The Hard Count (9 page)

I don’t think my car has ever, not once, been on this station. I didn’t know this
was
a station. And the music is soft, elevator-style, with some kind of xylophone and saxophone solo happening. I sigh, noticeably, and lean forward on instinct, but stop myself and push the air up one more notch instead. When I lean back in my seat, pulling up to the school exit, Nico begins to chuckle.

“How long were you going to let me listen to this shit?”

I stop hard at the light exiting the school, enough to jerk him forward, and he only laughs harder.

“I was trying to be nice! That’s it; your deejay rights are revoked!” I say, pointing a finger at him.

He pulls his knees up and clutches his fists to his chest, laughing harder while I press my favorite stations until the indie rock channel comes on.

“Oh hell no,” he says, leaning forward to press the stereo button. I grab his wrist, no longer thinking about how he smells, but instead thinking about how he’s screwing with my stereo, and the cocky bastard laughs again, leaning back in his seat. I look over in time to catch him pushing his hand through his wet hair, and my chest fills up with what I think might be hope, and my arms and legs get tingly again, sending me right back to where I started. The light goes green, and Nico gestures for me to look forward and go, so I do.

“I was just kidding,” he says. “I actually love this song.”

I purse my lips, and a part of me waits for him to take that back, too—to keep messing with me. Instead, he sings the chorus, lightly, but loud enough that I can hear it. His voice is nice, even if it’s a little off-key. I think about my damned dream again, and kissing him, and looking for secret rooms with him.

“Do you ever have those dreams where…” Shit! I’m telling him about my dream, my subconscious forcing my lips to talk even though this…
this
is the last thing I want to talk about, to say, to admit. I swallow and look out my window, check my mirrors, suddenly focusing on every aspect of driving my car the six blocks it takes to get to Charlie’s. We stop at the next light, because the universe is cruel and wants this trip to take me forever.

“Dreams where what?” Nico asks, and I glance to my right. He’s genuinely interested.

I draw in a deep breath and do my best to rest my palms on the steering wheel, to act natural and let myself get comfortable. I bunch my lips, stalling, looking for a graceful way to make this conversation now make sense.

“I’ve had the same dream the last three nights in a row,” I lie. I don’t need to tell him everything. And this conversation might be just right for this circumstance—just the right length, just the right depth. Polite. Interesting. Casual.

“Me and…” I stop myself, coughing to change my story before I slip and say Nico’s name. “Me and my brother are in some house we’ve never been in, and we keep opening doors that lead to new hallways and rooms and parts of this house, and every time we do, it’s like…it’s like the house just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. Every room is bigger than the last, and there’s always another doorway, or hallway, or whatever.”

The light goes green, so I glance at Nico briefly before pulling forward. His forehead is knitted and his mouth is twisted in thought. “Maybe, yeah,” he says. “It’s never a house, and usually I’m with Sasha and we’re somewhere kind of familiar, like the school. But I’ve had the door thing. Like…you’re looking for a secret door? Or you’ve found it, but you can’t open it?”

“Yes! Just like that!” I pound the steering wheel once, excited that my detour worked and that we have this weird, silly, pointless thing in common…
sort of.

“I dreamt about you once, actually,” he says.

My knuckles glow with the red of the stoplight that I’ve just pulled to a stop at, pressing on the brake a little too hard. Nico chuckles as he holds out his hand to grab the dash, and my eyes are frozen on the glowing red spheres dangling from a wire about twenty feet high in the intersection in front of us.

“Not that kind of dream; don’t get all…all…girl freaked,” he laughs, shifting in his seat. I can see from my periphery that he’s adjusted enough to face me, and I suddenly feel as if every movement I make is on display.

“I’m not…
girl freaked,
” I say, scowling, and very much girl freaked indeed—whatever the hell girl freaked is. It might be the most genius description ever, come to think about it. I’m a girl, and I’m freaked. Nico is dead on with this.

“Whatever…you are. But don’t be,” he says, pulling one leg under the other, his long fingers wrapped around his shin, holding it in place. He has a silver ring around his thumb, and somehow it’s the most masculine thing I’ve ever seen. If I were his girlfriend, I would touch it.

I look forward as the light turns green, my head snapping in place.

Girl freaked.

“It was last year, when we were practicing for the debate. I had a dream that you,” he stops, letting a genuine laugh play out, and I grip my steering wheel hard, preparing myself for some sort of insult. “You punched me.”

My eyes narrow, and I look him straight on this time.

“I…punched you?”

I’m kind of proud. Proud of this dream punch, that isn’t real, and actually only happened because Nico’s subconscious made up a version of me that did it, but I’m proud regardless.

I’m a girl-freaked, dream-puncher!

“You did,” he says, and I glance over to catch the dimple.

“You probably deserved it,” I say, looking back to the road quickly.

Nico shifts back the right way in his seat, chuckling. “I’m sure I did,” he says. “I don’t remember why, because I don’t remember a lot of my dreams. But I remember you hitting me. My nose bled like a son of a bitch, and when I woke up, I rushed to the bathroom just in case.”

A man speaks through my speakers selling insurance to veterans, followed by an ad for the weekend’s “big sale at Big Al’s Super Five Honda and Acura,” and Nico and I both get lost in the mundane sounds of the radio.

“So you never remember your dreams, huh?”

I don’t know why I speak when I do. I don’t know why this is the question I ask. But the moment I say it, something shifts in the air—something shifts inside Nico. Somehow, his large frame feels smaller, and his confidence feels lost, a certain energy instantly zapped from the air we both breathe. I look over at the last light before Charlie’s and catch a glimpse of his profile, his eyelashes moving with the tiny flickers of his eyes, his thumbnail lodged in his teeth while he thinks, his Adam’s apple moving slowly with a labored swallow.

“I have a lot of nightmares,” he says, his gaze seemingly caught on the bright Charlie’s sign out in the distance. “Not really the kind of things you want to hold onto.”

My instinct is to apologize, but the moment I open my mouth to do so, I can tell that’s not what Nico wants me to do at all. He shifts to sit taller, bends forward to tug his hat from the small duffle bag he kept at his feet, and slides it on his head, tilting his neck to the right and cracking it once.

As we pull into the lot for Charlie’s, Colton is sitting on the tailgate of his truck, waiting for us. I shift into park, and we both look out the front window as Colton hops down, holding a hand up to get Nico’s attention.

I scan the lot and recognize many of the cars, including my brother’s friend Travis’s Jeep. I’ve never been the girl who dates the football players. Maybe it was always just too close to home. Not that any of the players ever really had a thing for me. I was always Coach’s daughter—even when the boys were young and playing Pop Warner. Even so, for most of my life, I did harbor a sort of crush on Travis. It’s probably just because I knew him the longest, because we took him with us on family vacations when we were kids, and he lived next door. When I was little, I always thought he looked just like my Ken doll. Light brown hair and blue eyes, Travis is built more like Ken now, too. But as high school went on, Travis and my brother grew into boys who snuck out to house parties and didn’t come home in the morning, while I became the girl who begged her parents to sign her up for tech camp and take her to readings by her favorite authors.

That said, Travis and I are still close. And as much as my brother was an anchor for this team, Travis was his right hand. If he’s here, Nico needs to win his confidence. I don’t think walking in with Coach’s daughter is going to do him many favors.

“I don’t think I should go in there with you,” I say, my eyes still scanning the parking lot and patio of my school’s favorite hangout. One by one, I recognize more of the players here.

Colton is standing about a dozen feet in front of my car, paused with his phone in his hands, texting. Nico doesn’t shift to look at me when I speak, and we both keep our eyes on the only player other than Sasha he can really count on right now. I can tell he knows it, too.

“Thanks for the ride,” he says, pulling in a deep breath before pushing open the passenger door. “I’ll get home fine, really.”

“You understand…it’s not that I don’t want to be here with you, I just…” I lean forward, hoping to catch his eyes. He doesn’t look at me, but nods, and I can tell he knows why I’m backing out.

“Hey, man!” I hear him shout as my passenger door slams to a close, drowning out the sounds of traffic and the rest of his conversation with Colton.

They both slap hands and pull in for a half hug before walking toward the patio area, a few heads turn and watch them walk up. They’re all judging him—right now. Nico stops halfway, turning back to me, then holding up a finger to Colton and jogging over to my side of the car. I roll the window down as he leans down to speak.

“Can you just keep my things in your car? I don’t need any of it until tomorrow,” he says.

I nod
yes
, and his mouth curves into a slight smile as his hand comes down to pat the base of my window.

I watch him jog back to Colton, and I think of the dozen things more I should have said. I should have told him not to worry, that he could do this—that they would all warm up to him quickly, love him—just like they love my brother.

But I just didn’t want to lie. I can’t promise him any of that. But I know one thing—Travis better have his back. Otherwise, I’m digging out my Ken doll and feeding him to the blender.

“
N
ico
. Nico, get up!”

My brother pushes down several times on my mattress, shaking the springs until my head moves enough that my eyes startle open. His eyes hit mine, and he stands up from the floor where my mattress lies, moving close to the window, pulling my curtains to the side, but not enough to really look out my window.

“What is it, Vincent?” I sit up in my pool of covers, my hands fists that I ball and rub into my eyes. I’m so tired, and I can tell it’s still nighttime. He hasn’t been home in days. Mom is going to be so happy. “Are you coming home?”

“Shhhhh,” my brother says, rushing back to me, but still looking out the barely-exposed window. He pulls me into his arms, and I hug him tightly.

“Sorry,” I whisper.

Vincent pushes my shoulders square with his, then rubs his right eye, which is swollen and bruised. He’s been fighting, and I swallow hard because it scares me, and I don’t like looking at his face when it looks like this.

“I need your help,” he says, his grip on my arms tight.

I’ve grown a lot over the last year. I’m almost twelve, and I’m nearly five inches taller than I was last summer. Vincent has grown, too. He’s seventeen. He stopped going to school a few months ago. He also has a lot of numbers and strange symbols tattooed on his arm, and he tells me they don’t mean anything when I ask. My mom always makes him put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover them. I heard her tell him he should be ashamed of them. He doesn’t say anything to her face, but when she walks away, he calls her bad things. I don’t like it when he does that, and I tell myself he doesn’t mean it.

I miss how he used to be, when we were little. I liked it when we built forts out of Mom’s sheets in the living room. He was home every night, and some nights, he let me sleep in his room with him. That was before he started hanging out with Cruz. Before the smoke poisoned him. My mom threatens to kick him out of the house when she finds it. He always leaves first.

“I don’t want you to be scared,” Vincent says, reaching to the back of his jeans, pulling a gun from inside the waistband. I stiffen and try to push away from him, my heart racing.

“Shhhh, Nico. It’s okay. Look, here,” he says, flipping the gun open in his palm, showing me an empty chamber, clicking it closed. My heart slows, but not much. I’ve never been this close to a gun. I lied once and told my friends I saw one when Cruz drove by our playground nice and slow. I needed an excuse for running home. I didn’t want them to know I was just afraid.

“It isn’t loaded,” Vincent says. He sounds out of breath. I think he ran here. “Someone might be looking for it. They can’t find it. I need to hide it.”

My mouth is watering, the way it does right before I throw up. I pull my hand to my eye and wipe away the tear forming in the corner.

“Nobody will look here, Nico. I need to hide it here, okay?” he says, and I nod, because he’s Vincent, and I just want him to come home. I don’t want anyone to find it, to find him.

“And you can’t tell Mom,” he whispers, his right hand back on my shoulder, the gun in his grip between us. I nod again, but this time shake a little with my cry.

Vincent pulls me in close, holding me tightly to his chest, and I fall into him, watching as he slides the gun inside a beanie that he pushes under my mattress, against the cold concrete floor.

“I love you, Nico. No matter what. Know that I love you,” he says into the small space below my ear, his lips pressing on the top of my head. His hands shake where they grip my back, and I cling to his sweaty T-shirt, holding tightly but losing the battle as it slips through my fingers and my brother flees my dark bedroom.

I hear the back door slide open and closed again, and after several minutes, I sneak out of my bedroom, taking quiet steps to the sliding glass door. I get on my knees, and feel for the small pin that locks the door completely, and I put it in place, hoping I’ll remember to pull the pin free before my mother notices in the morning.

I won’t sleep. I’m too afraid. Whoever wants Vincent, wants his gun—they might come looking for me.

I want him to come home.

Home.