by Joy Preble
“It’s funny—the movie with all of them, I mean. The dialogue—like with Hulk and Loki. It cracks me up, and … they’re superheroes. See, that’s the thing I like about Tony Stark. He isn’t supernatural. He’s just a guy in a suit who’s totally smart. But he’s committed to saving the world. He hangs on no matter what. You don’t get to have that in the real world, you know. You don’t just wake up the next day and have powers. I mean the closest I ever come to feeling like that is in football.”
This is what came rushing out of Ryan like a river of words. It could have flummoxed me because I could certainly tell him stories about someone who had woken up with powers, but instead it made me feel happier than I had in a very long time.
“Or this one time when I was little,” he went on. “My Grandpa Dale in Fort Worth entered me in Mutton Busting at the rodeo. I hung on to that damn sheep for my life. I didn’t let go even after the buzzer rang. And they were picking me up and parading me around, and I know it’s just a stupid kid’s thing, but that feeling … I was just five but I knew I wanted to grow up and have things that I just didn’t let go of, you know? Important things. I guess it reminds me of that.”
I was fumbling for something to say when Ryan leaned in, closing the space between us. “Jenna,” he said. “Can I kiss you?”
My heart thrashed like a fish on a line. I nodded. “Yeah. I mean yes.”
A million thoughts had been dancing in my brain: Did he like me? Was my breath fresh? Was that really Axe he’d spritzed on himself?
Now there was only one. He was going to kiss me. He had asked to kiss me.
He dipped his head and our foreheads bumped. My pulse was doing NASCAR laps. Ryan reached out and rested his hands on my shoulders. Had he done this before? How many girls had he kissed? I knew he’d made out with that Mia Ross at Cammie Northrup’s party in 8th grade, but it’s not like I’d paid attention back then.
His face hovered over me. I had never thought there was any amount of Axe cologne that was good, but now I did. It was the perfect amount. My nostrils filled with boy. With Ryan Sloboda who was about to kiss me, his hands warm and firm on my shoulders. Then his lips touched mine. The lightest of kisses at first, like he wasn’t quite sure it was okay even though he knew it was because he HAD ASKED and I had said YES. Then his hands moved, trailing down my back, setting electrical fires on my skin, pulling me closer.
Holy hell.
His lips were soft and solid at the same time, which was a wonderful thing. He tasted like cupcake frosting, or maybe he always tasted sweet—only I hadn’t known until now. He opened his lips a little and I did the same. It was like warm butterflies everywhere. I moved my hands up to cup the back of his neck, felt the stubble of his haircut with my fingertips while his hands rested, warmed and pressure-y, at the small of my back.
I’d never been kissed at all. I used to feel backward about that, like I wasn’t keeping up with the pack. But now my brain announced: you were just waiting for the boy who would kiss you the right way. I thought I would die of nerves and pleasure right there on our driveway in the orange light from the Gilroys’ fake Halloween graveyard.
I opened my eyes, and he backed away enough that I could pay attention. He swallowed. I watched, dizzy. Did he know it was my first real kiss? Could he tell? My general impression was that once I kissed him back, I could have had a third eyeball in the middle of my head and he might not have noticed.
“Will you go out with me?” he asked. His voice was firm about it, which I liked. “And I’ll take you to Homecoming, too, okay—?”
“Jesus Christ!”
That one wasn’t me. It wasn’t Ryan, either.
“What do you think you’re doing, Jenna?” My brother advanced across our lawn at a fast clip, eyes on me, like Ryan wasn’t even standing there. “We’re going to dinner soon,” he said. He looked me up and down. My lips were still in full tingle from the kissing, and my signature shirt had come untucked from my signature jeans. I contemplated all the ways I could kill him. Unfortunately, he was already dead.
Ryan just smiled. “I’ll call you later,” he said. “Keep your phone on. Okay? Happy birthday.” And waited until I mumbled some agreeing sound before he swaggered off, all Tony Stark quippy-like, tossing a “See you later, Samuels” to my brother as he went.
I swear I heard him whistle.
“Jesus Christ,” my brother said again. It seemed to be his go-to response.
I wondered vaguely if he was getting angel demerits. Then I figured Management had enough on its hands with Bo Shivers and all his damn balcony leaping. Bo Shivers probably kissed a bunch of girls in his day and didn’t care if he left them wondering.
After that, we drove to Sake City and ate California rolls and Mexico rolls (which had jalapeño) and something called a torpedo roll, which had pretty much everything including avocado. My lips tingled from the kissing and the wasabi.
The waiters got together and sang “Happy Birthday” and put a candle in a bowl of edamame. Nice touch, Mom.
Ryan texted while we were eating. I had my phone on silent on my lap. He wanted to meet me at break time Monday in the Commons area.
Hope you like the last cupcake. ~R
I did let slip that Ryan was taking me to Homecoming. Mom allowed that maybe we should buy me a dress, and did Forever 21 have something that would work since that’s where my gift card was from? I said I would look into it. Casey was texting through this discussion. I wondered if it was to Lanie.
After that we went home. Or rather, Casey dropped us off and said he had something to do. He did not elaborate. If it was angel business he couldn’t say it in front of Mom. Of course, Mom didn’t blink about this, which pissed me off even though I should have just let it go. So I stood on the driveway after she’d gone inside, thinking that my birthday was almost over and that all told it had been a good one. Also, my lips were remembering Ryan’s.
Mrs. Gilroy was out front, perusing her fake graveyard. Her paint cans and brushes were stacked against a pine tree.
“Looking spooky,” I told her.
“Having trouble finishing,” she said. “MJ’s been under the weather, and my arthritis is acting up. The rest of those gravestones will have to wait till tomorrow.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to say. A thought fluttered: Mrs. Gilroy was old. Bo Shivers was older. This disturbed me in more ways than my brain could handle.
Eventually, I went inside.
I showered. I got in bed. I texted Maggie. She called and I told her everything about Ryan’s kissing. It made me feel less bad about not telling her all the other stuff.
Here is what I did not do: fall asleep. My brain was whirring with Ryan and his lips and the fact that I had a BOYFRIEND now.
By midnight I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to sleep.
By 2 A.M. I was positive.
I got up. I peeked into Casey’s room. He was still gone.
This is how I decided that I would sneak outside and surprise Mrs. Gilroy by painting the rest of those tombstones. She’d left the Halloween lights on, so it was pretty damn bright out there.
I was putting the finishing touches on BELOVED AUNT MATILDA, FELLED BY AN OAK TREE (which I thought was a nice addition, to add the cause of fake Aunt Matilda’s demise) when Amber Velasco trotted out of the darkness. I tried not to jump.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Painting gravestones,” I said. Wasn’t it obvious? “It’s two in the morning. So now I’ll ask you the same question.”
Amber glanced at Mrs. Gilroy’s yard, then back at me. She didn’t answer.
“Where’s Casey?” I demanded.
She didn’t know. At least that’s what she said. Suddenly, I suspected that he might be at Bo’s. There was more to Bo’s role in things, I knew, and so did Casey, and there was only so much he could take before he went and did something dumb. Since there was nothing I could do about it, I decided not to obsess over it.
A
mber chewed on her lip for a bit, then said, “Sorry I left … like that.” She stopped there. Apologies weren’t Amber’s strong suit. “I hope it went well with Ryan.”
“He brought cupcakes,” I said. “We’re going out now,” I added. I left out the kissing. She hadn’t apologized enough for that.
“Oh,” said Amber. “Well, good.” She looked at her boots.
“Want to do one?” I held out the second paintbrush. Terry’s necklace was framed on her chest in the V from the open buttons of her shirt.
We painted in silence for awhile. Amber came up with: SULLY ANDERSON: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.
I did one that said: FIDO. BEST DOG IN HEAVEN.
Every now and then, Amber would reach up and touch that silver and turquoise cross, as if to make sure it was still there.
“You know,” I said, dipping my brush in the paint to start another stone. “Just because someone gives you something, doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Doesn’t mean you owe them anything.”
Amber moved to the last unpainted tombstone. “Your brother gave you your life,” she said, so soft I almost didn’t hear her. “But you’re absolutely right. I need you to remember what you just told me.”
It took a minute for all that to sink in. Because she had just told me that I didn’t owe Casey anything. “You ever gonna tell me what really happened to you?” I whispered. The words were out and I had no way of pulling them back in. Truth: I didn’t want to.
Amber was silent again, for so long that I began to think that either she hadn’t heard me or she was not going to answer, which amounted to the same thing.
But then she said, “I can’t,” after which she added, “Because I don’t know.” And the way she said it, I knew she was telling the truth.
“Bo knows,” she said.
I had never been one for schemes. Before the AI (Angel Incident), I didn’t have a need for plotting and planning. I went to school. I hung out with Maggie. I watched TV, and I listened to music, and I annoyed my brother—and a long time ago I went with my dad to taste food at restaurants when he was writing his BBQ trail book.
Even after things went bad and then worse, even after he disappeared and Mom spaced out and stopped working or caring, I didn’t think, “Hey, I’m going to dig into this. I’m going to solve this.” (Not even when I first got so sick because of the poison. Granted, I could barely function.) We looked for Dad, of course. We hoped that he would come back. It’s not like we didn’t DO THINGS. But eventually, I moved on. He was still missing, but I put it in the back of my head where it whirred like the guts in Casey’s laptop—eating up brain space and making me feel sad. But really, what could I do about it? Back then I was dying, and Mom was fading, and Casey was hanging out with Dave and smoking weed and working two jobs and actively failing most of his classes even though he was whip smart. That’s just the way it was.
Until the AI, I kept things on automatic. I got myself up. I got myself to school. I kept up my grades. I kept up appearances that we WERE FINE. Since we definitely were NOT, that particular job took a damn lot of energy. I ate the occasional stray snickerdoodle from Dave’s Mamaw Nell. Things like high school—or a social life or a boyfriend—seemed far off, like Mars or Uranus, or Pluto, which wasn’t even a planet anymore. If I thought about the future, it was this fuzzy thing, like static on a broken TV.
Now, thanks to my brother, there was a future. Except that he was technically dead and there was this ENTIRE WORLD that no one else knew existed except for me. A world of glowing dead folk with Spidey senses that might work and wings that did work and an Angel Management System that had more loopholes and secret rules than the US tax system.
Maybe that’s why right now, I felt different. I might not have my learner’s permit yet—although hopefully Casey would cart me over there on Monday—but I had helped catch an actual bad guy last year. It hadn’t gone that well, but I had done it. I had helped my brother solve the mystery of what had happened to our family. I had always been a strong Texan girl, but I was stronger now because of it. Now when I took care of myself, it was conscious, not just going through the motions. I knew what was out there. And I knew that I had to BE AWARE. Plus, I had kissed Ryan Sloboda like I’d always imagined a kiss should be! Better, even!
If I could manage all those things, I could certainly help Amber Velasco figure out what had happened to her five years ago. Because no one should be in the dark about their own truths. Even people who sometimes annoy the hell out of you. That is what I figured when I woke up, after Amber had left and after I heard Casey stomp into his room around four. And that’s why I needed a scheme. So:
• I would spend some quality time researching newspaper reports from the day five years ago when Amber had her own life-changing AI. This would be a little tricky. Yes, there had been a break-in, but technically nobody was hurt. When Terry came home, she was sitting in the mess. (Of course she was dead. And Bo had already talked to her. But Terry didn’t know.) That was the problem: no living person but me knew.
• If I figured out something, I would get Casey to take me to Austin to follow up. My opinion was this: Amber didn’t know because she didn’t want to know. Or she was afraid of knowing, which I totally understood. I wasn’t sure what was going on between her and Bo Shivers, but she was afraid of him, too. Maybe because he had been there when her whole life turned into something else.
• Whatever the truth was, I needed to find it. There were problems I couldn’t solve. I couldn’t put my family back together unless my father decided he wanted to come home full-time. I couldn’t have my brother the way he used to be. I couldn’t stop him from getting worked up over Lanie Phelps. I was hard-pressed to find a way to track down Renfroe and Manny again. But Amber’s death? That was doable.
By one in the afternoon, here is what I had discovered about Amber:
• The only mention of the robbery was a small article in the local news section of the Austin American-Statesman. She was referred to as a student named A. Velasco. Her full first name was not given. But it had to be her.
• The article also named the address—and after digging some more, I discovered a record of the sale of the apartment building two months later. I guess it had been notable because it was by the UT campus and not far from all the hip places on Guadalupe and Lamar and 6th Street—so it was worth a bucket of money.
• Amber Velasco had no other mention online from that time or any other.
This did not surprise me, since both Casey and I had tried looking her up before on personal stuff like Facebook or Tumblr. Casey said Management did their best to wipe out reference once you were no longer exactly human. I guess the A. Velasco had slipped by them somehow. I had no problem believing this was possible. My brother still appreciated a toke of weed now and then to settle himself, so I knew the A-word community wasn’t all-knowing.
Terry McClain, on the other hand, was all over the web. For starters, there was his blog: Of Mice and Men. He hadn’t posted in over a year, but back five years ago he was writing up a storm. Stuff about Comic Con—he favored Star Trek over Battlestar Galactica, although he rattled on for so long that I think I fell asleep with my eyes open—and a series of posts that talked about his work testing drugs on mice.
This gave me pause. I remembered how he experimented with the tainted vitamins that Renfroe was giving Mom. He fed them to his mice, and they forgot to look for cheese. Of course that hadn’t happened yet when he was blogging.
Another series proclaimed his undying love for the South Congress doughnut truck. For each day that week, he talked about doughnuts. Sweet. Savory. Weird. In Houston we had normal doughnuts: glazed or jellies or what have you. But in Austin you could get doughnuts with fried chicken on them. Or ones with habañero peppers. Terry’s favorite was a maple frosting and bacon doughnut which sounded disgusting, but who was I to judge people’s food preferences?
Only one article about the robbery quoted him. “My girlfriend was terrified,
” he said. Once again, Amber’s name was left out.
I wondered if I could ask her about that. Was it Bo who’d finagled the silence? Or did the police want to protect her identity because the criminals were still at large?
All I could say for sure was that I was now craving doughnuts in the worst way. It was time to take a break. Plus, Maggie was coming over to discuss wardrobe options for Homecoming. I figured this would be quite the project. Especially since she had requested a more detailed play-by-play of the kissing with Ryan. Which I was more than happy to recollect.
U let him put his tongue in ur mouth? she’d texted.
Maybe, I’d texted back.
Unfortunately I couldn’t mention my specific craving to her when I opened the door. Because how could I explain about the doughnuts if I didn’t tell her about Terry and Amber and everything else including that my brother was an angel now? I had never been good at keeping things bottled up. Now I was the world’s biggest expert. It sucked.
“You hungry?” I asked instead, generic-like, a picture of that maple bacon doughnut wandering my brain. I was beginning to think it was less disgusting and more potentially tasty.
“I think you are compensating for wanting to kiss Sloboda some more,” Maggie informed me.
I had to laugh. I remembered how he slipped his hands in my back pockets and set off rockets in my brain. It also distracted me from the secrets. Also it was probably true. Kissing Ryan Sloboda was better than any doughnut I could imagine. Maggie had a read on things like that.
She tugged at the hem of her grey sweater dress. It was really more sweater than dress, except she was wearing tights so that took care of the peekaboo factor. Maggie was a churchgoer on Sundays. I’d gone with her now and then, mostly to get out of the house, but not since the accident. I, on the other hand, was wearing my Sunday-morning-pointless-Internet-research sweatpants and an old Ima Hogg T-shirt. Not exactly signature outfit material. The #76 mustang head necklace Maggie had given me did give things a certain flare, though. At least in my opinion.