Thin Space (5 page)

She springs out of her chair. “Maddie,” she says. Which gets Sam laughing for some reason and she flashes him a dirty look. “You can call me Maddie. Hey, let me walk you to the door.”

Whatever. I follow her down the hall, but I have to stop in the entryway, take one futile step into the front room. A voice in my head says that if I have to wait, I can. I’ve waited two months already. She’s invited me in. She’ll invite me in again. Maybe next time the front room will be cleared out enough that I can walk through—

“Bye, Marsh,” she says.

“Baa,” I say, and I laugh, even though what I really want to do is cry. Or bash my head against a wall.

My parents aren’t home yet. In the entryway, I grab a towel, press it around my toes. They burn against the fabric. My mother’s taken to leaving a clean towel by the door. Mostly she’s ignored the barefoot thing, my father too, but I know it’s bugging them. I try to make it easier by keeping my feet clean. If they saw how red they get, how dirty, they might try to put a stop to it.

Technically, my house is a place where I can wear shoes, or at least socks. I can say with complete confidence that it contains no thin space. I have been over every surface. Twice. But oddly enough I’m getting used to being barefoot, and in a way I wasn’t lying when I told New Girl—Madison—Maddie—whoever, that shoes feel restrictive.

Upstairs, I flop down on the bed in my brother’s room where I’ve been sleeping since the accident. I kick my feet out, and I guess I nod off, because it’s dark when I blink my eyes open.

“Marsh,” my mother’s calling. She says it a couple more times before I finally push myself off the bed and head downstairs.

My parents are trying. Still it’s painful to be with them. Dinner especially. Like, my mother tries to make everything normal. She sets the table—minus one setting—the same
way as always. We eat at the same time every night. She cooks up the same big meals.

What’s changed, though, is so huge that even she can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. At some point she pulled his chair away and tucked it behind the china cabinet. Other stuff has disappeared from around the house too. Some pictures of the two of us. This ceramic bowl I made in art class back in fifth grade. She thinks he made it, though, so it’s gone. I don’t tell her
his
bowl is still displayed on the coffee table in the front room. Whatever. Stuff like this—things getting mixed up—it went with the territory for my brother and me. No point getting ticked off about it now.

“Have a nice day at school today?” my mother says. She sits across from my father. I sit across from no one.

“This chicken is good,” my father says.

“I’m glad you like it. Do you like it, Marsh?”

“Marsh? Do you like it?”

I nod.

“Getting colder out there. Down to thirty tonight, I hear.”

“Thirty?” My mother and father pass each other meaningful looks.

“Might snow.”

“Snow?”

Out of habit, I swipe my feet back and forth along the wood floor.

“Would you like another piece of chicken?”

“Marsh?”

How long can this go on? Three months since the accident. Three months! It’s crazy how long—

“Marshall, your mother is talking to you.”

“Marsh?”

From my brother’s window I can see Mrs. Hansel’s house across the line of backyards. Upstairs, two windows glow like eye sockets. It’s Mrs. Hansel’s bedroom. A shadow flits across one and I wonder if it’s Maddie.

Funny girl,
I think as I flop into bed. Of course this makes me remember Kate and Logan and I get a sick lurch in my stomach. Ahh. Fun times with my so-called girlfriend. I don’t know how serious we were. Not very, I realize now. But I liked her. You don’t just get over something like that. Seeing a girl, seeing
your
girl, kissing another guy. And when that guy happens to be your brother—

Ugh. I can’t keep thinking about this. I twitch my toes under the covers, stare up at the ceiling. My brother tacked this poster up there a few years ago. A rocket ship blasting off. I stare at the puffs of smoke coming out of the rocket tail, the blobs of white and gray swirling.

Misty, like how Mrs. Hansel described the thin space.

I climb out of his bed and press my forehead against the window. The light’s still on in that house. It gives me a twinge of something I haven’t felt in months. Hope?

I
time it leaving the house this morning because I want to catch New Girl on my way to the bus stop. I see a splinter of light at Mrs. Hansel’s house, the front door opening, and a flick of a ponytail. “Uh.” I clear my throat. “Maddie.”

“Hey,” she says. She wraps her arms around herself, hunches her shoulders. “It’s freezing out here. This sure is different from Nashville.”

Time to buy a warmer coat,
I think, but what makes me an expert on keeping warm? I’m the idiot walking around barefoot. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s cold.”

“Gray too.” She blinks up at me. “Does the sun ever come out?”

Nope.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Usually. In the spring.”

“I don’t think I’ll make it until then.”

Me neither.

“I don’t even own a winter coat. My mother bought me
this one before we moved. But I don’t think she was thinking about the cold. That’s my mother. Fashion over comfort . . . ” Her voice trails off and I watch the mist swirl around her face. “She was right about these boots, though.” She lifts one foot and twitches it back and forth. “At least my feet are warm.” Her face fires up. “I didn’t mean—well, I wasn’t talking—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I say, even though it feels like icy knives are stabbing my feet and shooting up my calves. We’ve reached the bus stop and we aren’t alone. So that’s that. Conversation with Maddie’s over. Oh well. And here it was going along so great—weather, flaky parents, could it get any more fascinating?

“Marsh,” Lindsay and Heather say together. They smile at Maddie. Apparently they’ve deigned to talk to her today.

“Your brother,” Lindsay chirps up. “His name’s Sam?”

“He’s hot,” adds Heather.

The bus rumbles up. Good thing too, since I’m not feeling my feet anymore.

Today I trudge through the front entrance of the school, pass the guidance office, notice Mrs. Golden’s yellow head bobbing behind the window. She squints at me over her glasses and I pick up the pace.

I catch a glimpse of Maddie’s ponytail turning down the sophomore hallway. Locker doors slam. The warning bell rings. I scrunched up my toes as I push through the crowd. Finally my feet are thawing, but now they burn and itch.

Maddie’s stopped at a locker ahead, last one before the end. I give myself a pep talk.
Buck up. Talk to her. Get invited
back into that freaking house
. But when I open my mouth, the “hi” dies in my throat. She’s not alone. Her hulking brother’s behind the locker door. He hisses something in her ear, and I head in the other direction, my blazing feet slapping the floor all the way to homeroom.

Lunch, I plunk down at that corner table again, unload my mother-made lunch—ham and Swiss on rye, an orange, an organic cookie—keeping one eye angled at the lunch line exit.

“Maddie,” I say as soon as I see her. I notice her tray’s not shaking today. Good. Time to get down to business.

“Hi,” she says. It sounds like
ha
.

“Ha,” I say back without thinking.

“Yeah, I know.” She shrugs, sets her tray down across from me. “My accent. It’s funny.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve been hearing it all day. People want me to say stuff and then they make fun of me.” She twirls a droopy fry in her fingers. “You have an accent too, you know.”

“I—right, I guess it would sound like—so you’re not used to the way—” I close my mouth. What the hell am I even trying to say? I puncture my orange with my thumb, gouge a line through the skin. Why did I think this was going to be easy again? I clear my throat. “I’m not making fun of you.”

She looks down at her tray. “You’re a junior,” she says.

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Like my brother.” She twists her head, angles her chin in the direction of the sports tables. “Sometimes Sam’s kind of
obnoxious. He gets like that around me . . . and my friends.” She picks up another fry and taps it in a plop of ketchup. She’s not looking at me, and I’m wondering where this conversation is going. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” she says.

Okay, that’s not where I thought this was going. The orange wedge in my mouth is a wet lump. I force myself to swallow it. “I had a brother. Twin brother, actually. He died. August. A few weeks before school started.” I realize that I have not said these words to anyone before this moment.

Before I can stop myself, I’m flashing back. My white knuckles on the wheel. His skull thunking against the windshield. The glass shattering. How one side of his face blackened with blood and one eye—

“I’m sorry,” Maddie is saying.

I must have closed my eyes. I blink them open. An orange slice is pulp in my fist.
Focus,
I tell myself.
Focus!
“Yeah, so I don’t want to get into it.”

“No. Right,” she drawls.

I roll my organic cookie on the table. I can’t eat it. It tastes like cardboard.
Say something!
“Sam, your brother. He’s obnoxious you said?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m his baby sister, you know? He doesn’t like to see me as a girl.”

“What’s he like to see you as?”

She laughs, and I can’t help cracking a smile.

“I mean he’s weird about me being around boys, like I’m ten instead of fifteen. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I say, like I do.

“Anyway, I’m glad we moved. Stuff was cruddy back in Nashville.” She twists her head again, frowns. “My mom’s job got transferred, and she was like, ‘Good.’ She wanted a change. I don’t know. Fresh start after the divorce.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“No big deal. It was a stepfather. She’s been married three times. Long story.”

“Okay.” Her cheeks are killing me, how red they are. I yank a hand through my hair. It’s getting long, keeps hanging over my ears, pressing on my neck. God, it’s like how my brother used to keep his.

“—did some research online, looking for a nice suburb. And she found Andover close to the city and the schools are supposed to be so great.”

“Yeah, great.” I’m having a hard time following this conversation. Divorces? Suburbs? What are we talking about? And she’s still going on.

“Sam was bummed about moving. But I was thinking, hey, maybe a fresh start for me too. Anyway, he’s okay about it now and he’s got a bunch of friends already. Like these guys from the lacrosse team were Facebooking him even before we moved, and he’s got this carpool with them, and he said I could be in it too, but I want to do this for myself, you know. Make my own way.”

“Right. Make your own way.” I’m hardly listening anymore. I’ve been tapping my cookie against the table. There’s only a chunk left. The rest is crumbs. “Your house,” I say. I’m not sure this is the best tactic, but I don’t care. “You settling in? Unpacking?”

She shrugs. “My room’s mostly unpacked.”

I remember last night, looking at the shadow in the window. “Which room is yours?”