Interim (5 page)

Jeremy smiled. “I’m moving in tomorrow, Roy.”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that.”

“And there’s no girl,” Jeremy said, blushing.

“So there
is
a girl.”

Jeremy averted his eyes.

“She’s not allowed up there,” Roy said, pointing up where the garage apartment sat empty and waiting for a new tenant.

“I’m nineteen!”

“She’s not allowed up there.”

“Roy, for Christ’s sake, I’m an adult.”

“She’s not allowed up there.”

Jeremy sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

***

Caroline hung back, shuffling her feet and waiting impatiently for Regan to invite her inside. That was the rule: no entering bedrooms without an invitation. Regan called it the Vampire Rule.

“Caroline, I’m really busy,” Regan said, eyes glued to her laptop.

Caroline groaned.

Click click clack click clack.

Caroline cleared her throat, creeping closer and closer to the bedroom doorway until her toes jutted over the threshold.

“You’re breaking the rule,” Regan said, eyeing her sister from her periphery.

“Please, Regan,” Caroline begged.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Come in,” she huffed, closing her laptop.

Ten-year-old Caroline darted inside and jumped onto Regan’s bed, belly first, landing like a limp ragdoll. She exhaled a dramatic sigh.

“Exhausting day?” Regan asked.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Caroline replied.

“Do share.”

Regan walked to her nightstand and pulled out her brush. She knew the drill and settled beside Caroline, who immediately nestled her head in her sister’s lap. Regan brushed her dishwater blond locks.

“Well,” Caroline began, “I had P.E. this morning.” She glanced at Regan and then clarified: “We have P.E. every Tuesday and Thursday.”

“Uh huh.”

“And I was picked last for basketball teams.”

Regan bristled. “Why didn’t the teacher split the teams?”

Caroline shrugged.

“Stop shrugging,” Regan demanded. “God, that’s so freaking annoying.”

Caroline growled. “Fine. I
don’t know
why Mrs. McMillan didn’t pick the teams. All I know is that I was picked last, and it sucked.”

Regan ran her fingers tenderly through her sister’s fine hair. Still baby soft. Just like Caroline’s heart.

“It’s hard being picked last for teams,” she said gently.

“How would you know? You’re good at sports. You were probably picked first all the time.”

“Not true,” Regan countered. “I was always one of the last ones because of my size.”

“Hmm.” Caroline was quiet for a moment, thinking. “And then I guess you showed them!”

“Eh, not so much. I didn’t get really good until sixth grade or so.”

“I’ll never be good at basketball. It doesn’t mean I should be passed over like I don’t matter.”

Wow. And at ten years old. Regan wasn’t sure what to say.

“Okay, who do I need to beat up?”

Caroline giggled. “Sam and Teensie.”

“Hold up. There’s a girl in your class named Teensie?”

“Yep. It’s her nickname.”

“I can totally take her,” Regan replied.

Caroline buried her face in the mattress and laughed hard.

“You always wanna beat people up!”

“I know. I’m aggressive. I don’t know where I get it from.”

“Mom.”

“Ha ha. Don’t tell her that.”

“Remember the wasp?” Caroline asked.

An instant vision of Mrs. Walters annihilating a wasp that had flown in through the chimney flue flashed in her brain. The brandishing of her mother’s tennis shoe was amusing. The explanation her mother gave after she’d splattered the insect was scary: “Regan,” she panted, “there’s a difference between killing something and murdering it.” Regan never forgot those words, or the image of that pile of slightly twitching red and black mush.

“Oh my God, you’re right,” she whispered to Caroline. “I do get it from Mom.”

“Don’t worry. It’s better to be aggressive anyway,” Caroline replied.

“How so?”

“Aggressive people get what they want,” Caroline explained.

Regan’s eyebrows shot up a second time.

“Well, they do,” Caroline insisted, noting her sister’s expression. “They get picked first for basketball.”

Regan sighed and conceded her sister’s point. “They get picked first for everything. It’s obnoxious.”

Silence fell as Regan continued brushing Caroline’s hair.

“You can come in my room whenever you want,” Caroline said after a moment. “You don’t need permission.”

“Huh?”

“I just mean that I don’t care if you walk in without me saying you can.”

Regan considered this. “No.”

“No?”

Regan shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Boundaries.”

“Boundaries,” Caroline echoed.

“I know I’m your sister, so our relationship is different. Special. But we still need boundaries, Caroline. It wouldn’t be right for me to walk in without permission.”

“But I’m telling you it’s okay.”

“Nope. You can’t put a blanketed statement on all my future visits to your room.”

“Huh?”

“I need permission each time.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the right thing. What isn’t right is barging into someone’s personal space uninvited. You may decide one day that you need alone time, and then what would happen if I walked right in? Like I owned your room? That’s not very fair, is it?”

Caroline frowned. “I guess not.”

“We always need to respect each other’s spaces. That comes first. Always. It keeps people from getting their feelings hurt. Or getting angry. Or feeling like someone did something to them that was unethical.”

“Unethical?”

“Immoral.”

“Huh?”

Regan smiled. “Wrong.”

“Ohhhhh.”

The girls were quiet for a moment.

“Hey,” Regan said suddenly. “Listen up.”

“Yeah?”

“You can be good at whatever you want. Don’t say you’ll never be good at basketball. If you want to play, train. Practice all the time. You can master whatever you want.”

“But I don’t care about basketball,” Caroline replied.

“Oh.”

“I just care about people making me feel badly for not caring about basketball.”

Regan smiled. “Oh.”

Silence.

“Why did you stop brushing my hair?” Caroline asked.

“Oh, whoops. Sorry,” Regan replied, and went back to work.

~

I think my entire life would be different if I had a sibling—someone to watch out for me, someone to watch out for. I imagine we’d be tight . . . I even see us sharing a room. Whispering conversations in the darkness of the night. Making fun of our dad behind his back. Sharing our secrets and knowing they’re actually safe. I imagine it’s a different kind of connection than the ones you have with your friends. Well, if you have friends. It has to be different. It’s a blood connection, and blood is the strongest adhesive on the planet. It bonds instantly and permanently. It’s worth defending. And life is always a little more meaningful when you have someone to defend besides yourself.

~

He stared at his unconscious father. Blood oozed like thick strawberry syrup from a cut near his left eye, and Jeremy wondered if it would heal into a scar mirroring his own. Eye for an eye, he thought, half amused.

His father wouldn’t listen. Didn’t Jeremy warn him? Didn’t he say never to touch him again? Yet, the alcohol swelled his father’s muscles, transforming him into Mr. Hyde, and he was powerless against the rage. He demanded combat to alleviate the aggression, and so he flew into Jeremy’s room that morning looking for a familiar foe. Unfortunately, Mr. Stahl didn’t count on coming face-to-face with Jeremy’s baseball bat. There was no fight. Just one swing. Mr. Stahl lay curled in the corner of the room, still and quiet.

Jeremy moved swiftly through the room, shoving clothes into a huge duffel bag. Shoving all the books, binders, and notebooks he could find into his book bag. Shoving the . . . He took a quick inventory. Well, there was nothing else. His few collectibles and important personal items were at Roy’s garage, locked safely away in a corner cabinet.

He hesitated a moment, eyes moving quickly over the room, trying to recall one good memory to take with him. It’d be a shame to leave with nothing. He shut up his eyes tightly and conjured the image of his mother. But then his father stood in her way, taking up all the space in the room, in Jeremy’s brain. He had a brand new video game in one hand and a bowl of soup in the other. He brought them into Jeremy’s room and placed them on the nightstand. Then he sank into the mattress beside his son, his weight forcing Jeremy to roll into him.

“Hey, guy,” he said gently.

Jeremy smiled.

“You look awful,” his dad noted.

“Flu.”

“I know. I got some pretty good medicine here,” his dad replied. “What do you want first? Soup or game?”

“You’ll play with me?”

“Of course.”

“Game first.”

There. That would do. His heart constricted in slow, painful pulses. A drawn-out, emotional heart attack.

“Don’t cry, you pussy,” he muttered.

His father groaned, and he knew it was time to leave. He tiptoed past the sleeping giant and hurried to the bathroom. He swept the counter, dumping all his toiletries into his open duffel bag. And that was that. He was packed. He was gone.

***

“Get to class!” Mr. Armstrong roared.

Regan arrived late for school. It was completely out of character. She was one of those punctual people. But she slept through her alarm—“Mom, why didn’t you wake me?!”—and arrived ten minutes into first period. She noticed Jeremy, and watched him try unsuccessfully to shove a large duffel bag into his locker. He cursed and threw it on top instead, emptying his book bag as fast as he could to the sound of the assistant principal’s threats.

“Detention slips are coming!”

Jeremy slammed his locker door, but the latch didn’t catch, and the door swung wide, a red notebook spilling onto the floor. He was already far down the hallway, and Regan hesitated, unsure if she should retrieve it. She watched a student kick the notebook in his haste to avoid detention. It spun toward her, catching the toe of her shoe, and stopped cold. It stared up at her. Waiting.

“Regan, you’re one of the good students,” Mr. Armstrong said behind her.

She jumped. “I don’t want detention!”

She heard him chuckle. “Then please go to class.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, bending over and grabbing the notebook.

She rushed down the hallway, closing Jeremy’s locker in the process, and slipped into first period Journalism. Yes, she could have replaced the book, but she didn’t want to. She wanted an excuse to talk to him. This was her one chance to get his story, and she wouldn’t squander it by doing the right thing.

What could be written inside, she thought? She hoped for something good. It
felt
like a journal, and she bent over to thumb the corners of the pages, glimpsing words words words! Of course she wouldn’t open it! She had a moral compass that worked . . . most of the time. But the longer she thought about the journal tucked securely inside her messenger bag, the more her desire grew to open it. Just once. Read one sentence and that’s it. Cover closed. No more. Not another glance. If she could just get a taste of that one sentence, move it around in her mouth, get a feel for its texture, she could satiate her hunger. Just a bit of knowledge would do. One bite. What’s the harm in one bite?

***

There was nothing ethical about what she planned to do. The fact that she hid in the far corner bathroom stall was proof enough. She hated herself for it, but at the same time, she couldn’t hand the notebook over without getting a glimpse into his thoughts. It may be the only opportunity she’d have to know something about him. And she needed only a little . . . Oh, who was she kidding? She planned to read the whole damn thing.

She pulled a seat protector out of the dispenser on the back wall, lined the toilet, and got comfortable.

“I’m a wretched person,” she said aloud, hoping the confession would ease her conscience some. It didn’t.

She stared at the red cover—worn at the edges with the layers of thin cardstock peeling apart to mirror little paper fans. The color was faded near the middle where he wrote something but then erased it. Maybe he labeled his journal and then decided that was stupid. She pulled the notebook closer to her face, squinting her eyes in concentration. “My thoughts,” it had read, and she smiled at its simplicity.

“I really shouldn’t do it,” she whispered at the exact moment she opened the book.

Black pen. Crude cursive. No salutation, but there was a date. He was about to take her back in time to ninth grade. And she wouldn’t like any of it.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to introduce myself since this is my first entry. Seems weird, but whatever. My name is Jeremy. Most people call me Jer, which is fine. I don’t have a preference either way.

Regan grinned.

Anyway, like I said, this is my first entry, so I’m also not sure if I’m supposed to write to anyone in particular—real or imaginary. I had this friend in first grade. His name was Kevin. He was nice. If I wrote to anyone, I guess it’d be him. But I don’t plan to ever share these thoughts with Kevin. Or anyone, for that matter.

Her heart dropped—weighted by voyeuristic guilt—and she slammed the cover closed. The fifth period bell rang, and she held her breath, waiting for the halls to stop screaming.

Everything went quiet, and she dropped her eyes to the notebook once more.

“Pretend I’m not anyone,” she said. “You don’t know I exist anyway.”

She reopened the book and continued reading.

I would probably keep a virtual journal if I had a computer. I type faster than I can write, but too bad. I’m one of those poor kids who has to visit the library or stay after school if he has to type assignments. It’s so freaking lame. I’ve only asked my dad a trillion times for a laptop, and he tells me to buy it myself. I’m glad Roy hired me. I’m saving everything for a laptop first. Wait, no no. Not a laptop. A kickass snowboard. Then the laptop.

Regan laughed. “Priorities.”

So there’s my introduction. Not much, but I really don’t want to talk about myself anymore. At least not right now. I wanna talk about this girl in my class. That’s really why I started the journal today. I mean, not for her exclusively, but I saw her today, and it got me thinking. I don’t want to forget these thoughts, so here they are.

Regan read feverishly. All it took was the word “girl” to pick up her pace.

Regan Walters has been in my class since second grade.

Her heart beat out a frantic rhythm.

She’s a cool chick. Well, I mean she was.

“What the hell?” Regan mouthed.

She used to do her own thing. She was crazy, actually. She dressed all weird and was really pushy and opinionated, and I think I’m making her out to sound not so likeable.

“Uh, yeah.”

But she was totally likeable. She was nice to everyone. Sometimes the boys would pick on her, but she didn’t care. And they sensed that because all of a sudden, in like one day, they just stopped. They couldn’t get to her, so it’s like they just decided to leave her alone. Maybe even respect her a little. She became the uncool cool girl. (I know that doesn’t make any sense.)

And then I saw her walk into school today looking like a copycat of all the other popular girls. I saw her talking to Brandon, and I just flipped out inside. Who was this girl? What was she doing? I just thought to myself, Regan, you fucking sell-out.

Regan gasped. “Fuck you.”

Fuck you, Regan. Fuck your popular girl status and your fake ass personality.

“Fuuuuuuck
YOU
!”

She hurt my feelings. I know that sounds stupid, but she did. If someone were to ask me to name one person in the whole world I thought would never compromise herself for anything or anyone, I’d say Regan Walters. I wouldn’t think twice.

Regan averted her eyes and stared at the toilet paper holder. Embarrassment filled every corner of her heart until it could no longer fit. She braced herself for the tear—listening intently for the ripping seams—those few seconds before the shame spilled over in a mixture of anger and humiliation. And tears. She was a girl after all, and goddamnit, she was going to cry about it.

But now I’d think twice and come to the decision that no, she’s not it. She’s not who I thought she was.

She slammed closed the notebook and threw it against the stall door. It slapped the metal and dropped to the floor, landing flat on its face.

“You don’t know a thing about me,” she hissed.

She shoved the journal in her book bag and headed for the front office.

“I’m sick,” she lied to the secretary. “I was in the bathroom throwing up all last period. I need to go home.”

The secretary looked up. “Name?”

“Regan Walters.”

The secretary typed her name into the computer, then picked up the receiver.

“This is Pam from Ridgeview High,” she said. “Uh, no—” She glanced at Regan. “—it’s not about her clothes.”

Pause.

“Oh, I see,” Pam said, laughing. She looked at Regan and winked. “No, no, she’s sick. Or says she’s sick.”

“I
am
sick,” Regan grumbled.

Pam ignored her. “Uh huh. Okay, well, I’ll send her home. Did she drive? She walked? Oh, well then maybe you could pick her up?”

“I can walk.”

“Okay, she’ll be here in the front office,” Pam said. “Yep, you’re welcome, Mrs. Walters. Bye bye.”

“I can walk home,” Regan said as she watched the secretary hang up.

“In your condition? No way. You need to stay right here until your mom comes. Well, unless you’d rather see the nurse.”

Pam smiled pleasantly. Regan plopped onto a couch and waited. Her mother took her sweet time getting to school, and Regan had to bide hers with an English class novel. That was until she could hole herself up in her room for the rest of the afternoon to have a one-sided screaming match with
that
boy.

When she was safely locked away inside her bedroom an hour later, she tackled the journal once more. It was a new entry.

I’ve had several weeks to think about it, and I’m not going to scratch it out. Those were my feelings about her on the first day of school, so they stay. But I realized I could never say that to her face, and I would never want to. I don’t believe it anyway. If she were to smile at me, acknowledge me again in even the slightest way, I wouldn’t say, “Fuck you.” I’d smile back. I’d smile back because I’d remember the Regan from sixth grade who stuck up for me. I know she’s in there. She doesn’t belong with those people. They’re awful. She’s good. She’s goodness, earning a place on the imaginary pedestal I built for her. I’m waiting for her to climb down and get face-to-face with me. Have a real conversation about her cowardice.

“I don’t owe you a conversation,” Regan spat.

Or maybe she could climb down and just kiss me instead. I’m a guy. I don’t need her words. I need her tongue. And I confess I fantasize about—

The entry stopped dead. No period. Incomplete.

“Damn,” she said, though she wasn’t altogether certain she wanted to read a teenage boy’s sexual fantasies about her. She liked the pedestal talk much better.