Manhattan

by Steiner, Kandi

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Noah said. “Why would his things be in Robert J. Scooter’s office? I mean, I know Dad was cleaning it out, organizing it, whatever, but… he still had his own office. Why would the things from his office be burned if it was Robert’s office that the fire happened in?”

  That question made my stomach sink like an anvil, and judging by the white-as-snow looks on the rest of his brothers’ faces, I knew I wasn’t the only one.

  “We have to figure out what that journal says,” Logan whispered.

  “We’re on it,” Mikey said. “We just have to use a translating tool. It’ll take some time, but—”

  “Let me do it.”

  All eyes turned to Jordan, who had drained the last of his drink before speaking those words.

  He sniffed, looking each of his brothers in the eye as he leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees, hands folded between his legs. “It’s summer. Besides football camp, I’ve got nothing going on.”

  “But that takes a lot of your focus and energy,” Mikey pointed out. “I really don’t mind—”

  “You’re leaving,” Jordan reminded him — reminded all of us. “You need to be looking for apartments, and a job, and figuring out what you’re taking with you and what you’re leaving behind.”

  Those words sent another wave of nausea through me.

  “Besides,” Jordan said, leaning back in his rocking chair. “You’ve all been a part of this in some way or another. It’s my turn. Let me take over. I studied Latin a little with Dad when he first started, and a little on my own after high school, before I started coaching.”

  “Wait… you studied Latin?” Logan asked.

  Jordan shrugged. “Not a lot, just a little. Enough to know the basics. And like Mikey said, I can use a translation tool for the rest.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment, but I knew from the look on Mikey’s face that he was hesitant. I reached over, squeezing his forearm.

  “I think this is a good plan,” I said, more to him than to the group. “We’ve been caught up in this for months. Take a break, let Jordan look through what we found.”

  His mouth pulled to one side, and I knew it was because we’d worked so hard to get into the hard drive, he didn’t want to hand it over to someone else now that we’d finally gotten in. But, when he looked at his oldest brother, at the one who everyone knew only spoke when he really had something to say, he softened.

  “Yeah,” he said finally, nodding. “Yeah, you’re right. I’d get too tangled in this and wouldn’t focus on what I need to right now, like apartments and stuff. I think you should take over.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement just as the screen door flew open.

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” Lorelei announced. “Now, all of you get in here and get washed up.”

  We’d all jumped when she came out, Jordan reaching for the laptop and slamming it closed, tucking it under his arm.

  Lorelei narrowed her eyes and folded her arms over her chest. “Why so jumpy? What were you doing?”

  “Just looking at porn, Mom,” Logan answered easily, standing first and squeezing her shoulder as he passed. “So you’re right, better go get washed up.”

  Lorelei grimaced as we all laughed. “Logan Michael, that is not funny.”

  She chased after him, still chastising him as we all took a breath once she was off the porch.

  “I think we all agree, best not to tell Mom about this until we have something more to tell, yeah?” Jordan asked.

  Noah and Mikey nodded, and though I knew what I thought didn’t matter, I nodded, too. That woman had been through enough. The last thing she needed was to be worrying about some Latin journal when none of us knew what it meant yet.

  Jordan and Noah got up next, whispering quietly to each other as they made their way inside for dinner. I grabbed Mikey’s arm once they were inside.

  “Clear your schedule tonight,” I said. “After dinner, we’re going line dancing.”

  Mikey groaned, face twisting up like a child just told to take the trash out. “Not tonight, Kylie. It’s been a long week, and Jordan’s right — I really do need to get serious about my apartment and job hunt.”

  My stomach tightened, but I ignored it. “Exactly. It has been a long week, and what better reason to have a little fun? Besides, you made a pinky promise, remember?”

  His face twisted even more at that.

  I chuckled. “It’ll be fun. I promise. And you can use the rest of your weekend to be boring and look for jobs, if that’s really what you want to do.”

  He sighed, using his hands on the rocking chair armrests to lift himself as if it was the hardest task in the world. “Fine,” he said, dragging the word out. “I’ll go. But I’m not dancing.”

  I just smirked as I followed him inside, because we both knew that was a lie. And now that we’d made it past his father’s death anniversary, and cracked into the hard drive, and he’d forgotten about Bailey’s song on the radio — at least, temporarily — I could finally get back to my summer mission.

  Mikey loved to line dance, no matter how moody and broody he wanted to play right now. And if I knew one thing about New York City, it was that line dancing wasn’t going to be easy to find.

  Tonight, I fully intended to remind him of that.

  And when we bowed our heads before dinner, I said a silent prayer of my own that it would somehow be enough to make him stay.

  Michael

  The last time I went to Scootin’ Boots, it was with Bailey.

  It was the night before our first day of school as seniors, and she insisted that we go dancing. Of course, it wasn’t like I could ever say no to her. All she had to do was smile at me and bat her lashes and bam — whatever she wanted, I’d move the Earth and moon to get it for her.

  I remembered that night differently than how I used to. If she’d have stayed, I would have just looked back on it as another night of line dancing. But, after she left, I scoured our past few months together for clues that I’d missed, anything that might have been a warning sign of the imminent heartbreak ahead — and I always landed on that night. Because I remembered one slow song when I held her close, swaying gently, and she laid her head on my chest and let out a soft sigh before whispering, “I wish we could always be like this.”

  In the moment, I thought she’d meant young, free, kids going into senior year who were crazy about each other without another care in the world.

  But now, I knew she had already known the decision she would make, that she would leave, that I would be left behind.

  I tried to shake that memory away as I opened the door to Scootin’ Boots for Kylie, ushering her inside first. I paid our cover, that numb memory still hovering over me as they stamped our hands to show we were too young to drink, and then we were inside the sea of people — half of them dancing, half of them watching.

  Scootin’ Boots was a two-story bar, with a large dance floor in the middle of the bottom floor and a viewing deck up top. You could also dance in the slightly smaller dance floor on the second floor, though it was a different kind of dancing, since they only played hip hop and pop music upstairs. But the big floor, the one everything in that bar was centered around? It was for line dancing.

  The memory of Bailey started to wane the closer we got to the floor, along with the heavy ache I’d felt in the pit of my stomach since we’d cracked into my dad’s hard drive. I knew my older brother was handling it, but until now, I hadn’t been able to let it go.

  This was what music did for me.

  It slinked its way into all the cracks of my broken soul and filled it with hope, with movement, with rhythm and passion.

  Standing on the edge of that dance floor, I recognized for the first time that I missed it.

  I missed music.

  Even if it did hurt a little, now that Bailey had left her mark on the one thing I loved so much.

  Kylie and I huddled off to the side of the floor, watching as a do
zen lines of dancers moved in sync, kicking and stepping and spinning in time to a Luke Bryan song. Already, that familiar itch to get out there and join them was creeping up my spine, and the wide smile on Kylie’s face served to push my memory of Bailey a little further out. She’d been there for me that week, even when I didn’t deserve it. And now, I hoped I could pay her back with a night of fun.

  “Look at how fast they’re moving!” she said, pointing to the dancers.

  But I only looked out on the floor for a split second before my eyes were on my best friend again.

  Something had changed about her since we graduated.

  I still wasn’t sure what it was — at least, I hadn’t put my finger on it yet. But there was something that had changed. She was still the same girl I held hands with on the playground when I was eight years old. She was still the same girl who played video games with me and knew my favorite candy bar. She was still the same girl who bent over backward to help everyone around her, just because that was what she did. It was what made her Kylie Nelson.

  But, she looked differently, spoke differently, existed differently.

  I didn’t know if it was just me that was oblivious to it all before now, or if there really had been a change in her in the time I’d been with Bailey. Either way, she was the girl I knew before, and somehow, someone I didn’t know at all.

  That was the same dark hair I’d seen in pig tails and messy buns and pony tails and fresh out of the shower — but it was longer now, thicker.

  That was the same sunshine yellow tank top I’d seen her wear a thousand times, one she’d had since she was fourteen — but it fit differently now, stretched in places where it used to gape before.

  Those were the same legs I’d seen cut up on the playground, and folded criss-cross style on my bed when we had movie marathons all night, but I’d never seen them in the cut-off shorts she was wearing, the frayed edges of them somehow making those legs feel foreign and completely new.

  Even the boots on her feet, I knew they were the ones her dad got her for Christmas our freshman year, and that she loved them so much she refused to get different ones, even though they were a touch too small and hurt her toes — but paired with those shorts…

  Everything was the same.

  Yet, nothing was the same.

  Kylie glanced up at me with the smile of a kid at the circus, shaking me from my thoughts again.

  “I could never do that,” she said over the music.

  “Sure you could. You will.”

  Kylie shook her head. “My feet don’t move like that.”

  “Come on,” I said, offering her my hand. “I’ll show you how.”

  Her eyes bulged, but before she could argue, I was already tugging her toward the dance floor. It was the perfect timing, since the song had changed to an old favorite of mine — “Chattahoochee” by Alan Jackson. It was an easy line dance compared to some of the newer ones, and I pulled Kylie to the back corner of the dance floor so I could teach it to her.

  “Okay,” I said, lining us up side by side. “Just watch my feet and listen to my instruction. It’s only a few moves and then it just repeats.”

  “You make it sound so simple, when I know for a fact that it’s not.”

  I grinned, reaching over to squeeze her hand in mine. “You trust me, right?”

  Something passed over her face, like a shadow in the night, and she swallowed hard, nodding in lieu of a verbal response.

  “I’ve got you,” I said, squeezing her hand again before I let it go. “I promise. Now, you ready?””

  Her eyes were wide, lips parted just a bit, but she nodded tentatively again.

  And then it was show time.

  I called out the moves to her as we did them — the kicks and stomps, turns and steps, grapevines and shuffles. For the first few repetitions, she was a mess of legs and boots and flailing arms. She laughed and laughed, shaking her head and yelling at me over and over again, “I can’t do this! It’s too hard!”

  But, just like I knew she would, Kylie started to grasp it after the second chorus. She fell into sync next to me, and even though she still had to watch me and listen to me call out the moves, her body was responding, memorizing, dancing with more ease. And by the last round, she did it without messing up even once.

  The song ended, and Kylie jumped into my arms, screaming with excitement.

  “Oh, my God!” she yelled. “I did it! I did it!”

  I spun her around, laughing before I set her back on the ground. “I told you.”

  She stuck her tongue out. “Don’t make this about you being right, asshole. This is about me — being the best damn line dancer in the history of ever.”

  A laugh shot out of me, but I didn’t argue, just fell in line next to the other dancers as the next song began. “Ready for more?”

  Kylie bit her bottom lip, excitement flashing in her eyes before she took her place next to me. All the fear, the hesitation, the nervousness I’d seen in her just four minutes before was completely erased, and now, my fearless best friend who could take on anything was all I saw on that dance floor. And I wasn’t even a little surprised — because that was just who she was.

  She could do anything, be anyone, accomplish whatever she set her mind to.

  It was something I’d always admired about her.

  It was something no one else in the world could do quite the same way she could.

  And just like her nerves had evaporated, so did the heaviness I’d carried around on my shoulders all week. The more we danced, the less pain I felt reverberating through my chest. I’d forgotten how easy it was to lose myself in the music, to succumb to focusing on the next move, the next spin, the next song.

  Before I knew it, we’d been on the dance floor for an hour, and Kylie finally tugged me off after the fast, spin-heavy dance to “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” by Travis Tritt.

  “I need water,” she screamed over the music as she pulled me off the floor, making a bee line for the bar.

  We slid onto two empty bar stools, calling out our water orders to the bartender, and then Kylie reached just behind the bar for a wad of napkins, handing me half of them.

  “I’m disgusting,” she said on a laugh, peeling her long hair off her neck with one hand and wiping the sweat off her forehead with the other. I started to laugh, too, until she dipped her hand holding the napkins down her long neck, wiping them over her glistening chest, which, as the lake day had revealed to me, was not flat anymore like it had been when we were kids.

  I swallowed, tearing my eyes away from her cleavage just in time to take our two waters from the bartender. I gave her a couple dollars for a tip, and as soon as the water was in Kylie’s hands, she’d drained half of it.

  “Ahhh,” she said, letting the straw go and collapsing back on her bar stool. She fanned herself with the ball of napkins still in her hands, laughing again. “You know, I didn’t realize I was going to get a cardio workout by asking you to come here.”

  “You’ve been here before though,” I reminded her, sipping from my own cup. “It’s not like you didn’t know what you were in for.”

  “I’ve been here, yes,” she agreed, pointing her straw at me. “But I’ve never danced here. That’s the difference. I’m usually sitting at one of the tables in the back, or playing a solo game of pool like the loser I am.”

  Kylie laughed.

  I didn’t.

  “Wait… you’ve never danced here before?” I asked, frowning as I tried to think back on the other times we’d been to Scootin’ Boots. As soon as we were sixteen, we started coming for teen nights. I couldn’t even recall all the times we’d been since. “That can’t be right.”

  “Ohhhh, trust me. It’s right. There was no way I was going to get out there by myself, and as shocking as this might sound, the teenage boys of Stratford weren’t exactly clamoring to dance with me.”

  She rolled her eyes, chuckling, but I was still racking my brain, thinking about the dozens of time
s we’d been here and the fact that I couldn’t recall a single time that I’d seen Kylie dance.

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” I said, shaking my head. “I never pulled you out there?”

  At that, the smile slipped off Kylie’s face like a runny egg, and she shrugged, chewing on her straw a bit before she took another drink. “You had Bailey,” she said, softly, almost so quietly I didn’t hear her at all.

  She opened her mouth to say more, but not another word came.

  Not another word was needed.

  A sickening wave rolled through me, one as foreign as it was familiar. We both knew I hadn’t been the best friend when I was tied up in my relationship with Bailey, but still, neither of us had ever really discussed it.

  She’d never really told me how it had felt, for me to abandon her the way I did.

  And I’d never really apologized.

  I set my water down, folding my hands between my knees and staring at my knuckles as I tried to find the words. “Kylie…” I started. “I know we never talked about it, but I’m really sorry for—”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Parker Morris interrupted my apology, sliding up next to Kylie’s bar stool with an easy, care-free grin. He tucked his hands in the pockets of his Wranglers, hooking his thumbs on the leather of his belt. The buckle was huge, a gold and silver oval that boasted first place in goat roping at the youth rodeo, and though I normally would have found that impressive, I presently only found it annoying.

  “First, you’re jumping off rope swings. Now, you’re breaking a sweat on the dance floor?” Parker shook his head. “You’re just full of surprises.”

  He said all of that to Kylie, and the blush that shaded her cheeks made my stomach knot for a reason I couldn’t understand. Parker smiled wider, and only then did he turn to me.

  “Hey, Mikey. Been a long time since I’ve seen you out here.”

  “I thought Thursday was teen night,” I said, admittedly a little more like a bull dog than I intended.

  Parker blew a laugh through his nose, assessing me like he’d just realized I was the one stepping into the ring with him at a fight. “It is. But we have fakes,” he said, motioning to himself and a crew of seniors standing not too far behind him. All of them were watching us — some curiously, some like we were gum stuck to the bottom of their boot.