How We Fall (30 page)

He touched my shoulder. “That’s only what you can see right now.”

By the time we got to the theater, I was nervous, twisting my rings and repeatedly checking my texts. Nothing, except Kelsey wanting to hang out. Will parked the car and turned sideways in his seat. “Stop worrying.”

“I’m trying.”

“There’s no reason to worry. You look great. I love the skirt.

Sylvia doesn’t stand a chance.”

Yeah, right. Sylvia, with her blonde hair and big eyes. Sylvia, with her high cheekbones and long legs and fancy shoes.

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Will smiled. He had such an easy grin. “I can see you thinking that,” he said.

I frowned and unbuckled my seatbelt. “I’m pretty sure I’ve royally screwed this thing up.”

He reached for the door handle but paused. “Hey. I want to kiss you before we go in.”

“What?” I stared at him in surprise. We’d been over that.

“Just as friends.” He was serious.

“You know that’s not something friends do, right?”

“Please? It’s for good luck.”

He was such a giant dork. “Why would I kiss you?”

He shrugged. “You have before. And it doesn’t have to mean anything. Just for old times’ sake.”

Because it really didn’t mean that much, and because he was doing all this for me and Claire was so right about him being a good kisser, I said okay. He flipped up the armrest between our seats and scooted closer. “Just trust me, okay? Keep looking at me. Now kiss me.”

Me kiss him? “Okay, whatever.” I grinned before leaning over and brushing my lips against his. He held still for a moment, then kissed me back. He ran a finger along my jaw.

Because it tickled, and because the kiss was a little weird, I giggled, and then he started tickling my side and I couldn’t help laughing. He kept right on kissing me, his lips touching my neck and nose and cheek.

Eventually, he pulled back. “Hey, looks like they’re waiting.”

He nodded toward the windshield.

Marcus and Sylvia stood in the parking lot, waiting for us.

Sylvia wasn’t paying attention, but Marcus was looking right at us. “You did that on purpose,” I said.

“Well, it’s not like I have an objection to kissing you.” He grinned and opened his door. “Let’s go watch a movie.”

I should have had Will for my cousin. Marcus should have 232

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been the guy from town. That would have made so much more sense.

We walked toward Marcus and Sylvia. She seemed recovered from her scare last night, and was hanging onto his hand like they were Siamese twins, chatting about which movie we should watch. Marcus met my eyes for a moment and how empty he looked startled me.

We walked toward the theater without saying much. Only two movies were starting right then—a thriller and a romantic comedy. We chose the thriller and filed into the dark theater.

Sylvia went in first, which meant I was between Marcus and Will when we sat down.

I loved the dark and quiet of theaters. The giant screens usually meant I was able to focus on the film to the exclusion of everything else, but this time I was too aware of Marcus beside me. Our elbows shared the same armrest. Our shoulders nearly touched.

The credits rolled in over a misty lake as I settled back. Water lapped at the screen. Fantastic. Someone was going to end up drowning.

The movie was about a girl being stalked by a spirit-monster of some kind who lived in the lake. Her chances of survival didn’t seem high. Will kept whispering to me what he thought was going to happen, but he was almost always wrong. Sylvia jumped and covered her eyes every fifteen minutes, but I couldn’t blame her too much. The movie was tense. I was having trouble following it, though, because every time Marcus shifted, I forgot what was happening on screen and wanted to lean my shoulder toward his. I could feel his body heat and his shirt smelled like laundry softener. If we could only talk to each other, if he would just be honest with me, we could get past this.

No. Nothing had changed except I’d realized that if our families weren’t an issue, I’d be okay with us.

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Will shifted and put his arm around me. His hand idly played with my hair. Marcus glanced at us. The dark theater shadowed the planes of his face and made his eyes unreadable.

When the girl screamed on screen, he looked away.

Will kept whispering to me, usually nothing important, but every time he did, Marcus’s eyes flicked away from the screen and toward us. Even though the girl was murdered and her love interest died killing the monster, I couldn’t make myself care.

When we left the empty theater, Marcus still barely talked to me. But he was watching. Will, to my surprise, wasn’t kissing me, flirting with me, or saying things meant to provoke Marcus. Instead, he held the door for me, rested his hand on my lower back as we walked, asked me what I thought about the movie, and made eye contact while I talked. Everything I did made him smile.

The pizza place in Harris was a hole in the wall with two rows of booths and three tables. The place was nearly empty, since it was before the dinner rush, although nothing ever really rushed in Harris. We ordered two supreme stuffed crusts because there was no point to any other kind of pizza, and I drank a soda and a half while we waited.

Will kept the conversation going, making Sylvia laugh and turning toward me a bit anytime I said something. He asked questions, teased me, said he liked me wearing the necklace.

Everything he did made my face turn pink, just because his attention, even though I didn’t want it, was so much I didn’t know what to do with it.

When our pizzas came, Will picked the olives off his slice and gave them to me. Sylvia chatted on about how scary the movie was—“oh my god, I nearly
died
when that thing rose out of the lake”—and her dad’s teaching conference the next weekend. She kept emphasizing that he’d be gone Friday and Saturday, though it was a local conference, so he’d be home at night.

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She sounded a bit too disappointed about him coming home, and her glance at Marcus was a bit too long, so I leaned toward Will and he obligingly put an arm around me and ate my pizza crust. Marcus, for once, was hardly paying attention to Sylvia.

He only ate two slices of pizza and said less than a dozen words.

Will paid for my food, even though I hissed at him that he shouldn’t. He winked at me. “No worries. You can pay me back later.”

I rolled my eyes. “My fourth of the bill is less than eight dol-lars. What exactly do you think you’re going to get for that?”

He looked me up and down. “If you smile at me, we can call it even.”

I huffed and let him pay while Marcus watched us.

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School starting wasn’t far off. The double date hadn’t changed much, except that Marcus no longer looked like he was angry all the time. He looked worn out.

When he’d come home from wherever he’d been with Sylvia all day, he’d have shadows under his eyes. I’d hear him up walking around at night, or else completely disregarding his curfew and coming in at two am.

But he always got up on time, still helped with the kids, still did his share of the chores. When I found him making scrambled eggs one morning, I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around like I’d startled him.

I said nothing, just looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot.

“He’s a good guy for you,” he said. The kids waited at the table. He served the scrambled eggs onto plastic plates for the twins and carried them over. I divided up the rest and followed him with our plates, but he wouldn’t say anything else to me.

He ate half his food and left to go start his chores.

I stopped trying to make him talk to me. He didn’t want to, and if he wanted to get over me, then I was only making it worse. But maybe, if he wasn’t angry anymore, we were making progress. Maybe later on we could be back to friends, and he’d be happy with Sylvia, and I’d go off to college and start my career.

I went to the pool a few more times the last weeks of August with Kelsey and Hannah, and they teased me about Will. It was fun, and I liked that they liked him and my parents liked him.

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But their teasing landed in an empty place because it wasn’t at all what I wanted.

I buried myself in college applications, blogging, and hanging out with my friends. I bought a stack of books on cinematography and posted what I was learning about light and shadow and the shapes they created between the actors. Space, I was discovering, was incredibly important on set. The width of a room could be an unconquerable distance.

Marcus, too, was around less and less. I never saw him in the mornings anymore, and sometimes I didn’t see him all day.

Chris asked me a few times if I thought he was okay, and I honestly didn’t know what to say.

The first day of school I saw his truck parked in the lot; I rode in with Kelsey instead of him, like we’d done for the last three years. Kelsey caught me staring at his truck. “Something’s weird with you two,” she said.

I lifted my bag to my shoulder. “Yeah.”

“What happened?” We walked across the grass and through the doors.

I sort of wanted to tell her. “It’s not really mine to tell.

Maybe soon.”

Senior year. We’d made it here, but we couldn’t make it across our own house to talk to each other. The longer he stayed away from me, the harder it was to talk to him.

Instead of letting myself drown in it, I focused. I took notes I didn’t need to take all through the first week, trying not to watch Marcus out the corner of my eye. With a small school and smaller classes, it was hard to not see him everywhere.

Marcus, too, kept his head down. But by Friday, he looked worse than ever, and he didn’t show up for the rest of his classes after lunch.

I walked up to Sylvia at her locker. She probably knew why he went home. She was digging around in her bag and didn’t 237

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hear me, and I stopped behind her and froze when I saw what was taped inside her locker. “Why do you have a photo of Ellie?” The photo, dog-eared and hidden in the back of the locker, was of both of them, arms around each other’s shoulders.

Sylvia whirled around and dropped her chemistry book. She slammed her locker door. “She was on my volleyball team. It’s a reminder.” Her eyes were red, and she looked tired, too.

I picked up her book and handed it back to her. “You said you barely knew her. You look like friends in that picture.”

“We weren’t that close.”

“But you were friends.”

She tried to move away but I stepped in front of her. “I know you know something about Ellie.”

She gripped my arm. “I know why you were looking at me that way and asking me all those questions this summer, okay?

But I don’t know anything. I’m sad she was died. That’s it.”

I shoved her hand off me. “She was murdered. And whoever did it is getting away with it.”

“The police can handle it. Leave me alone.” She pushed past me.If there was one thing I wasn’t going to do, it was leaving her alone. I had Kelsey follow her after school, but Sylvia went straight home and Kelsey gave me a weird look.

But I was certain now.

I hadn’t seen the white truck around for a few weeks. I scanned town and the back roads for it every time we drove to or from school, and I watched Sylvia as often as I could. We drove past her house to get back to mine each day, and every day, she’d be pulling into her drive when we went past.

Claire came home that weekend to hang out with me, and she, Will, and I went for ice cream in Manson. A little green car I didn’t recognize crossed the street a block down. I sat between them on the picnic table while Claire talked about her new class-238

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es for the semester and her social psychology professor. The car headed along the street parallel to Main; I saw the flash of green in between the houses. It stopped two blocks up, at the park, and someone climbed out the passenger side. Blonde hair. She walked across the park toward her house, and the green car kept going.

Marcus wasn’t at dinner that night, and he didn’t come home before bed, so when Mom turned off the light in the hall, I asked her if he was still out with Sylvia.

She shook her head. “She’s apparently sick. Has the flu or something. And Marcus is at work.”

I stopped in my doorway. “At work?”

She peered at me, her hair unbraided over her shoulder. “His job. At the bowling alley.”

“He got a job at the bowling alley?”

“Money for college, Shelly said. He’s been working there for a couple weeks now.”

I’d assumed he was out all that time with Sylvia. I told her goodnight and closed my door, but lay awake in bed for an hour.

Marcus was working. That’s why he was coming home late.

And Sylvia was not sick.

I didn’t even know what time Marcus came home, or if he even did, because he wasn’t there in the morning, either.

That became the pattern. He left before I got up, leaving lunches for Candace and Angie lined up on the counter, talked to me if I talked to him at school, went straight to work when the final bell rang, and I wouldn’t see him again for the rest of the day. Days he didn’t work, he got out snacks for the twins and Candace and Angie as soon as he got home, sat the girls down at the table with their homework, and did his next to them until dinner, after which he’d go see Sylvia and not be home until after I went to bed.

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Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep and I got up in the middle of the night, I’d see a light and hear him doing homework by the computers upstairs. This time when I heard his footsteps up there, I got out of bed and crept up the stairs.

The desk lamp by the computers was on. His English homework lay scattered on the desk. “Marcus?”

He turned to look at me. Maybe it was just the light, but he looked thinner.

“Why are you up?” I asked. “It’s two-thirty.”

He folded down the page of his book. “The test for English.”