How We Fall (4 page)

10

Kate Brauning

I did not want him to.

I moved my hands to his chest and tangled my fingers in his shirt. Then I pushed a little, the weight of his body on my hands.

He moved back, sighing. The breeze rushed between us.

“Later?” I asked.

Everyone knew his truck, and everyone knew us. He cleared his throat and nodded.

“You okay?”

He nodded again.

I bumped him with my shoe. “As far as payback goes, that wasn’t exactly fair.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You started it.”

Sitting with him in the truck like this was tempting. Just to talk. To tease him and watch him grin like that. Here we were the most ourselves, and us together like this was where act three of a movie would end. And much as I would love a fade to black and the end credits to roll, letting this be the point we hung on forever, we wouldn’t get a fade out, and the other half of our lives was waiting.

11

Marcus turned left onto the blacktop. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t, either. By now we’d learned that there just wasn’t anything to say, and trying to find something that would help never did.

We pulled up the long driveway to the house. It had a two-story brick front, but the rest was built into a hill. “Earth-sheltered,” Aunt Shelly said, but my friends called it hobbit-style. I loved the stained wood and the dozen small places for hiding to read. Useful, since my parents and I shared the house with my aunt and uncle and their six kids.

I climbed out of the truck. Marcus fiddled around with something in the truck bed, so I went on ahead of him, glancing back in spite of telling myself not to. After managing to find time to ourselves, it always jarred me a bit to come home.

Readjusting my personal space to not include Marcus took me a minute.

He jogged up the driveway. Like always, he caught the screen door before it banged behind me.

“Sixty bucks, Mom.” I dropped the cash on the counter.

People said we looked alike, but I didn’t have her smile or the hair. I’d seen her college pictures—frayed jean cutoffs, a bikini top, a guy-stopping smile. The same gorgeous, blonde waist-length braid she had now.

I refused to do the braids. Braids make redheads look like Pippi Longstocking.

Her giant chef’s knife snicked on the maple cutting board.

She was slicing zucchini while Simon and Garfunkel played 12

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from the kitchen sound system. “Oh, thank you. Can you whip the egg for these? I’m in a hurry.”

“Give me a second to wash my hands.” I headed for the main-floor bathroom at the end of the hall.

“I should do that, too.” Marcus followed me.

I turned the taps to the cool side of warm and pared the dirt from under my fingernails. Marcus hovered behind me.

An inch over six feet tall, and not done growing. Aware he was watching me, I leaned back half a step to brush his chest with my shoulder. Teasing him wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Hey.” He hooked a finger in one of the belt loops on my jean shorts and pulled me back another step. His hands settled on my waist, his body close to mine.

I pulled his hands off me. “Not here,” I whispered. Dad’s office and my bedroom were the only rooms back here, but still.

If we bent one rule, we’d break them all.

“No one’s around,” he said, his brown eyes meeting mine in the mirror.

His expression stopped me. His shoulders were too straight, his smile forced, his stance too casual.

I almost never did this because it fell into the category of handholding and pet names, but because I didn’t want him to look like that, I stood up on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

For a moment, he looked stunned, then a slow grin split his face.“What’s that look for?” I asked. If it weren’t so dangerous, I’d do that more often just to see him look like that.

“I mean, it’s not what I was hoping for, but I guess it’ll do.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets, still grinning.

That meant we were fine. I pulled away and continued scrubbing the dirt out of my nails, but his expression in the mirror caught me. “Later.” I smiled. Marcus didn’t mind me teasing him. He knew there would be later.

13

How we Fall

He leaned against the bathroom wall, looking stern. “You really like playing hard to get, don’t you?”

“It’s half the attraction.” It wasn’t. But I did enjoy it.

Something creaked in the hall. My hand slipped on the faucet and Marcus stepped toward the doorway just as his uncle walked past. Hot water scaled my hand and I yelped. Uncle Ward barely glanced at us and continued down the hall.

I braced my hand on the edge of the sink and took a breath.

All those sick feelings were back.

My uncle was mostly to blame for my family moving to Missouri. Uncle Ward and Aunt Shelly were into whole wheat and fresh air—ideas he picked up during his pot phase. They’d pecked away at Mom and Dad until I was thirteen. “Oh, sis, you have no idea. Missouri hardwoods. Great for handmade cabinets. The children play in the yard all day. No kid wants video games when they can have creeks and crawdads.”

Uncle Ward’s opinions were a junk drawer combination of conservative family values, generous interpretations of self-restraint and normalcy, and questionable ideas Aunt Shelly found on the internet. He was right about one thing, though: Missouri had its benefits.

I just had to keep my two selves separate.

Marcus followed me back into the kitchen, but we both stopped in the doorway.

“Oh, gross, Dad.” My dad had Mom pinned up against the counter. Her arms were around his neck, and they were full-on making out. “Ugh. Get a room.”

Dad pulled away, not looking the least bit embarrassed. He grinned at us. “That’s the plan.”

I groaned. I had never managed to convince my parents, or my aunt and uncle for that matter, just how much their children did not want to see them Frenching.

Mom pushed him away and scooted the bowl of zucchini 14

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slices toward me. Marcus was avoiding making eye contact with anyone, still weirded out even though this happened at least once a week. Something things people just didn’t adjust to.

Dad straightened the cuffs on his striped green button-up and cleared his throat. “Are Ward and Shelly ready?” The expensive black slacks were leftovers from his days of lawyering in California. He did legal consulting from home now. I’d once hoped moving to Missouri was his mid-life crisis, but it now looked like a rest-of-life crisis.

“Can you tell them to hurry?” Mom peeked into the oven.

“We can go as soon as I change.”

Dad left the room and I set a bowl on the stone countertop and cracked three eggs.

“I need the whisk,” I said to Marcus.

“Please. I need the whisk, please,” my mother added for me.

“And ignore your cousin when she talks like that, Marcus.”

Our kitchen had hardwood floors and a huge window nearly covering the wall, separated into panes by strips of lacquered wood, to make up for the few windows in the rest of the house.

A giant island commanded the center of the room. When my parents decided we should all move in together to live cheaply and reduce our environmental impact, they’d sold our place in California to build this one. That way, they could share cars, a lawnmower, and house payments. Having her dream kitchen had been one of Mom’s provisions for building a house with her brother’s family.

“I don’t mind.” Marcus handed me the whisk and leaned against the counter. “She can boss me around. I don’t have anything better to do.”

I raised an eyebrow at him when Mom turned away. I was plenty nice to Marcus. I dropped a stack of zucchini slices into the egg and then dipped them one at a time into the bowl of seasoned breadcrumbs and parmesan.

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How we Fall

Dinner was usually a family sit-down thing. Part of the wholesome lifestyle goal. Mom would stir her coffee with her straw and talk about how the chickens were hiding their eggs again and we’d need to go find the new nests. Uncle Ward would rant about Sheriff Whitley getting re-elected only because he let the farmers’ kids drive grain trucks underage, while my twin cousins would bang their plates with their spoons and Marcus’s younger sister Candace would eventually tell them to stop it, boys, I can’t hear anything. Marcus would sit across from me and try to make me turn red while my parents were watching. Usually I won.

“You kids can eat whenever you want,” Mom said as Candace wandered into the kitchen. “We won’t be back ’til late.”

At nine, Candace was too young to know where the parents were going for their date night. Some kind of adults-only club in the city. I didn’t want to know anything more than that, and had never wanted to find out in the first place.

Candace gave the platter of raw zucchini a sideways glance.

“Since we have to eat zucchini, can we have ice cream after dinner?”

Mom flipped the zucchini with a pair of tongs. The olive oil snapped and the toasty smell of frying parmesan rose with the steam. “That’s up to Marcus and Jackie. They’re babysitting.”

“We can have ice cream, right?” Candace turned to Marcus.

The younger cousins all knew he’d let them have pretty much anything. Candace had figured that out by her second birthday.

“Hmm. What do you think, Jackie? We could make them earn it.” His smile made me grin.

“The basement does need a good debugging,” I said. “I think I even saw a goblin down there last week.” Our basement was more of a cellar—uncarpeted and mostly for storage. But it was also cool and quiet and one of my favorite hiding places.

Candace looked at me like I should know better as she 16

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walked out of the room. “Goblins aren’t real, and children shouldn’t use pesticides. I’m telling the twins you said we can have ice cream.”

Mom opened one of the in-wall double-oven doors. A chicken and rice casserole bubbled on the rack. “I have to go get ready. I should have gone twenty minutes ago.” She set the casserole on the table. “We might be gone overnight. Ward and Shelly want to stay at that hotel they like, and we’ll be at the club until late anyway.”

Marcus glanced at me, grimacing, at least as uncomfortable as I was. I shook my head and pulled a stack of plates from the cupboard. Seven instead of eleven tonight, since the parents would be gone. “I know. I figured.” My mother was nothing if not frank with her children.

My parents had always been semi-closeted hippies, but now that Uncle Ward had won them over, all freak flags were flying.

Repression and self-restraint could damage your brain, he said.

Probably another one of Aunt Shelly’s ideas from the internet.

Any time I protested the public making out, they reminded me of the importance of “fully expressive” relationships.

If only they knew.

I watched Marcus stirring his hot chocolate on the stove, thoroughly at home in this kitchen, this house, because it was his home, too. I almost wished that first kiss had never happened.

We were friends first, and this deal of ours risked that. Marcus had kept me from being bullied at school three years ago when we first moved here and I was the new girl with the weird family. He was an island of sanity in a household of anything-goes chaos. I never felt like I didn’t fit in when he was around, because we were our own group. He and I. And even when he was tired—I could see it right now in his shoulders, his eyes—

he was patient and did his share. More than his share.

17

How we Fall

Mom left the kitchen and I turned down the burner so the oil didn’t smoke. Marcus shook his head and huffed as he rinsed out the hot chocolate pan. “Brain damage. That’s what’s going to happen. If I have to see our parents doing that one more time, I’m going to suffer serious mental trauma.”

Grinning made my sympathetic glance unconvincing.

“Hey.” He picked up a newspaper from the table. “Another neighbor talking about Ellie.”

“Really?” I glanced over. Her photo, the same one on the park notice board, headed a multiple-column article. More speculation about her disappearance. News was scarce around here, and her story kept getting dragged up as the headline. I skimmed the article. The neighbor said he’d seen Ellie behaving strangely for the last several weeks before she went missing. He suspected drugs. The article digressed into hearsay about Missouri’s meth labs.

Ellie would never do drugs. I touched the silver charm bracelet she’d given me. She’d had one that matched. A volleyball, an ice cream cone, a book, and a tiny silver computer dangled from the chain. The computer was for my blogging. She was the social media queen, so it fit for her, too. We often did homework at the picnic tables outside the dilapidated burger place in Manson, ice cream in hand. My one year of volleyball had been Ellie’s last year at Manson High. Because I was clearly the worst player, and Ellie was clearly the best, she’d tried to show me some tricks, and I was actually enjoying myself by the time she transferred to Edison High School in St. Joseph.

The fifth charm on the bracelet was a bird in flight, wings outstretched. We’d sworn to stay friends even though she was leaving. The bird had come to mean a lot more than just her move to St. Joseph. She was really, truly gone now, and the part that made me sick was that we hadn’t stayed close friends. We hadn’t kept up like we’d meant to. Phone calls. Emails. A few 18

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visits. The months before she disappeared, we’d barely been texting.

Marcus set glasses on the table and didn’t say anything for a few minutes, simply stared into his hot chocolate. He’d drink hot chocolate any time of day, regardless of the season. I left him alone, since he was thinking, and started loading the dishwasher. His glance flicked over to me a few times, his jaw set but his shoulders slumped.

“I’m hurting you,” he said. He said it so quietly I had to watch his lips move to tell what he was saying.

“No,” I whispered. “You aren’t.”

“This is,” he said. “We are.” He set his mug in the sink and left the kitchen before I could find the words to reply.