Autumn

by Sierra Dean

  In the bathroom his mouth had opened as if to speak, a black gaping hole that might well contain the answers to all the questions plaguing her.

  Why did he die? Why were they moving to Texas? Why hadn’t he fought harder?

  But she hadn’t stayed long enough to hear what he might tell her.

  If he had been real and not a sign she was losing her mind, then she’d missed possibly her only chance to say whatever it was she needed to say, and to hear what he had to offer. Instead of listening, she ran.

  Maybe that’s what her life was going to be now, a long series of events she was simply going to flee from.

  She turned the volume up and let Vince Neil’s high-pitched voice distract her as she counted telephone poles and tried to imagine what hell was waiting for her at the end of the road.

  Chapter Three

  Earthquake.

  It was the first semi-rational thought to come into Cooper Reynolds’s mind when his bed began to bounce violently. Instead of getting up to hide in a doorframe or protect himself in any logical manner, he threw his pillow over his head and closed his eyes, hoping the trembling earth would respect his five more minutes policy.

  “Get up, you lazy jerk. Up, up, up.” His sister Mia’s voice was distinctive even through the muffled mass of fabric and feathers blocking his ears. She was only fifteen but had the husky tone of a sixty-year-old jazz singer, all raspy and a bit too deep for her tiny frame.

  “Screw off, Mia, I’m sleeping.”

  She continued to bounce, and her bare feet against his calf were freezing. Cooper sat up and whacked her with his pillow.

  “I said, screw off, Mia.”

  “You’re up now, may as well come have breakfast.” She hopped down, sticking the landing nimbly, and dashed into the hall before he could hit her again.

  For a moment Cooper considered rolling over and going back to bed, but he was upright, and he did smell a little foul. Maybe a shower and a good breakfast wasn’t such a bad idea.

  Once he was clean-ish and his dark brown hair wasn’t in such a state of disarray, he lumbered down to the kitchen and pulled up a chair at the island. Saturday was one of the rare days his mom didn’t have to work, so it was nice to look forward to a breakfast that wasn’t cold cereal.

  Mia was scrounging through the fridge, her nearly black hair pulled away from her face in a messy bun, and she was still wearing her penguin-print pajama pants and her volleyball shirt from the previous season. She handed their mother a bottle of milk and a carton of eggs.

  “Pancakes?” Cooper asked hopefully, rubbing some stubborn sleep from his eyes.

  “French toast.” His mom smiled at him over her shoulder, her short dark hair perfectly styled in spite of the early hour. “Is that okay?”

  He shrugged. “All tastes the same with syrup on it.”

  “Your enthusiasm is touching.” She laid strips of bacon onto a cookie sheet and put it in the oven, trading it for another sheet of already crispy meat. When the oven door opened, the kitchen was filled with the salty, delicious fragrance of bacon, and Cooper’s stomach growled audibly.

  “Here.” She dabbed the tops of the strips with a paper towel then dumped them onto a plate, placing it in front of him. “You two dig in.”

  He saw the way her mouth curved into a frown when she said two and knew without a doubt she was thinking about Jeremy. He didn’t mention his brother’s name because it had become second nature to pretend Jer hadn’t existed, but seeing the way her face momentarily let the pain show through, Cooper knew she hadn’t forgotten.

  Mia snatched the first piece of bacon off the plate and climbed up on the kitchen counter, reaching into the spice cupboard to hand their mother cinnamon and the family French toast secret—cardamom.

  The other guys on the team might tease him for knowing what went into baking, but that would have required them to spend any time with him outside school.

  When the first piece of soggy bread hit the skillet, a satisfying hiss swam through the air and with it the sweet, satisfying scent of bread. Since Mia was up on the counter, Cooper moved to the fridge to find the syrup and grabbed a half-full carton of OJ while he was at it.

  Extra pulp.

  Gross.

  He put it back on the shelf and closed the door, plunking the syrup down next to the bacon plate.

  “Are you guys getting excited for school next week?”

  Cooper’s gaze wandered to the family calendar on the fridge door where First Day of School was written in big red marker on September third. He wasn’t sure if Mom had written it that big because she was excited to be rid of them, or so she wouldn’t forget. It could have gone either way.

  “Meh,” Mia said, her fifteen-year-old grasp on linguistics managing to summarize both their feelings in one syllable.

  Technically, Cooper had already been back for a couple of weeks. Team practices started in the height of August heat because the football team had to be ready for games when school began. If there was one thing his school took seriously, it was the pride of their athletics department.

  A football season in Texas was no laughing matter.

  Cooper crunched on his bacon until he realized his mother was staring at him, waiting for his response. “Oh. Yeah, sure. I guess.”

  She turned back to the skillet, sighing, “My son, the wordsmith.”

  It was Cooper’s senior year, so perhaps she was expecting more jubilance, but it was hard to be psyched about going to school when no one really talked to him.

  He’d done what he could to fit in, joined the right teams, did well in class—but not so well he’d be branded a nerd—and avoided stepping on toes, but sometimes he felt his mere presence was a problem for those around him.

  Mia had taken a different route. After Jeremy left, she’d dyed her hair black, gotten rid of any color in her wardrobe and started spending her time with Max Dawson and his clan of weirdo goth kids. It seemed to work okay for her. She had people to sit with at lunch, and Max always had spare eyeliner for her to borrow.

  They ate breakfast in relative silence, since Mom seemed to understand she wasn’t going to get too much out of them as far as chitchat went. She was out of practice with them, considering they only saw her once or twice a week when there wasn’t some emergency situation at the Poisonfoot Sheriff’s office.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, taken by a sudden thought. “Do you guys need school supplies?”

  “Mom, we’re not seven,” Mia said. “We don’t need new colored pencils.”

  “But new binders? I don’t even know what you might need. Pens?”

  “We have pens,” Cooper assured her.

  It didn’t matter. She was on her feet and looking in her purse before they could convince her they were fine using last year’s binders and calculators. When she returned to the table, she was holding her wallet. “Cooper, take your sister shopping.”

  “Mom,” Mia protested, clearly horrified by the idea of being at the mall with her brother. For Cooper, his only complaint was missing an afternoon watching baseball when the Rangers were playing the Yankees. He didn’t much care who saw him out shopping with Mia.

  Their mother handed Cooper her credit card. “Don’t go too crazy, but get some new notebooks, and pick out some new clothes. Something with a little color,” she added pointedly to Mia.

  “Black is a color.”

  “Black is the absence of color,” Cooper corrected. “Don’t they teach you anything in science anymore?”

  Mia stuck out her tongue. “Why does he get the credit card?”

  “Because he won’t spend it getting something pierced,” their mother replied.

  Mall was a polite term for what Poisonfoot had. The closest real shopping was in Laredo, and that was too much of a drive on a normal day, let alone one Cooper hoped to salvage in some way. He so rarely got a break from practice, all he wanted to do was sit on the couch, snarf Doritos and watch baseball.

  The mall had a Walmart�
�quite a scandalous addition when it had moved in three years earlier—a hair salon, a grocery store, and a handful of specialty clothing and goods stores. The local video rental place had closed earlier that summer, meaning if Cooper wanted any new Xbox games, he now had to part with allowance money to buy them.

  He’d wanted to get a job, but his football schedule didn’t leave enough time for one.

  Mia had her phone out the whole drive over and didn’t let up texting once they were inside.

  “Who are you talking to?” he asked, not bothering to mask his annoyance.

  “Max.”

  “Is he telling you what kind of nail polish would look best with your complexion?” Cooper teased.

  Mia didn’t look amused. “Gay jokes? Could you be more Texas cliché, Coop? Next thing I know you’ll be joining the NRA and voting Republican.” She slipped her phone into her purse and shook her head so her long black bangs covered her eyes.

  “Jesus, Mia. I was joking. And besides, it wasn’t a gay joke. It was an observation that your boyfriend wears more makeup than you do.”

  She huffed.

  “What’s wrong with the NRA? I remember you shooting guns with me and Dad when you were little.”

  He knew he’d made a mistake the second the D word left his mouth. Much like the Reynolds family’s ban against discussing Jer, they also didn’t bring up their absentee patriarch.

  The men in their family had a long-standing tradition of bailing, and the ones left behind were well-practiced in the art of pretending it never happened.

  Cooper quickly covered his ass by adding, “And shouldn’t your Democrats be happy there’s a society that labels gun owners?”

  “Your Democrats?” Mia snapped, and Cooper let out a sigh of relief. Playing the political card had been a good call. “How can you be so ignorant?”

  Politics was a hot-button issue for Mia. At fifteen she fancied herself quite liberal, and by extension determined anyone who wasn’t had to be a Republican. Being Republican, in Mia’s opinion, was about as evil as being a Satanist. Cooper reminded her, “I’m seventeen, Mia. I don’t vote.”

  “And in a year, when you can? Are you still going to be stupid about it?”

  Cooper wanted to point out it would be at least three years before he’d have to vote in a major national election, but he’d probably get a list of all local elections he’d be expected to participate in before then.

  Mia would need a bigger purse if she was going to carry her soapbox with her wherever she went.

  “I’m not trying to pick a fight with you,” he said, trying to take the high road. “Look, why don’t we go to Walmart and get some new school stuff, and when we’re done there, I’ll take you to that thrift store in Collinwood you like.”

  Mia stared at him thoughtfully. He knew it wasn’t in her nature to back down from an argument, but he also knew she had no way to drive to Collinwood to buy flowy skirts and black tops that made her look like a witch or a reject from a Fleetwood Mac album cover.

  “You’re not going to make me buy notebooks with flowers or dolphins on the cover, are you?”

  “What the hell do I care what kind of notebooks you buy? I’m not mom. And do you think she cares if your binder is girlie? She carries a gun, for crying out loud.”

  “But she does have pink handcuffs.”

  Cooper rolled his eyes. “Let’s just get the stuff and go. It’s a twenty-minute drive to Collinwood. I’ll be lucky to catch the last four innings, and that’s if you don’t try on a million things.”

  They worked their way down to the Walmart with only a brief sidetrack to the Orange Julius counter so Mia could get an enormous mocha-something smoothie, and Cooper purchased a bottle of Coke. Mia held the shopping basket when they got to the store and surprise, surprise, loaded it up with all-black goodies. Cooper was pretty sure most of his stuff from the previous year was still in passable shape, but the presence of his mother’s credit card in his wallet made him feel obligated to buy something.

  The sports-themed notebooks he used to favor seemed a little juvenile for his senior year of high school, so he opted for a few basic colored ones and some fancy pens he’d probably lose by Homecoming.

  He was investigating a graphing calculator when a familiar voice asked, “Hey, Reynolds.”

  Twisting his neck, he peered over his shoulder to see the football team’s starting defenseman, Lyndon Fletcher, staring at him. Lyndon looked as if he’d just staggered out of the stone ages. He was a big guy for any age, well over Cooper’s six-foot height, and pushing three hundred pounds. He had a broad, flat nose and a Cro-Magnon sloped forehead that made him look permanently puzzled. Which was pretty accurate, all things considered. His hair was shoulder length and stringy, and he always smelled like Slim Jims.

  “Lyndon,” Cooper replied. He didn’t feel like chatting with the other guy for too long, but it would have been rude to just walk away. Not that Lyndon was too big on social graces.

  “You getting your school shit?”

  Cooper glanced down at the calculator in his hands. Mia had wandered off down one of the other aisles—which probably meant she was actually in cosmetics—leaving him no easy escape route from the conversation.

  “Yeah, helping my sister get some stuff, figured I’d grab a few things. You?”

  Lyndon stared into the basket in his hands as if he’d only then realized he was carrying it. A case of Red Bull and a bag of sour cream and onion chips were partially covered by a single spiral-bound notebook.

  “Sure.” Ever the scintillating conversationalist.

  “Well, good to see you.” Cooper turned back to the shelf and replaced the calculator, then pretended to study another one.

  “Hey, you hear the news?”

  For a moment Cooper considered acting as if he hadn’t heard the question, but it seemed unlikely to deter the course Lyndon was on, so instead Cooper asked, “What news?”

  “Libby took a summer job at the school office to add some sort of, like, volunteer bullshit to her college applications or whatever.” Libby Tanner was Lyndon’s on-and-off-and-on-and-off girlfriend. Last Cooper had heard they were off, but apparently that didn’t stop Libby from talking to her ex. “Anyway, she said yesterday they got a new transcript.”

  “Okay.” Cooper had no idea what the point of this was, and it hardly qualified as news.

  “New transcript means new student,” Lyndon explained, like Cooper was the slow one of the two of them.

  That was news. “Did Libby get a name?” The last time they’d had a new student had been in middle school, and in spite of four years passing since Malik had come to them from Pittsburgh, he was still called the new kid. That was how rarely new students came to Poisonfoot.

  “Eloise something.”

  “Eloise?” Cooper wrinkled up his nose, conjuring a mental image of a chubby girl with pigtails and Coke-bottle glasses. For some reason his mental Eloise also had a French beret. He blamed Mia’s childhood storybooks for that one. “That doesn’t sound too promising.”

  Lyndon shrugged. “I dunno, man. It’s just a name. Doesn’t mean she can’t be a hottie.”

  There were scarce pickings at their school to begin with, and those girls were ones Cooper had spent his whole life around. It barely mattered that he’d known them almost since the womb, because none of them spoke more than five words a week to him.

  If there was a new girl, it might not make a difference if she had six eyes and a mustache. If she was willing to talk to him, she’d already be an improvement.

  “She’s a junior. Coming from California.”

  California? Why in God’s name would someone leave California to come to Poisonfoot? “Why?” was all Cooper managed to verbalize.

  “Libby said there was something in the transcript about counseling for bereve…um, ber…you know. When someone croaks?”

  “Bereavement?” Cooper offered.

  “Yeah, that.”

  So this mystery El
oise was coming here because someone she knew had died. Awesome. A broken chick with an ugly name.

  At least Malik wouldn’t have to be the new kid anymore.

  Chapter Four

  The sun seemed to vanish the moment Lou and her mom crossed into Texas. It was still midafternoon, but a wall of clouds met them at the border and kept following them the whole way through the state. They’d spent the night in a dive motel just off the highway, and Lou’s body was still aching from the lumpy mattress. She might not be thrilled about moving, but at least tonight she’d get to sleep in a real bed.

  “Hon, before we get there, I need to tell you something about your grandma.”

  “I already know not to play my music loud and to be polite.”

  Her mother gave a thin smile. “And while I appreciate that, it isn’t what I meant.”

  Lou pivoted in her seat, pulling both ear buds out. Her mother’s grim expression brought a wave of anxiety crashing over Lou that made it difficult for her to breathe.

  “Is she dying?” It was now Lou’s greatest fear that the people in her life were suddenly going to expire. Hadn’t her father seemed healthy enough until the cancer took him? Granny Elle was old. What if she was about to find out her grandmother’s days were numbered?

  “What? No. Oh, honey, no.” Her mom took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sorry. Nothing like that. It’s just your grandma, is…well, she’s a bit weird.”

  “Aren’t most old people?”

  Mom laughed. “Yes, that’s true. But Elle…she has some strange superstitions, and she was raised a lot differently than you or me. If she says anything that seems crazy to you, just go with it, okay?”

  “Like what?” Now that death was no longer a concern, Lou wanted to know what kind of kooky madness she was moving in with. Plus she got a kick out of adults gossiping about each other.

  “Oh, I don’t know. She thought we ought to have moved home when your dad got sick. She was convinced coming to Poisonfoot would save him.” She shrugged. “Power of prayer or something? Anyway, I just wanted to warn you about it so she wouldn’t upset you if she brought it up. She’s quite into the herbal healing and holistic stuff.”