The A-Word

by Joy Preble

  “So how good a kisser is he?” Mags asked, waggling an eyebrow. I’d barely shut the door behind us.

  “I’d give him an A plus. Higher even. Two pluses.”

  Maggie laughed. Followed by my turning red in the face.

  “You really like him.” She nudged me with her elbow.

  I blushed some more. I really did like him—Ryan Sloboda, who played football and once hung on to a sheep for dear life and liked The Avengers and his dog and baking me cupcakes and telling me how he was headed to Hollywood to write stories for TV. But did he really like me? I was pretty sure he did. On the other hand, I’d grown up with my brother. I knew how it was with boys. Put a pair of willing lips in front of one, and he’ll latch on to them like lip-glossed life preservers.

  “Is he taking you to the Bonfire?”

  “Don’t know,” I said, wondering if I should. This boyfriend thing was feeling a lot like a test I hadn’t studied for.

  “Of course he is.” Mags frowned. “Probably he’s gonna meet you there. He’s on the football team so I bet he has to do that skit.”

  For a non-school spirit girl, Maggie knew a lot about this kind of thing. Then again, Bonfire was big at Spring Creek High. Casey used to love it. Maybe he still did. A couple days before Homecoming, there was a parade with red-wagon floats from all the student organizations. After that, there was a pep rally. The football guys cross-dressed like cheerleaders and the cheerleaders cross-dressed like the football guys, and everyone generally made happy fools of themselves. Then came the Bonfire in the student parking lot: a flaming heap topped with a dummy of the other team’s mascot so we could burn it and cheer. It was kind of violent and pointless, but that was Texas football.

  “I went last year,” Maggie said. “You were sick, remember?”

  Of course I remembered. Renfroe had been poisoning me. I could barely put one boot in front of the other. “How about those Homecoming dresses?” I said, changing the subject. I flashed her my Forever 21 gift card from Mom. “I’m flush with cash.”

  I snuck into Casey’s room to swipe his laptop, then we sat side by side on my bed. We settled on high-low dresses, which meant that they were short in the front and longer in the back. There was one with a red corset top that Mags favored. I was a subtler girl and perused one with a blue sequined top.

  “Hell no,” said my brother’s voice.

  There he was again, sneaking up on us all stealthy, glaring at the laptop.

  “You been taking spy lessons?” Maggie grumped at him.

  “You are NOT wearing that,” Casey said, scowling at the red corset dress.

  “That one’s mine,” Mags informed him.

  “You showed that to your mother?” Casey glanced from the screen to Mags to the screen to some place over our heads.

  “Get out,” I said, pointing to the door. Here he was acting all high and mighty and constipated, like I hadn’t Lysoled the keyboard, averting my eyes a million times while I deleted all the links to large-chested women doing things a lot racier than wearing a corset top. But here was the problem: I also wanted to know where he’d been. I wanted to tell him my plan. I couldn’t do this while Maggie was here.

  “I brought home Chinese from Bei Jing Bistro,” Casey announced. “Mom’s on her way back from Texas Children’s.”

  I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t here.

  “You don’t have to always bring us food anymore,” I said.

  “They still give me a discount,” he said, like that explained it. He turned back to Mags. “You want to eat with us?” Now he sounded all adult, asking her to dinner. Like a parent. I felt safe and sad and angry all at once.

  “Where else you been?” I held his gaze, trying to figure it out. I knew he wouldn’t answer or if he did it wouldn’t be the whole story. It was déjà vu all over again—like last night and the night before that. And then the oddest thing: I could have sworn that I heard Bo Shivers’s chuckling somewhere in the air. I knew he wasn’t here. But the hair stood up on the back of my neck anyway. For a second, I though I smelled his whiskey. Casey’s eyes locked on mine. Did he hear it, too? I tried to read his expression, but it was like reading a blank screen. One with perfect skin tone.

  Maggie shivered. “Cold in here,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at Casey and asked, “You been drinking? I smell Jack Daniels.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a second. I didn’t want to lie to Maggie anymore. But I couldn’t exactly be honest, either.

  “Mags,” I said slowly, my brain testing the waters. “I think I need to call it a night. We looked at so many dresses that my head hurts.”

  It wasn’t a lie. Also, it wasn’t the truth. I swore I heard another Bo chuckle. His image flashed in my head: That long hair with strands of grey, the scars on his hands and wrists that spoke to something unspeakable. Those shining dark eyes. This time I shivered. Was he watching us? Or really here somehow, trailing a scent of Jack? What if Casey developed that ability? There I’d be, kissing Ryan Sloboda and hear my brother’s voice in my head. (Or worse, Ryan would hear it.) My brother would backslide like he did with the weed because he was cranky and disgruntled and tell Ryan about the time I ate a jumbo bag of Corn Nuts and my breath stank for a week.

  I told my brain to stop imagining this because it was making me want to puke.

  “Be an angel and pack her up some egg rolls,” I told him.

  He seemed to let my lame A-word joke go. “You need me to drive you home?” Then he reached out toward Maggie’s shoulder.

  “Don’t!”

  They both stared at me like I was a loony.

  “Don’t forget the duck sauce for her egg rolls,” I amended. “You know Bei Jing.”

  My brain ran out of lies, so I left it at that. What I was thinking was: I wanted my best friend in the world to feel whatever she was feeling. Not get hopeful happiness if it wasn’t hers. But there was only more awkward silence. Eventually, Maggie stood and I said I’d walk her out and she said that she wasn’t in the mood for Chinese. I allowed that probably no one was, but that was the way things worked around here these days.

  My brother stalked after us, muttering something. Then Maggie announced that she was accepting Casey’s offer of a ride, but he needed to hold his horses because she and I had THINGS TO DISCUSS. I have put this in all caps because that is how it sounded coming out of her mouth. Shouty and pissed off. Which I totally understood. Her best friend had just hollered “Duck sauce” like it was the end of the world.

  I wrenched open the door to find Mom lugging a bag of groceries. She was wearing tan slacks and a white blouse with a navy sweater. That, and her Texas Children’s hang tags printed with Holly Samuels, SLP, which stood for Licensed Speech-Language Pathologist. Her hair was in a half ponytail. She looked tired but otherwise okay. I realized that checking her health was second nature to me now. I wondered if I’d ever slip up and forget that less than a year ago, she’d been almost comatose.

  What I also wondered: if she would ever remember to check on me that much, her daughter who almost bit the dust from her boss’s boot poison.

  Probably not.

  “Maggie?” Mom said, making it a question for no good reason I could think of.

  “I’m leaving,” Mags told her. “But hi.”

  Casey scooped up the grocery bag. “Heavy,” he said. I assumed he meant the groceries and not our moods. Maybe it was both.

  “What a day,” Mom said to none of us in particular. “Lots of swallowing therapies. Cancer kids.”

  She let that hang there along with everything else. Our house faced west and the sun was setting behind her head, lighting up the frizzies in her hair. Suddenly I felt like we were all standing too close together. Casey, still holding the groceries, cleared his throat. I could feel the million things he had bottled up because he couldn’t or wouldn’t say them.

  But nothing happened except that he told Mom he’d help her put the groceries away. She looked at h
im like she couldn’t quite place why he was so nice these days. When she kissed him on the cheek, he squirmed, but she smiled big and didn’t look as tired any more. My brain squirmed. Had Casey’s angel powers soothed her? Was that why she wasn’t worried about me? Why she had never mentioned Renfroe or Manny or the memory drugs and poison we’d been plied with? And here was what I didn’t want to think about: My brother had chosen to protect me from Mom’s worry by taking it away from her. Which also took her away from me.

  I let Maggie drag me outside.

  “For the millionth time, what the h is going on?” Maggie had still not developed a colorful vocabulary so this is exactly how she said it. “You know you keep kicking me out, right?”

  I did know. I had hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  Suddenly I was even more desperate to tell Casey my plan for solving what had happened to Amber. Because right now, all we were doing was swirling in the same dizzy circle over and over. What a kick in the pants for the Bible-thumper crowd if they ever discovered that guardian angels had about as much say in their jobs as Wal-Mart greeters. Maybe less since the greeters could at least pick which basket they shoved at you even if they had to do it wearing those ugly vests.

  Maggie was waiting for an answer that made sense. My heart felt like a stone.

  “There’s stuff,” I said. “Weird stuff.”

  Mags pressed her lips together in a line. “You already told me that.”

  “My parents are separating.” This wasn’t definitely true. Also it made me think of them like two pieces of paper coming unglued.

  “Figured as much.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “You did?”

  “Um, yeah. Is he staying in Austin then? Your dad? Makes sense though. That’s why your brother has been such a bone-head, right? ’Cause he’s all overprotective?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.” Then added: “He’s like my personal guardian. Gets himself all worked up.”

  “Fancy way of saying nitwit.”

  We stood there digesting my parents’ impending breakup which I wasn’t even sure was actually happening. I had managed to both lie and tell the truth. This made me feel worse.

  “You can tell me whatever you want,” Mags said, scuffing her foot on the driveway like she was trying to erase something. “You don’t have to keep it inside.”

  “I know.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” I lied.

  But I was not surprised when she announced she would walk home with her egg rolls rather than taking Casey up on his offer of a ride.

  After that, my mother, brother, and I ate lukewarm moo shu pork and shrimp-fried rice. We shoveled food in our mouths while Mom told us more about the cancer kids and their swallowing issues. I stole glances at Casey. If I solved Amber’s murder, maybe Management would promote her and leave my brother the hell alone. He’d be upset, but he’d work through it. He was a tough guy. He could pal around with Bo! Probably a bad idea, given Bo’s desire to fling himself off balconies, guzzle Jack, and look at me like he saw every single secret inside including this one.

  If Bo took a stance on the matter of Amber’s murder, I suspected it would be for his own self-interest. But I was doing the same thing, wasn’t I? The A-word community had gone to all that trouble to bring my brother back, spruce him up, and assign him to guard me. As I was still alive and a minor and without an actual driver’s license, it made no sense for him to move on. Was it weird that I felt like Bo and I had things in common? Maybe. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That picture of a lady he’d painted—the one on the far wall by his bed. What had she been to him?

  Easier to solve Amber’s death than dig into the secrets of Bo Shivers.

  Especially when all I really wanted to think about was Ryan Sloboda’s lips and how they felt on mine. I wasn’t one of those simpering types, but I wanted to linger on it for a while. More than a while. I deserved as much, didn’t I? Because that is what normal people did with wonderful things. They memorized the shape of them, the taste and sound of them. That’s what got you through the tough times. That’s what kicked your heart up and made you feel that anything was possible. But I was only a normal girl part of the time. The rest of the time, I was stuck in A-word land.

  I picked up a fortune cookie from the pile Casey had scattered on the table, cracked it open, and pulled out the little white slip.

  One man’s lie is another man’s truth.

  I would have called Casey on it—pressed to see if he’d used angel mojo to give me some crap fortune. But it was at that exact moment that his cell rang like a five-alarm fire warning. He grimaced. Eyeballed the screen while I craned my neck trying to read the text or whatever it was. Then he shoved away from the table, chopsticks clattering to his plate, one landing on my last bite of moo shu.

  “Gotta go,” he said.

  Mom gaped at him. So did I.

  “BJ’s. Bryce. Sorry. Three people called in sick.” He was at the door while I was still processing.

  Hey. I was going to tell him my genius plan. The door slammed.

  I leapt to my feet.

  “I’m going with him,” I told Mom. I had no idea what I could say by way of explanation, so I didn’t even try.

  “It’s Sunday night,” Mom said. Her chopsticks—crisscrossed over a fat shrimp—were pointed at her mouth, frozen right where they’d been when Casey’s cell had gone off. “Family night.”

  We hadn’t been a real family in a very long time. But the look on her face made me sad. Not sad enough to stop walking.

  “We’ll hang out later,” I said. “Maybe watch a cable movie. You can leave the food. I’ll clean it up when I get home.”

  I heard her chair scrape and knew she was following me so I hustled faster. Out the door. Down the driveway like the house was on fire. Casey was already backing up the Merc. “Wait!” I hollered. “Casey. Wait!” I raced forward, catching up with him, pounding my hand on the Merc’s hood. Bam. Bam.

  My brother slammed on the brakes.

  “What the hell, Jenna?” he bellowed. I could hear him even though the windows were shut. “Go back inside.”

  But he hadn’t pressed the gas again so I yanked open the passenger door and flung myself in. Casey rammed the gear shift into park.

  “No.”

  “Go,” he said.

  “What part of no didn’t you understand?”

  Casey pushed at me. “Get out.”

  I was puffing up to holler at him some more when out of the corner of my eye, I spied Mrs. Gilroy standing in the middle of her fake graveyard, crying.

  I did not have time for this. I seriously did not.

  But out of the car I went. Why? I wasn’t exactly sure. But if I had to say, it would be this: Mrs. Gilroy was nice. She made us Christmas fudge. And my family had been hurt by Dr. Renfroe—a man who had hurt old folks like her in the name of science. The way I looked at it, what else could I do?

  “If you leave without me,” I hollered back to Casey, “I will post all your naked baby pictures on the Spring Creek High website and Photoshop Lanie Phelps into them.” I raced over to her yard.

  “How did this happen?” Mrs. Gilroy had dropped to her knees in front of the SULLY ANDERSON tombstone.

  “It’s okay,” I said, bending to pat her back. “I finished it for you. Last night.”

  “What?” she said.

  “I painted your tombstones.” I did not add that Amber had helped, had in fact painted the SULLY ANDERSON stone. She looked confused enough. Maybe she figured it was a Halloween miracle or something.

  “I’m sorry,” I added when she kept looking miserable. “I can fix them, if you want. Did you have other names picked out?”

  Maybe the Fido one offended her. Maybe she had an Aunt Matilda who actually had been conked on the cranium by an oak tree. Things happened. My family was certainly proof of that.

  “You don’t have to cry,” I said. I stood then and held out a hand to haul her
up.

  “She needs to go home,” I heard my brother say from across the driveway.

  I swiveled my head. Mom had joined him. Wonderful. They were standing together next to the Merc. I hated when people talked about me like I was invisible.

  I turned back to Mrs. Gilroy. Her mouth kept moving, but nothing else came out. Her glasses had slipped down on their beaded chain and were now guarding her chin. Her eyes—a faded blue—were spilling over. One tear got stuck in a wrinkle on her cheek. It was not a pretty picture, but what is when you’re bawling?

  All of a sudden, Casey was standing there with us.

  I whipped around. Mom was walking back toward the house.

  “Let her go,” Casey said. I did. I didn’t even argue about it.

  He sat down on the grass next to Mrs. Gilroy. He took both her hands in his, calm and slow like he had all the time in the world. Like he hadn’t just raced out with some secret agenda. The air around them lit bright, then brighter. Stronger even than those Halloween lights strung on the Gilroy’s trees.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her, his voice strong but gentle as a breeze. “It’s MJ, isn’t it?” The hairs on the back of my neck rose one by one. My brain kicked into overdrive, processing. Thinking. Realizing. MJ was Mr. Gilroy, who had liver-colored age spots on his jowly cheeks and favored one-piece Dickey overalls and who was getting too elderly to climb the ladder stringing lights at Christmas.

  Mrs. Gilroy nodded.

  “Betsy,” my brother said, using her first name that I didn’t even remember she had. “MJ’s been short of breath lately. He’s telling you it’s allergies. But maybe he’s not right about that. You know us guys, Betsy. We’re pigheaded sometimes. Here’s what I think: his heart isn’t pumping like it should be. You probably need to take him to the doctor. That St. Anthony’s Emergency Center’s open on Sundays if you’re worried about waiting at Houston Northside. But the hospital’s a good place, too. They fixed me and Jenna right up after our accident, remember? You think you could get him in the car and take him? Or Jenna and I could cart you. If MJ’ll let us.”