3
I must have dozed off, because I woke up to a dark room and someone knocking on my door.
“Rhylee?” Abby called.
Shit.
I pushed my collages into the shoe boxes and shoved them under the bed. I’d put them away safely when I had the chance.
“Yeah?” I nervously answered, afraid she’d somehow found out. It was one thing to be with Tommy, it will be a completely different thing to admit to Abby what we’ve done.
“Mom wants to know if you’re okay. We’re having parmesan chicken for dinner; you never miss that.”
I relaxed. She didn’t know. She wouldn’t be talking about dinner if she did.
“I’m okay, just tired from work,” I replied. “Tell her I’ll get some leftovers later if I’m hungry.”
Abby left without saying anything more and the early evening gave into night, and things remained the way they always had been. The TV turned on downstairs, and Dad and Collin cheered for the Cleveland Indians. Abby talked with her friends in the bedroom across from me, her laugh punctuated the air every once in a while, and Mom retreated to the bathroom to soak in the tub.
I hid in my room, not daring to come out for fear that everyone would notice I was different, because I sure felt different.
I fell asleep to Tommy’s music on repeat; the familiar sound rushed over me and made it feel like everything was going to be okay.
I slept deeply until my phone beeped in the late hours of the night with a message from him. It was only five words, but five words was all it took to unhinge every last piece of me.
I’m breaking up with Abby.
I didn’t respond right away. I understood what his words meant and what they’d do to Abby and me. We’d grown so far apart since she began to date Tommy. The cracks in our relationship were already there, and this, this would cause everything between us to crumble.
Was I ready for that?
I should write back and tell him that this couldn’t happen. It was the right thing to do. But slowly, a tiny flash of hope began to unfurl.
I didn’t want to leave Tommy to Abby anymore. I wanted that high-rise in NYC. I wanted to travel all over the world with him. I wanted to be a part of his life.
There was no way I could continue to pretend I didn’t care that he and my sister were together. I’d lost him once; I wasn’t going to make the same mistake a second time.
I want to be with you, I texted, and before I could stop myself, hit the send button.
I deleted both messages so Abby would never see them, the words burned into my heart. And in my ears, his music rose and fell in peaks and valleys, invading every part of me as if I was breathing in the sounds of him, absorbing them into my soul.
4
Three days passed and I didn’t hear back from Tommy. I caught glimpses of him at school, but it was only for a quick moment and we never made contact. Our secret still seemed to be just that, a secret.
All around me, life too was paused. Fall would be here soon, and the world hung in a hazy suspension of denial. The kind where you suddenly felt like you needed to do everything you hadn’t, but all you want to do is sit still and will the minutes not to rush forward.
I had grabbed the mail when I got home from school and now sat at the kitchen table sorting through the newest stack of college brochures. I saved the ones from the schools that I could see myself at and ripped out images from the schools that I wasn’t interested in, to use in my collages.
These brochures had almost become an obsession. Ever since our guidance counselor talked to our sophomore class about “thinking ahead to our future” and told us how to request information, I couldn’t get enough. The school had wanted to give all of us a push, try to boost their numbers of students who went to college, even though it was pointless; most of my classmates were fine with staying in Coffinberry their whole damn lives. But that wouldn’t be me. I contacted all kinds of schools: big and small, universities in the middle of nowhere and others in big cities. It didn’t matter. The only prerequisite was a school that didn’t have a strong athletics program. My parents hadn’t even gone to college, so it wasn’t something they pushed on Abby and me, but the idea of living in a place that Abby didn’t dominate was enough to motivate me to do whatever it took to get myself out of here.
Collin walked in and took a seat at the table. He waved his hands in front of the big fan that did nothing but stir the hot air around. It blew his blond hair straight back.
“Careful,” I told him. “You’ll chop your fingers off if they get stuck in there.”
“They will not,” Collin said.
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I sure wouldn’t want to find out.”
I handed a rolled-up piece of paper to him, and when he opened it, his eyes got huge.
“Another edition to your story,” I told him. It was his own personal comic book. I’d been adding to it for months, ever since Collin wandered into my room one day when I was working on a collage.
“Can you create one of these for me?” he’d asked. “Something that gives me superpowers?”
And how could I say no? I made him a world where he was the hero. I created images where Collin leaped buildings, tamed tigers, and was cheered while up at bat by a baseball stadium packed with fans. I put him at the center of the universe in every picture, and he hung each one up over his bed. A quilt made from pictures where my brother ruled.
In today’s collage, he soared through the solar system and raced alongside comets. I’d ripped pictures out of an old science textbook I’d found at the library’s used book sale and created a sky peppered with stars.
“What do you think? Do you like it? I thought it was about time we got rid of you and sent you to the moon.”
Collin stuck his tongue out at me but grinned. “I love it.” He bent over and examined it up close.
“Good, I thought you would.”
I grabbed a soda out of the fridge and headed outside to the porch to search for a breeze. The day was sweltering; even walking from room to room created a fine mist of sweat all over my body.
I sat on the old porch swing Dad had hung years ago and moved slowly back and forth, my bare feet scraping against the dusty wooden boards of our porch. In the distance, gray clouds sat lazily on the horizon and the sky flashed bright with lightning. In this heat, storms blew through daily, and today’s would be here soon, stirring up the stale muggy air. My skin tingled as I remembered the park and the way Tommy and I had kissed as if we couldn’t get enough of each other.
The hum of a motor filled the air as Dad cut the field to the left of our house.
He sat on his old riding mower twice a week and followed the lines up and down in the early afternoon before he left for the night shift, attaching bumpers to the front of fancy cars we could never dream of affording. Bumpers that came in glossy colors with names like candy apple red and champagne bliss. He worked at the same car factory most of my classmates would end up at. The same one I’d end up at if I didn’t get out of this town.
He mowed straight lines for Abby to run, and she ruled the field just as she ruled the cross-country team at our high school. Her long muscled legs raced the stretch along the woods, down the path Dad created, and up against the old wooden fence that separated our yard from Tommy’s. Abby ran that trail every day. She never stopped moving, her blond hair shining in the sun, and I’d watch from the porch and wish I could be my sister.
I was born shortly after she turned a year old, and Mom would talk about how crazy those first two years were. We looked alike, but there wasn’t anything twin-like about us. Her outgoing and confident personality was a foil to my quiet, introverted self. She was part of a team while I dreamed of leaving everyone behind and discovering a world that right now I was so small and insignificant in. She was the one teachers loved. They’d tell me over and over again that I was nothing like my sister. It was meant as a joke, but beneath, there was a sense of disappointment, exactly like the o
ne I felt from my parents when I’d get a bad grade or they’d bug me to join a club at school, to get involved, as if it were so simple to find a place for myself when my world was so full of Abby.
Tommy was always the only thing I’d had that she didn’t. And then she’d taken him, too.
But now I had him back.
And I liked that feeling.
My long hair stuck to the back of my neck in the heat. I twisted it around my hands and wished for a hair tie. Dad must be boiling out there without any shade. The rain would be welcomed, cooling us all.
The screen door creaked, and Abby came out and sat next to me. I stiffened. The ice in my glass clinked together as the swing moved back and forth from her weight.
“I swear, it’s pretty much child abuse not to have air conditioning,” Abby said and fanned her face with her hand. “It’s cooler out here than it is inside.”
“It feels like the whole world is on fire,” I told her in a voice that didn’t sound like my own. I was someone pretending everything was okay, and I was sure she could see through me, but she didn’t.
“Your scrapbooking stuff is all over the table again,” Abby said, and I relaxed a tiny bit. She wouldn’t be complaining about that if Tommy had talked to her.
“It’s not scrapbooking,” I argued, even though it was pointless. Abby didn’t get it. No one did. A few years ago I’d shown my family a collage that had taken me hours to complete. It was on a giant piece of butcher paper, and I’d pieced together images and items from a family vacation. Abby thought it was hilarious that I’d spend that much time “playing with a glue stick,” Dad hardly glanced at it, and Mom told me she thought it was “cute.” It was stupid, really, to think they’d care. If it didn’t have Abby’s name attached to it, then forget about it. So now I kept that stuff private. They’d probably laugh me out of the house if I told them I actually thought I might like to do something with art for a living.
“Right, those pictures you make,” she said in a way that made them feel so stupid and dumb. “Anyways, that’s not why I’m here. I’m bored.”
She held out a bottle of nail polish. It was pale pink, like the inside of a seashell. The same color she had on her nails.
“Give me your feet. I need something to do and it’s too hot to run.”
“I was about to work on some homework,” I lied.
“Oh, please, homework can wait. I need someone to talk to, so stay out here and let me paint your toes,” Abby ordered.
I did as she said, because I didn’t have a better excuse. I stuck out my legs and laid them in her lap. They were even paler against her sun-colored legs, browned from days of running with the cross-country team. She slapped the bottle against the side of her hand and then bent over to draw the brush across my first toe. Her hair fell against my legs and tickled my skin.
“Don’t move,” she instructed when I wiggled.
The air shifted slightly as the storm drew closer; the loose pieces of hair twirled around my face. I wanted to be anywhere but here, but maybe this was my punishment for what I’d done. I was forced to face my sister straight on, and it sucked.
Abby concentrated as she painted each nail, the tip of her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth. The only noise was the buzzing of Dad’s mower across the field and the low voices from some TV show Mom was watching inside. I studied my sister’s face. The summer had stamped a constellation of freckles across her nose. It was odd to be this close to her when we’d grown so far apart. Tommy had pulled us away from each other, and it made me anxious to think about the secret I held inside.
When she finished the first foot, she pulled back and inspected her work.
“It looks good,” I told her, and she nodded. She moved on to my second foot, dipping the brush into the bottle after each toe.
“Do you ever feel like something bad is going to happen?” she asked.
I closed my eyes and remembered Tommy’s lips against mine. How we had betrayed her. “Bad things happen all the time. The news is nothing but gloom and doom.”
She gazed across the field to Tommy’s house. You could see the second-floor windows and roof from this far away. When I was younger, Tommy and I sent coded messages with flashlights. But that was so long ago. Now his light switched on and off as he lived a life separate from my own.
“Things aren’t right,” Abby said, and paused. A drop of polish fell off the brush onto the porch. It spread out in a small puddle and sank into the wood.
I tried to brush it away with my thumb. Mom would kill us if she found it, but Abby didn’t seem to care. She went back to painting my toes.
“I think Tommy’s going to break up with me,” she continued.
I jerked my foot away and a streak of polish smeared across the top of my foot.
“Jesus, Rhylee, look at what you did,” Abby complained.
Far off, the sky grumbled as the sound of thunder reached us.
Shit. Did she know about the text message? Had Tommy said something?
“Here, give me your foot back so I can fix it before the polish dries.”
I stayed still so she could finish and tried not to act as completely freaked out as I felt. She didn’t know anything. She couldn’t. Abby wasn’t the type of person to play games, so if Tommy had told her about the park and the text message, she’d say something.
“Why do you think something is wrong?” I asked cautiously.
“He’s being really strange, and he hasn’t been over here in a few days. He keeps coming up with excuses that I know aren’t true, because Mary Grace told me she saw him this morning at Otis’s Diner when he said he had to help his dad with his truck.”
She put the brush back into the bottle and rolled the polish back and forth in her hands. I’d never seen my sister this nervous before; she was the confident one. Even before a race, she was strangely cool and unaffected. So this seemed odd. Off. In a world where Abby was usually in control and the chosen one, the roles were suddenly reversed. This fear was something different, and even though I was the cause, I had to admit that I kind of liked it.
“He’s probably busy,” I said. “It’s the end of the summer. I’m sure he’s spending a lot of time helping his family out with the farm.”
“No, it’s not that. Something is going on.” She sat straight up and tilted her head as if inspecting me. “You don’t think he’s cheating on me, do you?”
The soda I was taking a sip from went down the wrong way, and I coughed. I couldn’t catch my breath and my eyes watered.
“Geez, what’s your problem?” Abby pounded on my back as if that would help.
“Nothing,” I said when I caught my breath. “I drank too much at once.”
“What do you think?”
“About what?” I asked, done with the conversation. I didn’t want to be out here anymore.
“About Tommy cheating on me.”
“Tommy would tell you if something was going on; that’s the type of person he is,” I said, and thought of the text he’d sent me about breaking up with her.
“Yeah, I’m being stupid. Tommy and I are fine, right?”
I paused before answering. I remembered back to the morning after the party when I had pushed him away from me and found them kissing. Abby had knocked on my bedroom door and climbed into bed with me, like we used to do when we were kids.
“Promise you won’t get mad,” she’d whispered, the two of us under the covers.
“Promise,” I’d said, because how can you be mad at something you caused?
“Tommy kissed me last night.”
I didn’t tell her I already knew. That I had seen the two of them tangled around each other, and it had broken my heart.
“It’s okay, right?” she asked. “You and Tommy aren’t like that. . . .”
“No, of course we’re not,” I interrupted her, because what else could I do? I’d never told Abby how I felt about Tommy. And I’d had my chance with him, but I’d pushed him away.
How could I stake my claim when it wasn’t mine to stake?
But now, here, outside on our porch, I wanted to say the words I didn’t all those months ago when Abby told me about the kiss she didn’t know I saw. I could tell her I was in love with Tommy and had been for years. I could tell her how much it hurt to see the two of them together. I could confess the truth and maybe she’d understand.
But what if she didn’t? Abby always got what she wanted.
So instead, I lied.
“I’m sure everything is fine.” I looked off over our field toward Tommy’s house. The sky had darkened and the clouds raced in now. The storm would soon be here.
“You’re right,” Abby said. “I’m worrying about nothing.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Things will work out just the way they’re supposed to.”
5
Coffinberry, Ohio, is a pit. A town of about a thousand people, most of whom will never travel more than forty miles past its borders in their entire lives. A town so small we leave our back doors unlocked and if we aren’t careful, we’ll run out of people to kiss and have to start all over again at the beginning of the line. So when there isn’t any fun to be had, we create our own. We walk through the fields and make fires deep enough in the woods that our parents turn a blind eye. The same woods they partied in when they were our age.
Saturday night began exactly like all the other nights where we hiked into the woods, carrying backpacks full of beer and scratchy wool blankets. It was the end of the summer. Fall loomed up behind us, and everyone was eager to let loose, ready to celebrate one of the last nights of warm weather.
I followed Abby and her friends across our field. It was obvious our discussion yesterday hadn’t worked. My sister was anxious and jumpy, talking and trailing off midsentence. I was anxious and jumpy too; I had no idea when Tommy was going to talk with her. I both dreaded and wanted it to happen.
Abby opened her purse and pulled out two of those miniature bottles of vodka. She dumped them into a water bottle of orange juice she’d poured in our kitchen while waiting for her friends Mary Grace and Erica to arrive.
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