“So, this is about yesterday morning.”
“No.” This time she met my eyes. “It’s not. I just don’t want to talk about it. Like I told you upstairs.” Her head fell to the back of the couch. “Can we just watch this movie? I don’t have the energy to argue with anyone else.”
Things felt so awkward between us. We’d had this Sunday movie date since high school and never had things been this strained. “Yeah, we can watch it.” I picked up the remote and situated myself more comfortably on the couch, hitting the play button when the menu screen came up. “You know you can talk to me, about anything.”
“I know,” she said quietly beside me.
“Anything, Navy.”
“Okay.”
She sounded so far away. I scooted across the couch until our sides touched and put my arm around her shoulders. We’d spent hundreds of Sundays in this exact position, but it felt strange in that moment. I found myself second-guessing every movement of my hand. Should I touch her shoulder or let my arm lay across her shoulders like it was dead weight? What did I normally do?
Being this close to her meant I could smell the subtle perfume she wore. A smell that had lived on my pillowcases since two nights ago. When I’d rolled over in bed this morning, face pressed to the pillows, that smell had jumpstarted my brain, flooding it with memories.
Her head leaned so that it was against my chest, bringing the smell of her perfume directly under my nose.
Fuck.
In an effort to move her hair from my face, I used my hand to brush it away but even that felt intimate in a this is not strictly platonic way. Every act of physical touch somehow felt more romantic than platonic, but that didn’t make sense. Surely, one night couldn’t completely erase the line between friendly and more than, but that’s exactly how it felt. With her soft weight pressed against me and my around around her, the feelings growing in me were certainly not strictly friendly.
I snagged a pillow from the other end of the couch and covered my lap as subtly as possible, feeling like a total jackass. This was not the time and place for an erection, but unfortunately my penis didn’t possess a brain.
“You okay?” she asked. She adjusted so that she was practically laying across my lap now, her head cushioned on the pillow as she looked up at me.
“I’m great. This movie, I’ve heard good stuff about it.”
“You say that about every random movie you pick up.”
“This isn’t random. It was in theaters.”
“For how long?” There was a teasing smile on the edge of her lips. My Navy was slowly coming back to herself.
I lifted a shoulder. “It might’ve taken only one showing for them to realize purchasing this movie was a mistake.”
She laughed, her eyes closing and her mouth wide. The movement shook us both. My gaze was drawn to the way her thick, dark eyelashes fanned over her cheekbones; the curve of her rosy pink lips and the tiny freckle right at her cupid’s bow. Had I noticed these little details about her before? It was as if all of a sudden, I was noticing the spattering of freckles that dotted her tanned cheeks and the small, dark birthmark under her left eye. When her eyes opened again, it was like looking at her specific color of brown eyes for the very first time. Gold streaks, like a sunburst, spread from her pupil outward, making her eyes less chocolate and more honey.
“And you still picked it?”
I stared at her, wanting to keep staring at her while also confused. “What?”
“The movie.” She turned her head toward the television, sending her long dark hair over my thighs. “Did the movie store pay you to rent it?”
I swallowed, reminding myself that this was my friend. My best friend. “No… But it was only a dollar rental.”
She laughed again and seemed much more relaxed than she had been all night. “From the grocery store?”
“Yeah. Harry’s.”
“Where Megan works?”
Why did I suddenly feel like I was in trouble? Her tone didn’t make me feel that way, so why did I feel like I just got caught doing something wrong? Her eyes were kind, friendly even. So what the fuck?
“She does work there, but I didn’t see her.”
“Oh.”
“It’s by the Chinese place,” I reminded her. “I got movies after I placed the takeout order.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I forgot she worked there, to be honest.” Megan was a nice enough girl, but I wasn’t as interested in her as I should’ve been.
Navy glanced at her phone and set an alarm for midnight.
“Early wake-up,” I remarked.
“Well, if this movie is not as exciting as I expect it to be—”
“Hey!” I acted offended. “The cover says it’s an ‘instant classic’.”
“The director probably said that.”
I picked up the DVD case and looked at it. “I mean, you’re not wrong.”
On a laugh she said, “Just in case I fall asleep, I want to make sure I wake up by midnight.”
“For your ‘or something,’ right?”
“Right.” She turned her head to look at the television. After a few minutes, she sighed quietly.
“What’s that sigh for?”
She turned again, looking at me. “I was just thinking, if we were at your mom’s house, she’d be interrupting us with snacks right about now.”
I laughed. “She never could resist checking on us under the guise of bringing us snacks.”
“She knows we’ve always been just friends, but she keeps doing it.”
Would we ever be able to talk about our friendship without my brain immediately going to the night we spent together in a way that was not explicitly friendly? “I think she just worries,” I said, to keep myself from making a quip that was more lighthearted than I felt.
“She still worried about Asa?”
“I think she will worry about us both long after our souls have left the earth.”
Her hand rested on the planets tattooed along my forearm, her forefinger circling earth. “Remember what you said when we were kids, about where we went when we died?”
“How could I forget?” My brother had introduced me to space when I was a kid. Partly to impress him and partly because space was fucking cool, I developed this ill-informed and terribly conceived theory that when we died, we ended up on another planet with all our loved ones. Things like heaven and other versions of afterlife were hard for me to understand. Choosing a place, somewhere I could look at in a textbook, grounded me in a weird way.
“Which planet do you think it is now?” Before I could answer, she turned my arm in her hands to better view the planets. “I think the first time you told me, it was the moon. And the last time I asked, you said Saturn.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.” She traced the ring around Saturn and laughed lightly. “Remember when we’d go to the big hill behind Amy Abernathy’s house in the winter, to sled? You used to tell me that when we died, we’d all end up on Saturn, sledding on its rings.”
It reignited a memory of huffing and puffing our way up a snow-covered hill, slipping on icy rocks as we fought our way to the top only to enjoy a ten-second-long sled down to the bottom, forcing us to start over again. “Yeah, well, Saturn is fucking freezing cold. I guess I always figured it would be winter year-round there.”
“I don’t think I could stand that. Winters in Amber Lake are terrible enough.”
“Just wait until the cabin is all set up. We’ll spend our winters there. I’ll take you ice fishing. You just need activities and then you’ll love winter.”
It wasn’t cold inside, but as if in reaction to this talk of winter, Navy pulled the blanket up closer to her chin. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
“Where do you think we go after we die?”
She was still staring at the planets on my arm, tracing the shape of t
he last one I’d had tattooed—Neptune. “I don’t know. I think that theory was born from fear of never seeing my grandparents again, anyway. Gramps taught me all about the moon and its phases. I thought that’s where I’d find him when all of this was over.” It made me grateful and sad at the same time.
“Come on. Humor me. Like you did when we were kids.”
“I humor you all the time.” I motioned toward the television. “By providing you with some prime entertainment.”
“And yet, we have watched only a couple minutes of this ‘instant classic’.”
“That’s because you’re a chatty Cathy.”
“Come on,” she said with a nudge. “I loved listening to your theories. Please.”
When she looked up at me like that, like all the worries plaguing her existed on another planet, how could I deny her? “Planet Nine.”
“I thought that was Pluto?”
“Pluto is technically a dwarf planet. It’s not a planet.”
“I don’t get it.”
“For it to be a planet, it has to have a round shape and orbit the sun—which it does. But unlike the other planets, it hasn’t cleared its orbit of other objects. It’s not gravitationally dominant and shares its orbital space with other bodies of similar size. Like, Jupiter,” I said, pointing to the largest planet on my arm, “has a bunch of trojans sharing its orbit around the sun. But Jupiter way more massive than the sum total of those asteroids, so it’s classified as a planet.”
“So, Planet Nine is not Pluto.”
“No. And, technically, it’s still a hypothetical planet. A few years ago, a couple of scientists announced that a planet about the size of Neptune orbits the sun. They believe that it was knocked out into a distant orbit when the solar system was a baby and has just hung out since then. And it’s predicted to be bigger than Earth.”
“But no one has discovered it.”
“No, but if it exists, its gravitational influence would explain several weird peculiarities of our solar system. So, we’ll see.”
“So, Planet Nine is where we’ll go after we die.”
“Yeah. And you better pack your parka because if you thought Saturn was cold, well, just wait until Planet Nine comes true.”
She smiled up at me. “You really believe it exists, don’t you?”
“I do. I mean, Sputnik didn’t go to space until the fifties, sixty-odd years ago. That’s a blink of an eye in the age of Earth. There’s a lot of stuff still to discover out there.”
Navy brushed my sleeve up to better see the space after Neptune. “Why Planet Nine?”
“Because it hasn’t been discovered, officially, yet. I like that there are unknowns. It means possibilities.”
“Even if those possibilities mean we’re in frigid cold.”
“Even if.”
Navy turned her attention back to the movie, but all this talk about space reminded me of the crescent moon tattoo she had. A secret she’d held onto for years. This wasn’t the appropriate time to bring it up, but I wanted to. Eventually.
“You know what I’m craving?” Navy asked about halfway through the movie.
“What?”
“One of your mom’s brownies—the ones with all the chocolate chunks.”
“Next Sunday. Mom’s brownies are on the menu.”
“I’m not…” she paused to look at the clock again. “I don’t know if we can make next Sunday work yet.”
“Because of the Adorables?”
“Yeah.”
“We can just do it here, right?”
Navy moved so that she was sitting up again and I missed the warmth her body laying across mine had provided. “I don’t know yet.”
She was avoiding eye contact, suddenly more interested in the movie than she’d been all night. “We can talk about it later this week, right? I know you said no to tomorrow, but you’re still coming up to the cabin to help, right?”
She closed her eyes, but I could read her expression anyway. She was overwhelmed by things she wasn’t ready to talk about. Despite the moments of awkwardness between us, I knew that our night together wasn’t what plagued her. Or, at the very least, it wasn’t the only thing that plagued her.
“We don’t have to do it this week.”
“No,” she said. “I can make it. What day?”
“Tuesday is what we’d planned.”
“Okay.” She pressed a hand to her forehead, as if imprinting the information directly onto her brain. “I can do that.”
Man, I felt like a total dick. The friendly thing to do would be to insist that she stay home, deal with her stressors. But, selfishly, I wanted her to get away from this place, to come up to the cabin and decompress a bit. I was self-centered enough to believe that I could keep her thoughts distracted from whatever she worried over.
When the movie ended, Navy picked up the blanket and immediately began folding it. “In a hurry?” I asked, not wanting to press but feeling concerned anyway.
“I have to leave in about twenty minutes.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans and looked sheepishly at me.
“Oh.” I pressed a hand against my chest. “Are you kicking me out, Navy Jane?”
Putting her hand over mine, she laughed. “Yes. Sorry, giving you the boot.”
“The Adorables will be here alone? I can stay if you need me to.”
“No, I’ll only be gone a couple hours. Besides, I can tell from the loud music,” she pointed to the ceiling directly over our heads, “that Jade at least is already fast asleep.” She shrugged away, turning off the television and removing the DVD from the player. “Thanks, though. Call you tomorrow?”
At least she was telling me she’d call me. “Sure.”
I packed up the remainder of the Chinese, putting it into the fridge and then wiped down the table. I was unsettled. Navy didn’t not tell me things. But there she was, waiting by the front door as if getting me out was the only thing she wanted to do.
Despite the emotional distance that had suddenly appeared between us, I grabbed her and hugged her tightly. “You’ll call me tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Her voice was muffled against my shirt.
As I started to pull away, her hands gripped momentarily tighter, so I stayed, holding her, until she was ready to let me go.
12
NAVY
A fresh rain had covered the ground in puddles, filling in the potholes that I kept accidentally driving into as I made my way across the parking lot of the bus station. I was fifteen minutes early, but since I hadn’t spoken to Violet since her stop in Salt Lake City, I was worried I was already late. There were a half dozen other cars in the parking lot waiting, their windshield wipers beating against the downpour. I wished I could call her, ask what mile marker she’d passed, but she would be there—I knew. Mostly, I just was impatient to hear her voice again. The fact that she didn’t have a cell phone anymore was incredibly inconvenient, and we’d need to remedy that first thing in the morning before I went into work.
Five minutes until arrival, a bus pulled into the parking lot and came to a stop in front of the building. I watched tired bodies climb down the steps, holding my breath until I saw her.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I’d known her for her entire life, I might not have recognized her at first. She wore baggy sweats and a sweater, and the shock of bleached hair caught the lights under the awning. This wasn’t my sister.
I exited the car, making my way to her. She hadn’t seen me yet among the other bodies swarming the bus and its passengers.
“Violet!” I called out, holding a hand up high. Her head turned and in less than five seconds she was in my arms.
It was nearly impossible to tell, but when I hugged her, she felt somehow smaller than the last time I’d hugged her, eight months before. My hands grazed up her back, meeting shoulder blades that seemed to protrude more than I remembered.
Violet pulled back, her bleached hair scratching my nose.
“W
as the ride cold?” I asked as she pulled the hoodie up to cover her hair. She must have been wearing multiple layers, judging by the sleeves that peeked out from under the sweatshirt’s wrist holes. It was late spring and not unseasonably warm. There was no need for the layers.
“Where’d you park?” she asked, looking everywhere except at me.
“I have Aunt Isabel’s car,” I explained, leading her to it with a hand across her back. “You hungry or anything?”
“Yes,” she said on an exhale. “I’m starving. Twenty bucks doesn’t buy you much over two days of traveling.”
“I could’ve sent you money.”
“I didn’t have a phone and had no way to get the money before the bus ride.” She said it like I was dense, for not thinking of that, and she refused to look at me. I was used to my sisters being mouthy and rude, but Violet wasn’t normally like that with me.
I bit my tongue to keep from saying, if you had told me what was going on, I would’ve figured something out. It wasn’t a promise I knew I could grant for certain, though.
I unlocked the car and opened her door. “Wait, where’s your bags?”
“Just this.” She patted the side pack that was so empty, I hadn’t noticed it pressing against her. She climbed into the seat and buckled immediately.
Our ride home was mostly silent apart from the quick stop at a fast food restaurant for a couple cheeseburgers and a soda. After inhaling both, Violet settled into her seat so that she was angled away from me, looking out the window. When we exited the highway and were stopped in town at a red light, I saw the streetlights flash over her face. As if sensing I was staring, she turned and asked, “Where are we going?”
“Home. Auntie’s house. She’s out of town.”
“That’s right. The twins are there too?”
I nodded. “They should be asleep.”
“Where am I sleeping?”
“Auntie’s room, with me.”
“I’m guessing Jade and Rose finally got their own rooms after I moved out.”
“Yep. Now that they have their own rooms, can you guess whose room is cleaner?”
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