The Moon and More (16 page)

“Yeah?” he said.

I nodded, then put down my ball to take my shot. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many times I’d played this very same course: as a kid, then a middle schooler, all the way up to when I, too, had gotten overenthusiastic and hit Luke
in the forehead. My dad had always been all about family activities and certain nights at SafariLand kids golfed free. It didn’t matter (to him, anyway) that my sisters and I were quickly bored with the course and bickering, dragging our clubs along behind us or swinging them at each other. If it was a collective outing, you went, like it or not. Yet now, as Benji and I moved to the next hole, I realized the memories I had weren’t bad. Not at all.

At the windmill, for sentimentality’s sake, I called Luke. No answer. So I shot a picture of Benji putting towards it. Wish you were here, I typed beneath it. This time, I made sure the text went through.

Because Benji was a novice, I stopped keeping score about hole seven and just let him go at it, rules forgotten. By the time he knocked his ball into the clown’s nose on the eighteenth hole (after ten or so tries, from multiple angles) he was miles away from the surly kid in the porch swing earlier.

“Wanna play again?” he asked me, once the siren and circus music of the game finale died down.

“Nah,” I said. “Let’s go to the arcade or something.”

“Arcade?” His face lit up. “Awesome!”

I opened up my wallet, digging around to see if I had any SafariLand cards. When I was a kid, they’d issued the old-fashioned paper tickets when you scored points, which you could then exchange for your pick among the toys and prizes kept in a dusty case by the snack bar. Sometime during the last few years, though, they’d switched over to a debit card system for both playing the games and keeping track of credits. I always had at least one floating around the bottom of my
purse, usually coated in lint and half-melted sticks of gum.

“Aha!” I said, extracting a card featuring a smiling lion. I unwrapped a hair elastic that was tangled around it, wiped it on my shorts, then slid it through the slot of the skeeball machine beside me to check the balance. “Seven seventy-nine,” I told Benji, as the number popped up on the display. I handed it to him. “Should keep you busy for a while.”

“I can spend all of it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Word of advice, though: Don’t bother with the toy grabber thing. It’s totally rigged. I’ve never seen anyone win anything there. Not even Luke, and he aced all these games, like, years ago.”

Benji looked at the machine, which was full of stuffed animals that looked deceptively easy to snag with the metal pinchers that hung above them. “Right. I like the video ones better anyway.”

“Perfect. I’m just going to grab a drink, okay? I’ll come find you.”

He nodded, then was off, moving down the rows of loud, blinking machines, the card in his hand. I walked over to the snack bar, checking my phone on the way. No reply from Luke, at least not yet.

I went to the snack bar and got a drink, then tried Luke once more, hanging up when it again went to voice mail. What was it about suspecting someone was deliberately not answering that made you that much more desperate to reach them? I told myself to calm down and put my phone away.

After a brief search, I spotted Benji at one of the driving games, wrenching the wheel back and forth as the screen
flickered in front of him. I was almost to him when my phone buzzed in my pocket. Finally, I thought, grabbing it and hitting the Talk button.

“Hey,” I said, cupping my hand over my other ear to drown out the array of noises around me. “You missed it. Benji’s got a lethal swing. Must run in the family.”

There was a pause. Then, “Emaline?”

It was Theo. Whoops. “Oh, hey. Sorry. I—”

“What?”

“Hang on a sec.” I walked over to the do-it-yourself photo booth and slipped inside. It wasn’t silent, but still an improvement. “Okay. Can you hear me?”

“Yeah. Much better,” he replied. “Where are you?”

I looked at the display of pictures on the wall opposite where I was sitting, all staged snapshots meant to look casual and spontaneous. A girl holding two fingers behind another girl’s head; a family crammed in together, all of them making faces. Meanwhile, in the reflective lens, I just saw myself, looking tired. “I’m hanging out with my … with Benji.”

He was my half brother. I knew that. But calling him that, or anything really, felt more than half-weird.

“Oh, right,” Theo said. “So … I was just calling to tell you Ivy went crazy over that milk crate. She couldn’t believe it.”

“Really.”

“Oh, yeah. I got some major brownie points. I owe you big.”

I looked at the pictures again, each in strips of four. At the top of one, a boy closed his eyes as a girl kissed his cheek. Next shot, she kissed his lips. Then they both faced the camera for the last two, one smiling, one laughing. “No problem.”

We were both quiet for a moment. Outside I could hear Benji’s computerized car squealing its tires, then crashing into something. Theo said, “So I wondered if you might be up for playing tour guide again sometime. I mean, at your convenience.”

I eased the curtain aside, looking over at Benji.
GAME OVER
, said his screen. He kept turning the wheel anyway. I sat back again.

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking of the look on Luke’s face the night before when he’d pulled up beside us. “I’m really busy with work right now, and …”

Theo waited a second, as if I might finish this thought. When I didn’t, he said, “Oh, right, sure. I understand. I figured you had a lot going on.”

I nodded at my own reflection. “Yeah. I do.”

“Emaline?”

I glanced over to see two skinny ankles clad in socks and Nikes at the bottom of the curtain. I opened it and looked up at Benji. “Hey. I’ll be off in a sec.”

“Cool,” he said. “Can I come in?”

Before I could answer, he was sliding in beside me onto the short bench, leaning forward to look at the camera lens. His arm was warm next to mine, one foot already tapping the floor. “I better go,” I told Theo, as Benji pulled out the Safari-Land card I’d given him and swiped it through the slot. A row of lights appeared on the screen behind the camera, blinking.

“Oh, right,” he replied hurriedly. “I’m sure I’ll see you around, or something.”

“Small town,” I agreed.

“Yeah.” A pause. Everything seemed awkward, for some reason. “Bye, Emaline.”

“Bye.” I hung up, then put my phone in my lap. Over the camera, the screen now directed us to
SMILE!
and began to count down from five with a series of beeps. Benji stuck his tongue out as the first flash went off.
Pop.

“Do something silly,” he told me, demonstrating by pushing his nose up to make it into a pig snout. But even as I watched him, I couldn’t think of anything in time.
Pop
. Two more to go.

“One serious,” I said, sliding my arm over his skinny shoulder. “For me.” He crossed his eyes anyway.
Pop.
I poked him with my free hand.

“Okay, okay,” he said, giggling. The machine was counting down again. As it did, I looked up at all those other pictures, happy and laughing, loving and sweet, all tiny manufactured moments in imagined lives. I felt suddenly, and inexplicably, sad. But then I looked at Benji, who was smiling, just as I’d told him to. So I fixed my own face, just in time.
Pop
.

An hour or so later, I dropped Benji off in front of Miss Ruth’s. Then I sat in the car, watching him as he walked up to the house, the paddle ball game he’d cashed in points for in one hand, three of our four pictures in the other. Once he was safe inside, I tucked the final one, which I’d kept, over my gas gauge before pulling away from the curb.

It was a warm night, steamy almost, but I kept my windows down, needing fresh air after breathing in arcade smells
for so long. I’d still not heard from Luke, which was now not just annoying but unsettling, so I went to look for him.

My first stop was the parking lot at the end of the boardwalk, in case he was at Abe’s Bikes or Last Chance. When I had no luck there, I headed out to the Tip, which was pretty dead save for a group of freshman girls hanging out in the back of an SUV. Doubling back, I cut through his neighborhood, on the off chance he was home. He wasn’t. I was driving towards my own house, trying to figure out where to look next, when I saw his truck parked outside of Finz, right next to his buddy Will’s Land Cruiser.

I pulled in on the other side, then cut my engine and sat there to think. I knew I needed to just go in and work this out. But Will was one of those gossipy types (a trait I disliked even more in guys than girls), which meant any visible tension between me and Luke would go public almost immediately. So instead, I got out and walked over to the truck and tested the driver’s-side door. When I found it unlocked, I got in, found a pencil in the console, and started looking for something to write on.

There was a Double Burger wrapper on the floor, but it was greasy, so I opened the glove box and dug around. After a moment, I unearthed a slip of white paper with something scribbled on one side. The other was blank, so I smoothed it out on the dash. I was sitting there, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say, when it occurred to me to double-check that whatever was on the reverse wasn’t important. I turned it back over.

Really. You look better without it (your shirt).
Melissa 919-555-2323

I had a flash of the dark-haired girl from the office, sliding this under the wiper. He hadn’t discarded it, but folded it neatly and tucked it away, like something precious. Then I noticed the bit of faint scribbling in pencil below her message. It was hard to read, as always, total chicken scratch. But, unlike most people, I had experience deciphering Luke’s penmanship. So it only took a moment for the message, and the situation, to become clear.

Fancy Free,
he’d written
. Till Sunday

Probably, he’d used the same pencil I was now holding to jot down this information after he called her. But when had he done that? That day? Or since he’d seen me and Theo?

I put the pencil back in the console, then folded the paper up again. It was like I was watching someone else as I got back out of the truck. I had left the paper on the seat, where he’d see it first thing. Another message from me he could ignore, if he chose. But I had a feeling he wouldn’t.

When I got home and pulled into my driveway, I could see lights on upstairs in the house. As I came in and walked down the hallway to my room, though, there was for once no sound or signs of occupation. Just my bed as I’d left it, made, the towel I’d used for my shower that morning hanging from the hook on the bathroom door. I should have been happy that
my mother and sister had finally given me the solitude and respect for my space that I’d been demanding for ages. Instead, I found myself listening for any sound of life from upstairs. A footstep, a voice, a door being shut. Just something to let me know I wasn’t really as alone as I suspected.

“Coffee?”

I nodded, then flipped my mug over and moved it closer to the edge of the table. The waitress—a girl with a lip ring and a tattoo of what looked like a circle of protractors on her bicep—filled it up. “Thanks.”

“Sure. Still waiting for one more?”

“Yeah.”

Still waiting
, I thought, as she moved on to the next table. I glanced at my watch. It was just before eight a.m., almost twelve hours since this whole nightmare had started. Although calling it that made it sound like sleeping had been involved at some point, which was not the case. Even after Luke and I had arranged to meet for breakfast, I’d tossed and turned until daybreak, tracking the hours one by one in the red numbers of the clock beside my bed.

“Hey,” he’d said when he finally called the night before, around eleven. “It’s me.”

“Hi.”

The awkwardness was like thin air, making it hard to breathe or think.

“I guess,” he said after a long pause, “that we need to talk.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” I swallowed, wondering if he could tell
I’d been crying. I honestly, still, could not believe that any of this was happening. A lot of people lied and cheated, I knew that. But Luke was one of the good ones. Then again, I’d also been sure he was mine. “Did you … you called her?”

“Emaline,” he said, sounding sad.

“Just tell me.”

Another pause. Too long, I knew, to be followed by anything I wanted to hear. “Yes. I called her.”

“Why?” I asked.

In the quiet that followed I thought, for some reason, of the first days we’d been dating, way back in ninth grade. How just seeing him coming towards me in the crowded hallway before first period made me nervous and insanely happy all at once. My throat got tight, and I cleared it. I was all too aware that he still hadn’t answered me.

“I think we need to talk face to face,” he said. “Not like this.”

I bit my lip. “All right. When?”

“Before work tomorrow? Last Chance? Like, at eight?”

“Okay.”

Too much silence, I thought, as we endured another pause. Luke and I were a lot of things, but quiet had never been one of them. Now, I’d had nothing
but
quiet in the hours since, most of which I spent shuffling the events of the last two days as I knew them, trying to make them add up to something else. But all I could see, again and again, was that girl—dropping his wiper back down over her note.
Thwack
.

Now, I pulled my coffee towards me and took a sip. I was just putting it back on the table when the bells over the front door jangled and Luke came in.

He glanced around, his expression businesslike. Then he saw me, and something softened in his features, triggering the same reaction in my own.
Oh my God
, I thought.
Please, no. No.
But then he was sliding in across from me, and it was already happening.

“I’m sorry,” he said, immediately. The words came out rushed, like he’d been holding them in with his breath. “I’m so sorry, Emaline.”