Invisible (21 page)

The squeak of the basement door, and here was Brenna’s mom clopping down the stairs in her heels. “How are we all doing down here?”

Adam straightened and put an innocent look on his face.

“Fine, Mrs. Viersteck,” Eric said.

She wore makeup that made her skin look orange, and her clothes were way tight and way short. None of the other moms looked anything like her. “Want some chips? I’ve got some baked Lay’s upstairs.”

“Mom, just go.”

“Oh, Brenna. Please don’t talk to me like that.” But she didn’t
really sound that pissed, more like she knew it was the kind of thing a mom was supposed to say. “Peyton, how are you, sweetheart?”

Peyton’s cheeks burned as the other kids eyed her. “Fine.”

“How’s your dad doing?”

“He’s okay.” Peyton turned the string bracelet around on her wrist. The brightly colored threads cycled around. Orange, yellow, red, green.

“It’s nice your aunt is going to stay and help out for a little while.”

Brenna groaned. “Mom.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Brenna. Just pause the movie.” She returned her attention to Peyton. “She came in to see Dr. Lindstrom today. I hope everything’s okay.”

Peyton was the daughter of a nurse. She knew that wasn’t the sort of thing Mrs. Viersteck was supposed to tell people, and it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing she should be asking about. “I guess.”

“I was surprised when she called to set up an appointment. I thought Dr. Lindstrom had stopped being her doctor long ago.” When Peyton didn’t respond, she reached up to adjust an earring. “It’s just that she was supposed to go to him for her college physical, but she never showed.” She shook her bracelets around her wrist. “I have no idea how she got into college without one.”

“Fascinating, Mom,” Brenna said.

So what was she saying, that Dana had been up to something, that she wasn’t what she appeared to be? Mrs. Viersteck had been a sometime friend of her mom’s, but Peyton could always tell her mom didn’t really like Mrs. Viersteck. Whenever Mrs. Viersteck called to say she was dropping by, Peyton’s mom always put the phone down with a little sigh of resignation.

“Well, it is fascinating. I’ve always wondered.” Mrs. Viersteck patted the front of her skirt, smoothing it over her hips. “I guess she and Joe Connolly are still an item, huh?”

“People don’t talk like that anymore, Mom.”

“I’m people, and I do.” Her mascara was so thick it clumped. She smiled and Peyton was pretty sure she’d just reapplied her lipstick. Who did that, put on lipstick to check the kids in the basement? “I saw her get into Joe’s car. It was sweet, actually, reminded me of the good old days.”

“Sweet,” Adam said.

She gave him a look as if trying to gauge whether he was sincere or mocking. “Make sure you use that coaster,” she told him, and smiled at Peyton. “Let me know if you change your mind about those chips.”

The moment her mother’s trailing hand on the banister disappeared around the curve of the stairs, Brenna dipped under Adam’s arm and snuggled against him. “Can we get back to the movie, guys, or what?”

“Or what,” Adam said.

He thought he was so original. Peyton could have seen that line coming from a million miles away.

Eric held open the door, and Peyton pushed past him onto the front porch into the cool night air. Rocking chairs sat lined up along the railing as if something was about to happen out on the grass and they didn’t want to miss the show. Clouds had rolled in to cover the face of the moon, and everything smelled damp.

“I know what we can do now,” she said. “Stick needles under our fingernails.”

“Come on. It wasn’t so bad. I thought you liked Brenna.”

She snorted.
Right
. Brenna was the kind of person who assumed friendship, who confided in Peyton and asked her to be lab partners,
blah blah blah
, but Brenna was like that with everyone. It didn’t mean anything. “You can be so dumb sometimes.”

Why was she so mad? Was it because of Brenna’s stupidity, Mrs. Viersteck’s insincerity, or the pressure of sitting beside Eric
for two hours and knowing he wanted to kiss her like Adam was kissing Brenna. Or maybe it was that Brenna still had her mom around. Brenna was so secure that she could treat her mom like dirt, right in front of Peyton.

“I guess.” His voice was mild.

She narrowed her eyes at him. She could call him a major dork, and he’d shrug. It just made her madder. “Whatever.”

He unlocked the car and Peyton climbed into the passenger seat. Eric’s car, technically one he shared with his older brother, was a total beater, with rusted doorframes and sagging seats, but it rode low to the ground, and she loved watching the way Eric drove with one arm on the windowsill and the other hand on the steering wheel. He’d hung the big green fuzzy dice she’d given him from the rearview mirror, and now she reached up and tapped them to send them swinging.

Thunder rumbled distantly as he backed his car out of the driveway. “Did you Google your aunt after you got her phone number?”

His voice sounded a little too casual. “Why would I?”

He shrugged. “It’s just that they’re saying she killed someone in that building implosion.”

That was ridiculous. She frowned at him, but he wouldn’t look at her. “Oh, come on.”

“For real. There was someone in the building when she blew it up.”

Peyton slumped in her seat and frowned at the dashboard. “I don’t believe you. Dana hasn’t said anything.”

“Well, but would she? Come on. Think about it. Your dad would be
pissed
.”

Eric was right. Dana was playing them.

“Sorry.” Eric glanced over. “I just thought you should know.”

“Great. It’s just one more freaky thing about my family.”

“Everyone’s family is freaky.”

“No, they aren’t. Yours is really, really not freaky.”

The light turned red and Eric braked to a stop. Lightning flared.

The whole world was outside, and it was just the two of them inside the small space of the car, the air tinged with the musty odor from the discarded fast-food wrappers on the floor, and the tang of Eric’s cologne. “How come you hang around me?”

He laughed a little. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” The dice had stopped rocking and now hung straight. “Lots of girls like you.”
Everyone
liked him. “You’re a normal guy. I’m all … twisted.” Saying it hurt, a stabbing pain that lingered.

“Peyton. You’re not that way.”

So much wonder in his voice. The red glow from the stoplight slanted into the car; his gaze was steady on hers.

“When I look at you, all I see is this halo around you, like you’re glowing,” he said.

“You telling me to get a tan?”

He shook his head, no amusement there. Was he
blushing
? “You’re just … it.”

A car behind them honked, telling them the light had changed. The rain started, a soft patter at first, then a steady rapping on the glass. Eric switched on the wipers. She watched the street blur and sharpen, blur and sharpen, all the quiet houses massed around them, the people inside them coming together and moving apart. Two letters that spelled the world.
It
.

 [DANA]

A
RAINY NIGHT IN A SMALL TOWN WITH NOTHING TO
do. No one to visit, and neither of the two movies playing downtown sounded appealing. Neither did hanging around a bar, watching other people connect. It used to be a game, to see if I could get the guy in the corner to come over, or the girl on the stool beside me to tell me her life story. Now I knew just how shallow those interactions really were.

Rain pattered against the windowpanes as Frank worked at the dining room table, sliding papers around with abrupt crispness, as though he were searching for something and not liking what he was finding. A glass of amber liquid sat by his elbow. So he’d moved on to the hard stuff. He didn’t glance up when I came to stand in the doorway.

“Where’s Peyton?” I had arrived to find supper dishes piled in the sink, and Peyton’s bedroom door hanging ajar to an empty room.

“Why?” He looked over at me, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.

For a moment, I saw him, the brother I could have had. “I’m going to go through my stuff in the basement, and I wanted to see if she wanted any of it.”

“Doubtful.” He went back to his papers.

And there he went, the brother I would never know.

The space was dark and cool, cluttered with old furniture and holiday decorations, and the storm seemed far away. Boxes were stacked in the far corner. I yanked the string dangling from the rafters, and yellow light spilled down in a cone.

I pulled a heavy box toward me, smeared with dust, the dry tape offering no resistance when I pulled apart the flaps. Papers, probably every note I ever took, every test. Why had Julie kept them? She couldn’t have imagined that I would want to wade through my theories regarding Nazi-occupied France. I shoved the box aside.

The next box was light, and rattled as I took it down. Trophies. Not mine, but somehow, magically, Julie’s.

A tarnished figurine of a girl holding a ball aloft, cobalt blue ribbon wrapped around the stand. I remembered Julie sinking the final basket, putting her team over in the last second of the game. I’d yelled so loud I was hoarse the whole next day. You’d think that a trophy figure would show some emotion. You’d think the chin would be raised and the mouth stretched wide in triumph.

The door at the top of the stairs creaked open, letting in a wedge of light shining around a pair of jean-clad legs. Peyton came down the stairs, arms filled with clothes, not seeing me until she was halfway to the washer. She looked away, but too late.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” came the reluctant response.

Up went the lid of the washing machine, in went the clothes. She shook in detergent, lowered the lid, pressed a button. Water rushed into the tub.

“Look what I found,” I said as she turned to the stairs. “Your mom’s old trophies.”

“Yeah?” Grudging.

“Here’s the one she got senior year. Her team voted her Most Valuable Player.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“She was the best point guard our high school ever had.”

“They have a plaque in the hallway.”

“Really.” The thought warmed me. “Her coach said she could’ve gotten a college scholarship.”

“She didn’t want that. She wanted to be married. She wanted to have me.”

Said challengingly. I wondered who had told her that. Julie or Frank? Julie’s senior year, she and her coach had sat at the dining room table in our old house, debating all the options. In the end, Julie decided she couldn’t leave me. She’d told her coach in a low voice that I wasn’t supposed to hear from where I perched on the landing,
She thinks people always leave
.

In the end, I was the one who left Julie.

“Do you play basketball?” I asked.

“Yeah, in middle school.” She sat cross-legged beside me, her short blonde hair feathery, and one knee poking through the denim of her jeans. She smelled of popcorn and rain. “I didn’t make the high school team.”

I didn’t move, not wanting her to bolt.

Peyton pulled a trophy from the box and sneezed. “Yuck. Why did she keep all this stuff?”

“For you, I bet.”

“Me? What am I supposed to do with it?”

“You could pass it to your own children.”

“You kidding? I’m never having kids.” She dropped the trophy into the box and wiped her palms on her jeans.

Would Julie have protested, hearing that, insisted that Peyton
was too young to make such a decision? No, she would have kept silent and given Peyton space, the way she had done with me.

The next box was filled with odds and ends. Would this mix of stuff hold Peyton’s interest, keep her close for just a few more minutes? I reached for a short red plastic tube. “Bet you don’t know what this is.” I held it out, and after a moment, she took it.

Shaking it, she pried off the top and tipped the tube to let small cardboard disks slide into her palm. She frowned.

“Pogs,” I said. “They were big when I was a kid.”

She poked one with a finger. “What do they do?”

“Nothing. You collect them and have wars with your friends. Whoever wins gets to keep the other person’s.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Pretty cool, huh?” I said lightly. “Bet you’re surprised we had such fun games back then.”

She made no comment, merely dropped the disks back into the tube, but I thought I saw the ghost of a smile touch the corners of her mouth.

I took out a stuffed sock monkey, its wide red mouth looking slightly obscene. “Yikes. I forgot about this guy. Your mom always said it gave her nightmares. Why did she even bother to keep it?” Maybe she’d imagined the two of us going through all this stuff and laughing. Julie had always been such a hopeless optimist.

“My mom kept everything.” Peyton pulled out a poster and unrolled it. “Who are New Kids on the Block?”

I groaned. “You’re making me feel
ancient
.” An easy exchange, the beginning of something?

The creak on the stair shattered it.