Authors: Kate Brauning
He turned around and walked away, leaving me in the hall. I sat down in one of the computer chairs and put my face in my hands. “Breaking up” was such an accurate phrase. Him, me, everything.
If Will ever asked me out again, I’d say no.
• • •
No arrest had been made. The article called her a normal teenage girl—a volleyball player from St. Joseph. The police had found her body in the woods fifteen miles from the city.
She’d been strangled.
I gripped the paper and read the line again. Not drugs. Not alcohol poisoning. Not a horrible accident. I sat down at the table and stared into my coffee until it turned cold.
I took the paper with me out to the truck for my turn at the 154
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produce stand again. Chris was going with me this time; Marcus was helping his dad with something.
In other words, he didn’t want to.
Chris drove, excited but acting deliberately cool about it. I couldn’t talk to him about Ellie, so I opened up my inbox on my phone and replied to Travis’s latest email.
Hi Travis,
You remember the girl you asked me about last time? Someone
killed her, and I found out this morning by reading the newspaper,
of all things.
I don’t even know what to do. She was upset at me when she
died, I’m pretty sure. I can’t get away from feeling like I hurt her,
made her think I didn’t care enough. I had so many chances to fix
things with her, and I didn’t take any of them.
Sorry to dump this on you. There just isn’t anyone here I could
tell.~J
I could have talked to my mom or dad, but they’d tell me it wasn’t my fault and that a lot of people don’t stay close friends when one of them moves away. But that wasn’t my version of the story. What everyone else saw as normal didn’t affect what I knew I should have done.
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No one said anything about the number of nights Marcus came home after everyone else was in bed. I’d hear him coming in, since my room was closest to the door, and each time the door creaked open and closed quietly, I’d roll over and try to go back to sleep, but I never could.
We hadn’t so much as had a conversation in a week. He’d still helped with the twins and been in charge of dinner on the kids’ nights to cook and harassed Chris into helping with the dishes on the other nights. He just acted like I wasn’t there.
When we were in the same room, he looked over me, around me, through me. Anything but at me.
He drove up to the house shortly after lunch. The sleeves of his black-and-gray button-up shirt were rolled neatly up on his forearms. His nice jeans were wrinkle-free. He was grinning, and for a moment I forgot the last few weeks. “Hey,” I said.
I stopped on the steps, holding a basket of laundry. I did my own, because otherwise Angie ended up with my under-wear and Aunt Shelly took all my socks.
He climbed down from the truck, spinning his keys. The grin faded a little when he saw me. “Hey.”
I shifted the basket on my hip and glanced around. No one else was in the yard, but Uncle Ward was down by the chickens.Marcus shoved his keys in his pocket. “Can we talk for a minute?” He was back to the grim, pale Marcus I’d known from the last few weeks.
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I raised my eyebrows. “I thought we said we weren’t going to do that.”
“Well, I need to for this.”
I headed back to the clothesline behind the house. He stared at his shoes as we walked, then stopped by the clothesline and met my eyes. “So, last night I asked Sylvia to go out with me.”
“You did?” My chest suddenly hurt, so I set down the basket.“Yeah.”
I shook out a t-shirt and pinned it to the line to give myself a moment. “So, like on a date?”
“I mean, I asked her to be my girlfriend, so it would involve dates.”
Socks needed careful pinning so the cuffs would dry. “And she was all for this?”
“She said yeah, so I guess.”
I turned away from the clothesline. “Why?”
“You know why. Asking me repeatedly doesn’t help.”
I couldn’t cry in front of him. If he could be this walled off and act like he didn’t care, then so could I. “Us backing off doesn’t mean you have to go find a girlfriend the next week.”
He shrugged. That’s it. After nearly two years, I got a shrug.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “It’s not fair to me to bring her around all the time. Not this soon.”
He leaned against the clothesline pole, not meeting my eyes.
“What wasn’t fair was starting something with you in the first place. If I could go back and stop my fifteen-year-old self, I would.”
Him wishing we’d never started being us shouldn’t have hurt so badly, because I wished it, too. “Do you even like her?”
He re-pinned the crooked hem of a t-shirt so it hung straight. “She’s nice, and she’s a lot of fun. And she really likes me. She says she does, anyway.”
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“So you just like her because she likes you.” I gave up pretending to hang up laundry and just stood there. “That’s kind of low, Marcus.”
“You know what?” His voice grew sharp. “I like being able to talk to my girlfriend’s dad like a man, and not constantly feel guilty that if he knew what I was doing to his daughter, he’d have me thrown out of the house. I like being able to tell her what I think about her without being told to back off. And I like being in a relationship. A real one.”
I stood there by the laundry basket, more in love with him than I knew how to handle, and he thought we hadn’t been real. This was not the Marcus I knew. I went back to hanging up my t-shirts.
His voice fell to a whisper. “We knew this was coming. Now we’re paying for what we did, and we have to deal with it. I’m trying, I really am.”
I barely heard him because I felt sick. “You’re trying? Being gone with her til midnight every night is trying?”
He crossed his arms. “How do you know when I come in?”
He stood close enough I could smell the scent of laundry soap on his shirt, and it only made me feel further away from him than ever.
“I hear you. The door wakes me.”
“I guess I’ll be quieter.”
That last night at the creek, he’d kissed me like he didn’t want to let go. I turned on him. “I know you’re trying. So am I.
But you can’t bring her around here and ask her out and all this so fast. I can’t stand seeing her in my living room all the time.
It’s not fair.”
His eyes grew hard and his jaw tightened. “See, that’s what I don’t get. You were the one always telling me we meant nothing. For more than a year, you told me that over and over again and said we were just burning time and it was all going to end.
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Every time I tried to show you I cared about you, you shut me down and pushed me away. That was hell, Jackie. You put me through hell for over a year. I kept up with it because I thought you didn’t really mean it, but you’re so ashamed of us it doesn’t matter if you meant it. Can’t I be happy? Can’t you handle that?”
I threw down the wet jean shorts. “We agreed to those things together. All I’m asking for is for you to be more careful about bringing her around.” And to not run off immediately to some other girl like I meant nothing.
His voice turned bitter. “I can’t be careful about everything all the time. I just can’t. I’m done.” He turned around and walked away.
I dropped the clothespin I’d been holding. The wind teased my hair and picked up the leaves on the ground, swirling around in the space between us.
I didn’t know it was possible to feel so hollow. Like my chest was my own personal void. I’d had no idea I’d hurt Marcus so much during the past year, and he was right; I wasn’t brave enough to pay the cost of being with him. But I wasn’t sure it was bravery if it hurt the people around me. Anna did not give herself to the king of Siam. The fox and the hound didn’t stay friends. Rick and Ilsa went their separate ways.
Travis’s reply to my email about Ellie didn’t help.
I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with that. And that must be
tough, knowing you didn’t get the chance to patch things up with
her. Life is so short. I can feel it slipping away from me, too, sometimes.
I hope you have at least someone you can talk to. I’m sure you
have other friends who can help you deal with this, though I
shouldn’t assume that. When I was a teenager, my girlfriend left
me, and all her friends were my friends, so I pretty much had no
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one my final years of high school, either. You can always talk to me,
if you need someone. The death of a friend is a lot to handle on
your own.
~Travis
At least he didn’t freak out about me dumping my emotions all over him in my last email.
I have a friend, I suppose, we’re just not super close. My cousin
and I used to be great friends, but he’s been a jerk this last month,
and we’re not really getting along. So, I guess this is my chance to
get out and make new friends. Senior year, here I come.
I did not feel nearly as excited as I sounded.
Sylvia, oblivious to the fact that I never wanted to see her again, came over that afternoon. Oblivious, really, was a good word for her. She kept trying to be friendly to me even when I barely responded, and she was clingy with Marcus. Everywhere he went, she followed. Everywhere he sat, she scooted closer.
All the parents but Aunt Shelly were gone. Again. Which meant I even though I was trying to put the twins down for their nap, I was the one who had to go see what happened when something crashed to the floor upstairs and one of the girls started crying. Marcus made no move to get off the couch.
He glanced toward the stairs, but that was it.
They were sitting much too close to each other, watching a movie. TV rules didn’t apply to dating couples, apparently. She was whispering, and Marcus was laughing.
By the time I came back, she’d moved—her back was against the arm of the couch and her legs lay across his lap. Marcus paused the movie. “What happened?”
“Candace bumped her head on the bedframe when they were jumping around.” I watched him, surprised he’d even talked to me, and Sylvia looked from me to him and back again.
It didn’t take me long to figure out him talking to me was only about Candace and had nothing to do with me.
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“You should come watch the movie with us,” Sylvia said.
“It’s really bad.” Her purse was tossed on the end table, keys and lip gloss spilling out of it. One of her purple heels was under the table, and one of them was on the couch next to Marcus.
Just to annoy Marcus, I sat down in the armchair. “What’s it about?”
“Oh, I haven’t been paying much attention. These kids go up to a cabin in the mountains and there’s this crazy mountain man. It’s supposed to be scary but it’s really bad.”
Marcus glared at me. He knew exactly what I was doing.
He could glare all he wanted. “What do you normally like to watch?”
“Oh, I love reality TV shows.” She grabbed her lip gloss, reapplied it, and tossed it back on the table.
Reality TV. It figured.
“But,” she said. “I also really love
The Truman Show
, and my favorite movie, hands down, is
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
”
My mouth fell open. “Seriously?”
She waved her hand. “Oh, yeah. I get the mean reds all the time.”
Now I felt bad. “I love that movie. I mean, she’s self-destructive, but I can see why.”
Sylvia leaned forward. “And you know what? I love that she wouldn’t name the cat. It says so much about her. And everything hinges on the final moment, and whether or not she can change.”
Marcus glanced at me and then her and a crease formed between his eyebrows. He tapped her bare foot with his finger.
“Hey, you want to go get dinner?”
She tilted her head. “This early?”
“Yeah. We can go somewhere nice.”
A huge smile split her face. “Okay. Let’s go.” She swung her 161
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legs off his lap and grabbed her shoes. Marcus stood up and she haphazardly stuffed her things back into her purse.
Sylvia waved to me. “See you later.”
Marcus spoke over his shoulder as they walked out of the house. “Tell Mom I won’t be back ’til really late, will you?”
I glared at him and didn’t answer. He didn’t want me to tell his mother anything. He just wanted me to know he’d be out with Sylvia until late into the evening, because he knew I’d hate it. And he was right.
I was still sitting in the living room when a text popped up.
Will.
Hey. I’m texting you but not flirting.
I moved to the couch and flopped down on the cushions.
Wise choice.
The reply came immediately.
Which- texting you or not flirting?
I almost smiled.
I’ll never tell.
A pause, during which I grabbed the throw pillow and I played with the fringe.
Jackie Lawrence. I think you’re flirting with me.
I wasn’t sure if I was or not. I lay there on the couch for a while longer, texting Will, and opened Facebook while waiting for him to reply. I commented on Kelsey’s status and tagged Hannah in it, then scrolled through my feed. But I stopped cold when I saw a stupid little heart next to Marcus’s name.
In
a relationship.
Awesome. It might as well say
I’ve got a real girlfriend now, one I can put labels on and bring around in public.
Labels must make things real.
That evening, I went back to the stack of white notecards on my dresser. I filled out the forms for the colleges with film-only programs and requested their information.