You don’t have to make conversation with him, I remind myself. I don’t even have to get along with him.
And I definitely don’t have to reach some kind of truce, where we part ways after all this as friends. It’s just payback. It doesn’t have to get personal.
In fact, it’s probably best if it doesn’t.
“Why the iPod?”
I freeze, the first bite of macaroni halfway to my mouth. It falls off my fork one noodle at a time.
Van is digging right into his meal, no eye contact, but I still squirm as though he’s got me under an interrogation lamp.
“You left everything else we got you.” His knife squeals on the plate as he stabs into his steak. He ordered it medium-rare. I watch until he gets to the middle and a thin, pink river pools too close to his potatoes. “But not that.”
“I took some clothes,” I point out.
He looks up and pushes his fingers behind his ear, leaning far across the table. “Hmm? What was that?”
“I took,” I hiss, “some clothes.”
“Oh, right, right. And my dad’s money.”
“Sit down and lower your voice, please. People are staring.”
“If I’m not embarrassed being seen with a thief, there’s no reason you should be embarrassed by my volume.”
The insult echoes around the diner. An elderly couple by the unplugged jukebox shakes their heads at us. Even the cook peeks out through the order window.
Van falls back into his side of the booth and resumes tearing into his food like the carnivore he is. Not just in what he eats, but how he eats it. Gnashing teeth, grinding like boulders with his mouth shut. A beast who cares about nothing but devouring his kill.
The difference is that he’s almost silent, and strangely composed. They say he’s got anger issues, but I say it’s his face that’s the problem. You can never tell what he’s really feeling, or if he feels anything at all.
Not until it explodes.
As soon as he’s finished, he drops one of his damp twenties onto the exact center of the table, flicks his eyes to mine, and leaves.
I see his back through the window, those marble shoulders highlighted by the flashing red neon of the diner’s Open sign.
Our waitress brings me the check. “Everything all right?”
“Fine.” I finish the coffee Van left behind. Its bitterness amplifies the sting in my throat.
So he thinks I’m a thief. Nothing new there.
So he’s apparently dead-set on remaining enemies, no matter how dead-set I am on leveling the scales I tipped out of his favor all those years ago, and even further yesterday. Big deal.
“Hey,” she whispers, when the breath I take cracks halfway through, “if you need help, just say the word. We see more of this sort of thing in here than you’d expect.”
“What thing?”
Her gaze lands on Van again, who paces slowly back and forth in front of the glass with his cigarette. Every cloud he exhales catches the neon, like an electrical storm over his head.
Slowly, as she touches my arm, it dawns on me.
“Oh! Oh, no, he’s not my.... It isn’t like that. He’s not hurting me, or whatever.”
Nothing that’d be visible, anyway.
Nothing I don’t deserve.
The waitress lets go of my arm and straightens, eyeing him again. “He’s not forcing you to travel with him, then?”
“Believe it or not, I’m kind of the one dragging him on this trip.” The laugh I give is beyond pathetic, like kittens whining in their sleep.
With a plastic smile, I replace Van’s money with my own and tell her to keep the change. She’s slow to move when I slide out of the booth, but finally steps aside.
“Sorry, I don’t like to assume,” she says, relaxed now, “but I’d hate to ignore a fire when I think I smell smoke.”
Assuring her I appreciate the thought but that no, really, everything’s fine, I grab my purse and the Transit keys and start for the doors.
I wonder what Van would think if he knew total strangers thought he was some abusive boyfriend, dragging his girl across the country against her will. Knowing him, he’d outwardly rage—but inside, he’d crumble with shame.
It almost makes me want to tell him.
“Ready?” The keys rattle louder than I mean them to.
Van jams his cigarette into the ashtray atop a pebble-encased trashcan. His hand stabs into the air between us. “Keys.”
“What?” I ask, shrinking back, until I remember I’m trying not to do that around him. The nervous habits I’d almost broken for good flutter back way too easily, around him.
“Keys,” he says again. “I’m driving for a while. That’s why I ordered coffee.”
“You’re not driving Eloise.”
“Jesus. Of course you named it. Look, I always did my driving at night. I liked it. And since I can’t do that anymore, thanks to somebody ramming my car into a lake—”
“Will you stop rubbing my face in that? It was an accident. And I already apologized, which you chose not to accept.”
Van raises his eyebrows and juts his hand out farther.
After a minute, I slap the keys into his fingers.
“Ah, there we go,” he smiles. “Balance.”
He slides in front of me before I can open the passenger door, my hand halted by the brick wall of his chest. I draw back fast, but not before he hears the gasp I give.
“You’ll learn pretty fast,” he whispers, lowering his mouth too close to my ear, “that it’s easier to just give me what I want.”
Blood pounds in my ears. His scent makes me want to shrink down and bloom taller at the same time.
“They say that about raising little kids, you know.” My spine fixes itself. I can’t quite tame my pulse, but I do manage to appear calm as I return that cool blue stare. “It’s easier to give in. But that’s what turns them into spoiled, entitled little brats.”
He is right about one thing: I’ve learned something pretty fast. Just now, in fact.
Tranquil blue eyes can still shoot daggers. Mind-scrambling muscles and acutely addictive scents are distractions, akin to those little lights on angler fish that lure in their prey.
Even our brief moments of civility aren’t real. They’re pauses in whatever game he’s playing with me. His objective: to make me suffer. He wins as long as I lose.
How do I win? I’m not sure that’s possible.
But I can refuse to play, by focusing on nothing but repaying my debts, and ignoring every little battle he tries to drag me into along the way.
I can refuse those piercing, cold eyes that draw me in like calm waters, then pull me under like the riptide they really are. I can stand straight when he tries to make me shrink down, for no other reason than to boost his ego.
Thank God, the universe, and everything else up there for this much-needed reminder.
Van is not worth it.
Ten
“Go to sleep. I’ve only been telling you that for the last two hours.”
Juniper folds her arms. “I’m fine.”
“Aw, cute. You think I’m telling you to sleep because I actually care if you’re tired.”
I hit Input on her stereo, then Scan. That podcast she put on was actually pretty good, but I’m tired of listening to anything piped in from that damn iPod. The one gift she deemed important enough to take with her.
“I want to be alone. And since there are no actual rooms, sending you to bed is the next best thing.” Blindly, I reach out and spin her chair towards the walkway. “Go.”
She spins herself right the hell back.
“Cute,” she mimics. “You think I’m staying up here because I actually care about keeping you company.”
Her hand flails out at the darkness, which the headlights can barely cut. It’s not foggy; the bulbs are just that dim. “I don’t trust you to drive the whole night through by yourself, because you’ve been gunning it ever since we got on the highway
. This is an old vehicle, Van, it can’t handle top speeds for miles on end. You have to baby it.”
“I’m going sixty-four.”
“Yeah, and it tops out at sixty-five. On its best day.”
“Goddamn.” I let off the gas until we’re practically fucking crawling. “There.”
“Promise me you’ll pull over if the engine makes a weird sound.”
“I don’t make promises.”
Every click of her seatbelt’s audible, she unbuckles it so slowly. “You used to.”
“Not anymore.”
“Huh. Should I assume it’s for the same reason you don’t believe in apologies, anymore?”
Signposts drag past. I spin the radio volume higher and stop the channel scan, landing on some depressing rock song that fits the mood way too perfectly.
“This is going to be a really long trip if you keep randomly instating the silent treatment.”
“Long trip, regardless,” I tell her, “but fair enough. Here’s a thought: you tell me what you ran away from seven years ago, and I’ll tell you why I don’t believe in damn near anything, anymore. You show me yours, I show you mine.”
“‘Eye for an eye’ sounds better.”
I hate that I almost laugh. I’ll blame sleep deprivation.
“We both know you’re not going to tell me,” she says, after a beat.
“So? We both know you’re not going to tell me, either.” I hitch my thumb behind me. “Seriously, go get some sleep. We’ll switch when you wake up.”
“Fine,” she yawns into her elbow. I ignore the fact she braces her hand on my shoulder, not my seat, when she gets up. “Don’t crash my car.”
“Only if I find a nice lake.”
* * *
Turns out, she doesn’t get those nightmares anymore.
Not like she’d believe this if I told her, but I’m glad. This world’s fucking awful, and being able to escape it for six to eight hours of unconsciousness every night is just about the only grace I think exists. Juniper deserves plenty of crap for what she did to us, but even she doesn’t deserve to lose that.
Angling the rearview back to her, I study the way she sleeps now.
She used to curl up into the tiniest ball imaginable. Only when she’d wake and find me would she let herself stretch out, like she couldn’t trust the darkness until another person stepped into it.
Until I was there.
Now? Just try and lose sight of her. Her head rests on the edge of the mattress, one arm thrown over the side and swaying with the motion of the Transit. Her legs are splayed out, one halfway up the backdoor and the other stick-straight, heel propped on the wall. It’s a good thing she sleeps with her head under her equipment shelf, otherwise she’d judo kick all those electronics into shrapnel.
More than anything else…I notice how calm she finally looks.
Whatever she ran away from, I guess she got far enough to feel safe.
My ego’s still dented that it couldn’t be with me, but I chalk that up to hating failure. Mom always told me I had narrow-minded determination, inherited straight from Abuelo Andresco. Once I decided I was going to do something, that was it. No other outcome was good enough. Even if, objectively speaking, it might be better for me.
It was obvious, she said, once I started walking.
Apparently I had a fondness for sticking things in holes (insert crude joke here). Drains, manhole covers, air vents—nobody could stop me in time. They’d turn around and there was baby Van, shoving a popsicle stick into the VCR, or pens into my cousins’ ears.
One day, as the story goes, I decided to find out exactly why all the outlets in our home were covered, and what the hell was inside.
Mom had no idea how I pried the safety covers off, or where I found the bobby pins I jammed straight into them. By the time they figured out why the lights kept flickering I’d made my rounds past three different outlets and three decent shocks. When I got busted, I was going for the fourth.
Mom always told the story with horrified laughter. “You’d made up your mind to figure out how those things worked,” she’d giggle, wiping her eyes on her sleeves, “and damn it, you were going to find out. No matter what it took.”
Sweet as Mom’s interpretation was, I decided Dad’s was more on-point: I wasn’t just that determined. I was just that dumb.
“Why would you keep doing the same shit and expect a different result?”
Harsh, but the man was right. As I got older, my detentions and suspensions cited the same old crap, from defacing school property with ink-pen porn, to inciting chaos in assemblies with laser pointers and old-fashioned heckling.
And that was the mild stuff. I lost track of how many fights I started, how many desks I flipped or shoved when a teacher pissed me off. That’s probably why I got put into private schools. Dad had to pay people to let me past their thresholds.
Even at home, my offenses were consistent and predictable: sneaking booze in the same places with the same kids, lying with the same awful excuses.
I think that’s what made Dad angriest, actually—that I was recycling material. If I was going to worry him into an early grave, the least I could do was make it interesting.
The shadows in the rearview shift. I watch Juniper roll from her stomach to her back, both hands now fucking up the electronics shelf without an ounce of awareness. Her mouth hangs open while she snores.
For just one second, I smile.
When Juniper Summers fell to my patch of earth, I vowed to keep her safe because I wanted to keep all the magic that had fallen with her.
It doesn’t matter that I know it’s all fake now. Or that, even if it were real, I honestly don’t want it anymore.
I wanted it more than my own heartbeat, once upon a time.
Maybe both my parents were right. I despise failure. I want what I want, and I don’t even stop to think about why. Sometimes, the only reason I go after anything is to prove I can: because I wanted it before, and didn’t get it.
But I’m also still so stupid, I’ll repeat my mistakes a hundred times and not learn a single lesson. No matter how many times I feel that jolt, warning me to quit while I’m ahead.
You don’t want her, I tell myself. I slap the rearview so that all I can see is the ceiling.
You just used to.
Eleven
“Hey, Fairy Lights! Stick your head out here, a sec. Maybe you can enlighten me.”
The window above the outdoor shower skitters open. Her face, a toothbrush shoved against her cheek, emerges. “Trouble with the— Oh, come on, Van, honestly?”
I glance down at myself. “What?”
“Nobody showers in a bathing suit.”
“They do when that shower is a garden hose thrown over a car.” I flick the nozzle screwed onto the end of said hose, then lightly punch this weird vinyl tube encasing me. “One little breeze and everyone and their grandma will see my goods.”
Juniper drapes her arm over the edge of the window and keeps brushing, foam dragging at the corners of her mouth. “There’s nobody around for miles except me.”
Yeah, I think. That’s the whole fucking problem.
I nod at the spigot in front of me. “What’s the deal with this?”
“Turn it. Water sprays. Towel dries. Pretty simple stuff.”
Without looking, I reach up and flick the end of her toothbrush. She gags.
“Does it, like...automatically regulate the temperature or something?”
“Nope.” She vanishes to spit, then returns. “All that handle does is dictate whether the water’s on, or off.”
“How the hell do you make it warmer, then?”
“You close your eyes and think of somewhere tropical.”
When I give a muttered laugh, she grins.
“Whoa, is that the faintest hint of a smile I detect? You warming up to me?”
About as warm as this shower’s gonna be.
That’s twice in twenty-four hours she’s made me smil
e. Maybe more.
Either way, I can’t stand it. The last thing I need is her thinking we’re friends.
So far, the trip has gone all right compared to what I expected. As in, neither of us has murdered the other one yet and dumped the body piece-by-piece in various dumpsters up and down the state.
But it’s still been a rough morning, starting with her absurdly early yoga routine in some tall, swaying grasses that I’m sure looked hashtag: goals on Instagram, but in real life was nothing but the neglected back lot of the Hardees where we got breakfast.
“You’re such a fraud,” I’d laughed, when I read the caption she posted with her video. “Another beautiful little piece of America.”
“Am not,” she argued, nodding at the pathetic landscape. “Look at all this concrete and steel humans put up, and yet nature still found a way to sneak in. It is beautiful, even if it’s surrounded by something ugly. Maybe even more so, because of that.”
“Sorry, Henrietta Hippie: I’m not buying it. But the reverse—ugliness wrapped up in pretty shit? That, I’ll agree with. I see that every day.”
“Like what?”
Shaking my head, I’d stayed silent. The first answer that came to mind was Juniper herself.
I ignored a lot of hideous, dark things inside her because the outside was appealing. Not falling for it again.
Like now, when she lingers in the window, and the sunlight sparkles in her eyes as she watches me brace myself under the blast of cold water.
I wish she still had her toothbrush, so I could flick it again. Judge me if you must, but I enjoyed the sound of her gagging.
“Give me privacy, perv.”
“What’s this one for?” she asks, ignoring me. One perfectly filed nail pokes the center of the moon tattoo wrapped around my shoulder, then trails to the paper airplane underneath.
Grabbing the shampoo she loaned me, I lather it up over my scalp and face so I don’t have to answer.
“Did you get those for your mom?”
“Close the window, Juniper.”
“Juni.”
Seven Sins: Durham Boys, Book 2 Page 7