Him: head wound in early stages of healing, though there’s a good chance it’ll leave a scar. Concussion somewhat less painful, though headaches and light sensitivity are ongoing. Plus, sometimes, it hurts to think. He plans to write a note to the cabin owners, thanking them for keeping the place well-stocked with Tylenol.
Me: arm wound also improving, will definitely leave a scar. Ash-singed eye functioning, but still pinkish and irritated. I’ve vowed never to blow on a fire again, with the possible exception of my birthday candles, should Luke and I survive to our nineteenth and eighteenth birthdays, respectively. I’ve also vowed not to leave my bed pantless without consciously choosing to do so, but I keep that last promise to myself.
Luke’s headache worsens, so he takes some Tylenol and a nap; my eye is still stinging, so I opt for a cool compress and a nap of my own. Once we awaken, Luke discovers a deck of cards in the back of the kitchen drawer, and spends the better part of the afternoon trying to improve my poker skills, which are abysmal. I complain until he finally gives up, and we play Go Fish and War, like we used to do on rainy days as kids. The sleet outside has changed over into freezing rain, so it isn’t too much of a stretch, but this time the card playing happens via candles instead of electricity. That’s one of the differences, anyway.
“You know earlier, when we were talking about New Year’s Eve?” Luke asks, out of the blue.
I’ve been gloating over winning the most recent round of Fish, even though we both know he’s defeated me way more times today, and he’s been smiling at me in a strange, soft way, something I don’t remember from our childhood.
“Mm-hmm,” I answer, distracted, trying my best to shuffle the deck. Another card-related area where I struggle.
I get frustrated and pass the cards to Luke. His hands are used to gripping footballs, so shuffling cards isn’t much of a challenge. Ask the two of us to thread some needles, though, and all bets would be on me.
He separates the cards, bows their middles toward the table, and forces their edges to weave together. “So, if we’re still here then, maybe you and I…?” He bends the cards up into an arc and they flutter into a single pile.
He repeats the process twice more in silence, and I hold out my hand for the deck. “My turn to deal. …So. New Year’s Eve. Us. Are you talking about celebrating?” He half-nods, wary, and I begin laying down cards: one for him, one for me. “It’s a date.”
Luke’s eyes widen and he laughs. “I thought you said no more teasing.”
“Who’s teasing?”
I am, of course I am. Or maybe I miss his flirting.
Luke smiles, but his gaze keeps coming back to my face, and this time, when we play Crazy Eights, I win with almost no effort.
♦ ♦ ♦
For dinner, we eat Luke’s candy bars on the floor by the fire and end up talking about college. The future’s looming, big and unknown and imposing, for both of us.
“So, I heard you signed some letter to play football for State?”
“Yeah, last week. National Letter of Intent.”
“That was kind of a big deal, right? Wasn’t there an assembly or something?”
Luke shrugs a shoulder. He doesn’t even bother with both.
“What’s wrong? Don’t you want to go there?”
“It’s a pretty great school.”
“But…?”
“No ‘but.’”
I wait.
“Okay, maybe a ‘but’…except I’ll sound like an asshole, saying it out loud.”
Now, I’m the one who shrugs. A lot can be said with a shrug, truly.
“Fine,” he says. “Here it is: they only want me for my body.”
I bite my lip, but a smile still forces its way out. A small laugh—almost a giggle—follows. Well, who doesn’t, Luke? I’m suddenly, wildly tempted to say, but I refrain. The laughter is bad enough.
“Go ahead, laugh at me. I know how it sounds, but I mean it. If I didn’t play football, they wouldn’t be offering me anything.”
“Okay, I get what you’re saying, and maybe you’re right. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want you as a student, regardless, and it doesn’t mean you won’t do a whole lot more than play football while you’re there. You’re smart, Luke—you and I both know it, no matter what anyone says about the jocks. And, as for your body, it’s getting you a whole lot of scholarship money, so don’t be too hard on it.” My eyes flick over his arms, his shoulders, his chest, without bothering to get permission from my brain.
The corner of his mouth lifts, so at least I’ve given him a reason to smile. “What about you?” he asks. “Art school, but which one?”
Whatever contentment I’ve been feeling leaves me like I’ve been sucker-punched. Not that I’ve ever been sucker-punched, but this is how I imagine it would feel.
“What’d I say wrong?” All traces of smile have left Luke’s face, too.
“It’s nothing. I’m just not sure what I’m doing next year.”
“But you’ve been talking about art school—about being a pro photographer—since we were kids.”
“I really haven’t. It’s been a long time since I talked about that.”
This is true, though I’m leaving out the part about how I do still dream of going to art school—one in particular—except the only way I’d have a chance of getting in would be to pick up my camera again. Not an option.
Luke is nodding, slowly, his gaze holding mine.
The missing years have shaken off their coating of dust, and risen to stand between us once again.
“I know my opinion doesn’t matter anymore,” he says, after an extended pause, “but I still think you should go for it.”
Oddly, I find his opinion does still hold some weight. Not enough to tempt me, though. So departs our college conversation, leaving us both dissatisfied and silent.
After a respectable pause, Luke resurrects the school talk, carrying us back to earlier days, safer ones. A time—for him, apparently—of juvenile crime.
“Honestly?” I laugh after he finishes his story. “You pulled the fire alarm? You, friend, are a menace to society.”
He grins. “The last dare I ever accepted. I still can’t believe I didn’t get caught. The thing started shrieking and the classroom doors flew open, one after another. I was already tearing down the hallway, but I was sure a teacher was going to reach out and grab me. Almost broke my leg again, taking the back stairs two and three at a time.”
“Aw, your broken leg. I remember when you came home from football camp wearing that cast.”
Luke nods. “Summer before fifth grade. I skipped the second half of football camp because of that broken leg.” His smile becomes quiet. “And you got all teary-eyed when you saw me.”
I remember the pain I’d felt then, but it wasn’t only about him. “Well, you looked so helpless, sitting there on your sofa with your leg propped up, and you’d even saved a spot for me to sign your cast. You said something like, ‘No hearts, no flowers, or anything swirly.’ Did I really draw hearts and swirly things in those days?”
He laughs. “Yes, and you also sacrificed most of your fun that summer, just to stay with me. No swimming, no climbing trees or hanging out in tree houses. That was the summer you taught me how to use your camera, and you stopped taking pictures, yourself.”
He’s watching me, I know he is, but I can’t stop the pain from flooding my insides and, undoubtedly, rising to my face. That summer, while Luke was away, I’d discovered the truth about our parents: the affair. His mom, my dad. Luke still doesn’t know I learned about it nearly a year before he did. He doesn’t know how I found out, and he can’t know I’m the one who drove his mother from his life.
Such terrible secrets, so difficult to bear. I spent much of that time caught between hating myself and hating our parents.
“You watch my mom sometimes. Do you know that?” Lucas had asked me once that summer while we were at his house, putting together yet another photo album
.
How could I tell him the truth? I wanted to know what it was about his mother that could draw my father away from mine.
“She’s pretty, your mom,” I’d answered, no warmth in my voice.
Everything had begun to unravel by then, and once it got going, it never really stopped. The affair was discovered during spring break of fifth grade, the summer that followed was spent almost completely inside the haven of our tree house, and the new school year brought both middle school and the rumors.
Maybe some adult had slipped up and a kid overheard. Whatever the beginnings, the news spread like it had been electrified: Layla’s dad and Lucas’s mom had been doing “it” and got caught, so Lucas’s mom had to leave town.
Not only was there sex and drama, but also culpability: mostly because he got to stay, my dad was the guiltiest of the guilty parties, and through the inconvenience of shared genes, so was I.
Still, Lucas remained loyal. Our classmates might have blamed me for the sins of my father, but he never did.
“Don’t listen to them,” he’d tell me, whenever I got upset by the teasing and made things worse. Never once did he mention the content of the rumors themselves. Neither of us did.
When ignoring the taunts didn’t make the kids quit pursuing me, Lucas launched threats at them. A few times, he got physical, shoving someone who’d said or done something awful, but that made me afraid for him.
“Stop, Lucas,” I’d beg. “You have to stop.”
He wouldn’t, though. Or couldn’t.
So, I did the only thing I could think of to protect my friend: I disappeared.
Lucas needed to be around those kids—some of the worst offenders were on his football team—but I didn’t, so I withdrew from everyone and everything that I could. It would have been a harder thing to accomplish if I wasn’t already sure I deserved it for what I’d done: ruined Lucas’s family and my own.
When I focus again on Luke, sitting a few feet away on the cabin floor, he’s watching my face, like he did so many times back then. I’ve never been sure of what he could see. It’s so hard to hide when he watches my face.
Ten
Glass: Fragile
After listening to ice pound the cabin’s roof for a full night, dawn of the twenty-ninth opens on a sullen and cranky note. Luke’s cell is officially dead—we tested it from the cabin too often as the time ran short, and brought its battery to a premature end. Plus, he and I might be experiencing some stir craziness. It isn’t easy being cooped up like this.
So, what do we do to lighten the mood? The freezing rain has stopped, so Luke goes to gather more firewood—a skill he seems intent on perfecting—and I make an early morning brunch.
We’ve settled on two meals a day in an effort to conserve food: brunch and a late dinner. Snacks are optional, but only when necessary. I save most of them for Luke, mainly because never have I ever encountered someone so endlessly hungry in all my life.
Together, we’ve come up with a rule about brunch: it shouldn’t happen until our desire for food gets the better of us, but today I’m breaking that rule and making it extra-early, since I’m always hungry too, and, besides, I can’t think of anything else to do with myself.
“Mm, I smell food,” Luke says, coming in from outside with his arms full of icy, snowy branches. He drops the firewood to the side of the ever-expanding pile and pushes my cat-eye sunglasses up off his cold-reddened nose and onto his head. I grin at him, because he looks adorably goofy, but he ignores my expression.
“Let me guess, rice and beans?” He comes to peek over my shoulder, without having returned to the door yet to close it. When it’s available, food takes precedence, even over heat.
“Beans and rice, this time. Cleverly disguised as oatmeal with rehydrated milk, and soon to have a dollop of honey on top.”
“Dollop? Fancy.” He leans closer to inspect the slowly cooking oatmeal.
“How’s outside?” I ask, watching him inhale the scent of the food.
“Aw, Layla, you have to see.” He turns to me, and his smile is contagious. “The sun’s broken through the clouds and it’s crazy: everything’s all covered in ice and glowing.”
He drops my sunglasses back into place, smirks when I can’t help grinning again, and grabs my hand to lead me outdoors. I lean back to resist his grasp, planting my feet in place when we reach the doorway. “No way. I’m not wearing shoes.”
He smiles and bends forward. “Get on my back.”
“Not a chance.”
“You have to. Otherwise, your feet’ll freeze to the ice and I’ll have to carry brunch and dinner out here to you.”
My eyes widen, despite myself. “Do you think that would happen?”
“No idea. Come on, Layls, before the sunlight dims.”
“Fine. Don’t drop me.”
I set my hands on his shoulders and hop. He catches my legs when I make contact with his back; gripping my thighs, he tips forward to scoot me into a higher position, and I try not to think of how intimate it feels to touch in so many places at once. We did this countless times as kids, all stumbling innocence and laughter.
“Comfy?” he asks, his arms looped under my legs, hands laced at his stomach.
I pat him on the shoulder. “Giddy up.”
“There’ll be no galloping here today, ma’am,” he says, his voice deep and serious.
Luke’s right about the ice: a glossy coating shines over every branch, every snow-covered log. We wind slowly through the trees, Luke being careful to step in the places where his feet broke through the crust on his earlier trip. He follows his tracks until we reach a rise in the land. “Forgot about this part,” he says.
“I should get down.”
“No, remember? Your feet’ll freeze. Just hang on.” Using one hand to help support me and the other to grip branches and saplings, Luke works his way up the slope. He slips once, catches himself quickly, and we both release our breath at the same time. “Close one,” he says, turning so that I get a half-glimpse of his grin.
A few more steps, aided by more trees, and he’s carried me up onto higher ground. From here, we can see for miles, across narrow valleys to other mountain peaks. There are cleared areas with homes visible, but the only ones we can see are far away, too far to reach on foot. Neither of us says a word about them.
Wherever we look, the sun is sparkling against ice, and this is where we focus. The colors shine white and silver in some places, deep blue-gray in others. A land of snow and frost. Of make believe.
“It’s like the world’s made of glass.” I breathe out the thought, and his reply is quiet.
“I knew you’d love it.”
“Honestly, if you told me magic were real right now, I’d believe you.”
I wrap my arms around him a little tighter and rest my head against his. We stay there for a while, beyond the reach of the past and the future. Just being us, right now.
♦ ♦ ♦
Food was the only thing powerful enough to make us leave behind our ice-glazed morning, but although the oatmeal called us back, it didn’t wait for us. I guess we were gone a little too long.
“Sorry I burnt brunch,” I tell Luke as we make do with a meal of boxed macaroni and cheese. The combination of powdered milk and cheesy orange dust makes it odder than usual, but food is food and we’re half-starved.
Luke swallows. “Wasn’t your fault. I was the one who dragged you away from the stove. Besides, totally worth it.”
“You’re referring to the ice outside or the mac ’n’ cheese in here?”
“Mac ’n’ cheese, no question. Who cares about glistening mountain views?”
From my seat at the table, I can see that the morning sky has lost some of its earlier enthusiasm, but its brightness still lingers. “That was kind of incredible, wasn’t it?”
“It really was.”
He holds my gaze, and the warmth in his smile inspires me to tell him something I’ve recently discovered. “You kn
ow what? I’ve forgiven you, Luke.”
“For?” He frowns. “Oh, the thing with Evan?”
“No, not that.” He still hasn’t told me what caused the locker room fight, but I guess what he wants is for me to trust his judgment, never mind the details. Maybe he’s right. “The thing with Evan might not be for me to forgive, but either way, we’re setting it aside for now. I’m talking about the time you knocked me down in school and didn’t even help me pick up my stuff.”
Luke’s face goes white, then red. “I did do that, didn’t I?”
I raise my eyebrows. “Yes, you most definitely did.”
“Wow, I think I tried to suppress the whole thing. That was horrible. I felt so awful.”
“You felt awful? I wanted the earth to yawn wide and devour me in a single gulp. Anyway, I don’t understand why you did it, but here’s the thing: I forgive you.”
Luke is quiet. Then, “Thanks. I appreciate that,” he says. “You should know I didn’t do any of it on purpose, though. Someone pushed me. Bill Carter.”
There’s a flash of playground, and the face of a boy from class who’d once lived in our neighborhood. “Bill? Wow, he’s been my favorite person ever since that sex ed lesson in fifth grade.”
Luke’s lip curls, and I know he remembers.
The two of us, sitting near the swings with a group of kids, the talk turning to sex. One of the boys was teasing another about his brother being caught “doing sex” with a girl in a high-school janitors’ closet.
Tension had filled my body. I knew enough to be sure I was both uninformed and uncomfortable with the conversation. I got up to leave, and it drew notice.
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