The Year of the Beasts (7 page)

“There’s a beast in all of us, you know,” Jasper said.

“No,” Tessa said.

“Yes, a monster right inside of us all,” Jasper said.

They wondered what theirs looked like. They faced each other and blinked while making faces to try to capture the phantom.

Sometimes Jasper and Tessa listened to each other’s heart beat or to the river rambling by or to the traffic from the highway a mile away. The sounds were soft, sometimes loud, sometimes like half-understood words. Tessa would turn to Jasper and be amazed by his eyes. She fell into them, they were her secret watering holes, and she would just swim in them. She liked to imagine that he felt the same way about her eyes. He was mostly quiet, though. So she satisfied herself with the fact that they would hold each other tightly, limbs all wrapped up together until she couldn’t tell where they were different. Tessa thought that Jasper’s skin felt like it was her own skin. And she would cover him in kisses, sometimes confusing her own hand with his.

When Jasper did speak, he wondered aloud.

“Who put that sculpture over by the bridge?”

“What is the purpose of wrapping a string around a ham?”

“Where does the end of the road end?”

“When will I know how old is old?

“How many craters are there on the moon?”

Tessa never knew the answers, but she always tried with all seriousness to answer.

“A small man in a blue peacoat who came down from the mountain ten years ago.”

“That is how a pig is caught.”

“At the place where the tallest tree and smallest stone meet.”

“When you forget where your bicycle is chained.”

“Not more than needles on a pine tree, not less than the licks it takes to finish an ice-cream cone.”

Jasper would laugh and say that she could be right, but might be wrong. Tessa was sure that it didn’t matter. Sometimes she would play an imaginary game with herself where she would try to imagine what it would be like to grow older and find out the right answers together. But older seemed like something so far away that even a year from now seemed like a forever away.

*   *   *

Initially Tessa hated that Lulu was always tagging along. But soon Tessa began to secretly like the fact that Lulu was with them. Lulu being there gave her a chance to slip away by herself. The girls would lie around in Celina’s cool bedroom and flip through magazines and paint their nails and talk about kissing. And then Tessa would go to the kitchen or to the bathroom or to get something back home or at the store down the street, and could do so and take her time without leaving either of them alone.

She would disappear from Celina’s house and slip into the adjacent woods to meet Jasper. Sometimes they would steal quick kisses, sometimes they would say hello and finish a debate from a topic they had discussed the day before, or they would walk down to Main Street. When they did, they were careful to walk on opposite sides of the street so that they didn’t look like they were together. They would go to the convenience store and buy ice-cream sandwiches. They would pretend to ignore each other, but they would lean into the freezer at the same time to reach for the ice cream and their fingers would touch, and despite the cold and the ice, there was always a definite shock of warmth between them.

After taking too long lingering for one last moment with Jasper, Tessa would bring the ice cream, now soft, back to Celina’s house. And more often than not, Celina and Lulu hardly even noticed that Tessa had been away for any unusual length of time. They would have decided on some late afternoon or evening plan without her. Sometimes it was boating, sometimes going to the cornfield, sometimes getting one of their parents to drive them to the mall so they could shop or see a movie. Whatever it was, it always involved Charlie and his friends and Tessa always agreed that it was a good plan.

Sometimes Tessa tried to imagine suggesting inviting Jasper to come with them all. She rolled the idea around in her mind more than once. She even asked him if he’d like her to invite him along. He ran his hands through his hair and shook his head.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Jasper told her that he wasn’t interested in laughing stupidly or flinging popcorn or shoplifting chocolate bars from Rite Aid.

“One day you’ll want to come,” Tessa said.

“Unlikely.”

But truthfully, she could never picture it becoming a reality. Jasper seemed so
other.
Although if she had thought about it in a different way, she probably would have realized that she could have maybe convinced him that it was a good idea. That playing normal meant spending more time with Tessa. Jasper would have been happy to do that.

Instead, he watched from his house as they all left without him.

chapter

eight

chapter

nine

Despite their best intentions,
there was a friction between the sisters that was undeniable. You could feel it in the house. They sat with it at breakfast. They passed it between them as though it were something simple, like the salt or the bacon or the coffee.

Tessa had tried to suppress the grudge she had about Lulu stealing Charlie. She had kept it inside, pushed down to fill all the crushed cracks about it. Tessa knew that she should maybe let it go. But still, it wasn’t fair. Tessa felt strongly that despite the fact that she secretly had Jasper, it didn’t matter.

And then sometimes, to make things worse, Lulu would rub it in. It might not have been on purpose, but it felt like it. Lulu would come home and swoon around the living room. Sighing heavily. Touching things on the shelves. She did it on purpose. She would pull out a book and put it back or pick up an object and replace it just so. Sometimes, when she sighed she would quietly say the word that Tessa didn’t want to hear.

“Charlie.”

Tessa tried to let it go.

But every time Tessa looked at Lulu, Tessa’s eyes were not soft or open. They stared out at her sister harder than they should have. They were hurtful. They were harsh.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Lulu said.

“Like what?”

“All mean.”

Tessa couldn’t help herself. Her eyes were
accusing.
And rightly so. Tessa felt that Lulu had a lot to be sorry for. Lulu had stolen something from Tessa. She wasn’t innocent in the affair. She knew why Tessa looked at her that way.

“What should I do?” Lulu said.

“You know,” Tessa said.

“I do not,” Lulu said. But the look she gave Tessa told her that she did know what would make things right. Lulu could make things better in the house—with a sincere apology.

After all, hadn’t Lulu heard all about Charlie from Tessa? Hadn’t she even gone with Tessa to football games and cheered him on, never once thinking of him as someone that was for her?

Lulu always said she could barely keep track of which one he was on the field. She could only remember him by his number: Evans 10. And after the games she used to say that she didn’t think that Charlie was her type. She liked boys who were soft and dreamy looking, like the ones on the posters in her bedroom. The ones whose fan clubs she’d joined. They had longish hair and full lips and didn’t look like they would ever turn into men. They were
safe.