Seven Sins

by Piper Lennox

  “Can’t imagine why.” Most of this yoga lesson has consisted of me swatting his hands off my butt, breasts, and whatever other body part gets within his reach.

  I guide him through a few sun salutations, listening closely to make sure his breathing stays synced with mine. “Good. See? Don’t you feel relaxed?”

  When I go down into child’s pose, he covers my body with his.

  I throw him off, both of us laughing until a sharp beat of thunder cracks the air. It makes me yelp, but Van just cheers.

  “All right, a thunderstorm. You know what that means.” He shakes out the towel while I roll up the mat, then tucks both under his arm. “No yoga, no skating—nothing to do but fuck.”

  “That’s all we’ve done for three days.” We’re still in Missouri. Our drive time has taken a serious hit. Now that we’ve given ourselves permission to touch each other, it’s all we really want to do.

  Like now, when he spins me in the parking lot, backs me up against the hot metal of the car door, and kisses me.

  “Haven’t done anything here, yet,” he grins devilishly.

  “What about the thunderstorm?”

  “Even a flood couldn’t stop me.” He shuts his eyes and leans in fast for another kiss.

  I open the door behind me, both of us falling inside.

  “Just for that,” he grunts, while I’m stuck under him and the weight of my own laughter, “no music.”

  “No!” I grab his arm while he climbs past me and stashes the yoga mat and beach towel. “You promised.”

  He didn’t. Not officially. Van really doesn’t make promises, anymore.

  But I still know he meant what he told me before we fell asleep last night: that he’d play his harmonica for me today, for the first time in years.

  “Fine,” he sighs, throwing himself on the bed and grabbing the harmonica from my electronics shelf. I stay right where I am, legs thrown over the edge of the Transit out the open door, even when I start feeling rain drops.

  The melodic howl pierces the air. It’s a slow, happy kind of song, and I know that’s what he’s feeling.

  Time has stopped. He’s glad he’s here with me.

  Afterwards, he sits up and lowers the instrument from his mouth a little at a time, like he’s not sure if he wants to keep playing or not. “You’re getting rained on.”

  “I know.” I point my toes. “I don’t mind. It feels nice.”

  He kicks off his shoes and joins me. Drop by drop, the dust on his calves streaks away and reveals the bronzed skin underneath. He didn’t even go skating, today. He just always seems to have dirt on him after he goes outside. Like he’s magnetized, and it can’t stay away from him. Or maybe the reverse.

  When the rain picks up, he steps out to let it engulf him.

  “I’ve got both my parents’ last names,” he shouts to me, “because my mom wanted me to remember no matter how much Durham blood I had in me…I had hers, too.”

  He cups some rainwater in his hands and scrubs his face, shaking out his hair before he looks at me. “In other words, to remind me I’ve always got a minimum of two choices. No matter the situation. No matter how I feel like reacting.”

  He swings his arms down. I read his tattoos to myself. They’re in the wrong order, from my point-of-view—Andresco, then Durham. But not when he looks at them.

  “My dad used to be a really big asshole,” he finishes, licking the water off his lips. “Then he met my mom. She fixed him.”

  “People don’t fix each other. They just help each other see something needs fixing.”

  Thunder rumbles overhead the second I start talking; a zigzag of lightning slices the sky in half, spooking Van back into the Transit while we both laugh. He dives right on top of me and soaks me to the bone.

  I shove him off and shut the door.

  “Sorry,” he pants, “what’d you say?”

  “Nothing.” In the last two seconds, I realized I don’t want to correct him.

  We might both be a little right and a little wrong, first of all.

  And second...I think Van just told me one thing he actually, truly believes in. Promises, apologies, karma: he casts all those notions aside.

  But he’s got faith, clearly, that people can fix each other. No matter how much I disagree, I refuse to be the person who takes that away.

  “Showed you mine,” he says. He strips off his clothes and throws them in the sink.

  I remove mine and set them in the hammock chair, but he takes them, tosses them into the driver’s seat, and tells me to sit.

  “In the hammock? Why?”

  “You’ll see.” He nods at me. “Tell me something.”

  “I can’t think of anything.” Nothing I want to talk about, right now. This moment’s too perfect: a sweltering, tiny space with him, in the middle of a summer storm, the entire world shut out.

  “Well,” he says, tilting his head to drain the water from his ears, “I told you my dad used to be an asshole, so why don’t you tell me something about your father? You’ve mentioned your mom a couple times, but never him.”

  “Oh.” I guess this answer is easy enough: “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Shit, that sucks.”

  “Thank you. But really...it’s not a big deal.” I shrug, spinning myself back and forth in the chair. “It’s not like I miss him, or whatever. Can’t miss what you never had, right?”

  “No, I meant it sucks I gave you some pretty decent intel, and all I got in return was, ‘I don’t know.’” Van grins when I laugh, but his gaze still tells me this is a serious moment.

  He’s done this many times, the last few days: happily giving me pieces of his story, totally unprompted, because he’s just so determined to get more of mine.

  And when I don’t give him a fair share, he calls me out on it.

  “Sometimes I wondered if it was our neighbor.” As fast as the lightning, Rebecca flashes through my head. “His daughter was my best friend. And we looked a lot alike.”

  Van whistles, brow creasing as he sits in front of me. His hands wrap around my ankles, spinning me back and forth when I stop doing it on my own. “You never found out for sure?”

  I shake my head.

  “Where’s your friend now?”

  “Bethesda, last I heard. But I don’t know. We don’t speak.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ah.” I press my finger to his lips. “That was an entire eye. Balance.”

  “Balance,” he sighs, then snaps at my finger, almost biting me.

  I yank my hand back and laugh, but it’s cut short when he spreads my legs apart by my ankles.

  “Speaking of balance,” he whispers, lowering his head, “let’s see if we can both keep ours, while we test the weight of this chair.”

  Twenty-Four

  “Are you positive this is the right way? The GPS can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “The GPS can take a goddamn hike. I told you, I saw the route sign. This is gonna be way faster than whatever it wanted us to take.”

  Juniper sighs like she hopes I’m right but knows I’m wrong. I reach across the aisle and flick her ear. She does it back and cites balance.

  “You sure you don’t want to pull over and let me repay you something else?” she says, all singsong and cute as hell. “I feel bad you didn’t get to finish before that security guard kicked us out of the parking lot.”

  “Pervert probably peeked in through the windshield,” I sneer, “and got jealous he wasn’t getting any action.”

  I might’ve told him as much, too, after I poked my head out of the bathroom window, and he informed me I couldn’t stay in the parking lot after five.

  When I asked him what in the hell he could possibly be authorized to do to me, Juni pulled me inside by my ear, assured the guy we’d leave, and gave me a lecture about mouthing off.

  “I’ll work on it,” I told her.

  But not tonight, apparently.

  The first car we’ve seen on
this winding country road decides fifty-five miles an hour isn’t good enough. There’s no passing zone, but that doesn’t stop him: he veers over, guns it around us, and whips back in front of us without a single warning.

  I tap the brakes. Instinct throws my arm out to the side to strap Juni to her seat, but all I get is the empty space of the aisle.

  Window down, I call some obscenities and speed up, ensuring he’ll see the middle finger I’m flying high.

  “Van,” she scolds, “that’s a little excessive.”

  “Dicks need to be called on their dickish behaviors. I’m doing a public service.”

  “Then I guess I am, too,” she says, “because you really shouldn’t give into road rage like that. All you had to do was beep at him. Look: now he’s slowing down just to make us mad.”

  “I see that. And if Eloise was a few years younger, I’d blast right past this”—I let off the gas until the car’s bumper is once again visible—“Tempo? Are you kidding me? Juni. A freaking Tempo just cut us off. We’re the slowest thing on earth, right now.”

  “Ah, but you’re forgetting your own thick skull,” she retorts, “which is absorbing my point about as fast as a sponge would soak up cold syrup.”

  When I reach out to flick her ear this time, she catches my hand and sticks it right up her shirt, leaning halfway into the aisle.

  “Damn. You play so dirty.”

  “Maybe,” she laughs, letting go, “but it worked: bet you’re not angry, anymore.”

  I haul my lead foot off the gas. The car vanishes ahead of us over a hill.

  “The compilation we posted on your page yesterday is doing really well,” she says. “Tons of views and comments.”

  “Huh. That’s…good.” I try to get excited about my social media stuff, but I just can’t. She might as well be describing the manufacturing process of shower curtain rings to me.

  “Don’t you want to hear the numbers?”

  “Unless it’s your sheets’ thread count, I couldn’t care less.”

  “You’re ridiculous.”

  “Just insatiable.”

  She laughs to herself, but I wasn’t kidding. This girl has no idea what she does to me.

  “Can I ask you a question you’re definitely going to hate?”

  “If you must.”

  The glow of her phone dims. She flips it over in her lap. “Why do you go by ‘Van Andreas’ instead of your real name?”

  “Just a skate name. Less clunky, easy to remember.” I hesitate. “Why?”

  “Have you ever considered...capitalizing on the fact you’re a Durham?”

  I feel my jaw tighten. “Like how?”

  “Going by ‘Van Durham’ in the skating community. I mean, it might help draw some traffic if people knew you were related to Wes and Delaney. And their mom, especially. Everyone knows who Billie Durham is.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t know much of anything.”

  I watch her mess with her phone some more, scattering the glow around us.

  “Decent idea…but hell no. First, if I ever replace my skate name with ‘Durham,’ you can bet I’m using ‘Andresco’ too. And second, it’d be like using my dad’s money, instead of getting by on my own. Besides, anyone who only checks me out because they remember my aunt and cousins from sitcoms and shit?” I shake my head. “They wouldn’t care about me, or my skating.”

  There it is again: that sigh like I’m wrong.

  “Fair enough. Just thought I’d throw that out there, while we’re talking about your social media.”

  “I wasn’t. You were. But I appreciate the suggestion.”

  I don’t appreciate it. Juni should know me well enough by now to understand exactly why I don’t “capitalize” on my Durham lineage. I was born into it. I didn’t earn it.

  But, for all the ways we do know each other...there’s still a lot we’re totally clueless about. Especially me.

  “Tell you what: I’ll add my real name to my YouTube video descriptions—kind of burying it in there, but not hiding it, either—if you tell me one actual thing about where you came from. None of those little peeks behind the curtain. Something real.”

  “That’s hardly a fair trade.”

  “Fine, I’ll give you something. Ask me whatever you want, and I’ll answer.”

  Juni shuts off her phone screen, unlocks her chair, and swivels to me like she’s been waiting for this all day. I’m really in for it.

  “Why don’t you believe in apologies, anymore?”

  The Transit groans. I’ve unknowingly hit the gas pedal again, my foot sinking more the longer I don’t answer.

  “For the most part, they’re totally pointless. We can’t change the past. What’s done is done. All a ‘sorry’ usually accomplishes is easing the other person’s guilt like they actually did anything worthwhile.”

  “Huh.” She pulls one foot underneath her and swivels back. “I guess I can agree with you there. That’s why I have that whole ‘balance’ thing—it’s not enough to confess and take whatever punishment comes to you. You have to try and make it right. Saying sorry is useless, if you don’t back it up.”

  “Exactly. So that’s why I stopped believing most people’s apologies: I realized how empty they are.”

  “They’re still helpful, though,” she says. “Sometimes we just need our pain acknowledged.”

  “Nope. I don’t buy it. It’s just a Get Out of Jail Free card for people’s guilty consciences.”

  The air gets a charge to it. If her chair could swivel the other way, she’d probably put her back to me, she suddenly looks so uncomfortable.

  “Are you talking about me?” she asks softly. “Because...I am sorry for what I did to you.”

  “Actually, I was talking about myself.”

  “You?” She leans forward, peering into my face. “What’d you do?”

  “I already told you. I left my mom.”

  “Van.” If her tone is any indication, her expression must be dripping with pity. “Your mom would have passed away—”

  “Died. Just say ‘died.’ I hate the euphemisms.”

  Juni takes a quiet, deep breath. “She would have died...whether you were there or not.”

  “But she wouldn’t have been alone.”

  My throat hurts. I swallow, but it makes it worse.

  “Bad enough she had to die at forty-six,” I go on, “but then to be all by herself in that penthouse, when it happened? And to have her last thoughts be about an argument with me that I can’t even remember anymore, it was so stupid?”

  The pain spreads to my eyes, but I’m not worried I’ll cry in front of her.

  Actually, I’d almost welcome that. It’d be nice to have proof my tear ducts still work.

  “So that’s what I was referring to, with the guilty conscience comment,” I tell Juni. “I can scream ‘sorry’ into the void until my voice is gone, but it wouldn’t benefit her—the person who actually needs to hear it. It would only make myself feel better. And I don’t deserve that.”

  Without thinking, my eyes flicker to the moon overhead. I know Juni’s staring at it, too.

  “Yes, you do,” she says.

  I shake my head. The road yawns in front of us, darkness swallowing us whole.

  “Wait…your dad still thinks you were with her, when it happened.” Quietly, her breath catches.

  My eyes stay glued to the horizon I can’t see.

  “You were the one who found her?” she asks.

  I tongue the wound in my mouth, where I bit it during a fall yesterday. “Yes.”

  “Van...I’m so....” She sniffs, then laughs to herself. “Well, sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But see? Don’t you feel better, in some small way, hearing a person say that?”

  “My turn’s over.” I nod at her. “Show me yours. And remember, it’s gotta be something real.”

  “Everything I’ve told you was real.”

  �
�No, not ‘real’ as in true.” My hand lifts briefly from the wheel, a shrug I’m too tired to give. “Solid. Gritty. Maybe even ugly. A piece that stops hinting at the story, and actually gives me a good idea of what you came from.”

  Minutes tick by as she thinks. “My mom was young, when she had me.”

  “Interesting. But not good enough.” I beckon her for more. “Something else.”

  “Okay,” she says slowly. “Uh...I stopped real schooling when I was twelve. All my lessons after that were for cooking and housework.”

  “Juniper, come on.”

  “What do you want me to say, Van?”

  “I want you to stop giving me these little nothing details that, yeah, are intriguing as hell, but don’t really tell me a damn thing about who you used to be. I already knew your education was weird: that was made abundantly clear when you could thread my mom’s old sewing machine like a goddamn Nascar pit crew, but couldn’t power up a laptop. Don’t tell me what I already know.”

  “Would you care to take over, then? There’s obviously some answer you’re just over there waiting for. By all means, clue me in.”

  I hit the wheel with my palm and bite my cheek to keep from yelling. Amazing how different the last few days have felt…but one prod into the past, and here we are.

  Weirdly enough, I think she’s the angrier one this time. It’s hard to tell. Mine builds and bursts into flames; hers simmers indefinitely.

  Maybe it would do her good to turn it up a little. Let it explode.

  “You told me to stop giving you details.” Her voice is small. Not exactly quiet, but compressed, just like the rest of her as she shrinks into herself. Just like she used to.

  “But in the end, that’s what you’ve been giving me. Right? Details. Pieces. That’s what we agreed to. And that’s all I can give you right now.”

  “Can?” I challenge. “Or will?”

  “Both. And I’m not going to let you bully me into—”

  “Don’t call me that.” My pulse seeps through my head, pounding on every inch of my skull. “Never again. And after all we’ve been through, if you can’t trust me enough to just get it all out there, then maybe we….”