Don't Forget Me

by Victoria Stevens

  Red turned to look at Hazel. He held out his arm to her, his smirk replaced by a soft smile. “Together?”

  She looped her arm through his, holding on tight. The two of them made their way to the edge, Hazel took a deep breath and let it out, and then they were jumping, they were in the air, and they were falling, and as the wind whipped around them Hazel looked down and felt her heart soar.

  No matter what happened next, her friends were right there at the bottom, waiting for her.

  * * *

  Monday night. Three hundred and forty-five days.

  Hazel and Luca were back on the track running laps. Or, rather, he was running laps, and she was sitting patiently on the sidelines timing him. That was one of the things that had surprised him most about her: how understanding and imperturbable she was.

  That evening, they got down to thirteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. It didn’t sound like much—to shave nine seconds off his time from last session—but it meant a lot. Nine seconds closer to his goal. Nine seconds closer to being back where he was before.

  When he had finished his cooldown, they set off from the field and walked in silence for a while. Luca liked how if there was nothing to say she just said nothing, and that she wasn’t constantly looking over at him to see if he was okay, which meant he could relax a little. He was going to miss that when she left—having someone around who got it. He and Redleigh had never talked about the specifics of Hazel’s plan for going back to England—Redleigh refused to speak about it behind her back, which was annoyingly admirable—so Luca didn’t understand exactly why she’d want to go back to London if her mum wasn’t there anymore. Was it just about returning to the familiar? Was that really enough to warrant leaving behind the life she’d started to build here? Her new friends? Her dad?

  “So,” Hazel said finally. “You’re doing great time-wise lately. I think you’ll be at your target pretty soon.”

  Luca just shrugged. “I don’t know about that. We’re making progress, though.”

  “Lots of progress.”

  “Some progress,” he corrected.

  “Lots,” she argued, and he turned to glare at her. “Don’t look at me like that, Cawley, I know what I’m talking about. I’m not an idiot, you know.”

  “Could’ve fooled me, Coach,” Luca said, and Hazel just grinned at him.

  They soon arrived at Graham’s gate. Luca wondered whether Hazel knew that this had become the part of the training sessions he least looked forward to, leaving her at the gate. He hoped not.

  “Thanks for walking me back,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Thanks for training with me.”

  “Anytime.” She raised a hand in farewell and headed through the gate toward the house. Luca waited until she’d let herself safely inside before turning around and walking home.

  * * *

  When Luca got back to his house, he snuck into the kitchen to get a drink. Red was there, sitting at the table and staring at a stack of photographs. He jumped slightly at the sound of Luca’s footsteps, whirling around to face him.

  “Oh,” he said when his eyes landed on Luca. “Hey, Luc.”

  Luca reached into the fridge for a bottle of water. “Hey.”

  “I thought you were in your room. Have you been out?”

  “No,” he lied automatically, and then caught himself. “I mean, yes. I have. I was helping Hazel with her math.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Red said. “She said you offered to tutor her. That was … nice.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  Red nodded slowly, but he was still watching Luca closely, like perhaps he didn’t entirely believe him. Luca was so grateful that he was just wearing normal shorts and a T-shirt—if he’d been in training gear, he’d have been caught out in a second.

  “Well, thank you, anyway,” Red said, getting to his feet. “For being cool with her.”

  “I didn’t do it for you,” Luca said quietly, but his brother was already out of the room.

  23

  At dinner the next evening, everything was going fine until Claire announced cheerfully that Marc had called and was expecting to be back in Port Sheridan by the weekend. For the rest of the meal, Luca spoke only when spoken to. He excused himself from the table as soon as he’d finished eating.

  Red and Claire shared a look of concern as he left the room.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” she asked quietly, as they listened to Luca’s footsteps making their way upstairs.

  “I’m sure he’s fine. Probably just tired. Don’t worry about it.”

  She smiled faintly since they both knew that was an impossible task, that worrying about Luca came as naturally to her as breathing did.

  “Do you want me to go talk to him?” he offered, and she nodded.

  “Maybe take him some dessert?”

  Red dished up a slice of the apple pie from the fridge, heated it in the microwave, and headed upstairs. Luca’s door was shut, but when Red knocked there was no answer. He eased it open; the room was empty.

  Red shut the door again and made his way to the other end of the hallway, where the big bay window was propped open. Luca was sitting out on the garage roof.

  “Hey,” Red said, climbing through the open window and out onto the flat surface.

  Luca didn’t look up. His arms were wrapped around his legs where they were drawn up to his chin. “Hey.”

  “Mum told me to bring you this.” Red handed him the bowl. Apple pie was Luca’s favorite—or, it had been at least, before. Was it still? He wondered how much Luca had changed in the last year, how much about Luca he no longer knew.

  Luca took the bowl, looked at it for a moment, and then placed it on the roof beside him. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  Luca fixed his eyes back on the horizon, expression carefully blank, and Red found himself studying the side of his face. He looked the same as he always had on the outside, with no sign of his inward struggles etched into his skin. He and Red were just versions of each other when it came down to it, even despite their differences. Luca 2.0. Red thought it was funny, really, how he still found the concept of having a twin so strange when he’d lived with it for seventeen years. I am you, and you are me.

  “So,” Red said finally. “This is about Dad, right?”

  When Luca didn’t answer, Red bumped his shoulder with his own. “Hey. Maybe this time will be different.”

  Luca looked over at him. “Have you heard from him since his last visit?”

  “Yeah, of course. A few e-mails, some texts. We even Skyped last—”

  “I haven’t.”

  Silence.

  Red felt a surge of anger toward their father. Did he even know what he was doing to Luca? When he didn’t call him, when he pretended like nothing had happened but still couldn’t look him in the eye? Couldn’t he see?

  After Ryan died, their mum smothered Luca in motherly love, keeping him close as if that would somehow stop the hurt from reaching him. Their dad, on the other hand, just slowly pushed him away.

  When they lived in Sydney, the family was split down the middle, but in a good way. Their dad got Luca, in a way he never got Red. Luca’s whole life was running back then. He lived it, breathed it. Marc Cawley ran track himself when he was a teenager, and he was the driving force behind Luca’s involvement in the sport, always pushing him forward, helping him train harder.

  Luca never minded, though. He loved it. He and Ryan and Dad would spend hours out on the beach, practicing sprint starts and honing their technique. Sometimes Red would go down there too with his mum, and she would read, and he would draw. Dad went to every race and only missed a few training sessions. When Luca wasn’t running, the two of them were always talking about it, scheming, and once the scouts from the University of Sydney started recruiting Luca with the promise of a full track scholarship, there was no stopping them.

  It wasn’t as if their dad didn’t love Red, or that he loved him any
less, but he certainly loved him in a different way. Luca was his protégé, and Red was just his son. His mum would take Red out instead, to art galleries and to buy canvases and other art supplies. At dinner, the table would be split too—Dad and Luca down one end so they could talk running to their hearts’ content, Red and his mum down the other. Not that anyone was bothered back then. That was just how things were.

  When Ryan died, Red thought for a while that things would stay the same. That Dad would continue to be the light of Luca’s life, the one person he looked up to. At first, things were normal—as normal as they could be under the circumstances. But then, after just a few weeks, their dad started suggesting that Luca go back to training, kept trying to get him to race again. He was so frustrated and angry when Luca told him he couldn’t. He didn’t understand it, wouldn’t accept it, and kept trying to get Luca to change his mind—but he wouldn’t. Red wasn’t sure if it was even a choice; all he knew was that Luca hadn’t set foot on a track since Ryan’s death, because it reminded him too much of his best friend.

  Dad hadn’t known what to do. Their whole relationship was built around their shared passion for a sport Luca was now refusing to participate in. When he got dropped from the track team, Dad was furious. He told Luca to get his act together before he lost everything.

  What he didn’t realize was that Luca already had.

  Their father worked for a consultancy firm for digital analytics based out of Sydney, and his job had always required travel and time away from home, but before Ryan died, he had turned down the long-distance business trips to Canberra or Hong Kong so that he could always be there for Luca’s races. When Luca stopped running, and the house became such a difficult place to live in, he began accepting more of the offers. Just a trip or two at first, and then volunteering himself for more.

  Since moving to Port Sheridan, Marc split his time between working from home, traveling to visit clients overseas and around Queensland, and living in an apartment the company rented for him in Sydney and working from his old office there, even though the latter wasn’t required of him and none of the other senior associates did it. That hurt, more than Red would ever admit—that his dad would choose to stay away more often than to be at home. This weekend would be the first time Red had seen him in over three months, and honestly, he’d started to think that Marc was never coming back. Three months was a long time to be without a dad, but even when he was home it was as if he wasn’t really there. Red didn’t think his father understood that Luca’s depression was hard for all of them, not just him, and that if they stuck together then maybe they’d have more of a chance of getting through it.

  “I’m sorry,” Red said eventually, because he’d let the silence stretch out between them.

  “I wish people would stop saying that,” Luca muttered.

  “Why?”

  “Because people always apologize. That’s the first thing they say—as if them saying sorry will change anything. It doesn’t change a fucking thing. He’s still dead, Redleigh. He’s … He’s still dead.”

  And suddenly Red was sorry about that too—sorry that Luca felt so trapped, that he felt like things would never get any better. But sorry wasn’t something Luca wanted to hear. Sorry wasn’t something he needed to hear. Red wished he could argue with Luca about this, tell him he was wrong, and that he didn’t know what he was talking about, but he did. He did, and Luca was right, and there was nothing Red could do or say to make him feel better.

  Dear Mum,

  I remember the time I was picked on at school by a group of girls. They told me I was useless, and that I didn’t have a dad because he didn’t love me, and that no one ever would.

  You held me tight that night while I cried, and you told me I was the most perfect person in the world, and anyone who told me otherwise was just too blind to see what was right in front of them. I believed you, and it kept me strong next time they started teasing me.

  I miss you, Mum, but I remember.

  Love,

  Hazel

  24

  When Red arrived back at the house on Sunday after spending the afternoon at Hazel’s, there was a sleek black Audi in the driveway: his father’s pride and joy. Marc was sitting at the breakfast counter when Red walked in, perched on the stool that lately Luca had adopted as his own.

  “Redleigh!” he cried when he caught sight of Red, jumping up and crossing the room to smother him in a huge bear hug.

  “Hey Dad,” Red mumbled into his shoulder, hugging him back just as tight.

  “How you doing, kiddo?” his dad asked when he finally let Red go.

  “I’m great, thanks.”

  “Glad to hear it. Have you grown again?”

  Red shrugged. “An inch or two, maybe. Trying to overtake you.”

  Marc let out a laugh and pulled him in for another hug, ruffling his hair affectionately. “I’ve missed you, son.”

  “Could you go and tell Luca that dinner’s ready, please, love?” Claire said from where she was cooking at the stove. “I’m about to dish up.”

  Red nodded, leaving the kitchen and making his way up the stairs. Luca’s bedroom door was ajar. Red could hear his music playing from the other end of the hallway, a loud, heavy rock song. He peeked his head around the door. Luca was sitting at his desk, his head in his hands as he studied the computer screen intently. Red knocked on the door, and Luca looked up.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” Red hovered in the doorway. “Dad’s home.”

  “I heard the car.”

  “He hasn’t been up?”

  Luca didn’t have to reply—the answer was obvious from the hurt in his eyes—and Christ, Luca shouldn’t have to deal with this.

  “Well, dinner’s ready,” Red told him quietly, and turned on his heels.

  * * *

  “This is so great,” Claire said a little too brightly. “All of us finally back together.”

  The four of them may have been back together, but they were still sitting around the kitchen table acting like it was perfectly normal that Dad was the only one actually eating his food.

  “Come on, boy,” Dad said suddenly. Red looked up to see him glaring across the table at Luca. “Stop with the sulking and eat, will you?”

  Luca raised his head in surprise and looked helplessly over at their mother like he didn’t know what to say, how to answer.

  “Marc,” she said quietly, but there was a warning in her eyes. Shut up, she was saying. Shut up before you make this so much worse than it already is.

  Marc held a hand up to silence her, eyes still trained on Luca. “Did you hear me?”

  Luca nodded, lowering his eyes back to the table.

  “I don’t think you did,” his father pressed. “Because if you had you’d have wiped that look off your face.”

  Luca stood abruptly, his chair scraping back across the tiles. “Please may I leave the table?” he asked his mother.

  Mum nodded, but Dad wasn’t finished yet, wasn’t ready to let him walk away without having the last word. “No, you can’t. You’ve barely touched your food.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Luca replied stiffly, pushing his chair back under the table and slipping out of the room.

  For a moment, no one spoke. The air was thick with tension, the sort that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

  “What?” Marc finally exploded. “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you dare make this out to be my fault. That was all him.”

  “He has a name,” Claire said wearily, and Red realized that since he’d been back, his father hadn’t used it once. “For God’s sake, Marc, he has a name. Luca. Your son’s name is Luca.”

  “Claire, don’t—”

  “Luca,” she repeated, ignoring him. She got to her feet too, still saying his name as she followed in his footsteps out of the room as if it were a mantra, a spell that might just make things right. Luca, Luca, Luca.

  Red sat frozen as his father eyed t
he untouched plates around the table, the meal just as incomplete as everything else. “Christ,” he hissed, slamming down his glass. “That was not my fault.”

  He wasn’t looking at Red, probably wasn’t even talking to him, but Red found himself shaking his head in disagreement. Of course it was his fault; his fault for failing to see what kind of damage he was doing by treating Luca like a child he was tired of raising.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said again as he stormed out the back door, but Red wasn’t sure he was even convincing himself.

  25

  Luca had to get out of the house. He had to get the hell out of there before he broke something.

  He’d been better than this lately, was the thing. He’d been so much better than this, and that just made him even angrier at himself. It had been weeks since he’d felt the urge to punch something or someone—and that Oscar guy from the party last week didn’t count because he was asking for it and really all Luca was doing was protecting Hazel anyway.

  Shit. Luca hated that he wanted to protect her, hated that she was so small, so gentle, so trusting. Hated how many times he’d thought about how different things would be if he’d met her before everything with Ryan, back in Sydney, back when he wasn’t so screwed up. Not that there was any point thinking like that, not when it was already too late and this was the only version of him that she was ever going to know.

  He found himself on the road, without really remembering how he got there. He was just glad to be out in the open air. He started running the second he arrived at the stadium. He ran around and around the track, and he didn’t keep count of the laps because for once he wasn’t trying to reach a goal. He was just running. Not for his dad, not for Hazel, not to prove he could. He was running, finally, for himself.

  * * *

  Red closed the sliding door behind himself as he stepped out on the veranda to join his father. “I thought you gave that up,” he said to Marc when he lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.