How We Fall (12 page)

How we Fall

awkward. Things with Marcus were good, and not awkward, and I liked it that way.

Marcus and Claire stood in the living room. His face was still flushed, which meant he was embarrassed or angry or both.

He was texting one-handed with the other hand shoved into his pocket. Splendid. Texting Sylvia, probably. Why he had to do that right now, I had no idea.

Claire was glaring at Marcus, standing with one hand on the door knob. I followed her out the door and climbed into her car. As she backed out of the drive, my phone vibrated. Marcus.

He’d been texting me.

Sorry. Don’t let her kill you.

“So,” Claire said. “I can’t even really get this. How did this whole thing start?”

I texted back.
No worries. We’ll work it out.
The less of a deal we made this, the better. “When we were fifteen, and we played truth or dare that one time.”

Claire braked too sharply at the stop sign. “When Candace dared Marcus to kiss you. I remember that. It was weird. And that was two years ago, not one.”

Weird, yes. But it hadn’t been bad. I’d thought Marcus was cute since he made me play his alien invasion video game with him when we first moved in, and he told me I was good even though I was terrible. That cuteness opened up a whole new range of possibilities when he kissed me, even though it was only a dare. When Candace dared him to, I’d figured he’d give me a that-barely-counts kiss and then never talk to me again.

He actually kissed me, just briefly, but still a second longer than necessary. He’d turned red like he always did, and he didn’t stop looking at me all evening. I’d looked back.

I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “We didn’t talk about it for like two months, but then he brought it up.” We’d been hanging out laundry. Naturally, the parents ran a dryer-78

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free home in all but the dead of winter. The clothesline was behind the house, and since the house was built into a hill, it had no windows in the back. “He said something unconvincing about how weird that was, and I said it wasn’t that weird.”

I’d also said if he wanted, we could do it again sometime.

He’d looked so nervous when he’d brought it up. It had taken him the whole two months to work up the courage to mention it to me. Maybe if he hadn’t seemed so nervous, I wouldn’t have said we should do it again. But I had.

That was fifteen-year-old me. Brash. Brave. Fascinated by my cousin and his calm, unshakeable nature. I’d felt certain I could rattle that responsibility, make him do something reck-less.I’d been right.

I’d never forget the stunned look on his face. His next words had been, “So—so like, right now?” and we spent the next half hour in the grass making out on a damp sheet from the laundry. But Claire didn’t need to know that.

My prior experiences with kissing had so much build up, and turned out so awkwardly, I was surprised when my first actual kiss with Marcus hadn’t been anything like that. It wasn’t awkward or clumsy and it didn’t have that
oh crap what if I do it
wrong
factor.

“Ew. This is too weird.”

“Stop saying that. You’re not helping.” After making out that first time, we’d let the issue drop again. I’d bounced between being excited and embarrassed over having made out with my cousin, and he acted awkwardly for the rest of the winter. We’d kept hanging out—we didn’t have a choice, constantly paired up by the parents for chores and babysitting—but it was always there between us.

And then we’d both turned sixteen, and we kept getting closer. When the school year ended and Ellie moved, we found 79

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ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. In the vacuum of our trio turning into just the two of us, we finally acted on what we’d been pushing away.

We hadn’t even talked about it. Most mornings I’d get too close to him on purpose during chores, touching his leg, brushing him with my hand. He’d watch me, his eyes missing nothing, until we were done and then we’d make out behind the toolshed. And he’d gotten really good at making up some reason he had to have help on a trip to town for errands; the parents would automatically send me. If I sat close to him on the way to town, he’d brush my leg with his fingers as he shifted gears. He’d park on some lonely road and the next half hour would be freeing, exciting—stabilizing, somehow.

After a few months of that, we’d finally talked about it.

Asked the questions hammering in our minds. Admitted neither of us wanted to stop. We’d established our three rules and sworn no one would ever find out.

Except now someone had.

We fell quiet. Claire passed the city limit sign. Manson was only four miles away, and barely even a town. It was mostly a cluster of buildings around the school. A burger place, a convenience store, and a bar were pretty much the town’s only businesses. A handful of houses flanked the four graveled streets.

We passed a small house with an unmowed yard the on the outskirts of town. The Wallaces had moved to St. Joseph a year ago; selling their house had probably fallen by the wayside when Ellie disappeared.

Claire saw me look at the house as we drove past. “You haven’t heard anything new about Ellie, have you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Not since they found her backpack.”

“She’s been gone for what, four months?”

“Yeah.” Maybe if our volleyball team had been better, she wouldn’t have transferred. Maybe if I’d paid less attention to 80

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Marcus in those early weeks, I would have spent more time with her and she would have kept in touch.

Claire pulled into the burger place and parked. Todd’s burgers were underwhelming, but they did perfect dipped cones.

Claire and I had been coming here for them every Saturday since we’d moved until she went to college last fall.

“So, this is a no-strings thing?” she asked. “You’re seriously just messing around?”

“Sure.” Until yesterday, I’d thought that was true.

“You can’t mess around with a friend. This whole thing is weird. You have to stop.”

“It’s worked so far.” Marcus would call me on that, but Claire wouldn’t.

We went inside and Claire ordered two dipped waffle cones with nuts. Since she ruined my morning, I let her pay. We took the cones outside and sat on the top of one of the picnic tables under the overhang. Potholes studded the crumbling asphalt and a big-eyed, bony hound wandered around by the curb.

My phone chimed, and I thought it would be a text from Marcus, but it was an email. Claire was staring at me, waiting for me to say something, so I opened the email instead. From Travis, the guy who followed my blog. He’d emailed me a few times once he found out I wanted to go to college for film stud-ies of some kind; he went somewhere with a film program. I skimmed the email. He wasn’t saying much. I shoved my phone in my pocket.

“I know it’s weird,” I said. “I don’t know what to do about it.”

Claire picked a nut off her chocolate. “Yes, you do. Stop making out.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It’s exactly that simple. Listen to me, Jacks.” She turned to face me. “I know you guys are close. But you’re going to cause a big problem if you keep doing this.”

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I wouldn’t. Whatever happened, we could work through it.

“We’ve talked about that. We’re not letting things get complicated.” I could hardly believe what I was saying.

Claire tapped my hand so I’d look at her. “I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “I have exes. Even the ones who were nice guys, even when we said we’d stay friends—we don’t talk at all now. You know why?”

She didn’t need to treat me like a child. “I know what breaking up is.”

“Exes can’t be friends. It doesn’t work, because before you break up, things get bad. You hurt each other. You hate each other, even though you wish you didn’t. I can’t look at any of the guys I used to go out with without remembering it, even if I remember some of the good things, too. By the time I decided I was better off without those guys, we’d hurt each other often enough and badly enough that neither of us could fix it. And you know what eventually does fix it?”

Letting her talk now was my best chance for keeping her quiet later. “What?”

“Someone else.” She licked a drip off her cone.

My napkin fluttered off the picnic table. Now I was listening.“He’s going to find someone, one day, and they’re going to get married, and you’re going to resent her because she’s with your ex. You won’t be friends with Marcus anymore, and you’ll resent him for hurting you. Even worse, Marcus is going to tell her about you and him, and she will not like you. And you won’t be able to get away from it, because he’s part of your family.”Imagining myself married and seeing Marcus with his wife and kids at Christmas made my stomach turn. Even after we moved out and went to college and started our own lives, we’d see each other several times a year.

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I said nothing. I’d thought maybe we’d quit when we went to college, mutually agree it was over and that would be fine.

We’d be the cousins who were closest, we’d keep up with each other and stay friends. But with the way this summer was playing out—me resenting him, him wanting a relationship, us crossing and re-crossing our limits—it just wasn’t going to happen that way. The thought of us hurting each other so much we couldn’t get over it made my eyes sting. Claire was right.

“Oh. My. Word.” Claire squinted. “Look at me.” I did, not sure what she was talking about.

Her mouth fell open. “Jackie! You like him! Don’t you!”

“What? No.” I bit my chocolate even though I didn’t feel like eating it anymore.

“Lies. I can see it. If it meant nothing, you wouldn’t look like that. You need to end this, for real. It will be hard, but you need to make a clean break. This isn’t healthy. Once it’s done, you’ll be glad you ended it, and you’ll find someone else, and it will be fine.”

She didn’t get it. And I didn’t need her to tell me it wasn’t healthy. “But we’ll still live in the same house. It won’t be fine, because I’ll see him every day.”

“It will be weird for a while, but you’d get over it eventually.”

That was where she was wrong. If Marcus ever started dating someone else for real, I wouldn’t get over it.

Claire grinned, which was rude, because there was nothing funny about this. “See? You have a huge crush on him,” she said. “I knew it. He’s gotten kinda hot, I’ll admit, but you seriously have to get over him. He’s your
cousin
.”

I whipped around to face her. Whatever I had for Marcus, it wasn’t a passing, giggle-worthy attraction. “I know he’s my cousin. Stop saying that. Being cousins is the whole problem. If we weren’t—” I stopped.

What would happen if we weren’t cousins? If he lived in 83

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town and our families only knew each other from school events? My ice cream dripped onto the picnic table.

His stability fascinated me. He was okay with how his family worked and he didn’t worry about what other people thought of him. I wanted to be more like that. He was comfortable with who he was. Maybe that was why I could talk to him so easily, why I didn’t feel the pressure I did with most other people. And he knew it was hard for me, the same way I knew it was hard for him to shake off the responsibility of being a third parent in his family and act like the teenager he was. “I don’t know,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound like a crush,” Claire said, eyebrow raised. “Jackie. This isn’t good.”

I didn’t need her to say it.

I wanted to cry or pound the picnic table or anything other than just sit here and pretend like it didn’t matter.

I didn’t only like him. I didn’t just want our friends-with-benefits fling to be a real relationship. This was a mess. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I was supposed to find someone perfect for me. Someone my family would like and we’d make our lives good together. But because it was Marcus, that couldn’t happen and I had to fall out of love with him.

Somehow I’d gone from thinking of Marcus as my friend to wanting him to love me.

A crack in my warming chocolate let melting vanilla soft-serve seep out and sog my waffle cone. “Are you sure I’m not adopted?”

Claire’s face softened. “Neither of you are adopted. Photos from the days you two were born are hanging right outside your room.”

“Then where did I get my red hair?”

“Grandma had that red-brown color.” Claire threw out the end of her cone and took mine from me. She broke off a piece of the chocolate then huffed. “This must be hard for you.”

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Just a bit, yes.

“So if you’re so into him, why didn’t you ever sleep with him?”

The thought made my hands sweat. “I figured, we can’t undo that, you know?”

Claire shook her head. “You can’t undo any of this. And I can’t imagine how many times in the last year you must have given him blue balls.”

Trust Claire to put it that way.

“You really have to end this. Seriously. Promise me you’ll stop making out with him. If you end it, I won’t tell anyone.”

I didn’t answer her.

“Jacks. Really. It’s weird. And long-term, it’s messy. You can’t be permanently related to your ex. It’d be a nightmare. Plus, family is supposed to be a place where some things aren’t an option. It’s a safety thing.”

It seemed so strange that out of all the people in the world Marcus could have been, he ended up being my cousin. Why couldn’t he have been a guy from school? It was so unfair we were related. Some cosmic mistake, a genetic error that couldn’t be fixed.

Claire let me sit there. Maybe she knew I needed the space or maybe she didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t handle any more questions, and I wanted to stop talking about it. Talking wouldn’t fix it.

The hound wandered away. Sheriff Whitley drove past and waved. A rusty white pickup rolled up to a pump at the gas station across the street.

To keep Claire from grilling me further, I motioned to it.

“Have you seen that truck before?”

She squinted. “Don’t think so. Why?”