How We Fall (31 page)

I walked over to him and sat down in the chair by the second computer. “I’m worried about you.” It wasn’t the light; he had lost weight. The hollows on his face were sharper. It looked like it had been a few days since he shaved last, and he had black shadows under his eyes.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m holding down a job. I have A’s in all my classes. I have a girlfriend. It’s working.”

He no longer looked seventeen. Somehow in the last month, he’d aged two or three years. “What’s working?” I so badly wanted to move my chair closer and brush the hair off his forehead.

“Will’s a good guy for you. I have Sylvia. We’re making it work.”

“Why are you doing all this?” I whispered. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”

“No, I won’t. I’m dealing with the problem.”

At least he was talking to me and we were having a real conversation. “Which problem?”

“That I—we—” He glanced around the silent upstairs.

“That we wanted to be with each other. I’m dealing with it. It’s working.”

I shouldn’t have, but I did it anyway. I reached across and touched his hair, brushed it out of his eyes. His eyes met mine, 240

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and then he looked down to the carpet. “I should keep working. That test is tomorrow and I’m only half done.”

I lowered my hand to my lap. “You can’t keep not sleeping like this.”

“Yes, I can.” He turned back to his books. “See you tomorrow.”

Except I probably wouldn’t. I stood up and walked to the stairs. I never should have agreed to our new rules.

I walked down the stairs, and the lamp lit up his brown hair and his pale skin as he bent over a giant volume of Shake-speare’s collected works.

When I got back to my room, I pulled out my phone and texted him.

I miss you.

He hadn’t replied to my texts in two months. I had no reason to think he would, but I stared at the clock anyway. Five minutes later, he replied.

I miss you, too.

• • •

The white truck seemed to have disappeared. The parents all lost the worry lines that had been gathering on their faces, and it had been a while since anyone had bothered Marcus.

But I was more convinced than ever that Sylvia had something to do with Ellie’s death. I still had a few details to work out, but everything pointed back to St. Joseph. Something had happened there, and for Ellie’s sake, I had to know what. I draped my legs over the side of the armchair in the living room.

I had several tabs open—a few articles with dates covering the time span of her disappearance, the school website, a mention of the volleyball team in one of the city’s newspapers. And of course, my email contacts. I always filled in addresses. My 241

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college-ruled notebook had a page nearly filled with notes.

Sylvia giggled so I looked up. They were always here, now.

Never at her place. She was whispering to him, again. But she still looked tired and her laughter seemed forced. Was the entire town not sleeping?

I hadn’t replied to Travis in a few days, so I opened his last email and clicked “reply.” He’d apologized for not getting back to me for a while, saying the start of the semester had been busy.

No worries. It’s been busy here, too. School starting always does
that, plus my cousin is always bringing his girlfriend over, and
the garden is producing like crazy now, so we’re all working with
produce almost every spare minute.

We’d started chatting more about things besides film, just normal life things, and I was surprised once I started how easy it was to tell people about myself. It was pretty great having Kelsey and Will and now Travis.

Marcus and Sylvia were whispering now. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but their voices were tense. Sylvia seemed okay, though, and laughed once or twice while they watched videos on his phone. I didn’t really buy it. Marcus never sat straight up like that, and his attention kept drifting to other things in the room. Usually, he focused. He paid attention.

I closed my laptop. He wouldn’t be happy if he knew what I was doing, even though he knew something wasn’t right about Sylvia since she’d panicked at the carnival, and she’d been sick enough she’d skipped school a few times already.

Sylvia and Ellie having known each other was too much of a coincidence for me to believe it was one. Sylvia was a nice girl.

I’d looked hard and found no legitimate reason to dislike her.

Sometimes oblivious, sometimes messy, but she reminded me a little bit of Ellie.

Except Ellie wouldn’t have hidden something like this. And 242

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as I sat there, watching Sylvia texting my ex in my own living room, a thought struck me that made me turn cold.

Maybe she wasn’t hiding something. She could just as easily be hiding from something.

• • •

When a crash came from the kitchen after midnight, I was still awake. Since Marcus hadn’t been there for dinner, the parents had talked all about him and young love and how overdue this was. They’d solemnly agreed, with much head nodding, what a lovely girl—just a lovely girl—Sylvia was, while I stabbed my rosemary potatoes. Chris had raised his eyebrows at me, but other than that no one seemed to notice.

I slid out of bed and opened my door a crack. A light was on in the kitchen, and I heard Marcus swear. I pulled a cardigan over my pajamas and went out to see what was going on.

Marcus stood in the middle of the kitchen, setting a chair upright. His eyes were bloodshot and he wore his shoes on the wrong feet. “Are you drunk?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No.” He paused and closed his eyes.

“Yes.”

He didn’t look tipsy drunk; he looked sick drunk. He tried to walk forward and ran into the chair again. I hurried over and helped him set it up. He gripped the rail along the chair back and wouldn’t let go.

“Why are you drunk?”

His knuckles were turning white.

“What happened? Are you okay?” Maybe I should take him to the hospital. I could wake Uncle Ward, but they’d freak out if they saw him like this.

“I don’t know.” He was breathing too fast, but I couldn’t see anything actually wrong with him.

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I stepped closer to him and touched the back of my hand to his face. He jumped when I touched him. His skin was hot.

“You didn’t drive like this, did you?”

“They drove me.”

“Did something happen? Tell me what’s wrong.” I touched his hands, trying to get him to let go of the chair, but he pulled away from me and stumbled backwards.

“Hey,” I said. “Calm down. It’s okay.”

“No it’s not. I didn’t avoid it, I did everything, and it’s not okay.” The dim kitchen light only lit up half his face.

I took a step toward him. “Let’s go sit on the couch. Then you can tell me what’s going on.”

He turned away, looking out the big windows that let in the night. “You used me, didn’t you?”

Now I was the one who felt like stumbling backwards.

“What?”

He talked to the window, his arms crossed and his shoulders set. “You knew. You had to know I loved you. That I—how I couldn’t—but you didn’t stop. And you let me. You let me think it was both of us. I would never have done that to you.”

He swung around, his eyes red. “You did this to me. You came here when I was fourteen and shy and you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. You kissed me, and you talked to me, and you made me love you. And then you said I couldn’t, and you didn’t, and you were embarrassed to be with me. You said it meant nothing.”

“We,” I said slowly. “We said. We talked about it.” I had not made him love me. Whatever he’d done had been his own fault.

“Because that was what you wanted.” His voice fell flat. “I might love a girl who doesn’t want me, but there’s nothing I can do about it if she doesn’t want to love me back.” He walked toward me. “Just tell me. I have to know. I can’t stand not knowing.”

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He stopped inches from me, and it took everything I had to not touch him again.

“Anything,” I said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Tell me the truth. Just tell me, okay?”

“Okay. I promise.”

He ran both hands through his hair, then backed up, like he couldn’t be too close to me when I answered. “Did you love me? Did you ever really love me?”

That night at the creek, I’d told him I did. But I looked into his eyes and what I saw there burned me. “Of course I did. I told you I did.”

“No.” His voice was a hoarse whisper. “You kept saying you didn’t, before.”

I couldn’t stand him sounding this way, looking at me like that. “I didn’t know. I didn’t want to.” The kitchen floor was cold on my bare feet as I walked toward him. “But I did love you, Marcus. Once I realized it, it was all I could think about.

You have to believe me. I didn’t know you’d loved me all that time. I never would have kept up with it if I’d thought you did.”

He looked down at my feet on the hardwood floor. “You said it, that time at the creek. But later I figured I was wrong and you didn’t. Once you’d gotten away from it, you changed your mind.” His jaw clenched and unclenched. “I was right, wasn’t I? You—you cared about me. You loved me like your cousin. But you never loved me like that.”

“I did. I loved you!” I wanted to yell at him that I still did; I wanted to shake him until he looked me in the face and told me what the hell had happened tonight. But if I did that—

“Because I couldn’t stand it if it was just me.” He stepped forward and gripped my shoulders. “Don’t lie to me. I know—

compared to Will, and he’s not your cousin. But I can take it. I have to know.” His grip trembled, and he shook me.

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I put my hands on his arms and tried to push them away.

“Stop it. Marcus, let go of me.” But he didn’t. His hands didn’t hurt, but he was so much bigger, so much stronger than me. I gripped his wrists and shoved. “Let go. Damn it, let go of me.”

He dropped me like I’d burned him. He looked horrified, and stared at his hands for a minute. “I’ll move out,” he said.

“I’m almost eighteen. I’ll move out.”

I pulled my cardigan tight around me. “Stop it. Stop whatever this is. Don’t move out, just believe me, Marcus. I wasn’t using you, and I’m so, so bitterly sorry I hurt you. But it wasn’t ever just you. Please, believe me.”

He looked up from his hands. “You loved me.”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t just me. You weren’t using me.”

“No.”

His face fell. “God, Jackie. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His eyes flicked over every part of my face. He reached out to touch me, but then didn’t. “Did I—Did I hurt you?”

I swallowed hard. “You just scared me,” I whispered.

“I scared you. Me.” He looked dazed. He walked into the living room and sank onto the couch.

I went over to him and sat facing him cross-legged on the cushion.

“It’s not working,” he said.

“Tell me.” I knew, but if I didn’t find out what was going on in his head, this would be it for us. We were falling already, and if this kept up we’d keep falling until we hit the bottom and broke.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m dating someone else. I’m working every spare minute. I never even see you anymore. That night you came upstairs, I told you it was working, but it’s not working.” He gripped the edge of the couch, his fingers digging into the fabric. “And I can tell from the way he treats you. Will 246

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actually cares about you. And that’s great. I don’t care if you’re sleeping with him. No, shit, I do, what I mean is, you have the right. You have the right to, okay? But I can’t stop thinking about it, about you and him, and even Sylvia can tell.” He put his face in his hands.

I could barely see him in the light from the kitchen. We were only two feet away from each other, but it felt like miles.

“Marcus.” I waited for a moment, because I wanted him to hear me, believe me. He lifted his head and he went back to gripping the edge of the couch. His eyes were black holes in the dark, and he was looking somewhere across the room, but he was listening. “I am not dating Will.”

His hands let go of the couch.

“And I didn’t sleep with him, either. We went out a few times, and I tried to make it work because of what you and I said. But he wasn’t what I wanted. We’re friends. That’s it.”

“You’re not dating Will.” He said it like an echo, like he didn’t know what it meant. “But you are. In your room, and going out to the movie. And whatever.”

“We’ve just been hanging out.”

It took a minute for his breathing to slow down. He held one hand in the other and rubbed a thumb across his palm.

“So if—” he cleared his throat. “If I wasn’t me, if I wasn’t your cousin, would you still want to be with me?”

Now I touched him. I rested my hand on his shoulder, traced my fingers over his cotton shirt. His shoulder was thinner than it had been. “Yes. If you were just you, and I was me, and we weren’t cousins, there’d be no question.”

He froze. His slow breathing sounded loud in the darkness of the room, and so did mine.

The things we shouldn’t say lay between us, all the things we wished and regretted. But then Marcus reached for me.

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taken him months to bring it up again. I’d told him to kiss me a second time, and after that, I’d been the one to find him, tease him, push him, until we’d both admitted what we wanted.

But this time, it was his hands that touched my skin, his lips that crushed mine, his body that tipped mine backwards onto the couch. I didn’t move for a moment, because I didn’t want him to know, but he had a right to the truth and I was done hiding things from him. I put a hand on either side of his face and kissed him.

His lips parted mine, hot and impatient. He tasted like whiskey, and the way he kissed me threatened to make me drunk with it. He fumbled with the sleeves of my cardigan and tore it off me so I was in my pajama shirt and shorts. His hands came back to my face, though, and to my hair. He touched my eyebrow, and my ear, and my eyelashes. Ran his hand through my hair and kissed me and I kissed him until we were nothing but shape and shadow and motion in a dark, silent house.