How We Fall (6 page)

When he looked up at me, he frowned. “What?”

The words got stuck in my throat so I glanced at the ground.

I’d barely seen him alone since our escape to the basement when the parents had gone to the city. The start-stop intensity of it all was screwing with my brain.

He dropped the spinach and walked over to me. “What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “She’s kinda weird.”

“She seems pretty normal to me.”

I looked up. He watched me.

This was how girlfriends should feel. I wasn’t a girlfriend, 27

How we Fall

and I didn’t want to be one. I definitely shouldn’t be feeling like one.The line between being friends who made out and dating was muddier than I expected it to be. I played with the volleyball charm on my bracelet as the silence stretched between us.

“So, hey.” Marcus shoved his hands in his pockets. “I want—I want to take you somewhere.”

“You—what?”

He looked at the grass. “Some place people don’t know us.

Dinner somewhere nice, maybe? We could go to St. Joseph.”

Tension settled in my shoulders. A date. That was a date. We weren’t dating. “Um—what? Why?”

He frowned. “We’re always sneaking around. You shouldn’t have to do that all the time.”

I stared at him, not understanding. But then I did. This was the problem. I should have seen it.

He cleared his throat. “I should be buying you gifts and stuff and taking you out every once in a while. I mean, I know we live together and whatever, but I don’t want to be a lousy—”

He stopped. His face flushed.

A lousy boyfriend. That’s the only thing he could have meant to say.

Boyfriend.

I had no idea what to say so I just started talking. “But we aren’t dating. We can’t be dating. We keep saying that and I don’t know why we would go out to dinner if we aren’t dating.”

He searched my eyes for a moment. His face turned even deeper red and he looked down at the ground. His jaw clenched, but not like he was angry. “It’s—it’s been a year, Jackie. I don’t mean anything big. Just something we can do by ourselves.”

No labels. That was one of the rules. Dates, boyfriend, anni-versary. Those were labels. Anniversaries were something official 28

Kate Brauning

couples did. Not us. I must have been in panic mode because tears stung my eyes and I didn’t even know why. Horrible. This whole thing was horrible. I was hurting him and I didn’t know how we’d even gotten here.

“I just—people would find out. It’s hard enough to keep this a secret now.”

His eyes hardened. “Don’t do this, Jackie. It’s hard enough without you pretending we don’t matter.”

We couldn’t matter. He knew that.

A rusty white truck rumbled to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Marcus turned away from me. “Whatever. I’m not going to beg for it.”

He never talked to me that way. Stunned, I stared at his back as the driver stepped down from the truck and came around to the produce stand.

I climbed inside the truck so neither of them would see my eyes watering. I sank back into the vinyl seat and pressed my palms to my eyes until it hurt.

Fine. I was angry at Marcus. Angry that I was so obsessed with him. Angry I couldn’t walk into a room where he was without wishing he’d look at me like I was special. Angry that I couldn’t look at his parents without so much guilt flooding me that it made me nauseated.

I pulled my hands away from my eyes and punched the dash. Pain stabbed my knuckles, bad enough that it made me want to cry instead of hit things.

We were just burning time. We were using each other, and we knew it, and neither of us was supposed to care. This was separate, completely separate, from our friendship. It had to be.

This was as far as we could go. Just fun, just for now. If people found out, they’d think we were messed up, a product of an unsupervised, abnormal childhood.

I watched him through the rearview mirror, handing a 29

How we Fall

melon and a pound of green beans to the man in sunglasses.

He must be visiting someone for a while, because I’d never seen him before and he’d started coming to the stand almost every time we were there.

Marcus didn’t look upset. His jaw was tighter than usual, but he was really good at hiding what he was thinking. If he hadn’t been so good at hiding his thoughts, we probably would have started hooking up much sooner than we had. Most of the time I only knew what he was thinking because I knew him so well.The guy drove off after a few minutes. I slid out of the truck and went to help Marcus pack up the stand, but he didn’t say a word to me. In fact, he barely looked my way. We didn’t talk on the way home, and when we climbed out of the truck and I put a hand on his arm in the driveway, he shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I get it.”

Someone moved by the kitchen window, so I took my hand off his arm. “Okay. Sorry.”

He shook his head. “It’s fine. I’m gonna get Chris to help unload the truck.”

Having me around was making things worse. I went inside and watched through the kitchen window as he and his brother unloaded the crates and moved the produce to the cold cases in the garage. Chris was better at pitching in this year than he used to be. The boys were talking, but I had no idea what about. Marcus kept shaking his head and Chris kept shrugging.

I needed to blog, to read, to watch a movie that would let me forget about this for a while, but I couldn’t, because the parents were nowhere to be seen and Angie had just spilled her juice all over the kitchen floor.

When the boys came inside, Marcus still wouldn’t look at me. My hand still hurt from punching the dashboard. Candace and Angie broke out into a fight in the living room, and one of 30

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the twins started wailing at the top of his lungs.

Too much. This whole day was too much. One more minute in this house might kill me. Texting as I ran down the hall, I wished my sister, Claire, was here. She’d go with me if she was.

I grabbed my swimsuit and my beach bag and ran back out the door. I hadn’t heard the parents, but if they couldn’t find me, they couldn’t make me babysit.

It would take Kelsey a while to get here, and I needed to run. My flip-flops slapped against the grass and I kept scuffing my toes when I reached the gravel road. I stopped and shoved my sandals into my beach bag, and jogged barefoot down the asphalt highway.

Damn this whole situation. We had rules so this wouldn’t happen. There was absolutely no point to me going out on a date with Marcus. It would only make things worse. He was pretty much making me hurt his feelings; if he hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have had to say no.

A battered Ford crested the hill. I waved. Kelsey braked in the middle of the lane. I jogged over to the passenger side and climbed in and barely got the door closed before she pulled a u-turn that threatened to drop us into the ditch.

Her frizzy-curly blonde hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, and she already wore her bikini top and jean cutoffs over the bottoms. “Geez. Running on this road in bare feet? You’re brave.”

I slumped against the seat. “I had to. Is anyone else coming?”

“Hannah’s there already.”

Kelsey and Hannah were fun, but they weren’t Ellie. Ellie had moved away about the time Marcus and I started things, and I’d been so occupied with him I hadn’t cared as much as I should have when it got to be longer and longer between emails and calls.

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It was my fault, but he was the reason.

The pool in Harris was the closest one, and it was almost always packed. I changed into my bikini and found the girls on the beach chairs they’d probably had staked out since that morning. I tried to wipe the scowl off my face, but it wasn’t working. I threw my bag on the cement by the chair the girls had saved for me. What did Marcus think he was doing, pushing things like that?

Hannah rolled over on her lounger. “Such rage. What’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “Family stuff. Someone push me in.”

Kelsey bounced out of her chair. “Hannah, push us both.”

The lifeguard was always halfway through some Nicholas Sparks novel. She’d never notice, and if she did notice, she wouldn’t care. I stood on the edge of the deep end of the pool with my back to the water. Kelsey lined up next to me while Hannah waved her arms yelled at the kids behind us to move away. I took half a step back so my weight balanced on the balls of my feet and my heels had nothing beneath them.

The adrenaline of hanging suspended like this made me focus on this and only this. I closed my eyes. Hannah waited in front of us to catch us off guard. I stretched my hands out to the side to feel the air and the emptiness around me.

I took a breath, and on my inhale, a palm pressed to my chest and shoved. The thrill of fear surged through me and I left myself fall. I hit the water arms stretched out. Cold soaked through me. I stayed under for a moment before twisting my body and kicking to the surface.

Kids around me were whooping and hollering. I swam out of the way so Hannah could push Kelsey in and watched to make sure no one swam too close.

Some guy across the pool was staring at me as I wiped the water from my face. He wasn’t from my school. I stared back, and he looked away.

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I was plenty brave enough for falling into the deep end, for meeting someone head-on when I knew he was checking me out. Just not brave enough for letting the whole town, my whole school, know what I’d been doing with my cousin.

Kelsey hit the water and as soon as she surfaced, Hannah jumped in. I climbed out and glanced back to see the guy watching me again. Probably staring at my butt. There was no good way to climb out of the deep end of a pool.

The hot cement warmed my feet as I walked back to my spot. I wiped my face with my towel and wrung out my hair, but paused before sinking onto my chair. Outside the pool area, the skinny man in sunglasses who had been coming by the produce stand was waiting in line at the concession stand. I frowned. “Hey, who is that?”

“Who?” Hannah asked.

“The guy in the red shirt.”

“No idea.” She collapsed in her chair.

I stretched out on the beach chair and flung an arm over my face to shield my eyes from the afternoon sun. Kelsey flopped down on my other side.

“Did you hear about Heather Graves?” Kelsey asked. “Her and that guy?”

Heather was in my grade, but I’d barely ever talked to her.

“What guy?”

Kelsey’s lounger creaked as she stretched out. “Some college dude. They hooked up this summer and he’s like, five years older than her. They’re dating now, I guess.”

Hannah rubbed sunblock on her nose. “I saw them at the diner. He’s twenty-three. How creepy is that? I don’t think it’s even legal.”

My skin turned cold even though the sun was still bright in the sky. Seventeen and twenty-three. That would even out with time. Being cousins would not.

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Kelsey sighed. “I dunno. I wouldn’t mind a college guy.

Might know what the heck he’s doing.”

“But five years?” Hannah tossed her the sunblock. “Five years younger than us is twelve. Ew. Just ew.”

They argued over whether or not it was ew, and I moved my arm more directly over my eyes so I couldn’t see either of them.

This was a huge part of why I couldn’t go out on a date with Marcus. One slip, one person who knew us, and Hannah and Kelsey would be talking about me, not Heather Graves. And the rest of the school would be far worse about it.

In California, I had fit in. My dad had been a lawyer and my mom a librarian, my sister was only semi-embarrassing, and my friends didn’t need anything explained since they’d known me since kindergarten. But three years ago, my life had become exponentially weirder. Too hard to explain to other people. Now none of the four parents worked traditional full-time jobs, and I usually didn’t invite friends over for fear they’d see my parents groping each other and just because of the constant noise and chaos. Plus anything that came out of Aunt Shelly’s mouth was enough to convince the county we were some weird kind of conservative hippies.

Fitting in and finding friends after leaving all the ones I’d grown up with had been hard enough without enduring the nine million questions people always had about my madhouse of a family. My first day of freshman year, some kid had asked me if we were Amish.

Dating my cousin would mean any chance I had of being normal ever again would be gone.

My eyes stung, and not from the light of the sun on the water.

Aunt Shelly gave me the suspicious eye when I got back in time for dinner, but since the house was still standing, my be-34

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ing gone couldn’t have been too much of a problem.

Mom gave me a gentle reminder to “let us know where you’re going, honey.” I should have texted her once I got to the pool. It hadn’t even occurred to me. Once again, I was too wrapped up in my secrets to think about what was going on around me.

I pulled Candyland from the shelf after dinner. “Candace, Angie. Let’s play a game.” The girls ran over as I spread the game out on the living room floor.

Chris walked through and paused. “Need a fourth?”

He was probably trying to avoid helping with dinner dishes, but I waved him over. “Let’s do it.”

Angie grabbed a token. “I want blue.”

“But I’m always blue,” Candace said.

Marcus came out of the kitchen, hands shoved in his pockets. I could feel him looking at me as I set up the game. “Want to play?” I asked.

He smiled. “Well, I mean, as long as you’re okay with losing.”

Chris snorted. “There is zero strategy to Candyland.”

Marcus sat across from me, and the clench in my chest eased up when he grabbed the green token and said, “Green is my lucky color. You better be ready for this.”

We sat around the game board in a ring, while my knees pressed into the fibers of the carpet and the evening settled around us. The tink and clatter of the parents doing dishes drifted out as we leaned forward to grab cards and move our tokens. Marcus kept pretending to think Candace or Angie’s token was his and move it forward instead of his own, while they squealed and laughed and told him to move the
green
one.