by Amber Smith
I must make a noise, because they both turn around at the same time.
“Hey, Brooke,” Mark calls out to me. “Did you bring us some scones?” he asks, referencing my work uniform, and they both start cracking up again.
I try to smile. “Nope, sorry.”
“Hey, sorry—just realized,” Aaron says. “Your window, right?”
“It’s okay,” I tell him, stepping closer, trying to act casual. “What’s . . . uh . . . going on?”
No one says anything.
Mark shrugs. Aaron takes a sip of beer. When he looks up at me, I see a flash of something. I recognize it immediately. It’s one of Dad’s favorite looks, a gaze designed to make its object feel infinitesimally small and scared and useless.
“Nothin’, little sis,” he answers. “What’s goin’ on with you?” There’s some kind of weird, under-the-surface antagonism exchanged between us. I think Mark must pick up on it too, because he stubs out his cigarette and stands, stretching his arms over his head like he’s been sitting for too long.
“I’m takin’ off, man,” Mark says to Aaron, and then reaches out to do that dude-handshake thing.
“You don’t have to leave,” Aaron says, standing up now too.
“Yeah, it’s getting late. But listen—think about it, right? What we talked about. It’s no problem, dude. No problem at all.”
“Thanks, I will.”
“See ya, Brooke,” Mark calls out as he climbs back over the wall and down the metal steps that creak, one by one, under his weight.
“Sorry to break up the party,” I tell Aaron, but he doesn’t answer. “What was Mark talking about just now—what are you thinking about?”
“Nothing. He might have a job for me, that’s all.”
“Well, what about the job with Ray?” I ask. “What about getting your GED and everything?” I add, though something tells me I shouldn’t go there right now.
“That’s . . . uh . . . not happening,” he mumbles, scoffing.
“Why not?”
He doesn’t say anything to me as he gathers up the empties and tosses them into the plastic garbage can in the corner, the glass bottles making a racket as they fall against each other one by one.
“I’m just saying—” I start, but he interrupts me.
“Yeah, what are you saying?” he snaps.
“I thought that was the plan, right?” I ask, feeling my patience slipping away with each crack of glass against glass. “What, are you mad at me now? For coming up here, ruining your good time?”
“No,” he answers. “I’m not mad you came up here. It’s just so obvious you’re standing there judging me. Which, by the way, you have no right to do, especially after the way you came home last night. So if you have something to say, say it.”
“I’m not judging. I was worried that something happened!” I yell over the glass clinking. “I always worry when you’re up here,” I add, except I don’t think he hears me.
“Well, don’t!” he says, turning around to face me. “Don’t worry about me so much. I feel like you’re always watching me, waiting for me to fuck things up. Guess what? I fuck up sometimes, okay? I already feel bad enough about it, and it makes me feel ten times worse when you look at me”—he points at my face—“like that.”
I wish I could see how I’m looking at him, because then I could try not to do it anymore. “What are we even talking about? I’m not judging anything!” Although that’s not completely true. “The only thing I’m ever trying to do is keep everything from falling apart.”
“How, though?” he snarls. “It’s already apart, Brooke! Why can’t you see that? It’s broken, okay? There’s no saving this.” He throws his arms open and turns in all directions, as if he’s trying to gather up everything around us—the air, the roof, the building, the street below—all of this. Part of me wonders if he’s talking about our family or Mom or maybe just himself.
“If you really believe that, then what are you even doing here—why did you agree to come back?”
Something settles inside of him as he looks at me, his anger suddenly transformed into sadness, weighing him down. He shakes his head, as if he’s trying to find the answer. “Because you asked me to,” he says.
We stand here, silent, on opposite sides of an invisible line. There are so many things I want to say, but so little I think he’ll hear.
“What’s going on with us?” I finally ask. “Why are we all fighting so much?”
He shrugs and shakes his head and smiles sadly as he looks up at the sky. “Maybe it’s just in our blood.”
He starts walking toward the fire escape, and I know I have to say something—I know we can’t leave things like this. “Aaron. Wait, okay?” He stops and turns to look at me. “I disagree. It’s not broken. I think it can be saved. I really do.” I’m not sure if I’m talking about our family as whole, or our mom, or him, or all of it.
“I know you do.” Something in his voice, in the way he says those words, makes me suddenly doubt myself. He swings his leg over the wall, then disappears, his footsteps fading as he descends the stairs.
OLD MONSTERS
I WENT DOWN INTO the storage unit in the basement and rifled through the stacks of plastic bins full of various holiday decorations and pulled out the one with all the Halloween stuff. I brought it upstairs and started taking the contents out, one by one. Old monster costumes and face paints, plastic pumpkin baskets for trick-or-treating, bundles of fake white spiderwebs and little black spiders.
Callie walks into the room, regarding the pile of stuff with contempt.
“Hey,” I say to her, doing my best to sound optimistic, doing my best to mend whatever it is between the two of us that keeps on breaking over and over. “I thought maybe it would be fun to go out this year. What do you think?”
“I’m twelve.” She pauses. “Not two.”
“What are you talking about? Halloween’s your favorite.”
“Oh, okay. If you say so.” Then she walks into the kitchen and says, almost as if she doesn’t care whether I hear her or not, “I must be wrong, then.”
“Okay,” I mutter to myself as I start piling all the stuff back into the box—the witch costume from second grade, the devil one from fourth, Callie’s Barbie princess one from kindergarten, a rubbery decayed-flesh mask from a zombie ensemble, the eye patch from when Aaron was a pirate. Then I see something I almost forgot about. There, at the very bottom, bundled in a heap. My homemade Peter Pan costume from sixth grade.
Everyone was into fairies that year—it was all about Tinker Bell. But I wanted to be Peter Pan. So I asked Mom if we could make my costume that year. It was one of the few crafty things Mom and I ever did together. She wasn’t that good at sewing and neither was I, but together we were really proud of this “project,” as she called it.
Green leggings and a green leotard—those were easy enough to come by. But Mom made the skirt, layers of different shades of green fabric, sewn together so they looked like strips of leaves and whatever other greenery we imagined might be appropriate for a girl version of Peter Pan. And then, of course, the signature hat with a feather—Mom made that, too. And my favorite part: the shadow.
Mom bought a cheap black sheet and laid it out on the living room floor. She had me lie down on top of it with my arms and legs spread out, and she drew the outline of my body in chalk. Then she cut it out and sewed a strand of ribbon into the neck so I could wear it on my back like a cape, my shadow trailing behind me. I remember telling her about how Aaron and I would run as fast as we could at the park, checking behind us to see if our shadows could keep up.
She threw her head back and laughed as we sat on the floor, cutting out my shape on the sheet. She rarely ever laughed like that, so that’s probably why I remember it so well. That was the year Dad decided I was too old to dress up for Halloween. I’m not sure why he decided, right then, when I was already in the stupid costume and ready to leave with Callie, that this was suddenly a
new rule. I remember him making me go back into our bedroom and change into regular clothes.
As I looked at myself in the mirror one last time, I decided it was probably my turn anyway. Maybe, I thought, there was a finite amount of meanness in him, and if he took some of it out on me every once in a while, then maybe there would be less for Mom, less for Aaron. So I went out with Callie that Halloween, dressed as myself, and I didn’t complain.
Almost as if Mom can sense how much I’m missing her right now, the phone rings—the landline. And no one ever calls the landline—the only reason we have it is for her phone calls. I trip over the Halloween stuff to reach it in time. I answer, and it’s the recording that always comes on. I press one to accept the charges.
“Mom?”
“Brooke, I’m here,” she says, her voice so much stronger than the last time we spoke.
“You sound good,” I say.
“Well, I’ve been feeling better lately.”
“Good,” I tell her. “I can tell.”
“How are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m good. Pretty good, I guess. I mean, we miss you. I was just thinking about you.” She’s so quiet I start to think I’ve lost her. “Mom? Hello?”
“I’m still here.” She pauses. “Brooke, I have something I want to tell you.”
“Okay?”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think in here over these past few months,” she begins. “And I don’t think I’ve been fair to you kids—to you especially.” Her voice shakes as she tries to talk louder. “It all finally made sense to me.”
“What . . . what did?”
“I look at you, and I see you trying to take care of things and be responsible”—her voice catches—“trying to take care of me. I’ve put too much on you. I always have, and that’s not right.”
“Mom, you know I don’t feel that way,” I tell her, but that’s not the truth.
“That’s exactly what my mother did to me. My whole life was taking care of her. And I hated her for that, Brooke. I don’t want you to hate me. And I certainly don’t want you to be me. And that’s what I see when I look at you. I see you turning into me, and it scares the hell out of me.”
I keep opening my mouth to interrupt her, to argue with her, but I don’t know what to say. I want to tell her all the ways she’s wrong. I want to tell her to take it all back right now.
“Brooke, I want you to stay away from here from now on.”
“What? No, Mom—”
“I mean it. I don’t want you to visit me. You see me here, like this, and you think you have to fix this for me, but you can’t. I don’t want you to take care of me anymore. I’m going to take care of myself now. All right?”
“No,” I repeat. “I need to see you, Mom,” I tell her.
“Just until everything is settled. I need you to stay away. For you, and for me, too. I love you. That’s why I’m saying this.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. No,” I repeat, trying to get her to hear me. But she doesn’t. “Mom?” I try again. “Mom!”
“I have to go now. I love you.”
“Mom, don’t hang—”
But it’s too late. She did. She hung up.
HARVEST
“YOU KNOW HOW I’M LEFT-HANDED?” I ask Dani as we sit next to each other in her car outside my building. We made a deal—I would stay and work with her until the library closed, and she would give me a ride home every day.
Weeks have passed since unhomecoming, and each day we hug good-bye, letting it linger a few extra seconds, and then I stand on the top step and wave as I watch her leave, feeling like some vital part of me is slipping away. And then my whole life is stuck on pause, unable to move forward until I see her again.
Maybe it’s the deeper chill of the air today, something about all the fallen leaves staining the sidewalk with their last shreds of pigment, the bare branches trembling in the wind, that makes everything feel so urgent. These are our last moments together before Thanksgiving break, and if I have to wait five more days to tell her, I’m fairly certain I’ll lose my nerve, fairly certain something inside of me will die.
Or maybe it’s just because I need something to make sense, need something to feel good. Fall is supposed to be the harvest. A time to reap the fruits of the seeds we’ve sown. Which means I need to say something. I need to say it now, before my heart ruptures, before one more minute passes and the ripeness that is now turns to decay.
“Mm-hmm,” she hums, lowering the volume on the radio.
“Well, when I was little, I tried to teach myself to write with my right hand instead, because I wanted to do it the right way, you know. I didn’t want to be different. But it was so hard. Too hard. Impossible, actually. So then finally I broke down and accepted it: I’m left-handed.”
“Yeah,” she says, grinning. “I can totally picture it.”
“Well. Being with you is like that.”
She looks at me uncertainly and then asks, her voice soft, “Like what?”
“Like I’ve been living my whole life in this right-handed world, where everything felt slightly off, everything a little too difficult, out of sync in this way I could never really explain or understand.”
“Okay,” she says.
“And now—when I’m with you, I mean—everything feels right, easier. Like I’ve always been looking to the next thing, waiting to finally get to that place where I’m supposed to be, but when I’m with you, I feel like I’m already there. I’ve never had that before.” I dare myself to look up at her. “Do you—do you know what I’m talking about?”
I wanted her to know: I’m in. But now that it’s all out of my mouth, this interminable silence stretching out between us, all I want is to rewind and tell her “Happy Thanksgiving” and “See you Monday” and do our cute but counterfeit hug number, then get out of the car and wave to her from the top step like every other day. I grab on to the door handle, and as I’m about to make my escape—
“I think I do . . . ,” she begins, the corners of her mouth almost curving upward, but not quite. “But I just made my peace with the fact that we were only going to be friends.”
My mouth suddenly goes dry as a desert. I lick my lips. “Oh,” I manage. “Okay.” I’m about to sprint from the car when I feel her taking my left hand in her right, our fingers weaving together, and God, it’s like my hands never knew what they were made of, what they were made for, until now.
“It’s just that sometimes I get this strong Back off vibe from you, so I’ve been trying—not very successfully—to forget about it.”
“I don’t want you to forget about it,” I admit to her, and to myself, out loud, at last.
She doesn’t say anything. Instead she leans in slowly, closes her eyes, and presses her lips against mine. Her fingertips against my face, my cheek, send a trail of sparks along my skin. Our mouths fit together effortlessly, like our hands, missing puzzle pieces.
When we finally pull apart—forced only by the need to breathe—I look at her and it’s like I’ve known her my whole life, but then again, in this other way it’s like I’m looking at her for the first time. Maybe it’s because of the way she’s looking at me. Like I’m someone different than I was only minutes earlier.
I realize I’m right in the middle of one of those earth-shattering, life-altering, mind-melding, world-rocking moments you hear about that you think can’t possibly be real. I try to memorize it all—her face, the way her lips are parted, the sound of the wind, a siren faintly wailing somewhere blocks away, footsteps crunching through the leaves on the sidewalk—these things are the beginning of my life. My real life. Finally, starting now.
I don’t know how I make myself get out of the car, how I force myself to say good-bye. She waits until I’m inside before she pulls away. When I close the front door behind me, I stand there staring at the rows of mailboxes that line the entryway. I touch my lips. They’re pulsing. They’re alive. And so am I, for maybe the first time in m
y life.
WINTER
DOLLHOUSE
“YOU SEEM NERVOUS.” Dani looks at me in the passenger seat as we drive away from school. She’s taking me to her house for the first time. Her parents wanted to meet the “friend” she’s been spending so much time with, and honestly, I’m happy to be away from home for an evening. The trial is about to start and none of us—not me, Aaron, Callie, or even Mom—are on the same page anymore.
“That’s because you’re making me nervous,” I tell her. “What are your parents like?”
“My parents are accountants.”
“That’s what they do. What are they like?” I ask again.
“They’re like accountants. They’re nice. They’re not cool. Our house is boring and looks the same as every other house on our street. And I have two guinea pigs,” she adds, as if owning guinea pigs signifies something unredeemable about someone’s personality.
“So?”
“So I’m just giving you fair warning. You might have been under the false impression that I’m more interesting than I probably really am, okay?”
“Stop,” I tell her as I stroke her hand. “I’ve never seen you like this. What are you so freaked out about?”
“I should live somewhere more like your neighborhood. It has so much character. It’s eclectic and funky. The buildings are old—”
“Yeah, old and dirty?” I interrupt. “It’s so great. You have to make sure you lock up all your doors and windows. You get to take the bus everywhere . . . it’s really funky. Walking up a thousand stairs to get to your house every day—now, that’s character.”