The A-Word

by Joy Preble

  Donny was about six feet of packed muscle, light brown hair, green eyes, and a white-toothed smile. He treated Lanie like a queen. Whatever they did or didn’t do together, you never heard him talk about it. He was probably good to his mother, too. According to Casey, Donny managed to postpone a midterm for everyone in his government class by arguing nonstop that if we banned guns, Congress would probably ban airplanes and the terrorists would win. The teacher gave up and left the classroom because “lunkhead idiots don’t shut up.” I’m still unclear about whether those were the teacher’s words or Casey’s. What I do know: the seniors had recently nominated Donny Sneed for class president.

  Spring Creek and Forest Ridge lined up. The coaches were pacing like Ryan, talking into their headsets.

  “Bootleg,” my brother muttered. “Gotta be a bootleg play. Sneed can do that.”

  The band was wailing up a storm and the cheerleaders were chanting, “What about? What about? What about the color shout?” which I suppose they felt was helpful.

  I wasn’t sure what a bootleg play was. Did Donny know? Donny reared his arm back like he was going to pass left to the running back.

  “Do it!” shouted my brother.

  The pass was faked. Donny still had the ball. He dodged right behind the defensive linemen.

  “Get downfield!” my brother bellowed. “North and south!”

  I guess this meant keep running toward the goal line, because that’s what Donny did—right through the gap in Forest Ridge’s coverage. He was almost free and clear, when number sixty-eight from Forest Ridge broke free and sped after him. He was fast. Faster than the track guys I used to watch. Too fast. He dove for Donny. It was all over. I knew it.

  “Uh-oh,” Maggie said.

  “Aw, shit,” said my brother. “Idiot.”

  Number sixty-eight lunged.

  Casey leaned across the fence, stretching out an arm. He blew a breath.

  Later, number sixty-eight would tell everyone that some jerk from our school had somehow sabotaged him, messed with his cleats when he wasn’t looking, and that’s why he tripped. But anyone with eyes could see that both his shoelaces came undone only while he was closing in—undone in such a lace-flapping frenzy that there was no way you could miss it. And trip he did. He fell at Donny’s heels.

  The impact must have set Donny off-balance, because he started stumbling, too.

  “Jesus Christ,” my brother muttered.

  Out on the field, Lanie Phelps gave a girlie yelp.

  Donny righted himself—the crowd cheered like wild people—and then he was running across the goal line.

  Touchdown. Victory. The score was twenty-three to fifteen. We kicked the extra point to twenty-four and not long after that the buzzer sounded. I eyeballed my brother.

  “Thought you hated him,” I whispered in Casey’s ear. Not that I had to lower my voice. No one could hear me with all the joyful shouting.

  “I do,” he said. “Fuck.”

  Then everyone rushed the field even though it wasn’t allowed, and we pushed on through the gate with them, across the cinder track to the turf, the crowd hooting and hollering about how great Donny had done. How he’d won the game by himself.

  But he hadn’t done it by himself. Casey had used his angel mojo to help him.

  Lanie Phelps ran toward Donny. He grabbed her up in a celebratory hug, her blonde, pink-ribboned ponytail flying behind her.

  Casey started walking toward them. My heart flung itself into my neck, beating like crazy. What was he up to? Maybe I didn’t want to find out. If it were me, I’d want to pound the guy’s face. But I wasn’t an angel. On the other hand, even angelized, my brother was an unpredictable sort.

  I dashed after him. “Let’s go,” I said, tugging his arm.

  Which was when Maggie, scurrying at my side, elbowed me in the ribs. “Look at Casey,” she whispered.

  His skin wasn’t just radiant, it was glowing. He didn’t have the same shifting shadows on his face as the rest of us did. There were no shadows. Just an invisible sun fixed solely on him, illuminating every feature.

  “Those new stadium lights are amazing,” I hollered in case anyone else was looking, which other than my best friend, they were not. They were too busy congratulating Donny for something he hadn’t exactly done. Donny hugged Lanie closer. He pulled off his helmet and kissed her rumpled, blonde, sweaty cheerleading hair.

  I tugged at Casey’s hand again, agitated. He must have gotten the hint because the glow vanished. But then that angelic calm of his flowed through me, even though I didn’t want it to. Touching him was warm. It was a good warmth, like settling back into a beach chair at sunset. I could almost feel that invisible sun on my face. Everything faded comfortably. Even Maggie, blinking at Casey, was befuddled.

  And then the world came rushing back. My brother slipped from my grasp and strode quickly to Donny and Lanie—who turned to Casey with so many emotions in her eyes I needed a calculator to keep up with them.

  I held my breath. All the calmness I’d felt had become panic, now that Casey had let me go. He clapped Donny on the shoulder pads.

  “Good job, Sneed,” he said. His lips twitched, but he kept a straight face. “You won the game for us. You’re the man.”

  My shoulders sagged.

  Okay, it wasn’t that funny. But it was sort of funny.

  Then a voice to my left said, “Jenna.”

  My heart stopped in mid-beat. Ryan Sloboda.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. He was sweaty. His hair was standing up every which way. There was a huge smudge of dirt on his cheek. But he was looking at me. Not at the coaches or Donny or anyone else. At me.

  He grinned.

  My mouth went dry. The Frito pie congealed in my belly.

  “I’m going to call you, okay?” Ryan said. He was calm and matter-of-fact about it.

  “Okay,” I told Ryan. My heart pranced around my chest like one of those show ponies.

  My brother continued telling Donny Sneed what a hotshot player he was, while Lanie looked on, discombobulated. Why was her ex being nice? I had the same question, but screw it: Ryan Sloboda was going to call me!

  Of course then Coach Collins stomped up and told Ryan he needed to get his ass to the field house. “You too, Sneed,” he added.

  “Hey, Casey,” Ryan said to my brother as he hustled off. “Good game, huh?”

  Casey’s face went blank. Then he frowned. Bad sign.

  “I gotta pee,” Maggie announced, which definitely broke the already breaking mood. Casey told her we’d meet her at the car.

  WE WALKED BRISKLY toward the Merc, not because we were rushing, but I think because it made Casey feel like we were doing something normal people would do. He avoided my eyes. The glow was long gone. We lounged under the parking lot lights while people searched out their cars and the knots of traffic wound to the street. I wanted to think about Ryan Sloboda. But Casey had made that impossible.

  “Why did you help him?” I asked. “Donny, I mean. You did, right?” Maybe I was wrong.

  My brother heaved a sigh, like an old man. He looked tired, even though I knew he would never be either old or tired again.

  “What am I supposed to do? Let Lanie be saddled with a loser? She’s top-of-the-class. Already accepted to UT. Then vet school, if she gets in, which I know she will. Did I tell you that? That she wants to be a vet? He’s Sneed. But he’s good to her. He’s good. Better him than most of the other numbnuts around here …” His voice faded. “She’ll see that when she’s in vet school.”

  A million sharp-tongued comments froze on my tongue.

  Casey nudged me with a smirk. “Least it’s funny for me, right? Knowing he would have fallen flat on his face?”

  “Ha ha,” I said, not laughing.

  He didn’t respond, just rubbed at his back where I knew his retracted wings sat. Something tightened inside me.

  “Do you always know they’re there?” I whispered.

  Casey’
s gaze shot to mine.

  We didn’t talk about it much. Or at all. Maybe since I knew he was grounded because he’d used his earthly flight to save me. Crazy angel rules.

  “I guess,” he said after a bit. “Yeah. I do. I guess that’s part of it. Of being—”

  “How did it feel?” I interrupted. “Flying?” So much had happened since last year that it had felt like just one more thing to talk about. But suddenly I needed to know.

  “Amazing,” he said, and it surprised me. His voice was deep and sincere in the way he wasn’t always with me, even now. “I could feel them stretch out and become part of me. Like my body welcomed them or something. Does that make sense? And then there I was—in the air flying toward you. I’d never … God, Jenna. It was the best thing ever. Like I was made for it.”

  I knew then the other reason we didn’t talk about it. It was just another thing he loved and couldn’t have, another thing he now had to miss forever.

  Across the parking lot, I spied Maggie hurrying toward us. I waved my arm and she waved back. Somewhere in those two short motions, my brother’s smile faded.

  “I’m not ever gonna be good enough, am I?” he asked, looking everywhere but my face. “That’s the real reason I’m still here, isn’t it? They turned me into … this.” He gestured down his body with his hands. “And I saved you. What the hell was I supposed to do? Let you die? They sent me back and made me your guardian, and when you needed me I was there. And now what? I’m stuck here forever. That’s what I think. Me but not me. Able to look and not touch. Wings I can’t use. Screw this, Jenna. Screw it all.”

  I started to reach for him and stopped, knowing that if I touched him I wouldn’t feel normal, here, present. “You’ll figure it out.”

  We both knew I was lying, but what else could I say?

  My brother tilted his face toward the top of the light pole at the end of the aisle. The fluorescent glow increased its brightness, flooding the parking lot with fake light, stronger and stronger.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “Why? What difference will it make? What difference will I make? Isn’t that the whole point? For me to make a difference?”

  “There’s a reason,” I said, lying again.

  But by then Maggie had arrived, and he gave up and drove us all home.

  Mom was in the kitchen, busy with speech therapist paperwork (she always seemed to be working these days) when we trooped in the door. Also, talking on her cell.

  “Your father won’t be here for your birthday,” she said, glancing up. “He’s staying in Austin.” She waved the phone at me like a baton.

  “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” my father singsonged in my ear.

  “It’s tomorrow, Dad.”

  “So I’m the first one to tell you.”

  That was one way of looking at it.

  “Lot going on here,” he said when I stayed quiet.

  I almost laughed. A lot going on here, too, Dad. I wondered what he meant. Our father was a reporter who split his time between the Houston Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman, sportswriting mostly, but he’d branched out to politics, among other things. He’d recently published a piece in the Sunday Statesman about this group of people who wanted Texas to secede from the Union. Texas had been its own country once, so this was not as odd as it seemed.

  “Crazies plotting to overthrow the government again?” I asked him.

  My father grunted. “That’s not what it’s about, Jenna.”

  “Then what’s keeping you from coming home?”

  This stumped him enough that we said our goodbyes, and he promised—ha!—he would try for the following weekend.

  Here is what neither of us said but understood completely: odds were, he would have left us years ago, anyway. Even if Mom’s boss, Dr. Renfroe, hadn’t given him a megadose of memory-losing drugs because Dad started investigating Renfroe’s nefarious activities. (Nefarious is not a favorite word of mine, but it is on the SAT list, and it means evil and conniving. Like a person who’d keep drugging ailing oldsters and justify it in the name of scientific research.) Because what father would admit to his children that their life together actually had never been enough? Sometimes your family is falling apart even before the cracks are evident.

  “You sleeping over?” Mom asked Maggie while Dad was telling me he loved me.

  “If that’s okay,” Maggie said, even though of course it was.

  “It’s Jenna’s birthday in a few hours,” Mom told her. “She gets to have whatever she wants.”

  This was more optimistic than even I could manage.

  “How was the game?” Mom directed this to Casey. What she probably wanted to say but didn’t: Why don’t you go back to playing football now that you look so great and you’ve quit one of your jobs since I’m working again and not comatose? Followed by the part where she might ask why that nice Lanie Phelps wasn’t coming around anymore like she had been a few months back.

  “We won,” my brother said.

  “Jenna’s outfit was a hit,” Maggie observed.

  Mom’s eyes narrowed. She scanned me up and down and up again. “Hmm,” she said, then cut her glance to Casey as his cell vibrated like a fire alarm in his pocket.

  “It’s fine,” he hissed into the phone. “Don’t you worry.”

  On the other end, loud enough that we could hear it, Amber Velasco was saying something in the annoyed, high-pitched, East Texas drawl she slips into when she’s peeved.

  Lately, with my brother, it had been her normal tone.

  Even Maggie recognized it. “What’s up with her and your brother?” she whispered. Mom went back to the mess of documents in front of her. “Is there something going on that you aren’t telling me?”

  “You want to order pizza?” I asked her. Maggie still thought Amber was just the wacky EMT who pulled us out of our Prius wreck. And that was all she was ever allowed to think, for her own good. “ ’Cause if you’re waiting for my brother to make sense, you’ll be waiting till the Second Coming.”

  This seemed to satisfy Mags, who started rattling off topping choices. As for me, I was sorry I’d put it that way. Our family had never been what you would call religious, but let’s face it: once your brother comes back from the dead as your guardian angel, you begin to wonder about things. Like what would happen if I brought my brother to Maggie’s Sunday school class for show and tell.

  “I’m going out,” Casey said, shoving his phone in his pocket.

  Mom looked up. “It’s almost midnight.”

  Casey strode toward the back door. “Won’t be long. Bryce needs me to help close over at BJ’s. Someone went home sick.”

  At the kitchen table, Mom steepled her fingers. “You work too many hours,” she said.

  “You want Domino’s?” I asked Maggie. “Or Papa John’s?”

  Casey slammed the door behind him.

  “You want me to order for you, too?” I asked Mom. She shook her head.

  “I’ll get one with pineapple and Canadian bacon,” I said. “Just in case.”

  Mom was looking at her hands. “He wouldn’t have to work so many hours if your father were here.”

  I stood there. On the one hand, I knew full well Casey wasn’t going to work. He was going to meet Amber somewhere or do something that Amber had told him needed doing. On the other hand, my father was being a douchebag even if he was providing income again. He was still renting an apartment in Austin. That wasn’t coming cheap.

  It was Maggie who saved us. “So who invented pineapple pizza anyway?” she asked. “Not the Italians, right?”

  “I’ll ask the delivery guy,” I said.

  Mom smiled. Then her forehead wrinkled. “Did you leave this house with your blouse unbuttoned like that?”

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. “Gotta check this,” I said, and her wrinkle deepened.

  It was Ryan texting. Call u tomorrow?

  My heart leapt.

  K I typed back.


  He texted again with a smiley face. The winky-eyed one. This time my heart waved its jazz hands. It hadn’t done jazz hands in a long time.

  BY THE TIME we crawled into bed—Maggie on one side and me on the other—I was ready to puke. We had consumed most of a pineapple pizza (the Domino’s guy did not know who invented it) and half a cheese. Also chocolate chip cookie dough sundaes. My mother had taken one thin slice of pineapple to her room.

  My brother was still not home.

  “Jenna,” Maggie said as I turned off the light. “Something weird is going on with Casey, isn’t it?” She leaned up on an elbow and peered at me in the dark. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  I didn’t answer. What could I say?

  Then: “Are you?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I lied.

  Maggie burped. Not long after that she passed out in a food coma.

  This is the fortunate thing about having a best friend who, in her own words, “Treats her body like a temple.” Load the temple’s altar with Frito pie and Hawaiian pizza and ice cream, and you don’t have to tell her much of anything. The temple’s too busy digesting. But I had stretched my own personal limits getting her there.

  I lay awake for a long time rubbing my overindulged belly and listening until finally, sometime after three, I heard my brother’s footsteps on the stairs.

  I tiptoed into the hallway. “Where have you been?” I whispered.

  “Go to sleep,” Casey said. He opened the door to his room and started to step inside.

  “That’s not fair,” I said. I was no longer feeling sorry for him.

  “That’s the way it is.”

  He closed the door behind him.

  Then he opened it again. “Hey. It’s Saturday. Happy birthday.” He winced. “And brush your damn teeth. If you’re gonna have a boyfriend, you can’t have pineapple pizza breath.”

  “Don’t talk to me about personal habits. Listen, I can get my learner’s permit now.” If he wasn’t going to tell me the truth, then I needed to focus on something he could do. “You can take me Monday, right?”