture of our dads
arm-in-arm. In the yearbook the next year, graduating year, there
are more of them. They’re so easy to find now. Playing soccer, even
my grandma and Walter’s mom next to the two of them. Holding up a
set of drawers they must have made in a shop class.

I point to all of them one
after the other.

“
Something has
obviously happened in the last decade or two but our dads were best
friends, family friends even, and I have no idea why they wouldn’t
have told us. I forget sometimes that Mom and Dad grew up here.
They were only in Chicago when I was a kid. But Melbourne
was—is—their home.”

“
So your dad
was pissed at my dad for a fight they had back before we were born
and decided it was time to pay my dying dad back by stealing his
money?”

“
No.” I thump
my fist into my forehead, fighting back the urge to punch
something, or cry, or both. Fighting my damnedest to save this day
so I only have happy memories of the first time Charz let me
experience making her come. “For some reason my dad feels that he
owes—owed—your dad something and was trying to give money back to
him.”

“
Why?”

“
FJH,” I
say.

It takes a moment, but she
remembers the name from the accounts. She flips through the recent
yearbook from the year before we graduated and finds my brother’s
picture.

“
For Jack
Hollingworth,” she states.

“
Yes, for my
dead brother.”

30. Define Dad

Charlee

“
So you’re
unpacked, right? All of it?” I call, rapping on Darcy’s bedroom
door when he doesn’t reply.

“
Define
‘all’,” he replies.

I open the door, step in, and
see Darcy’s lone backpack unzipped, indeed. The contents are strewn
all over his bed like someone just shook out the bag.

“
Wait a sec,”
I say, realizing something. “You started this when I knocked on the
door?”

“
Define
‘start’,” Darcy replies.

I thump him over the head with
my fingers—well it’s a light tap, but I muster up all the
seriousness I can.

Sitting on the
edge of his bed, something occurs to me. I haven’t felt as angry at
someone—haven’t felt angry at anyone, really—since Dex came into my
daily life. And I’ve also never been as happy as I am when I’m with
him. And
definitely
have never come as hard as the way he made me. I think I died
from embarrassment and came back shrieking like a girl, but since
then, I’ve felt loose, carefree and happy. Before Dex, I didn’t
understand the feeling of “intense”.

On the bed, Darcy sorts his
stuff into piles. One pair of sneakers: complete. Four undies:
complete (how often did Nana wash, or worse, how often did he
change them?). And so forth.

“
Here,” I say.
I begin pulling the random bits into a cohesive group. “You’ll take
all day. And no, I will not define ‘all day’ because if you’re old
enough to talk back to me, you’re old enough to do at least half of
this.”

“
It’s only
been a couple of days.”

“
Random?” I
ask, holding up a LEGO man. Darcy shudders, indicating it belongs
only in the garbage. “Then a couple of days will turn into a couple
of weeks and…”

“
And I get it.
You’re trying w
a
y
too hard to be Mom. She would pack toys in my bag for me to play
with and you don’t even let me have friends over.”

“
Oh, blah,
blah, blah.” I shove his shoulder. “I’m twenty, so I have no option
but to be cool.”

He rolls his eyes, hands me one
sock.

“
Isn’t this
for your ‘Sock’ pile?”

“
Define
‘Sock’.”

“
I swear,
Darcy—”

“
I’m being
serious, Charlee! It’s all I’ve got.”

I stare down the lone sock. One
white sock with no partner. It’s nothing without its mate. Just a
nobody for nothing. “Right,” I say, not meeting Darcy’s eyes, for
fear of being made a fool by my ten-year-old brother. I dump it in
the Random pile.

“
And this?” I
ask, holding up a folded piece of paper. “Garbage too?”

As I scrunch it in a ball to
shoot for the can, Darcy lunges at me and swipes back the note.
“You silly head! That’s like your one from Dad.”

I sit straight, blinking
dumbly, until “like your one from Dad” slaps me over the forehead.
The letter Dex gave me! Where are those jeans? Was I wearing jeans?
Did I…oh, please, no.

I apologize and ask for the
letter back, promising not to throw it away. Darcy gives me a glare
before deciding he can trust me this time.

“
Haven’t you
read yours yet?”

“
Well, I
didn’t really know about it. What does yours say?”

I look down and catch the
words, “my big, strong man” before the paper is ripped away. Giving
Darcy a look, the best he can come up with is that he changed his
mind.

“
Okay, general
points, then,” I say.

Darcy blinks and then there are
tears. Real droplets of sadness trailing down his nose, cheek, chin
and falling into his lap while he sits there, unmoving. “Go read
yours. Daddy would have wanted it.”

I nod and sprint to my room,
digging my fingers into pockets, in hoodies, skirts, shorts, jeans,
sweats. In a moment of insanity, I even dig down inside to the toe
of my shoes in case it’s stuffed in there. I can’t miss this
letter.

Instead, I find that note I
wrote tucked under my pillow. The one I keep putting back, even
when I change my sheets. It was before I started chatting with Dex
and an ice-cold sensation insta-freezes my core, stabbing me with a
thousand needles—like pins and needles, but on an epic scale. I
read:

Dexter Hollingworth “killed” my
parents.

I’ve gone from believing that,
to not believing it, to thinking maybe it was true, to closing the
door on that forever. Dex was in the wrong place at the wrong time,
and I’ll never blame him for the tragedy he has to wear for the
rest of his life. I rip the note into quarters, shoot it into the
can and as I’m about to give up looking for my dad’s letter, I
collapse onto my desk chair and it’s there: folded in a corner on
the side of my desk.

I run back and bounce onto
Darcy’s bed, even waving the letter at him to both make him laugh
and show off my triumph.

When I touch the edge of the
paper, my fingers freeze up. What if now’s not the right time? What
if I should wait until Darcy is at school so he won’t see me cry?
What if it’s better to wait several months until I’m out of the
worst of the grieving stage?

Looking at the paper, I’m
certain the words “Just wait” are written in invisible ink right
there. This is the one chance I get to read Dad’s final words. I
should be alone.

“
I’ll just be
outside,” I announce to Darcy before I stagger to the bathroom,
where I fall into a heap at the bottom of the door, just the way I
was when Dex found me and gave me this very letter.

Looking back,
this letter seems somehow different. Anger—the Dexter-anger I’m
familiar with—tenses up my shoulders, stiffens my arms by my side,
makes me involuntarily grind my teeth. Makes me think,
asshole
. But that’s not
fair. That was my anger directed at me for losing the most
important man in my life. It wasn’t anyone else’s fault it was
Dad’s time to go.

I clamp the letter between my
hands and breathe in slowly. Just as I think I’m ready to begin, I
realize I should have tissues ready, so I grab those from the
counter and reclaim my spot hunched behind the door.

I take that long breath again
since it seems my lungs have collapsed like two plastic bags with
all the air sucked out. I fold open the pages and read:

Charlee,

I love you so much more than I
can write down, so it’s taken me four tries to write this first
line without blotching up the paper. If you’re reading this I’m
either a) such a vegetable I have no hope—in which case stop
kidding yourself, accept the veggie stew I am, and turn the damn
machine off! or b) I’m gone.

What do I think about as I
write this?

Dragging you
off your bed by your ankles for six
am
training sessions. Stripping your
pillows and sheets away in the hope you’ll have to get out of bed
(and having no such luck). Tallying up scores with you of how often
I could hit your mom in the head with that beach ball before she’d
yell. Forgetting to feed you because we were too busy playing video
games. Kissing your forehead after a bedtime story, twice, because
you always wanted a second kiss from me. Attempting to have “the
talk” with you at fifteen. Being informed I had “the talk” with you
approximately two years too late.