by Trish Doller
She sniffles and I look up. She’s crying. Not outright bawling or anything, only a tear trickling down her cheek, which is something I’ve never seen before. She blows out a breath. “Except you went straight for Harper, just like you did back in middle school.”
I’m so confused. “So, wait—”
“No.” Paige wipes her eyes on the bottom of her tank top. “Shut up. I know the only good thing we’ve ever had is the sex. I guess one time I wished you’d want me the way you want her.”
Sometimes girls make no sense at all. “What are you talking about?”
“I came over last night,” she says. “You were sleeping with her, and all your clothes were on, and—you love her.”
“I don’t—do you, um—” I stumble over my words. “You don’t love me, do you?”
She laughs. “Jesus, you really are an idiot. No, I don’t love you. But it would have been nice if you loved me.”
“You mean the way Ryan does?”
She stops laughing, because she knows I’m right. My brother is crazy about her in a way I never was. Never will be. Paige has had a string of lovesick schmucks who fell for her and didn’t realize she’d never love them back. Even though Ryan and I don’t get along all that well, he’s still my brother. I don’t like the idea of him ending up one of those lovesick schmucks. “He’s a lot better for you than I am.”
“I know.”
I hear the hesitation in her voice. “But?”
“He’s not you.”
“Well, no shit,” I say, which makes her sniffle-laugh. “But if you’re not into Rye, don’t toy with him. Cut him loose.”
She shoulder-bumps me. “If things don’t work out between you and Harper—”
“Get out of here.” I laugh. “I’ve got things to do.”
Paige leans over and kisses my cheek. “See ya, Trav.”
She pulls open my bedroom door and Ryan is standing in the hallway. Of course. The one time that absolutely nothing happens between me and Paige, we get busted. Ryan’s face goes to rage instantly. “What the—?”
He rushes me, slamming his hands into the middle of my chest, and pushes me back against the wall. I hear some of the photos tear away from the wall and the head of a thumbtack presses into my back. It happens so fast and I’m still trying to process the fact that Ryan got the drop on me when his fist connects with my eye. The same one Harper hit.
“Ryan, stop it!” Paige grabs his arms and tries to pull him away, but he shakes her off and cocks his fist back to hit me again. I shove him, but the stupid fool comes at me again. One hit? Fine. I deserved that. But I’m not going to be his personal punching bag. Not when he started this. Lowering my shoulder, I hit him in the chest. He grabs on to me and we hit the floor. His fists are pummeling me wherever he can reach, but I’ve got him pinned to the ground.
“Let him go.” Dad grabs the back of my T-shirt, pulling it until I can feel the collar pressing tightly against the front of my neck like a noose. Ryan gets in one last hit, smacking the side of my head with his fist. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Nothing.” I reach out to help Ryan up, but he slaps my hand away. “Just a misunderstanding.”
“I want you out of here,” Dad says, pointing at me.
“Dean—”
“No, Linda.” He cuts her off and helps Ryan to his feet. “Ever since he’s come home, Travis has stirred up trouble—getting you drunk, trying to break up our marriage, and this isn’t the first time he’s had Paige over in the middle of the night. I’ve had enough.”
They’re standing in a clump on the other side of my room. Them versus me. Except Paige, who looks as if she wishes she were anywhere but here, and Mom is gnawing her lip. Dad’s arm is across my brother’s chest, holding Ryan back.
“Well, we finally agree on something.” I grab my seabag and shove in a handful of shirts from the top drawer of my dresser. “I’m done.”
“Travis, wait.” My mom steps forward. Out from Dad’s shadow. “You don’t have to leave. This is my house—”
“Your house?” Dad interrupts.
“It will be mine in the divorce if you don’t stop talking,” Mom snaps. His eyes go wide, because she never talks like that, but he stops talking. “Travis isn’t the bad guy here, Dean. He spent his childhood trying to live up to your impossible expectations and when he decided he didn’t want to do that anymore, you were the one who treated him as if he’s worthless. And you’ve made me feel like I’m wrong for supporting our son when he was in the middle of a war. You are the bad guy, Dean. You. And I have had enough.”
I have to do a mental check to make sure my mouth isn’t hanging open because… damn, Mom.
“So Travis isn’t leaving unless he wants to leave, and things are going to change around here,” she says. “If you want to stay married to me, you’re going to have to straighten up, and if you don’t, you need to pack your things and get out.”
Dad looks bewildered—like he can’t figure out what just happened—but I have no sympathy. Not when I’m so proud of my mom.
“Now,” she says. “I’m going back to bed. Paige, you’d be wise to leave now, and Dean—well, what you do is up to you. Good night.”
She walks out with some serious dignity, leaving the rest of us standing there in silence. Dad’s expression is murderous as he clings to his pathetic insistence that this is my fault. His fists bunch at his sides and his jaw twitches, as if he’s considering taking a swing. I meet his glare. “I wouldn’t.”
He stalks out of the room, his footsteps fading down the stairs, instead of down the hall toward Mom, the way they should. Coward.
“Listen, Rye—” I say.
“Go to hell.”
Paige doesn’t say anything. She drops the spare key on the end of my bed and leaves. Pain flashes across my brother’s face—he won’t get the courtesy of a Dear John letter to make the breakup official—before it hardens back to anger.
“Why did you do it?” He won’t look at me.
“Do what?”
“Sleep with my girlfriend.”
“Why did you sleep with my girlfriend?”
“You get everything, Travis,” he says.
“What exactly do I have that you haven’t taken, Ryan?” I ask. “You hang out with my friends, drive my car, and steal my girlfriend while I’m in Afghanistan. What more do you want from me? I have nightmares that keep me up at night. You’re fucking welcome to those.”
Ryan doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just looks at the floor. But when he looks up at me, his face is still hard. “I can take one more thing,” he says. “You tell Harper or I will.”
Shit.
When he’s gone and I’m alone, I return to my laptop and the words are still there waiting. Cursor blinking.
Charlie Sweeney was
There’s no way I’m going to think of anything tonight. Not with Ryan’s threat hanging over me. I close the laptop and get into bed.
I’m walking down a road in Marjah as the muezzin sings the haunting call, summoning the faithful to prayer. A mud-colored dog lifts its head to watch as our patrol passes by. First me, then Charlie and Moss. Peralta is behind them. The hair on the back of my neck sets me on alert. Something isn’t right. But when I try to call out to my friends, my voice won’t come. My hands won’t lift to flag them down. My feet feel as if they are rooted to the ground. Charlie takes a step forward, his foot landing on the pressure plate of a bomb, and the explosion rattles my teeth, my bones. A cloud of dust envelops him. Shrapnel from the bomb, hidden in the base of a tree, riddles his body and he falls. Movement comes rushing back to my limbs, but when I reach him the world tilts. I’m the one on the ground, not Charlie. I’m the one sprayed with shrapnel that sends searing pain through me. Above me is an Afghan boy. One I’ve seen before in the streets, begging for whatever we have to offer. He smiles at me as I die.
My blood is rushing in my ears as I lie in the dark with only a dream, only a dream
, only a dream repeating in my mind like a mantra. The words don’t help. They can’t blot out the nightmare. I reach for the bottle of pills on the nightstand and after I take two, I call Harper.
“Travis?” Her voice is gravelly with sleep.
“I forgot it’s the middle of the night.”
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
“I had a nightmare, so I’m awake,” I say. “I just took my prescription.”
“Do you want me to stay on the phone until you get sleepy?”
“Do you mind?”
She’s quiet for a beat and I wonder if she’s mentally calculating the hours between now and the time she has to get up for work. I almost hang up so she can go back to sleep, but then she says, her voice soft and low, “I don’t mind.”
Harper talks for a while. About the sea turtles. About how she’s ready to go to college, but that she’ll miss her dad when she’s gone. About the crab trap they keep in the canal behind their house.
“Depending on the season, we’ll get blues or stone crabs,” she says. “Usually we’ll boil them and freeze the meat until we have enough for crab cakes. Or sometimes we’ll make crab dip or alfredo pasta.”
“I like crab.” I’m starting to get tired and it’s making me talk like a three-year-old.
“Me, too,” she says. “It’s my favorite. Maybe, um—maybe I’ll make you crab cakes sometime.”
“Okay.” A yawn overtakes me.
“Travis?” she says.
“What?”
“Sweet dreams.”
“I hope so,” I say. “I’m really tired of the bad ones.”
“Talk to you tomorrow?”
“Okay.” I feel the sleep wave approaching. The one where your words will wash away if you don’t say them. “I’m really sorry.”
She probably thinks I’m apologizing for waking her up, but before I can tell her that it’s for what happened with Paige, she whispers good night and hangs up. At least I think she does. I’m not sure because I’m asleep.
Chapter 12
The sun has barely broken the horizon a few days later, when I pull the Jeep into the driveway at Harper’s house. She’s waiting on the front porch swing with a yellow duffel bag beside her.
“Hey, you,” she calls over the rumble of the engine as she throws the duffel in the back and swings up into the passenger’s seat. I catch a whiff of sunscreen as she leans over to drop a kiss on my cheek.
“Hey back,” I say. “Thanks for coming with me.”
“Sure.”
“I can’t promise it’s going to be a good time.”
“That’s okay.” I can’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but she’s smiling as she twists her hair up into a knot. She makes messy look so damn good. “I’ve never been to St. Augustine. Have you?”
“Nope.”
She’s happy and I don’t want to spoil it by telling her about Paige. She’s going to be pissed. Now would be the perfect time, so she still has a chance to get out of the Jeep and leave me. But I don’t want that to happen, so I throw it in reverse, spitting gravel as I back out into the street.
“I brought music.” Harper reaches back to her duffel and pulls out her iPod. “What do you want to hear?”
“You pick.”
She plugs her iPod into the stereo with one of those fake cassettes and dials up a reggae-sounding band I’ve never heard before. Harper sings along, her bare feet propped on the dashboard, and I wish I could run off somewhere with her, away from Paige and Charlie and the United States Marine Corps.
I pull in for gas at the Racetrac just before the interstate.
“I’m going in for a Coke,” Harper says as I’m punching the buttons on the self-serve pump. “You want one?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I’m leaning against the side of the Jeep, waiting for the tank to fill, when she comes out. “I’ve got something for you,” she says.
From behind her back, she dangles a bag of Skittles in front of my face, and it knocks me out that not only does she remember my favorite candy, but buys it for me. Paige never did anything like that. With one hand I snatch the bag. With the other, I wrap my arm around her waist and pull her against me—and kiss her.
The latch on the gas nozzle pops when the tank is full and the pump shuts off, but we don’t stop until a voice comes through the little speaker on the pump, asking if I’ve finished fueling my vehicle.
“Wow,” Harper breathes. Her hands are beneath my T-shirt, splayed out on my back, so I’m pretty confident she was as into it as I was. “I should buy you Skittles more often.”
“You don’t have to buy my love,” I say. “I’ll kiss you for free anytime you want.”
As soon as the words leave my mouth I wish I could spool them back in. Buy my love? Jesus, she probably thinks I’m an idiot. Because I am an idiot. But she doesn’t look freaked out that I dropped the L-word on her. She smiles.
“I already knew that about you, Travis.” She gets back in the Jeep. “I read it on the wall in the girls’ locker room.”
“That,” I say with a laugh, “doesn’t surprise me at all.”
It’s pretty much impossible to talk when you’re doing eighty with the top down on the interstate, so for the next few hours Harper keeps the music on shuffle and we sing along. I don’t claim to be a good singer, but back in high school, Eddie and I got it into our heads that we were going to start a band with him on bass, me on guitar/vocals, and whoever we could find on drums. It was a punk band, so we figured I wouldn’t have to sing well.
We drive into the middle of Florida, through towns I’ve never heard of—past farms and orange groves and trees that aren’t palms—until we reach the outskirts of Disney World. The crops there are restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions, and traffic picks up, because even in the summer there is no escaping the Mouse. Once we’re on the other side, the landscape changes again and the green highway signs tell us we’re getting close to the beaches. New Smyrna. Daytona. Ormond.
The miles close in on St. Augustine and I start thinking about Charlie. I asked him once, when we were picking through our MREs for the best parts, why he joined the Marines.
“It was the commercial that got me, man,” he said, shoveling a plastic forkful of sloppy joe into his face. “You know the one where the guy jumps into the pool and comes up out of the water in full gear?”
I had no idea what he was taking about. I never paid attention to the recruiting ads on TV and I hadn’t even considered enlisting until the day I walked into the recruiter’s office. I had no idea that most guys don’t sign up and ship to boot camp a few weeks later, the way I did.
“My mom’s a hippie type,” Charlie said. “She was always talking about how I should take a gap year between high school and college to find myself. I think she was expecting me to backpack my way across Europe or live in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. So I’m watching TV one day and that commercial comes on and I start thinking about how fucking cool it would be to be a Marine.”
Moss, who was sitting with us while we ate, just shook his head and muttered, “Boot.”
Charlie laughed, because insults never stuck to him. He was rubber that way. The only thing that would have ever gotten under his skin was if the other guys had made fun of his mom being a lesbian, but I was the only one who knew. “So I go to her and I’m like, ‘Mom, I’m going to join the Marines.’ She’s completely horrified on account of her being a tree-hugging peace freak, but she says, ‘Well, if that’s what you really want—but, Charlie, wouldn’t you rather go on a vision quest or something? I know a guy in New Mexico. He has peyote.’” He laughed again, his mouth full of food. “My mom—the only parent on the planet to try and talk her kid into doing drugs to keep him out of the Marines.”
It’s just past lunchtime when we roll into St. Augustine on Highway 1. My face feels tight from the wind and sun, and the end of Harper’s nose is a little bit pink. My insides are bunched up now that we’re here,
even though the memorial service isn’t until later this evening, and I still haven’t figure out what—if anything—to tell Harper.
“You hungry?” I ask as she lowers the volume from highway to city.
“Definitely.”
“How do you feel about barbecue?” On the side of the street is a little soul food place. The smell of barbecued meat hangs in the air and my stomach growls out loud.
“I think your stomach already decided,” she says. “But that sounds good.”
We go inside and order ribs, greens, and macaroni and cheese off a menu board spelled out in mismatched letters.
“Do you want to sit in or out?” I ask.
“In,” Harper says as we sit down at a picnic table. “The air-conditioning feels good.”
She’s right, it is, but shit—I have to take off my sunglasses. Because it would be weird if I didn’t. And as soon as I do, she notices the black eye.
“What happened to your eye?”
“I got in a fight with Ryan.”
“Over Paige?”
“Why would you think that?”
She picks up a rib. “Because if you were going to get in a fight with your brother, chances are it would be over a family thing or Paige. I went with logic.”
“I, um—I kind of hooked up with her since I’ve been back.”
She puts down the rib and starts gathering all of her food onto the tray we brought from the counter. She does it really fast. Angry fast.
“Harper, I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t talk.” Her voice is low and controlled as she stands with the tray. Quiet, so she doesn’t draw attention. “Or I’ll dump my lunch on you and that would be a waste of good food. I’m going to the Jeep.”
I get up, but she cuts me with a look so sharp it drops me back down on the bench. My stomach growls again, reminding me I’m hungry, but to dig into my lunch would be a dick move. On top of all the others I’ve made since I’ve known her, I mean. From the window I can see her sitting in the passenger seat with the tray on her lap. She doesn’t look my direction at all. So I eat.
And try to think of a way to fix things. Again.