by Julie Israel
“Is it her handwriting?”
I check the cursive again. “No.”
“Think it’s the guy’s?”
“Looks like.” I root in my bag for my camera, forgetting the chalk dust. “But I have something at home to compare it to.”
“Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
I snap a picture of the message, and we start back down the trail for his car.
∞
Our last stop, Madame Viera’s, is impossible to miss. It is the only house in the neighborhood buried in ornaments and sculptures. Brand and I pick our way through weird crafts and spinning devices strewn across the lawn and must duck rows of crystals and pipe chimes to get to the door. As he’s stooping, Brand brushes and nearly pricks himself on the talons of a metal griffin. He jerks away, catching a whole wall of bells and hanging trinkets with the back of his head.
I laugh as he spins to untangle himself. “You okay?”
He curses at the clanking curtain. “Just ring the bell.”
“You know,” I say, reaching for the buzzer, “you would think a psychic wouldn’t need a doorbell. Wouldn’t she SEE us coming?”
“Or Jesus, HEAR us?”
The door opens abruptly. Brand and I bite back our barbs just in time to greet the bohemian twentysomething who answers with innocent smiles.
She predicts, airily: “You’re here to see Madame.”
“Actually”—Brand laugh-coughs behind me—“we just came to drop something off. A clue for our school’s scavenger hunt?”
I hold out the envelope we’ve come to deliver.
“Oh.” She drops all mysterious pretense and snatches the package. “Anything else?”
Brand and I exchange glances. We must not conceal our amusement very well, because the girl says, “Have a nice day,” and shuts the door in our faces. We stand there, blinking.
I propound, “Not just any psychic has a receptionist, you know.”
Brand agrees, “Yeah. Only the really good ones.”
We meet each other’s eyes and jackknife with laughter.
“Shhhh!” I hiss, shooing him away from the door.
Brand, too busy laughing to pay attention, walks plumb into the chimes and bells again.
“Fucking—” He half swears, half laughs as he sidesteps the jangling forest, at which point there is a very loud rip and more cursing than laughter.
“Are you okay?”
“God, I’m stuck—”
He pulls at his shirt, currently pinned in the claws of the griffin he’d just missed on the way in. I smother laughter and tears and help him unsnag it.
“Christ,” he mutters when the fabric tears free, and darkly eyes the statue before lifting his shirt to inspect the damage. “Don’t need to be psychic to see a lawsuit in somebody’s future.”
“Did it get—?” I glance at his stomach. “Oh my god, Brand, are you—?”
I reach to touch the exposed skin, alarmed by the purples and greens there.
At the same moment Brand sees what I am seeing and hastily pulls his shirt back down.
I realize that the bruises are too many, too ripe and widespread to be new.
They aren’t from the griffin.
∞
Somehow we make it to the car before we start to argue.
“Are you going to tell me how you got those?”
Silence.
“They’re from him, aren’t they?”
Nothing. Houses blur by out the window.
“When, Brand? Was it a one-time thing, or—”
“It isn’t your business.”
“Brand. If your dad is hurting you—”
“Stay out of it, Juniper.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. I agreed not to tell anyone before, but only because I thought you were safe. You obviously aren’t—”
“Jun—”
“—and if you don’t do something about your situation, I will.”
Brand slams the brakes. The car swerves violently over to the curb.
“What?” I dare him when we lurch to a stop, and his fingers clench and unclench around the steering wheel. “What are you going to do?”
He draws a furious breath. His jaw is clenched and he doesn’t look at me.
“Out.”
I don’t move.
“Do you hear yourself? Ignoring the problem won’t—”
“OUT.”
His face is hard. He releases my seat belt and starts shoving me toward the door.
“Brand—” My eyes prickle with anger or tears, maybe both. “You can’t just—”
“Get the FUCK out of my car!”
Face stinging, determined not to cry, I bite my lip in and almost comply when something in me snaps, and I whirl around and shove him in the chest instead. “I’m trying to help you, asshat. If you’d just—”
Brand grabs my arm. “I am not another problem you can fix to feel better about your sister.”
His eyes challenge mine, cold.
Well.
Those last words accomplish what all the shouting, shoving, and cursing could not.
I rip my arm from him, fling the door open, and go. Brand yanks it shut behind me, pulls into the street, and speeds off.
- 230 -
“Brand?” a voice asks two weeks later.
I snap to. Kody lands at the lunch table and nods at the phone in my hand, at the thumb that hovers absently over CALL.
“Yeah . . .”
I put the phone away. She lends a lumpy half smile in sympathy: one of many she has given me since Sunday, a Valentine’s Day infinitely worse than last year’s. I knew I’d be missing Camie this year; I hadn’t expected to fall for a boy and then lose him, too.
I wish I could tell Kody everything. About Brand and why we’re fighting; the bruises; New Year’s; the time he was hurt so badly he was limping; that the real reason he gets himself put in detention is to postpone going home after school. In fact, since the scavenger hunt two weeks ago, I’ve wanted terribly to tell all these things to someone. Not just Kody; an adult. Someone who can do something about them.
But then I remember Brand’s warnings; what he’s said about interfering with people; how, even if my intentions are good, any action would just mean consequences for him. I talk myself out of it.
“He’ll come around.”
“I know,” I say. But I don’t really believe it. Brand is avoiding me for a reason: because he knows, as evinced by the dozen messages I’ve left him, that I’m not going to drop it.
“What’s that?” Kody nods at some papers I laid out before my phone sucked me in.
“Oh, crap.” I’d almost forgotten my watercolor washes due next period. I stuff a fry in my mouth and assemble my supplies. “It’s for art. We’re supposed to make ‘grounds’ before class today.”
“Grounds?”
“Foundations. Like, the base layer.”
Kody watches me scramble for something to pour water in. “Cutting it kind of close, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t mean to. I’ve just been . . .” My phone stares at me through my backpack.
She understands.
When I nab an empty ketchup cup from the counter, I am on my way. Soon the others arrive, their laughter and lunch trays filling the table: Sponge nabs fries from me and Angela; Angela and Kody argue over what movie to see this weekend; Nate asks Sponge if he’s seen any “Cats in Hats” lately, some inside joke they’ve shared since the scavenger hunt, and all the while I try to paint as Brand weighs on my spirits. I’m so consumed, I can’t even muster a smile when Angela snatches up a stack of books Sponge extracts from his backpack: poetry. They’ve discovered their mutual affection for verse.
I almost don’t catch the sticker on one of the volumes wh
en the bell rings and she gathers them up. A familiar sticker.
One from Fullbrook University Bookstore.
“Uh, Juniper?”
“What?” I look quickly away from it.
“You’re salting your painting.”
I glance down at my watercolor. Sure enough, it’s now coated in crystals.
“Crap!”
I pick it up and shake it like a grassy towel, but the salt rocks cling like barnacles, and those that do come off take bites of color with them.
The result is a sickly looking, blotchy pox in my blues.
So much for that assignment.
∞
When art begins, I have one botched and barely dry wash for a ground. I feel extra foolish when today’s lesson turns out to be led by a girl named Emile, a guest speaker from Polaris Experimental Arts. While everyone else tries out the Sharpies and chalk and paint pens she’s provided on their grounds, I am left to kick myself and stare at my failure. This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been drooling over Sponge’s Fullbrook sticker, getting my hopes up about YOU again.
I sigh at my ruin, debating whether or not to start a new wash.
“Stuck?”
I look up. Emile is circling around my table.
“Ehh . . .” I suck in air and shamefully push my work into view. “Well, the thing is—this happened.”
“Ooh,” she pips. “You’ve discovered salt. Nice! That’s one of my favorite ways to add texture.”
“It is?” I frown, certain she’s just saying that to make me feel better. But then Emile says “One minute,” and rounds up some supplies: a clean page, a palette, some water, Q-tips, and a blue bottle of nail polish remover.
“This is another of my favorite methods. May I?” She takes one of my brushes and works water over the page, adds in soft clouds of purples and reds. Then she dips a Q-tip in remover and pogos it across the surface—and instead of blotches, it leaves footprints, neat little stars in its wake.
The salt and remover weren’t corroding the paint, I realize; they were absorbing it.
“See? Like the salt, it’s painting with subtraction. But tools like this can give you more control over the shapes the holes make.”
I sit up straighter. Did she just say holes?
“Wanna try?”
She hands me a Q-tip and the bottle. I imitate what she did and dot a trail in the wet paint: the spots that follow are like freckles or falling snow.
Constellations of negative space.
Emile grins. “Now you look like you’re having fun. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Wait.” She turns back as I reach for the ground with the salt still on it. I brush off the crystals, revealing more star holes, and ask, “What should I do with this one?”
Emile considers. “You could still try some mediums on top of it. Or . . .” She shrugs. “Maybe it’s complete as it is.”
∞
In my room that afternoon, I tell Kody about Sponge’s Fullbrook sticker.
She cuts me off with a terse “Coincidence.”
“But he—” I start to tell her about his love poem, but then recall that that would mean telling her how I found it. “He’s still at Fairfield,” I finish. “He was in International Club with Camilla. He’s in 3 Hall a lot for theater, and he knows his way around poetry. If Sponge has a book from Fullbrook, it can only mean—”
“Nothing. There could be a dozen reasons he has that book.” Kody shifts on the bed, where we’re both sitting, to better face me. “And didn’t you say YOU had a Ducks keychain? Do you really think fact-quoting, computer-toting, color-coordinating Sponge Torres is our guy?”
I fling myself back into pillows. “No . . .”
But as I stare at the ceiling, I really don’t know. There’s a reason Camilla kept YOU a secret. Something that made him different from the boyfriends before him. Could it have been age? Social status? An unnatural attachment to his laptop? Who’s to say? Maybe YOU isn’t Sponge or Nate or Brand, or even a boy at all. Maybe YOU is a girl, and I’ve been looking in all the wrong places from the beginning.
I lay an arm across my eyes and groan.
“Oh, don’t be such a drama queen. You’ll find YOU eventually.”
Always eventually.
“And anyway,” says Kody when my phone buzzes and I scramble up to check it, but it’s only Dad, “I get the feeling that YOU isn’t the problem we should be talking about.”
I wince. I think I know what is.
“What happened between you guys? I mean, maybe it’s none of my business, but you’ve been miserable ever since the scavenger hunt. Can I ask what’s going on?”
“It’s . . .” I sigh and drop back again. “Complicated.”
I can feel Kody studying me, worrying.
But she just says, “You’ll still come to the dance, though, right? I mean—even if you guys are fighting?”
The St. Valentine’s Shaker is tomorrow. It makes my chest ache to think that Brand might still be ignoring me then.
“Plenty of people go stag,” Kody fills in. “I am. If Angela—”
“I’m not worried about going stag.”
“Then what?”
“If Brand and I are still fighting . . .” I stare at my empty hands. “I just . . . I don’t know how to handle it. And his band is playing, so if things blow up—”
“Is he avoiding confrontation with you, or are you avoiding it with him?” Kody holds my eye, probing. “’Cause it sounds to me like you’re making excuses.”
I realize, with a start, that she is right.
“But what if I’m afraid?” I whisper.
Kody answers, softly, “Everyone’s afraid, Juniper.”
- 231 -
The next morning, I call and leave the following voicemail for Brand:
“Hey, it’s me.” I take a slow breath, allowing the device to record silence. I wonder if he’s even listening to my messages, or just deleting them when he sees they’re from me. “Look Brand, you don’t have to talk to me. But I still care about you, all right? And I won’t continue to watch you get hurt. Even if that means taking action myself. Okay? I’m here for you, but I mean it. I won’t stay silent forever. Call me.”
I hang up and slump across my steering wheel. It’s late morning and I’m parked across the street from his house, where I don’t see his Pontiac. There is, however, another car—a black one I don’t recognize—in front of the property. I think maybe it’s a loan from Keegan, or whoever Brand is staying with. But then, why not park in the driveway?
I decide to watch the door from my car. I wanted to catch Brand in person today, to talk face-to-face like Kody suggested—to make peace, even if we didn’t really fix anything. Not because today is the Shaker; I just miss him. And I need to know he’s okay. Since today is the dance, I figure he’ll at least swing home for a nicer change of clothes at some point.
Assuming he’s still playing tonight.
I wait. Fifteen minutes pass. Thirty.
At forty-five I start to worry what the neighbors think, but just as some lady is walking by with her dog and giving me the stink eye, the front door opens.
I sit up. A well-dressed figure emerges, starts down the sunken porch. It’s . . .
A woman?
I see the business blazer, the heels clicking on concrete as she reaches the drive, and somehow understand that this is a house visit. But for what? By whom? The woman slips a clipboard into a work bag and comes out with car keys.
The black car is hers.
As she gets in and shuts the door, there’s a split in the blinds from the house. I can’t see the eyes there, but I feel their heat. They watch the woman start the engine.
Before she can pull away, however, a vehicle in the street slows and pulls into the driveway.
A Pontiac.
The lights go off and the driver’s door opens.
“Brand!”
I’m outside my car before I can think about it. But Brand doesn’t seem to have heard me; he’s gotten out and is busy hefting out duffel bags, his cell phone cradled to an ear with his shoulder. He isn’t talking. He looks, I realize, as if he’s listening to messages . . .
I start to say his name again—
“Brandon Sayers?”
But the house call woman beats me to it.
Brand looks as surprised as I do. I can’t hear what the woman says when she clops over to him, but she must’ve introduced herself, because she brings out the clipboard again. As she speaks, Brand goes rigid. The stranger indicates the house with a gesture, an invitation almost like the residence were her own, and for a moment I think it is—that this woman is his absent mother. But then I remember the clipboard and know this is wrong, and in the next terrible moment two things happen at once:
Brand, who’s facing out toward the street, looks up, finally seeing my car and me outside of it, and
I realize the woman with the clipboard is a social worker.
His jaw sets and he swallows, hard.
He thinks I did this.
I open my mouth to correct him, to protest, to explain—the words falter and die in my throat. His eyes smolder, lingering on me as he lets the woman guide him to the door, almost too shocked, too hurt to be angry.
Almost.
But not quite.
∞
An hour into the dance, I get a text from Kody:
Brand’s here. Muffin Wars is killing it. You should come!
Kody’s the only one who knows I’m really home right now because of Brand. I told the others I was feeling sick.
Which, to be fair, is not a total lie.
I peel myself up from my bed and text:
How does he look?
I never got a chance to talk to him, and though I’ve been trying to reach him all day, his phone just goes straight to voicemail.
Kody answers:
Intense. But I think that’s just his face.
I purse my lips. She adds: