Days Like This

by Danielle Ellison

  Good. I want to show you something.

  It’s not a cape is it?

  What? No.

  What is it?

  It’s a surprise. Come back and meet me. I’ll be at The Garage.

  I hated surprises. But it was Rohan, so I would smile and pretend like I didn’t hate them.

  I stole one last glance at the lake where the boy and his mom were building a sandcastle. I wiped sand off my jeans as I rose to my feet and turned away.

  Maybe theirs will stand longer than anything we tried to build.

  I slammed the car door and had to crank the engine twice before the old convertible turned on. Around me, the sky turned that familiar shade of orange. It was the same shade as this tiny boutique Mom and I visited when we’d drive to the beach when I was younger. We always stopped at a little orange boutique with a name I couldn’t pronounce, and we’d try on all the hats in the store. Especially the ones with lace. We jumped around and she talked to me in fake accents and told me her name was “Tallulah” and I was “Divine” and we’d laugh and laugh until the clerks grew annoyed.

  Then we’d wander to a green store for ice cream, which had an open sign that blinked like someone was eating a cone. She ordered us a banana split because those were better if they were shared, and before we hit the road again, she’d go to the purple shop and buy a record. Something classic from the sixties or seventies. The kind of stuff Mom loved.

  “This,” she’d said, “is how music should sound.”

  That was her line every time we bought one, and when we arrived back home in the middle of the night, she’d play it before she put me to bed. It screeched and scratched on the record player, but it was the way music was supposed to sound. Eventually, I’d believe the same thing.

  “It’s pure,” Mom had said.

  Mom called a lot of things pure, whole and better. Especially the ocean. There was nothing like the ocean for us. I always thought I could keep her focused on the pretty days and she’d be okay, we’d be okay, and it would be enough, but I’d fail. I always failed.

  THE SKY WAS dark when I arrived at The Garage, and the sound of drums leaked out into the cool April air. I stopped right outside the heavy iron door and listened to Vinyl Drive practice. They were getting good, that was for sure. Two months ago, they landed a manager. They’d been working on a demo ever since. Rohan wasn’t ready to admit the band was more than a pastime. He still planned to get his degree in engineering and go on to do something to use all his brains and make lots of money so his family could be proud. It was a standard that all three of his older siblings achieved (doctor, NASA technician, chiropractor). Music meant something more to him. Something more than a hobby, more than science, and maybe even more than his parents’ approval.

  It was that for me too, and it definitely connected us in a way that I hadn’t felt with Graham. But where Rohan created his own music, I survived on everyone else’s. He heard me once when we were driving in the car, and he stopped singing mid-song so he could listen to me. Then he turned the radio down, and said that I was good. “Really good. Better than anyone I know. You should sing more.”

  “I don’t sing,” I’d said.

  “Why not? This could be your path. You wanted a major.”

  “Not music,” I’d snapped. Because as much as I loved it—listening to it, writing it, breathing it—that was always more Mom’s thing. She was the one who’d been in the music industry, manager to some really famous bands back before I was born. She lived music, and I knew that passion flowed through my veins, but embracing it meant embracing everything that she was. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want one more part of me to be shaped by someone else.

  Rohan struck the last chord; my ears rang in the silence. He found me immediately, his hungry eyes taking me in. The smile that danced in his gaze made all the worries melt away. He made me feel without saying anything.

  Levi, the drummer, started rambling about their meeting next week, the last chance to make sure they had established a sound. A song that was a hit maker. It was a big deal for the band. Rohan commented on it, and in a quick movement, jumped off stage and pressed his lips to mine.

  I knew everyone was watching, but my body didn’t care nearly as much as my brain. Rohan pulled me in closer. His hand trailed the line of my waist where my shirt rose, and I leaned in, pressing our hips together. His thumb was rough against my stomach, sending chills up my spine. Vaguely, I heard the guys catcalling around us. Rohan must have heard them too, because he pulled away and stared over my shoulder. There was a noise, as the rest of the band started moving behind me.

  “What's going on?” I asked.

  “Can't a guy kiss his girl? ”

  I nodded. “You wanted to show me something? ”

  A smile broke out on his face. “This way. ”

  He led me through the door beside the back of the stage and the guys yelled something. Rohan flipped them off, and then I was surrounded by darkness. It was so dark I couldn't tell if my eyes were opened or shut. Warmth spread across my neck as Rohan said in my ear, “This is the moment, Cassie.”

  His heart raced against my back, and the feeling of him so close to me made my breath hitch. Between his hands around my waist and his breath on my neck, my body melded into his. My heart pounded too, trying to keep up with his, anxious from this surprise and from his fingers on my skin. Every part of me responded to Rohan when he touched me, from my head to my stomach to my toes. It was a feeling I still wasn’t used to.

  With Graham it was different. With Graham, my whole being responded. Just by a look across a room or a word. And God, a touch was like fire exploding all over my skin. I didn’t have that with Rohan. What Rohan and I had was only physical, what Graham and I had was everything—multiplied by a hundred, plus soaring.

  Thinking about what I left hurt. If I had stayed, maybe we’d be married right now, going to school together and I’d be really seen, really known. But I hadn’t stayed. He’d put a ring on my finger, but Mom’s secret about my dad leaving freaked me out, so I left. I couldn’t go back to that. It was gone. I had made sure of that.

  Someday I hoped I would be able to apologize.

  “What's going on?” I asked again, maneuvering my body away from Rohan.

  Rohan dropped his hands and for the first time it felt cold. The lights came on and Rohan smiled, arms out. A grungy, faded, white RV was parked in front of us. "What do you think?"

  “What is it?”

  His smile dropped. “For this summer. You, me, traveling across the country.”

  “What?”

  “It's what you said you wanted. To travel. It needs some work but nothing we can't fix.”

  “You can't do that, Rohan.” He gave me a look like I killed his pet turtle. The same one Graham had when I’d actually killed his in middle school. Stop thinking about Graham. “What about summer classes? You can't blow it off.”

  Rohan shrugged. “I thought it was me and you, Cass.”

  I froze. He'd never, ever called me that. That wasn't a name he could use. Only Graham had ever called me that. Letting Rohan call me that was wrong because it wasn’t his, and I didn’t want it to be. It would never be anyone else’s. I shook my head. “I can't go with you all summer.”

  Rohan grabbed my hand and guided me toward him. His scent wrapped around me as his lips grazed my neck. I was not a weak girl; this wouldn't work, but I didn’t move away.

  “Think about it,” he said. His voice was low and in between words he kissed my neck. “Please. For me.”

  His hand trailed up the bottom of my shirt, warm against my skin and somehow I said, “I will.” There was a smile on his face, and then his lips crashed against mine, a force so strong it pushed me against the dirty RV. His fingertips gave me goosebumps as they found any place they could touch while he pulled off my shirt. We stumbled backward, and I shivered as Rohan pressed me into the side of that RV, my back flush against cool steel, my lips on his, and my mind dr
ifting to another boy. I felt a little guilty about each thought even though I knew the relationships weren't the same.

  When Rohan looked at me, he didn’t see the girl I used to be; he saw the sexy nurse. It was scary in a way completely different from Graham. Rohan didn’t have the history with me that Graham had, and maybe I needed to be seen a different way. To be seen by someone who didn’t know everything about me. He knew the Cassie I presented to him, a girl who dreamed and listened to his punk rock pop crap; not the one scared of never finding her own way.

  I liked him, but a whole summer? It would never last a whole summer. The sex wouldn't be enough to glue us. He'd get bored, or I would get scared, and it would be done. I’d been scared before. I was scared when I left Graham, even more scared when I let him walk away, but what we had was real. Forever, even when I’d walked away.

  Rohan and I weren’t forever. We were a flame. From the second we met, there was something that burned hot and fast and bright. But it wouldn't last. He didn't know me. Only one person ever got that close to me, and I broke him. It wouldn’t happen again. Rohan and I had lips and bodies and nights, but deep down I missed the thing I’d let go. I let it go for the right reasons, but wanted it back for the other ones.

  4.

  Graham

  CLYDE’S BAR WAS packed at seven on Tuesday night, but Lou was working, so it wasn’t a surprise. He was the only bartender in the surrounding cities who didn’t ID. Molly laughed next to me, and her hand rested on my thigh. She flipped her blonde hair over her shoulder. Each time she did it I smelled her shampoo. Lilacs or some shit. Girls always smelled like flowers or fruits or spice. It was part of their secret powers.

  Molly knew how to use all hers.

  The guys from the bar couldn’t stop staring at her. Her legs, her chest—everything really. James, my late-twenty-something boss, was staring a little too much, so I kicked him under the table. He shrugged.

  “We should go, Michael,” Molly said. I hated my first name, but Cass was the one who started getting everyone to call me by my middle name. When she left, I wanted to be “Michael.” “Graham” always had Cassie. “Michael” made it feel less like she was missing. At least, sometimes.

  “We have that thing,” Molly added when I didn’t move.

  I took a swig of my beer. “What thing?”

  She batted her eyelashes, rubbed her hand across the crotch of my jeans, and leaned in to my ear. “The thing that involves you and me being naked.”

  I spit out my beer and she smiled, like some innocent little angel. But she was a devil under her southern girl charm.

  Cass would never have said something like that to me. They were completely opposite in every way. I think that was why I liked Molly so much. She surprised me. By day she was a do-gooder, a nursing student holding people’s hands while they died, solid and driven. By night she was someone who lived every second of life.

  “We have to go,” I said, helping Molly off her stool.

  “See you tomorrow,” James said, nodding toward me. I’d been helping James at a residential construction site. Tomorrow, it would be done. Building houses was a science and an art and a miracle at once. Construction was a lot like architecture, and even though I hadn’t designed that house, I still had pride in it. Nothing was there a few months ago, and now there was a house. There would be a family. And it was all because of us.

  “Sure thing.”

  “You bring the coffee in the morning, Mikey!” James yelled after us.

  WE WERE OUTSIDE Molly’s apartment about six minutes later. That was the nice thing about a small town—it didn’t take long to get places. She smiled at me, blonde hair falling in her face, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Molly found me four months ago at Clyde’s. I was there with two friends, Eric and Lila, who were in for Christmas break, when Molly walked right up to us and asked me to dance.

  “There’s not a dance floor,” I’d said.

  “We’ll make our own.”

  Eric had practically pushed me out of the booth into Molly. I didn’t think I was ready, but they disagreed. They both went to high school with Cassie and me, and when she left I guess I won the straw that said they would be my friends and not hers. Strange how that had happened.

  “Have fun,” Eric had said.

  “Move on,” Lila’d added.

  Molly had been a casual thing at first. She made me smile, made me forget, and that was something I needed after Cass. I’d found my own way in the months after she left me—architecture school, construction, friends, a plan—and then Molly. Cass leaving may have been a good thing, because before that day, I was content to follow her. Now, I made my own path. Somehow Molly fit into that, at least currently. If I was accepted into college then I didn’t know, but Molly didn’t seem to mind the unknown. She had her own dreams.

  I wondered if Cass had found hers. That was part of why she left, at least the only part she admitted to, and I hope they were worth ending us. I hoped too that it wasn’t, and she missed me every day and regretted it. It felt wrong to want both things for her, but I did.

  “You ready?” Molly asked.

  I didn’t answer. I jumped out of the car, went around to her side, as a gentleman should, and guided her out of the seat. My mouth found hers and we walked backwards, lips not parting, until we made it to her door.

  THE WHOLE BLOCK was dark and quiet around me, save the sound of my engine and the hum of the streetlights. I parked outside my house and it was already after midnight. Four hours of sleep was better than zero. I slammed the door shut and walked toward the back of the house to my apartment above the garage.

  Cass and I used to sneak up there when we younger, back when we were “Cass and Graham,” before I graduated and moved into it to wait for her to graduate. Before she left me with the memories of waking up without her. We’d sneak up there in the night and talk about nothing, about everything, and make out until my lips hurt. It was our place. It was where I figured out what every inch of her felt like, and where to touch her in a way that made her sigh, and how to make her body tremble with pleasure, and have her cry out my name in that way that made us both come undone.

  That felt like forever ago.

  I shook away the thoughts, and paused to unlock the door. That’s when I smelled something burning in the air, like in the summer when every house on the block grilled out. No one grilled at midnight. This was something else. I turned around, scanning the woods for anything off. If there was a fire in the woods it would be at our houses in minutes.

  Then I saw the smoke. And it wasn’t coming from the woods.

  Fuck.

  “Mrs. H!” I yelled, and took off in a sprint toward Cassie’s house. I raced over there. It felt like I wasn’t moving at all, like I was running through water. I jumped over the half-broken fence between our backyards, and rounded toward the backdoor of her house. I could see the flames and the smoke thick in the air.

  The door was locked so I pounded on it, calling her name. I made out the top of her head from where she was curled up in a ball on the couch. I grabbed a rock from the ground and smashed in the window on the door. Glass crackled against the tile floor, and I yelled her name as I crossed into the house. Smoke stung my eyes, a grey haze that draped over everything.

  Mrs. H was sitting on the couch, and she was bawling. “It’s so small in here. Too small.”

  Shit. The whole wall where she wanted the window was engulfed in flames. We had to get the fuck out.

  “I know. Let’s go outside where it’s not small,” I said.

  I tried to get her up, but Mrs. H fought against me. Her arms thrashed in the air and I wasn’t sure what the hell I was supposed to do. She wouldn’t stand up. She kept throwing herself on the ground.

  “I want Cassie! Where’s Cassie? It’s too small here, but it’s bigger now. Cassie!”

  I bent down and titled her face up to mine. “Cassie isn’t here. She’s at my house, Mrs. H.”

  Her eyes
widened like I was Santa. “Your house?”

  “Come on, you can see her.” I tried to keep my voice calm, but I knew I was really yelling. I had to get us out of there. Lying seemed like the only option. I’d seen her before like this, and it’s what Cass always did. Lied to her.

  Mrs. H started to stand, so I swooped her up and carried her out of the house. We collapsed in the backyard.

  I dialed 911, out of breath and tired, and beside me Mrs. H was still crying. I didn’t know what to do to calm her down. So again I did what Cassie would have done and started humming while we waited. Mrs. H was still crying on the ground, legs to her chest, so I sat down beside her and watched the smoke trail up from the house.

  “Sometimes,” I whispered, trying to sing. Singing wasn’t my thing, but I sang “Angel” the best I could. I knew the words as if it was my favorite song, but I hated that song. I would hate it forever.

  Mrs. H rested her hand on my arm. “Where’s Cassie?”

  I didn’t answer. It was hard to believe that this happened and Cassie was nowhere around. Did I miss the signs? I knew them. I learned them four years ago when Mrs. H was diagnosed as bipolar.

  I’d realized something was wrong when I was twelve, and I’d found them in the snowstorm, but I’d kept it a secret. I’d been there when Cassie put Mrs. H to bed, or ran guys out of their house, or cried herself to sleep, or disappeared for days. Cassie didn’t talk about it much, even to me, and I’d never pressed her. She was the type who closed up tighter and recoiled if I’d tried to force her into something. Instead, I’d been there for her. I’d signed that emergency contact form when I turned eighteen because they wouldn’t let Cassie sign it yet. I did anything I could for her, and yet...

  “Where’s my Cassie?”

  She left.

  The sirens blared around us, and firefighters worked to put out the flames. A medic wrapped a blanket around Mrs. H. “Where’s Cassie?” Mrs. H asked again. I didn’t want to hear her name. Not when it was the one that started all of this. Not when it was her who should’ve been here instead of me. And especially not when that fire meant I had to fucking call her after all this time.