Brother (19 page)

Michael nodded faintly, but he was afraid of the reasons.

“Because blood is thicker than water, and maybe you're too dumb to get what that means, but—”

“I know what it means,” Michael cut in. “It means family comes first.”

Reb leaned back in his seat, looking impressed. “Huh. This comin' from a kid whose parents dumped him on the side of the road. That's pretty good.”

There was a beat of silence.

Michael shifted his weight uncomfortably.

Rebel leaned against the steering wheel.

“Besides, ain't nobody keepin' you here, are they? I don't know about you, but I don't see any handcuffs around your wrists, no shackles around your feet. You wanna blow outta here, blow outta here. Ain't nobody gonna beg you not to go.”

Michael looked up, trying to judge whether Reb was being earnest or not. Could it have possibly been that easy? Could he just stuff his knapsack full of clothes and leave the Morrows behind?

“Except maybe for Misty,” Reb said, cutting into Michael's thoughts. “She'd probably care. If you bail, you'd be ditchin' me, and if you ditch me, Claudine ain't gonna be getting a steady stream of girls. So you know . . .” His words trailed off as ­Michael slouched in his seat. He didn't need to hear the rest. “Your mind's gettin' muddy. You ain't thinkin' straight. She's got you all screwed up. Good thing I've got a way to fix your problem, though.”

“What do you mean?” Michael looked up, curious, and Reb smirked at his eagerness.

“You show her you mean business. Show her you ain't just some passin' John, right? Show her that she belongs to you and she ain't goin' nowhere unless you say so.”

Michael frowned. That plan sounded complicated—­besides, who was Michael to say Alice belonged to him? What if she didn't like him as much as he liked her? That made a difference, right? There wasn't some switch you could flip in someone's mind and make them your own.

Rebel reached out and patted Michael's knee in a chummy sort of way. “I just want my little brother to be happy,” he said. “Believe me, Mikey, you follow my lead and you can have her forever.”

I
T WAS STRANGE
how quickly Michael's feelings toward that tie-dyed record shop could change. The last time he and Rebel had pulled into the Dervish's parking lot, his palms had been sweaty with nervous excitement. But this time he was reluctant.

He wasn't sure whether he could follow Reb's advice, wasn't sure if he even
liked
the idea of owning anyone, especially Alice. But he certainly didn't want to lose her either. Those three hours he'd spent with her in a darkened movie theater, the way she had scooted closer to him in the backseat of Reb's car—it had been the best night of his life. He wanted to relive it over and over, and he couldn't do that if Alice packed up her stuff and left Dahlia behind. Maybe if he went with her. But they were practically strangers. There was no way she would ask him to go with her, but if she stayed here . . .

“Here.” Reb arched his back to lift his butt off the seat, fished his wallet out of his back pocket, and handed Michael a ten-dollar bill.

Michael peered at the money, then gave his brother a quizzical glance. “What's this for?”

“Show her a good time,” Reb advised.

Except Michael had no idea what a “good time” was, not when it came to a girl like Alice. “How?”

“Hell, I don't know,” Reb muttered, pushing the car door open. “Figure somethin' out.”

Michael watched Rebel stalk across the parking lot. He took a breath and shoved open the passenger door, his thoughts momentarily derailed by the temperature. It was getting hotter by the day, the trees wavy and distorted like some psychedelic trip. The air felt thick, hard to breathe. And while Michael would have been content standing out in the parking lot for hours, contemplating his next move, the heat forced him forward.

The little bell above his head jingled, the cool air of the place hit him head on, and like déjà vu, Alice looked up from the counter and smiled. A couple of customers milled around, flipping through records, their heads bobbing to the music pumping through the speakers. It was stuff Michael actually recognized this time. He'd heard it on one of Misty's stations. She always laughed at the lyrics. Something about boogying with a suitcase and doing the milk shake.

Rebel and Lucy were near the back of the store. She was giggling, and he was leaning against the wall with his ankles crossed, looking slick. Michael sucked in a breath and stepped across the front of the building. His eyes swept the place, snagging on the golden arches through the window—an oasis just across the street. He caught Alice's eyes wandering the front of his shirt, but Michael was too distracted by his thoughts to give her a chance to react. If he didn't act fast, Lucy and Reb would disappear into the storeroom and Alice would be stuck working the front. He watched her mouth quirk up into an amused grin—lips parted, words balanced on the tip of her tongue—but he cut her off.

“You wanna get somethin' to eat?”

She looked surprised, as though it was the last thing she had expected him to ask. Shooting a look toward the back of the store and the customers that were there, she gave Michael a playful glance. “You buying?”

“Sure,” he said, his fingers crumpling the ten in his pocket. If anything, she'd accept the invitation just to get out from behind that counter. After all, she hated her job, right?

“Hey, Luce,” Alice called toward her friend. “You're in charge.”

“Where're you going?” Lucy asked.

“I'm going on my lunch break. Michael's taking me to a five-star restaurant.”

Lucy and Reb exchanged looks before Lucy replied with an easy “Cool.” Reb gave Michael a subtle nod, then turned back to the girl beside him, leaning into Lucy like a vampire, ready to bite.

 • • • 

Michael held open the door for Alice, then followed her inside the McDonald's. His mouth watered at the scent of grilled meat—
two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese
—and salty fries. Alice chuckled as they stood in line, both of them staring up at the menu board. “Okay, now
this
is classy,” she joked. “Did you call ahead for a reservation?”

Michael didn't reply; he only smiled down at the scuffed-up tips of his boots. Alice pressed her arm against his as they waited to be helped, a slender finger looping around his thumb.

Michael got a Big Mac and Alice ordered a Happy Meal, which the cashier refused to sell her because Happy Meals were for kids, not adults.

“You've got to be kidding me,” Alice scoffed at the girl behind the counter.

“Sorry, it's the rules,” the cashier said with a shrug.

“But it's not even for
me
,” Alice explained. “It's for our baby.” She wrapped herself around Michael's arms and flashed the girl a smile. “Right, Mikey?”

Michael's mouth went dry, but he wasn't about to let anything stand between him and his Big Mac. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “We gotta feed our kid.”

“It only eats hamburgers,” Alice said.

“
It
?
” The cashier asked, peering at them both through narrowed eyes.

Alice grimaced at her slipup but recovered fast. “Look, I'm pregnant, all right? Just sell us the dang Happy Meal and we'll be on our way.”

Five minutes later, Alice and Michael sat at a table, ­Michael relishing his Big Mac while Alice ate her hamburger and fries and wore her prize—a pair of canary-yellow McDonaldland sunglasses, Ronald McDonald's creepy clown face staring out from above her nose. Michael couldn't look at her without cracking up. A few older patrons gave them curious glances as they passed by with trays of food. The looks didn't seem to bother her. She refused to take the sunglasses off, her cheek full of fries, the tip of her combat boot kicking at the leg of Michael's chair.

“We really should go see that movie again,” she said. “I keep thinking about it, and I'm pretty sure I missed parts, like, important stuff, you know?”

Michael nodded, taking a bite of his burger. Squares of chopped lettuce fell onto the wrapper between his elbows. It was even better than he remembered. Maybe because, this time, Reb wasn't there to ruin the taste.

“Sometimes things only make sense in retrospect,” she mused. “You don't know what you're looking at until you know what happens next, and then you have to go back to the beginning to see the signs. They call it foreshadowing. Comic-book writers use it all the time.”

She was smart, possibly smarter than Reb. Michael loved that. He loved the fact that she wasn't afraid to act silly or look dumb, or to tell him about her dead dad and her depressed mom, as though they'd been friends their entire lives. He wished he could be just as open, spill everything about himself and get it off his chest. He wanted to tell her about his family—about Misty Dawn and how she liked to dance to old hokey records and cheesy pop music, about Rebel and how Michael was afraid of him but they were still best friends. He wanted to tell her about his first time down in the basement at the age of ten, how Wade had locked him in there with a dead girl and wouldn't let Michael out until he field dressed her the way he would have any other kill. But he knew he couldn't tell her any of those things, and it made it hard to look her in the eye. Alice was perfect, and he was nothing but secrets. Dark ones. Darker than the basement after all the lights went out.

“Michael?”

When her fingers brushed his forearm, he almost jerked away. He expected to see the fear he knew was coming—the look in her eyes that assured him that she had figured it all out. Alice knew what he was because she'd read his mind, his poisonous thoughts. But she wore a look he hardly recognized at all—concern.

“Are you okay?” she asked, pulling the funny glasses from her face.

“You ain't really pregnant, are ya?” he asked. It was the first thing that came to mind.

Alice burst into laughter. “No, stupid.” She leaned back in her seat and grinned. It was the most beautiful smile Michael had ever seen. “Anything else you want to ask me?” She batted her eyelashes, though he wasn't sure what she was getting at. So he asked her the question that he'd been wanting to ask for days.

“Are you really gonna leave Dahlia?” He knew it was intrusive, but he couldn't help himself. He needed to know. For the first time in his life, he felt like he was connecting with someone. It was the kind of link that he hadn't experienced before. But the possibility of losing her continued to loom in the back of his mind. He had to know whether she was leaving so he could make her stay.

Her smile faded a notch. “I don't know, I mean . . .” She hesitated. “I guess I should be flattered you're asking.”

Michael stared down at the plastic tray full of empty, ketchup-­smeared wrappers. His stomach twisted around his burger, and he was suddenly sorry for having eaten so much so fast.

“
Should
I be flattered?” she asked, reaching out to touch his arm for a second time, to pull him back from the wasteland of his own thoughts.

“Maybe I can come with you,” he told her. But that was
not
supposed to be the deal. If Rebel had been there to overhear him, he would have pummeled Michael in front of the entire restaurant. Michael cast a quick glance her way, just to see if she was still wearing the same expression—a delving, inquisitive smile. She wasn't.

She shook her head at him, not in a response to his suggestion, but in some sort of acknowledgment, like she finally understood. He waited for the terror, the disgust, but her eyes lit up instead, sparkling with something he couldn't explain. Mischief? Fascination?

“Michael Morrow, you're the strangest boy I've ever met.” She leaned back in her seat, her head cocked to the side. Her eyes wandered across the front of his T-shirt and her mouth twisted upward at a single corner. “Do you even know who that is?” She nodded at the portrait across his chest. Michael looked down and felt stupid for wearing the secondhand shirt. If anyone knew who the guy was, it was Alice. He should have known, should have seen it coming, and maybe subconsciously he had, but the realization of it made him feel foolish now.

“Naw.”

Alice's easy smile bloomed into another grin. “It's actually appropriate,” she said. “David Bowie. He wrote a song called ‘Space Oddity' . . . about a spaceman, y'know? Maybe he was writing about you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Cause I already told you, you're the strangest boy I've ever met. It's like you're from a different planet.” She shifted her weight in her seat, her gaze fixed on David Bowie's face. “I thought you said you'd miss this place if you left. But now you want to leave?”

Michael didn't know how to explain his sudden change of heart. When he had uttered it days before, he'd believed it. But that had been before the woman. Before Rebel's faraway smile. Before he had leaned down and kissed the dead in the hopes of having it feel like real life. He remembered the way Reb had made him toss his most favorite things into a hole in the ground. The way he had made him bury them as if to remind Michael that, without Reb's permission, he wasn't allowed to love or dream or
be
anything.

It was rule number one.

“I . . . guess I just wanna see what else is out there,” he said softly. “It wouldn't be so bad seein' it if I wasn't alone.”

Alice leaned forward, their table of wrappers and ketchup packets between them. She brushed her fingers along his jawline. His heart sputtered beneath muscle and bone, and for a moment, he was sure he'd never breathe again. She was only inches away, her hazel eyes drifting across the curve of his bottom lip. It was then that he realized their eyes matched in color almost perfectly. Somehow that small detail gave him the courage to tip his head forward and press his mouth against hers.