If I Fix You

by Abigail Johnson

  “You wanna teach me?” he said, not really meaning it.

  “Yeah, maybe.” I didn’t really mean it either. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I used to hustle pool back in Philly. I could do that for a while.”

  I leaned forward. “What, seriously?” The look he gave me was very serious and I sat back. “Sorry, I didn’t think people actually did that.”

  Daniel had an arm draped over one bent knee. “My old man taught me.”

  The way he said that made me pause. “Is your dad one of the things you needed to get away from when you moved here?”

  Daniel was looking down at his hand, flexing his fingers. “Here’s the thing.” But then he didn’t say anything, like an entire minute passed and he was staring off at the back of the house across from us. When he suddenly turned and focused on me, I almost drew back.

  “We don’t really know each other. Not really. I don’t want to tell you about my life back in Philly. There’s all this stuff I’m trying to forget, you know?”

  He wasn’t asking me a question, but I nodded even though I had no idea what he was getting at.

  “Like my dad. I don’t want to talk about him.” Daniel was tapping his foot, faster by the second, and he wouldn’t look at me. “He was—”

  “Okay.” I cut him off with a hand on his forearm. “You don’t have to talk about him.” When he looked at me, I added, “Or anything that makes you think about him. I couldn’t care less about playing pool. Honestly.”

  When Daniel dropped his eyes to where my fingers still rested against his skin, I pulled it back.

  “You should have told me how old you were. I don’t mean that like you did something wrong,” he added when he saw my reaction. “It just would have been good to know.”

  I could have said the same thing to him. I thought the age difference was pretty obvious, but really up until that moment at Sonic, I hadn’t thought it mattered. I could still fix his car, hang out with him occasionally. It wasn’t a big deal.

  Until it was.

  Sometime later when Daniel stood up to leave, he stopped at the edge of the roof. “You said almost seventeen. How much is almost?”

  “October.”

  His eyes were once again scanning the sky. “That’s not that far away.”

  “Yeah?”

  He was still looking up. “We’re just friends, right? And you seem pretty mature for sixteen.” I made a face and Daniel mirrored it. “That sounded creepier than I meant it to.”

  I bit both my lips to hide my smile. “How creepy did you mean it to sound?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “So you’re going to be around tomorrow night?”

  The expression on his face made me think he wasn’t sure he should be asking me that. I kind of felt the same way even as I said, “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I didn’t realize how much Hall & Oates had grown on me until Dad stopped playing them. Not right away, but after Mom called they were on less and less. There wasn’t anything to dance to and Dad grew different again, quiet and heavy like when she’d first left.

  Sundays were the worst. Dad always got quieter after church, introspective. We’d get home and I’d catch his gaze lingering on things that reminded him of Mom. He stood for twenty minutes in the hall closet last Sunday when he’d found the pin from her college sorority caught on the corner of one of the coats. When I asked him about it, he’d given me the strangest look, as though I was the answer to a test he’d cheated on.

  Beyond that we talked and worked, but he didn’t leave me any cartoons on the work board, and he didn’t comment when I put on the most obnoxious music I could think of. By week’s end, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went into Dad’s office, scanned the shelf over his desk until I found what I was looking for. I dusted it off on my way back to the garage and plunked it down in front of him as he was finishing his roast beef sandwich.

  To the uninitiated, the Creeper Race Cup looked like a wrench nailed to an exhaust pipe and spray-painted gold. In reality, it was the most coveted wrench nailed to an exhaust pipe and spray-painted gold known to man.

  Or to me and Dad at least.

  We’d inaugurated the Creeper Races the day we moved to our house when I was eight. It was one of the best and worst days of my life.

  Our old house had been a lot bigger. It had a little garden and the neighborhood was anything but cookie cutter. Claire lived around the corner too, so I didn’t want to move. I didn’t understand anything about money back then, but Dad explained we had to sell our old house, downsize, in order to buy the auto shop from the previous owner who wanted to retire. Dad had been working there most of my life and bringing me with him whenever possible, so I warmed up to the idea real fast.

  Mom was harder to persuade.

  She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to buy the shop. She didn’t want to give up what little she had to acquire something she’d never wanted in the first place. She wouldn’t go look for new houses, refused to pack when our old home sold, and basically made everything harder. She stayed with her sister nearby the week we moved.

  I remember sitting next to Dad in the moving van and him telling me all about our new little house. He kept calling it that, our little house, which made me feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder, impatient and excited to see everything. Dad said the little house was small and that it needed to be fixed just like the cars in the shop. He explained that Mom was having a hard time with the move but that we could help her by fixing it up before she saw it, as a surprise.

  He made it into a game for us. I don’t think he slept that entire week. We painted everything inside and out. He let me pick the color for their bathroom, a soft periwinkle because it was her favorite. There wasn’t any garden, but we built flower boxes for the windows and filled them with colorful blooms. Dad even hung a porch swing out front in an effort to dress up the rectangular slab of concrete that jutted several feet from the door before dropping off and connecting to the driveway. It wasn’t anything like our old house, but I remember thinking it was perfect when we finished.

  It was Christmastime, so Dad dropped me off at Mom’s sister’s so we could drive around and see the lights while he added a few last details to our new little house without the overeager hands of an eight-year-old trying to help.

  Mom took us to the “pretty houses” in the fancy neighborhood she liked. She pointed out her favorite, a two-story that had one of those little balconies on the front, a Juliet balcony, she called it. The owners had wrapped every inch of it in white twinkle lights. I’d smiled, pressing my face against the window, and told her that Dad could string lights like that for her at our new little house too. Instead of answering, she’d parked us in front of it and cried.

  When we pulled up to our new house, she didn’t say a thing about the flower boxes or the porch swing. She didn’t smile at Dad when he came out, and I didn’t understand why he had to pry her fingers from the car door handle.

  She kept silent as I towed her through each room and pointed out all the work Dad and I had done. And when we got to the bathroom, I remember smiling so hard my cheeks hurt, thinking finally she’d be happy.

  She wouldn’t even come in. She just glanced around with an expressionless face and asked Dad if he expected her to like the hole he bought just because he’d painted it.

  I’d started crying and Dad scooped me up and curtly told her we’d leave her to unpack. We went straight to the shop where he sat me directly on top of a creeper, lined up his own next to mine and said the phrase that I planned to get as a tattoo when I turned eighteen: “On your mark, get set, go!”

  He’d engraved those words into the Creeper Race Cup that very night above my initials after I finally won (with a helpful push).

  Over the years his name covered more s
pace on the Cup than mine, but I was on there too. And we had plenty of room left.

  “What do you say?” I asked, when Dad looked from his sandwich to the Cup. “I’ll even give you first creeper pick.” I rotated the Cup so he could read our initials. He always took care of me, found ways to make me smile when I couldn’t on my own. And I was going to be just like him.

  “Aren’t you getting a little old for that?”

  “You know the rules of Creeper Cup say if you refuse a challenge it’s considered a forfeit, and by my count...” I lifted the Cup for closer inspection. “Your lead is dwindling.” I had improved as our “courses” became more intricate over the years, but not that much. Yet. And based on the way Dad snatched the Cup for his own perusal, he knew it.

  Still, I thought my appeal to his competitive nature had done the trick. His eyes passed over the chipped paint and his mouth lifted.

  “Which one are you looking at?”

  He pointed to a year that I’d never forget.

  “The one when I accidentally set myself on fire. Awesome, Dad. Thanks.”

  “Wasn’t my fault you went careening into the rag bin.”

  “It was your idea to add sparklers to the creeper!”

  “Your pants only got singed a little. And I thought you were more coordinated back then.” He patted my head. “We know better now.”

  I had him. I knew it. “You grab the creepers and I’ll start blocking out—”

  The door chimed up front. We had a customer.

  And the Cup was returned to its dusty shelf.

  * * *

  When Dad shut his bedroom door later that night, I opened my window. I sat on the sill and twisted my legs out, feeling like I was escaping air that had grown too thin when I finally stood and peered over the edge of my roof.

  Daniel was already there. Waiting for me.

  “Sorry,” he said, seeing my surprise. “Figured you wouldn’t want me to knock.”

  He meant with Dad in the house. Yeah, that wouldn’t have gone well.

  “You figured right.” I rose up on my tiptoes and flattened my hands on the shingles that hit just under my chest. I would have preferred never as a date for Daniel to watch me awkwardly climb onto my roof. I took a deep breath, preparing to get it over with, when Daniel crouched in front of me and extended his hand.

  “Let me help you.” Daniel lifted my hand and smoothed my fingers open to grasp his. He lifted me easily too, which did all kinds of funny things to my stomach, then smiled when we both sat down.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just, your hands.” He lifted one and smoothed my fingers open. “They feel like a mechanic’s.”

  I pulled my admittedly rough hand into my lap. “I like my hands. They say who I am and what I do.”

  Daniel’s eyes flickered between mine. “I like that about you too.” He reached for my hand again, gliding his fingers over skin that wasn’t soft, but still sensitive. He found a scar that flowed from the base of my thumb to the middle of my palm and traced it. “What happened here?”

  It was hard to talk with his fingers sliding over my hand.

  I made a pretense of pulling away to examine the line myself, as if I’d somehow forgotten the two-inch scar.

  “I tried to pry up the hood of a rusted old Nova that my dad was working on. I slipped.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seven.” I found myself telling him about that day and the way the vein in Dad’s head nearly burst when he found me messing with the Nova before nearly passing out when he saw all the blood. Twelve stitches and a new pair of coveralls later, he was showing me the correct way to open the hood.

  “Not that I never got hurt in the shop again, but I was never on the wrong end of a Nova again.” I smiled, then flicked my eyes to Daniel. “What about you, any scars worth showing off?”

  “Not really, no.”

  He had at least two visible scars, the one I could barely glimpse on his collarbone depending on the way he moved, and the one on his eyebrow. But before I could ask about either of those, Daniel leaned forward and ran the back of his hand along the underside of my jaw.

  “And this one?”

  I dropped my chin, breaking the skin-to-skin contact.

  “Sorry, too personal,” Daniel said, misinterpreting my reaction.

  “No, it’s not. Indirectly, I guess. I crashed racing my dad around the garage on a creeper.”

  Daniel raised a surprised eyebrow but said nothing. In the silence that settled between us, I realized he was giving me the choice to tell him more if I wanted to or leave it at that. I was so used to Claire pouncing on me with questions that I almost didn’t know what to say when it wasn’t being pulled out of me.

  So I just started. I told him about moving and Mom, and about Dad turning that whole awful day into something amazing.

  Talking about Mom with Daniel didn’t feel like I was exposing a festering wound to someone who’d never gotten so much as a scratch. He had his own wounds—and I was sure they were a lot more than he was sharing at that point, but it didn’t feel like we had to compare them that way. We both bled. How much wasn’t as important.

  And just like that, I started seeing stars again, brighter and more numerous than they’d ever been before.

  Daniel saw them too.

  CHAPTER 18

  Spending my mornings with Sean and, increasingly, my nights with Daniel, was confusing in ways it shouldn’t have been. Because I found myself looking forward to sunset in a way I hadn’t been able to look forward to sunrise.

  For the first time in years, there was someone I wanted to see more than Sean. And that shift in my heart, free as I was to make it—free as I’d always been to make it—felt like a betrayal.

  It made no sense to feel that way, to have any guilt over one fire dying and a new one kindling, but I did. And it was harder because, when we ran in the mornings, I’d sometimes find a spark, an ember that wasn’t supposed to be there. Wasn’t allowed. Sean would be telling a story about teaching his grandma and her bridge club how to use Twitter, or about the latest awesomely bad movie he’d discovered, when his eyes would catch mine. We’d share this smile that was all about our past and had nothing to do with our present. His mouth would kick up on one side, revealing much more than his dimple, and I’d let myself forget that it hurt to smile back.

  It was becoming...not easier, but less of a battle to ignore Sean when I was with Daniel.

  Other things were easier though.

  Coming home at night didn’t feel like slipping underwater without a full breath. The nights ahead of me weren’t something I had to endure. At least not alone. When Daniel and I were together, it was as if the world beyond my roof didn’t exist. We didn’t have to think about anyone fighting or walking out. While the world around us slept peacefully, we could escape it.

  And that changed everything.

  It had been a blisteringly hot day and even though the sun had long since set, the heat had soaked into the earth, my roof, even seemingly the air, and it hadn’t dissipated yet.

  Daniel and I were both sweating. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably have succumbed to the lure of my air-conditioned house. But I’d wanted to see him more than I’d wanted the comfort of cool air.

  I wanted to see him more than a lot of things. And I guess he wanted to see me too.

  There wasn’t even a semblance of a breeze though, so I wasn’t sure how long either of us would last outside. Daniel was already faring worse than I was.

  “That’s because my blood is thinner than yours,” I told him when he remarked on the difference. “Besides, it gets hot in Philadelphia during the summer too.”

  “Yeah, it does,” he said. “In a way it’s worse because it gets sticky from all th
e humidity, like you need a straw just to breathe.”

  I folded an arm under my head. “There you go.”

  Daniel sat up and nodded his chin at me. “But we didn’t melt on rooftops. We had pools. Where’s your pool?”

  “It’s in my bathroom and it’s called a tub.” I offered him the half-empty, barely cool water bottle I’d brought up with me, but he ignored it. Where the warmth was pestering him, it was lulling me. “Stop moving so much. You’ll cool down.”

  But he kept shifting constantly. I tugged my lip and looked past him, squinting into the distance, as an idea occurred to me.

  “Come on.” I stood and pulled Daniel up with me. For a second his stomach brushed against mine. A lot of his body brushed against a lot of mine. All of his warmth wrapped around me. I felt the tiny sweat droplets transfer from his skin to mine. My breath caught in a way it hadn’t maybe ever.

  No big deal. I had to repeat that a lot to myself when I was with Daniel. No big deal when his thigh would rest against mine sitting next to each other, or when his breath stirred the tiny hairs on the back of my neck when he stood behind me closer than was strictly necessary. Or like when his fingers slid down my arm once I regained my balance, but he stayed standing just as close.

  I was used to the butterflies I felt around Daniel, but not the pterodactyls that suddenly swooped in and started crashing around in my stomach.

  “How badly do you want to get out of this heat?” I asked, putting a few much-needed inches between us.

  “Badly, but I don’t want to let you—to go yet.” He was smiling at me, a questioning sort of smile that made me imagine what he might have looked like as a little boy.

  “I’m talking about both of us going somewhere. Maybe.”

  Daniel hesitated. Things between us had been...good. Easy. We hung out, we talked. But we kept it safe. Neither of us ever suggested going somewhere. All the nights that we spent on my roof had always been that—on my roof. I never actually left my house. Somehow that had seemed important. Daniel must have come up with his own rationalization for all the time we spent together, and now I was potentially jeopardizing that.