Julie was surprised when I said someone was coming for dinner. She wanted to know who, and I said it was Alissa.
“Alissa? Is she your girlfriend?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
Julie smiled. I think she was relieved. She wants nothing more than for me to move on with my life.
The bell’s ringing. My heart skips a beat.
Alissa’s here.
I can’t help it. All the way to Miles’s apartment, what Mint said is on my mind. Why did she come to warn me about him? Maybe I should have asked more questions, but I was already late. Besides, Mint’s just like her mom. They both get all panicky about stuff.
Trying to put her remark out of my mind, I ring the bell of the last apartment. The door swings open almost immediately, and Miles is standing there with a flushed face.
“Hey, you’re here! Come on in.”
I follow Miles to the living room and kitchenette, where a woman shakes my hand. She’s younger than I’d imagined Miles’s mom would be, but he looks so much like her. They have the same smile, a smile that their eyes join in.
“So you’re the girl Miles has spent an hour in the kitchen for, are you?”
Miles cooked for me? I smile to myself. My last thought about what Mint said dwindles and fades away.
While Miles is getting the dish out of the oven, I look around. The living room is small but cozy. There are some photos on the bookshelves. My eyes linger on a photo of a man who is practically Miles’s double. It must be his dad.
I look at a photo of Julie with a friend outside a café. They both have huge ice cream sundaes in front of them.
“I love desserts,” Julie confesses when she sees me looking.
There’s another picture of a blond girl around Fenna’s age, and a few of Julie and Miles together.
“He’s a good-looking guy, huh?” Julie sounds so proud that I can’t help laughing.
“Sure is.”
It’s kind of strange being here, but Julie makes me feel welcome. It’s like Miles and I have known each other for months.
Behind us, Miles puts a steaming dish on the table. “Dinner’s ready.”
* * *
—
There aren’t any photographs in Miles’s room. Actually, there’s hardly anything in there, just the bare essentials. He does have a keyboard, though.
“You play the keyboard?” I ask curiously.
“A bit.” Miles sits down on his bed. “My dad gave it to me.”
“Um, where is your dad?”
“Dead.”
“Oh…” I can feel my face turning red. “I…”
“You had no way of knowing.” Miles’s face becomes hard, as if he’s wearing a mask. “Did you?”
“No.” I wish I could take back my words. It suddenly feels so uncomfortable. The good feeling I had during dinner has melted like snow in the sun.
“How…” I weigh my words carefully. “How long…?”
“Almost a year now.” Miles looks at the floor. “We used to live somewhere else.”
I look around. That explains why Miles’s room looks so sterile. They must have just moved in.
Miles pats the bed beside him. “Come and sit with me.”
I feel my heart beating faster as I drop down next to him. We’re sitting close together, like on the bench last week, but this time Mint and Sky aren’t watching.
“Weird, huh?” I say, but don’t dare to look at Miles. “Us sitting here like this.”
“Do you think?”
“Not really,” I admit. “It feels kind of familiar.”
Silence for a moment. I don’t know what else to say. The clock above his door ticks the seconds away.
“Your dad was sick, wasn’t he?” Miles says, and it’s like he just stabbed me. That’s how shocked I feel.
“How…How do you know that?”
Miles blushes. “I watched the documentary.”
Two things go through my mind. First I feel angry, as if Miles has seen something that wasn’t meant for his eyes. But then I start to feel warm inside, because it means he looked me up online. If you search for my name, the documentary is the first thing that comes up.
“My dad had PTSD,” I say.
Miles nods. “That must have been hard.”
Sky and Mint have seen the documentary too, but we’ve never really spoken about it. Sky’s no chicken, but he’s not much of a talker. Mint just kept giving me worried glances, like she thought I might collapse at any moment.
But Miles has just brought it up like it’s the most normal thing in the world. And he was honest about his dad, so I want to be honest about mine too.
“My little sister started sleeping with me. She was too scared to sleep alone, because Dad screamed in the middle of the night. When I was small, I used to sleep badly when he went to work, and I’m still having problems with it now, after the accident. It’s like every day I’m just…”
“Frightened,” Miles says, finishing my sentence.
“Yes.” I turn to look at him. Miles’s bright-blue eyes are sparkling, as if there are thousands of little lights in them. “I’ve never talked to anyone about this.”
“Except for in that documentary,” Miles says.
“Exactly.” I smile. “I don’t think my friends dare to ask me about it.”
“I know that feeling.” For a moment, I’m afraid that Miles’s hard mask will come back, but that doesn’t happen.
“What’s it like with your friends?” I ask.
“Don’t have any.”
At first I think Miles is joking, but he looks deadly serious.
“Don’t you like people?”
Miles shrugs.
“I’d have thought you had loads of friends.”
“Why?” Miles points at his face. “Because of this, right?”
“A bit,” I admit.
“I hate it.”
I can feel myself smiling. Wasn’t that exactly what I’d thought I’d seen in him?
Miles sighs. “Whenever I meet people, they have an instant opinion about me. Oh, I bet he’s arrogant. Oh, I bet he has stacks of girlfriends at the same time. But I’ve only ever had one girlfriend.”
Why did I start talking about that? I could kick myself, especially when Alissa asks “What was her name?”
“Karla.”
Saying her name out loud makes it feel like she’s here, just for a moment.
“When did you guys break up?”
I’ll never forget that day, but I pretend I have to think about it.
“January.”
“After your dad…”
“Yes. I wouldn’t talk about it, and she couldn’t handle that.”
That’s not true. The problem was that I did talk about it. And I can never take back the things I said.
I remember the moment Karla’s father appeared at the apartment, soon after Karla ran away. He yelled at me to stay away from his daughter. Said he’d drag me straight off to the police if I ever tried to see her again.
Thank goodness Julie wasn’t at home at the time. She’s always thought I was the one who broke up with Karla.
“What about you?” I ask quickly. “You got any exes?”
“Nothing serious.” Alissa blushes a bit. “With me, boys are often after only one thing.”
“Sex,” I say. “I get it. You’re beautiful. But there’s more to you than that.”
Alissa nods slowly. That piercing in her nose is new, I think. My eyes are drawn to the stud. And then they automatically move to her mouth.
I want to kiss her.
The skin under her ear, her neck, her stomach…
What would she do if I leaned in? Maybe it’s too fast, too much. The evening’s gone so well. I don’t want to ruin it now.
But then she kisses me.
My stomach explodes as I pull her closer and feel her soft tongue sliding against mine. She kisses so differently than I remember Karla kissing.
> Karla…If Alissa knew what I’d done, she’d never kiss me like this.
I push that thought away. I should be enjoying this. The past is over.
Alissa’s hand goes up and into my hair. I’m back on my old bed, in my old room. Karla often used to brush my hair the wrong way, giving me instant goose bumps on my arms. Which always made her laugh.
I pull away. A reflex.
Other images shoot through my mind. The creaky stairs that always gave us away when Karla wanted to slip out in the morning before my mom and dad realized she’d slept over. Dad teaching me how to play chess and patiently explaining the rules for the tenth time.
“What’s wrong?” Alissa’s face is so close that I can’t see her clearly. “Don’t you want me to touch your hair?”
My throat feels dry, as if I haven’t had anything to drink for hours.
Alissa smiles. “My brothers don’t let me do it either. Koby gets really mad if I mess up his hair. And my dad’s hair is sacred, even if he is almost bald.”
My dad had dark-brown hair, the same as me. I look like him. Whenever I see myself in the mirror, I see him. And then I’m hit by the stone-cold realization that he’s under the ground somewhere. My face brings Dad so close to me every day, but it will never bring him back.
I don’t want Alissa to talk about her dad. It makes me think about mine.
“Come here,” I say, pulling Alissa toward me again.
I want to go on kissing until the bad feeling’s gone. And even then I don’t want to stop.
I want to believe that we’ll make it together, even if it’s just for now.
For the first time since Dad’s illness, I’ve really talked. Miles asked about Dad, and I answered. It was that simple. Why did Sky and Mint never try doing that?
All the way home on my bike, I’m deep in thought. I dared to kiss Miles.
I didn’t think about it, just leaned in. At first I was afraid he’d push me away, but then he actually pulled me toward him. We kissed like we had years of catching up to do.
Everything with him happens so naturally. I become a version of myself I don’t recognize, but one I really like.
Just be a bit careful, okay?
But why? The only scary thing was Miles’s face when he talked about his dad. But what do you expect? If my dad died, I’d go mad with grief. I don’t know if I’d ever be able to talk about it normally. I can hardly even talk about when Dad was sick.
I pull the front door shut behind me. All the lights in the house are already off. Everyone’s asleep. I head for the living room, because there’s no way I can sleep yet. I’m way too hyper about Miles and our kiss. I’ll see him again tomorrow, but it feels like I’ll have to wait forever.
In the darkness, I see a figure sitting on our sofa, so someone is still awake.
“Dad?”
I switch on the small lamp next to the TV.
“What are you doing in the dark?”
I take in the scene, from the untouched bowl of chips on his lap to the absent look in his eyes.
I feel my heart racing.
This looks a lot like when…
Should I get Mom? But then it’ll start all over again. The worried look in Mom’s eyes is almost harder to bear than the vacant look in Dad’s.
“I was just thinking.”
Dad’s voice sounds bright and clear. It’s a relief. When he was sick, he sounded so far away.
“What about?”
“Come over here and sit with me.” Dad puts his arm around me. I see our reflection in the black screen of the television. Dad in his firefighter’s uniform, me still in my coat.
My dad starts talking. “A teenage girl got seriously burned tonight. She wanted to make a fire with her friends, but it got out of hand. Someone saw the blaze and called us. I even spoke to the girl for a second before they carried her into the ambulance.”
“What did she say?”
“She thanked me. I think she was completely high from the adrenaline. She called me a hero.”
“And that’s exactly what you are,” I say.
My dad cringes, and I immediately regret what I said, because I know he’s thinking about last Christmas. The little girl who died in the fire was the same age as Fenna is now. The fire took four lives that night.
I cautiously look at him. Does my dad still think it was his fault? That makes no sense at all. The investigation proved it: there was absolutely nothing he could have done. If he’d gone back into the house, I wouldn’t have a dad now, like Miles.
“Daddy?” Fenna appears in the doorway. When she sees us sitting there together, her face clouds over. “Are you crying?”
My dad shakes his head. “No, baby girl. Daddy’s not crying.”
“I’ll take her to bed,” I say, quickly standing up. The last thing I want is for Fenna to start worrying. But as I tuck my little sister in, she looks at me with fearful eyes.
“Daddy’s shipwrecked again, isn’t he?”
It feels as if my heart breaks into a thousand pieces.
Tomorrow.
“Sky!”
This week I managed to avoid Caitlin at school, but now she rides up alongside me.
“What are you doing tonight?” she asks.
“Going to an Escape Room,” I say. “With Mint, Alissa, and Miles.”
Alissa and Miles. I’ve had three nightmares about them this week, and all three ended in a kiss. I’m dreading the thought of later, being locked up with the two of them from eight to nine this evening. What am I going to do if they spend the whole hour flirting with each other? Just the thought of it is driving me crazy.
“Hey, cool!” Caitlin looks at me sideways. “Can I come too?”
I could pretend that four people is the maximum, but what if Caitlin looks it up? No, I’ll have to come up with something better than that.
“Sure, you can come. I need to go by work first, but if you’re waiting outside the Escape Room around nine o’clock, we’ll be there too.” It’s not technically a lie. We will be there; we’ll just be leaving, not arriving. Then I can tell her I got the time wrong. Or she did.
Dad looks at me in surprise when I walk into the living room with my coat on. “Where are you going?”
“To an Escape Room.” I look at my watch. “I’m already late.”
“But you were going to babysit for Fenna tonight.”
Shit. I completely forgot.
“Can’t Koby or Ruben do it?”
“They’ve gone into town. Your mom’s at Janet’s, and I have to go to work.”
I look at Dad’s uniform. Why doesn’t he find another job? Something dull in an office, for example, so I know he’ll come home safe at the end of the day.
“My friends are counting on me. Can’t Fenna stay in on her own?”
“She’s nine, Alissa.” My dad sighs. He was grumpy this morning too. Probably didn’t get much sleep last night. I heard him go to bed, and I’d been awake in my room for hours by then.
“I really can’t do it tonight. Tomorrow would be fine, but not now. Mint’s going to be here any minute.”
My dad shakes his head. “You’re staying here. A deal is a deal.”
Tears of fury fill my eyes.
“Your dumb job sucks!”
“Excuse me?” My dad suddenly sounds like Mint’s mom. He’s not usually so strict. Whenever he tries to be, he just bursts out laughing. But not this time. Fenna’s right. Dad’s changing again.
I’m not sure I can handle this another time.
“You’re always at work,” I scream. “I hate it!”
My dad’s face darkens. “Alissa…”
I can’t stop. The words I’ve been saving up for months come pouring out.
“You’re the one who should stay in, not me. You go out every night and just expect it all to be okay. Well, it isn’t. Do you know how much I worry? And not just me. Fenna has to sleep with me, because she’s frightened of you. She cries herself to sleep every night. She
’s not my daughter, Dad. She’s yours. So damn well behave like a father for once!”
Where is It?
Something’s wrong. Alissa’s cycling way faster than normal. I want to ask her about it, but her snappy comment is still fresh in my memory. I’m worried she’s going to call me panicky again. If she does, I might just burst into tears.
She hasn’t brought it up again, and I haven’t asked her about her evening with Miles either.
I told my mom and dad that we’re having a movie night at Alissa’s. It didn’t feel good, but I know they hate things like Escape Rooms and they might have made a fuss. Gotten worried.
As we ride our bikes over there, Alissa still doesn’t say a word. I don’t think she’s even noticed that I’m wearing makeup for the first time in my life.
Things have changed.
Mint and Alissa don’t say a word to each other as they come cycling up. Mint’s wearing makeup and she’s put her hair up. She looks like a different person.
“Looking good,” I say as she locks up her bike.
Mint blushes. “Thanks.”
Miles is the last one to arrive on his scooter. He gives me a quick wave and then leans in close to Alissa.
For a moment, I think his kiss is going to land on her cheek, but then he kisses her on the lips.
They mix like watercolor paint, becoming one color.
How did I ever think I had a chance?
“Should we go in?” Mint’s suggestion makes Miles and Alissa finally release each other. I try to pull myself together, but it’s as if my body is slowly crumbling. All the hope I had is gone.
Mint pushes open the wooden front door and we step into a long corridor, which is pretty dark. The only light is coming from tea lights in holes hacked out of the walls.
Halfway down the corridor, there’s a waiting room with a jukebox and two shabby sofas. On the wooden crate that’s serving as a coffee table, there are flyers for the Escape Room.
Escape Room (Underlined Paperbacks) Page 3