A Girl Like Me

by Ginger Scott

  “Tell them the rest,” I say, bringing Wes’s attention to me first, and within a breath, everyone else’s along with it.

  His eyes lock on mine as he opens his mouth to speak, staying with me the moment the words come. All I can do is smile faintly as he begins, but it seems to be enough. He doesn’t hesitate; he tells them everything.

  “He never called me his,” he begins, his choice of words hitting my chest. How long did he go through life belonging to no one? “I’d always get taken back to him, though. You know…when things didn’t work out? I figured that was just how the system went.”

  His eyes flit down briefly, and his lip rises with a short laugh.

  “I guess I thought it was like with a puppy from a rescue or something. If the dog wasn’t a fit, you just brought it back to the rescuer,” he says, his mouth falling as his eyes come back to mine. “Only he wasn’t rescuing me. Whatever is the opposite of that word…sabotage, maybe? Using for sure—definitely using me.”

  TK slides from the roof of the truck, his feet crunching on the ground, and everyone begins to make small movements to settle their nerves, now rattled with Wes’s story.

  “There’s a reason Mom and Dad never take us over to his house,” he says, looking back to the ground, his feet kicking at the loose dirt and gravel, hands back in the safety of his pockets. His brow creases. “He’s sorta nuts.”

  “What do you mean?” Levi asks.

  Wes chews at the inside of his cheek and scrunches his eyes, searching for the best words.

  “When I was a kid, I thought it was cool. He had all of these comic-book things, and he would always call me hero. He had this one book…”

  His eyes scan up from the ground, back to mine; my breath pauses.

  “It was filled with sketches, most of them color. He drew them,” he says, his hand rubbing against his chin as he smiles, his eyes glazing over with thoughts of his past. “The art is actually really good.”

  The smile evaporates, and a heaviness regains control of his shoulders and chest.

  “Maybe that’s part of the problem,” he says. “Those drawings were so good…so…real. He always told me I was the hero in them. He said he drew me because he knew my story, and I thought it was cool, because it looked like me. I guess anything pretend felt a hell of a lot better than where I was—a boy who didn’t belong to anyone.”

  He smiles on one side of his mouth and glances at both of his brothers.

  “You know…the hell that is foster care?”

  TK and Levi both snort out a small, sad laugh and look down as it fades, burying this common hell they all share.

  “It was all just this fantasy that I’d get to visit when I was with him, in-between the miserable families—if you can even call them families—that Shawn placed me with. I’d go to hell then come back to this world where I had powers, where I saved the day—”

  Wes stops with his front teeth together, lips parted. His forehead dimples as his breath picks up just before his eyes meet mine again, and for the first time since I’ve learned the truth, I see just how terrified he was of not being able to stop the painful things his father predicted would come my way.

  “And then a car came racing at this girl I liked more than anyone in the world, and without flinching, I dove in front of it to save her…just like the book said I would.”

  I look inside him, my eyes boring so deeply into his that I can actually see the boy who lives inside. I see us, and that day, and all of the days that came before and after. We are forever connected. Shawn may have put us together, but the fact that we belong that way has nothing to do with him. Wes would have found me on his own; I’m sure of it.

  “She’s the girl,” Levi says, his voice hushed.

  “She’s the girl,” Wes echoes.

  He looks at me with this unfathomable love that I never quite feel good enough to deserve. I’m starting to think that loving each other is a curse. Maybe that’s the moral of our story—we suffer and overcome, then risk again.

  Levi runs his hand over his face, dragging his eyes down as he leaves his palm over his mouth.

  “She’s the girl,” Levi says again, nodding this time.

  Understanding.

  “He has so many stories,” Wes says, his eyes not leaving mine. He wants me to see through him, to grasp all of the whys that kept him away. “I’ve lived so many of them. Catching dad when he fell from the ladder last year at Christmas, or stopping the truck from falling on my face when the jack slipped out last spring…”

  Wes turns his head slowly with that last one, his eyes catching TK’s. His brother was there for that, and Wes said he slid out in time. He holds his brother’s stare through several deep breaths, the only sounds from buzzing insects and the humming highway miles away.

  “The bridge collapse,” Wes continues, and TK’s head falls to the side slightly in response, his eyes sagging with sympathy. “Joss…” Wes continues, quieting for a moment to suck in his lips and shake his head, blaming himself still.

  “Her leg,” he says.

  Our collective stillness puts me on edge. The only other person who knows nearly as much as I do is Kyle, but hearing Wes speak openly about the fucked-up destiny his father swore him to—that he and I share—feels raw and new.

  “I thought if I just stayed away, then the predictions would stop playing out,” he says, his gaze sliding back to me. “But what if it’s worse without me here? I figured maybe the real point is I’m supposed to stop something from killing you.”

  “Nothing is going to kill me,” I say, feigning my confident self as I shake my head and look at my boy. I’m not entirely confident—not when loan sharks know where I live. But whatever is coming for me…for my dad—it’s nothing compared to the things I’ve survived.

  Wes’s lips form a sealed line, and he breathes in deeply through his nose.

  “You’re right,” he says. “Nothing will. I won’t let it.”

  My lungs fill and my mouth is overcome with a sour taste because what Wes isn’t telling them is that the story never says I die—my father does. And while Wes is determined to protect me, I’m just as determined to save my tiny family.

  “So what you’re saying is…” Levi begins, pushing away from the truck and stepping closer to his brother, stopping just out of his reach. He points a finger at Wes from his folded arms. “You can stop bad things from happening.”

  “Some of them,” Wes says, a slight lift in his shoulders.

  “Because you’re…like…”

  This is where Levi stops. Saying anything more out loud feels childish and fantastical. I avoided it for a long time. In many ways, I still refuse, because underneath the strange things that Wes can somehow do…is a young man with a soft heart and a capacity to love that I once thought didn’t exist. Wes isn’t weird. He isn’t alien. He’s a gift—rare and mine.

  “Because I’m like this,” he says, walking toward the front of the truck and holding out a hand to help Taryn slide down so she can stand next to TK. Wes lifts the hood high, propping it up with a metal rod I can tell he or his brothers or dad added to the truck themselves. Rubbing his palms together, he studies the engine, looking for just the right place to make his point, pausing once his gaze passes over a rounded metal box lodged on the right side of the motor. Wes reaches forward, his fingers outstretched, inches away from the searing-metal piece, but before he grips it, TK grabs his wrist.

  “Dude, you’ll burn yourself. Don’t!” his brother says.

  They both stare at one another for a few seconds, neither of them blinking, until one at a time TK’s fingers let go of Wes’s arm, as if he somehow knows what’s coming next and just isn’t sure if he’s ready to witness it. The moment he steps back from the space radiating with heat under their truck’s hood, Wes returns his attention to the part that would leave blistering, and likely debilitating, burns on anyone else’s skin. Without pause, he falls forward, gripping the box hard and flexing to make sure all of
his hand is exposed.

  We all watch breathlessly, and I glance to my side, catching the expressions on Kyle and Taryn’s faces. Their eyes, mouths, the paleness of their skin and the wash of disbelief that colors their cheeks—it’s exactly how I’m sure I looked the first time Wes showed me just how different he is. After a dozen seconds, he pulls his hand away, curling his fingers into a ball that he holds in front of his chest.

  “It’s not that I don’t feel it, it’s just that…” He pauses for a deep breath, turning to face us all. He rolls his wrist, slowly opens his fingers, and unveils a slightly pink palm, and skin that looks like it’s never been harmed. Lips part and words hang on the tip of his tongue, as if even he is amazed at what he can do despite living with it for eighteen years.

  “It’s that it doesn’t hurt like it should.”

  No one moves for nearly a minute. Wes holds his hand open, on display for us all, and I know the urges that are kicking at everyone’s insides. Wes does, too. It’s why he doesn’t make eye contact with any of us. He simply waits until we’re ready—until one of us is brave enough to say something out loud.

  Kyle is the first to move, only his first step isn’t toward Wes, it’s toward the open hood where he rests his elbows on the rim of the open cavity and rubs his palms together as his eyes narrow on the part Wes just touched.

  “That’s your exhaust manifold,” Kyle says, reaching forward and holding his palm several inches away. “That should have puckered your skin and smelled like death when you touched it.”

  He pulls his hand away quickly and rubs the back of it with his cooler palm, wincing as he does.

  “A foot away and I’m pretty sure I singed away the hair on my knuckles,” Kyle says, looking at me first, then to Wes.

  More silence follows—everyone is processing. Nobody knows what word to use to describe what we’ve witnessed, and I refuse to buy into Shawn’s story, to label Wes as he always has—as something super. But it’s hard not to go there when he does things like this. He’s human and whole. There’s nothing about him that’s otherworldly, other than these things he can do without getting hurt.

  “You can touch hot things,” TK says, finally, pacing around the front of the truck, stopping next to Kyle and leaning in to point to the proof. “You don’t get hurt.”

  Wes lifts a shoulder and blinks in acknowledgement.

  “That’s some of it,” he says.

  “Some of it,” TK repeats.

  “I can take an impact, like say getting knocked on my ass by my brother from the roof of a truck seven feet up,” he says through a faint smile.

  TK’s eyes haze and they shift from the rooftop down to the ground where Wes landed.

  “A’right…what else?” he asks.

  Wes pulls his lips in tight and breathes in through his nose, thinking.

  “I can get hit by a car, straight on, going forty miles per hour, and come out with nothing more than a little temporary memory loss. I can roll down the highway, catching someone mid-air, at about the same speed, and walk away with a few scratches. I’ve held up cars for minutes at a time, even our truck…when I’m working on it alone and you guys aren’t around to see it. My reflexes are fast, too…like…I can catch things in the middle of the air at high speeds.”

  “Like what?” TK continues, his face contorted. I think he’s waffling between a world of skepticism and one of awe.

  “Rocks…” Wes says, his eyes swiveling to Levi’s. “Hit from a metal bat at twilight.”

  Levi’s chest rises fast, his memory kicking in. It wasn’t long ago that we all played a game of makeshift baseball on the beach as the sun went down. Levi was pitching a rock, and Kyle’s brother Conner was swinging the bat. Wes saved me from being hit, and nobody noticed.

  “You catch rocks,” TK says, smirking on one side of his mouth, letting out a short laugh. “That’s so unimpressive,” he adds, rolling his eyes.

  He keeps the act going for a few seconds, spinning on his feet and wandering a few steps from us all before turning back, his hands in his pockets and his chin tipped up.

  “So that fight in the weight room…when you went all caveman on Zack for saying that shit he said to Joss…”

  “Yeah,” Wes says quietly, chewing at the inside of his mouth as he waits for TK’s real question to come.

  His brother looks down at the ground as he steps forward, closing the distance until his nose is inches from Wes. TK tilts his head, and their eyes meet, but he lets everyone simmer in anticipation for a few more seconds.

  “You hold back on that asshole?”

  Wes’s mouth twitches with the urge to grin, but he holds it off for a beat, finally giving in and letting his lips curve up on the right as he nods once to his brother.

  “I’m not the one bleeding,” he says.

  “Joker, you just full-on felt up a steaming piece of metal in our crappy 1980s engine block with your bare hands. Don’t give me any of that ‘I’m not the one bleeding’ shit. You held back, you douchebag,” TK says, laughing through the end of his speech before hooking his arm around Wes’s neck, rubbing his head, and working to wrestle him to the ground.

  Levi and Kyle start to laugh, too, and my chest fills completely with a breath I’ve been dying to take, each intake of air coming a little easier as what began as wrestling between Wes and his brother morphs into an embrace. TK’s hands move to Wes’s head, and with his eyes closed, he rests his forehead on his brother’s, rocking gently side to side on his strong legs. His jaw flexes in his fight not to cry.

  “You’re my brother,” he says, and all Wes can do is nod, his eyes closed and his hands clinging to TK’s elbows. “Nothing ever stops that, you hear? Nothing. You and me and Levi—Mom and Dad. We’re family. No matter what.”

  “I know,” Wes says, his words coming out through a hoarse whisper.

  “You do now,” TK says. “You don’t have to handle things alone. You’ve got us…you’ve got me.”

  Wes nods again, their heads still resting on one another. Their family makes me wish for a sister or brother of my own.

  “So this book thing…” Levi says, breaking the peace and cutting through the air like a hammer through water. My mind flashes to my dad, to the situation we’re in, to that crazy trailer parked near the lake filled with answers and questions.

  Wes and TK break apart slowly, and my boy’s eyes catch mine in short passes. His hands go back in his pockets, and my chest grows tight again.

  “What comes next?” Levi asks the question the others all want to know.

  Wes hitches his shoulders high and wobbles his head side to side, downplaying the unbelievable things he’s just shared.

  “I don’t really know. They’re just stories, and it’s all probably just coincidence—like things I’m reading into, maybe remembering wrong…”

  Wes’s words trail off as he looks at his brother. Levi steps closer, his posture a mirror to Wes’s, hands in his pockets, too.

  “Family,” he says again, as if he has to remind him of the huge mountain of trust they’ve just climbed together.

  Wes’s eyes shift to me again, and I exhale slowly, my eyes falling closed.

  “It’s my dad,” I say, opening my eyes when my chin is tucked to my chest, so my focus is away from the stares I know I’m now getting.

  “Like when we were kids?” Taryn asks in a whisper.

  I shake my head no.

  “Not his drinking, or anything happening to me. Something bad will happen to him. At least, according to the guy who kept giving his only son away to strangers just so he could watch over me,” I say, sharing more than I’d planned, but unable to hold back the pressure of it all inside.

  I spare a glance up, and the faces are all as I expected—wrinkled, frowning and breathless. I suck in air fast, pushing it out just as quickly, but the tension in my body only squeezes tighter.

  “I’m pretty sure Shawn was in love with my mom,” I say, my gaze moving to Wes. “He hates my
dad. It’s not all that crazy that he fantasized about bad things happening to him.”

  TK and Levi lean against the truck, arms folded over their chests, and Kyle kicks at the ground. I recognize where they are in their heads—they’re caught between calling the bullshit card and believing that some of this might just be for real. I’m caught there, too, honestly, but the one thing I’m certain of is that Shawn is pulling a lot of the strings, even if it is just by messing with all of our minds.

  “Hey,” Kyle says, nodding his head up and squinting with one eye from the rising bright sun shining in his face. “You think next time we ditch we could go back to doing fun shit? You know, like swimming at the lake or pushing shopping carts around with the front of our trucks? Not that watching Wes try to hurt himself isn’t loads of fun, but for the most part…this morning’s been a bit of a downer.”

  Our collective laughter starts quietly, but picks up fast, and soon Wes is rushing toward Kyle and lifting him over his shoulder, carrying him toward the truck.

  “How about we push your ass around in a shopping cart in front of the truck?” he shouts through laughter.

  “Atta boy,” Kyle yells, slapping Wes’s back hard before he puts him down.

  Their eyes meet and make a silent agreement, and nothing else is said as we all climb into the truck and Wes drives us back to school. We’ll get dinged for being late, and I’ll use the car crash at my house as an excuse to buy us a little leeway. I’ll also probably prop a nail up underneath the back tire of Zack’s Camaro, because I found one in the pickup truck bed a minute ago and something told me I should put it in my pocket. Zack will know why it’s there, and he won’t say a word.

  And Grace will be here soon.

  My father will be home.

  Everything will be just fine.

  Sixteen

  Wes drove me to pick up Grace from the airport during lunch. We didn’t talk about the morning, about my dad and the money he owes, or about the truth Wes finally shared with his brothers. We talked about unimportant things, both of us craving a little normal, I think. Wes asked what I planned on wearing for my Girl Strong photoshoot, and I talked about how maybe the photographer will show me a few things I can use for the next assignment due in my photography class.