The Blood Between Us

by Zac Brewer

  So much for my nap. Headache or no headache, this was my chance to find out exactly where Grace had been going and what she’d been up to. And this time, I knew where Penelope would be, so there was no chance that she could get in my way.

  I made my way down the stairs and out into the morning air just in time to see Grace and Penelope part ways. I tried to act casual as I walked across the campus grounds, but I had to be quick or I would lose her.

  It didn’t take long for me to figure out where she was headed. I’d seen Grace take this path a hundred times. She was headed for the library. Of course, as I’d learned on Friday night, it probably wasn’t the books she’d been visiting at all. It was probably the radio station on the third floor.

  But then it occurred to me I’d caught her slipping out the back door of the library before. Once, I’d even seen her do so when I’d been visiting Josh myself, so there was no way she’d been in the radio station.

  Deciding to test the hypothesis that was taking shape in my mind, I waited for her to head into the library, then rounded the building to the back and hid in the shadows behind the recycling bin. Sure enough, before long the back door to the library opened, spilling light out into the nearly enclosed parking lot. Grace exited the building and turned toward me. Her stride was confident and direct, as if she’d walked this route so often it was a routine. I ducked down, peering between the Dumpster and the wall. Grace stood at a locked door I’d assumed led to a maintenance room. She paused and looked around before retrieving a key from her pocket. Opening the padlock, Grace yanked on the door and went inside.

  I moved around the Dumpster toward the door. Whatever she was doing in there, I knew that it couldn’t be good for me. I had to find out what it was. I reached for the door handle. If I could just get it open a crack, I might be able to get some idea of what she was up to.

  As my hand began to close around the handle, I felt it turn from the inside. Grace was coming out. A crack of yellow light spilled outside, and I had microseconds before I was caught. In a moment of panic, I reached out with my leg and kicked the door as hard as I could. It slammed closed. I picked up a glass bottle from beside the recycling bin and ran for the front of the library. The door started to open again. I threw the bottle behind me, and it shattered into pieces when it struck the block building. I could hear Grace yelling from inside the mystery room.

  “Real mature, jerk!” She hadn’t seen me. Well, she had seen someone, but I didn’t think she knew it was me.

  I didn’t stop running until I got back to my room. I grabbed my messenger bag and some supplies, then headed right back out. My earlier headache was gone. I couldn’t even think about sleeping anymore. It had taken me this long to find out where Grace had been going all this time. I wasn’t about to waste any more time wondering what she was doing.

  The only variable in my plan was where my sister was now. It would put a serious damper on my investigation if she were to walk in on me going through her secret lair. But as much as I liked to eliminate variables, that was a risk I was willing to take.

  I made my way out of the dorm and back to the library. I took a couple of paper clips out of my bag. I bent the end of one and inserted it into the padlock. After ten minutes of twisting and swearing, I remembered that I had no idea how to pick a lock. I’d seen it done on TV and read about it in several novels, but it turned out that TV and novels were not necessarily accurate representations of real life. I decided to take a much more scientific approach. If I couldn’t pick the lock, I’d just break the damn thing instead.

  Reaching back into my trusty bag of tricks, I grabbed my can of compressed air. It was a simple-enough tool. I’d purchased this particular can right here at the campus bookstore. Sure, it was great for cleaning the dust and debris from one’s computer and keyboard, but who knew that it was so helpful when breaking and entering?

  I slid the red straw into the padlock that I had seen my sister open less than a half hour earlier and pressed the button. The trapped carbon dioxide gas inside hissed as it escaped its cylindrical prison. The lock grew white with frost as it chilled from the inside out. I picked up a large rock and slammed it against the lock. It shattered like glass, and I opened the door. Videos on YouTube had shown me several examples of it working, but I stood there in shock for a moment. I wasn’t actually sure how much the canned air helped, but the rock definitely did wonders.

  I flipped the light switch and waited for my eyes to adjust to the low yellow light. What lay before me sent a chill up my spine while simultaneously sending flames up the side of my face. I was in a lab. A chemistry lab. Grace’s lab.

  There were glass bottles full of chemicals lining metal shelves on the walls. Various acids and solutions were neatly labeled and placed so that those in danger of reacting were as far away from one another as possible. There were jars of raw elements as well. Sodium, potassium, cesium. Several of them could be quite volatile if not properly handled. Beakers and test tubes lined a drying rack near the sink. A Bunsen burner was attached to a large green cylinder with a hose.

  I made my way down the three steps and onto the floor of my sister’s laboratory. Her experimental notes were sitting out on the table. I picked up the top sheet of paper and my heart sank. I instantly recognized what she was doing. These were my father’s formulas, in my father’s handwriting. This was my father’s life’s work. The formulas he’d been developing to create temporary night vision for a variety of purposes with nothing more than some brilliantly concocted eye drops.

  On the table next to his notes was an experiment log book that she’d obviously been working on for some time. It looked almost ready to be turned into a paper for presentation. I leaned back against the table. The mysterious texter had been right all along. Grace was going to take credit for my father’s work.

  I started gathering Grace’s and our parents’ notes together. I was taking them. I was taking it all. I’d be damned if she was going to take credit for Dad’s biggest dream and all of his and our mom’s hard work. I picked up the last notebook from the table and added it to my pile, swearing under my breath as I did. This was my father’s notebook. The one I had picked up from the burnt remains of our home the day our parents died. This must have been what Grace and Penelope had been grabbing from my room earlier.

  I set down the stack and flipped open the notebook. Loose pages came fluttering out, falling to the floor at my feet. I picked them up and started to read the words written on them. I didn’t recognize these words. I had read my father’s journal—at least what I had of it—countless times over the last four years, but I didn’t recognize these pages. I turned to the section that had been ripped out—and held one of the loose pages up to the tear. These were the missing pages from my father’s journal, reunited with their home at last.

  What did she hope to accomplish from stealing his work, exactly? Was this about getting into an Ivy League school? I was the one who’d assisted Dad in the lab. Did she hope to erase my involvement completely? Or was this about the money she could get from selling the work, plain and simple? I remembered what she had said at the dinner party the night before about going into pharmaceuticals. How like Grace to turn this all into a horrible joke.

  CHAPTER 12

  SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS:

  The randomness of the universe is always increasing

  “Ya know what?” I chewed the bite of cheese, dough, and pepperoni in my mouth and swallowed, chasing it down with a swig of cola. Maggie’s hood was still warm beneath me, even though we’d been out here for almost an hour.

  It was well after curfew, but that just meant the drop-off overlooking the campus was empty and quiet. The sky stretched on forever above us, framed by the shadowy treetops. It might have been a perfect evening . . . if I had any idea what I was doing out here with Caroline. We weren’t on a date. I wasn’t even sure I thought about her in that way. Not that I could think about much of anything but Grace’s secret lab. No matter wha
t I did, my mind just kept trailing back to Grace. Caroline deserved better than that.

  “What?” Caroline was wearing a worn-out band T-shirt and ripped jeans under an oversized camouflage jacket that looked like she’d picked it up at the military surplus store or something. There was a rank insignia on the sleeve. I thought it might have been for a staff sergeant, but couldn’t be sure—I hadn’t played enough Call of Duty to recognize rank, apparently. Maybe it had belonged to her dad or something. I didn’t ask. I kept wondering if she was cold but didn’t say anything about it. It was weird to see her in anything that wasn’t her school uniform.

  I sucked some sauce off my thumb and said, “This pizza really sucks.”

  She laughed and dropped the crust that she’d been holding into the open pizza box. “So true. Why do we keep eating it?”

  I lay back on Maggie’s hood, stretching my arms up and placing my hands behind my head. Then I rolled to the side to face her and shrugged, a smirk on my lips. “Maybe you’re doing it to impress me. But I have to tell ya, I’m only interested in friendship.”

  “Oh really? Just friendship, eh?” She looked at me with a disbelieving smile.

  I nodded for emphasis, teasing her a little. “Really. Friendship and bad pizza.”

  “Well, my heart’s really broken over that bit of news. You should have told me before I brought you out here to convince you I’m dating material.” She laughed, nice and loud. It was the sweetest sound that I had ever heard.

  “Too late now. Of course . . .” I reached out and pinched her jacket sleeve, giving it a gentle pull. “I might be able to be persuaded. It’s been known to happen a time or two before.”

  “No. You seem pretty set in your ways to me.” She tugged her sleeve from my hand and lay down beside me, looking up at the sky. She said, “The stars are pretty. See that constellation there? They call it the Northern Cross. It’s supposed to be the image of a swan. Do you know much about Greek mythology?”

  Sensing a make-out session wasn’t on the agenda, I lay back and looked up. “Not as much as I should, I suppose.”

  “Well, the story about the Northern Cross tells of two close friends, Cygnus and Phaeton, who were constantly competing with each other. One day, they challenged each other to a race across the sky, around the sun, and back to Earth. But you know how competitive types can be.” She paused, and for a moment, I wondered if she was referring to Grace and me. But then, it was always hard to figure out just what Caroline was talking about. “In order to gain the advantage, they both cut too close to the sun, and their chariots were burned up. They fell to Earth and were knocked unconscious. When Cygnus woke up, he looked for Phaeton, only to discover his friend’s body trapped by the roots of a tree at the bottom of the Eridanus River. Cygnus repeatedly dove into the river, but couldn’t reach his friend’s body. While he sat grieving on the bank of the river, Cygnus begged for Zeus to help him. Zeus said that if he gave Cygnus the body of a swan, he would be able to dive deeply enough to retrieve Phaeton’s body and give him a proper burial. The only catch was that if Cygnus did turn into a swan, he’d also have to give up his immortality and would only live as long as a swan would normally live. Cygnus agreed. And in honor of this great unselfish act, Zeus placed Cygnus’s swan image into the night sky. Kind of a love story between the two of them, really.”

  I swallowed hard, now feeling like she could be talking about Grace or Josh. I wondered if she had any idea what had transpired between my best friend and me. Had someone seen? Were rumors spreading through the school that Josh and I had kissed? Absently, my fingers found my lips. What had it meant to him? What did it mean to me? And how would it affect our friendship? My voice caught in my throat for a moment. “That’s so sad.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s beautiful.” She sighed, watching the night sky. “To think that someone could love someone else so much that they would give up everything for them.”

  “It must have been a hard choice to make.”

  “When it’s love, I don’t think the choice is all that hard at all. You just feel it. Even if it scares you. It’s just there.”

  Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t know what love was. Not the kind of love that Caroline was describing. Was that even real? Or just the stuff of fiction? Poets wrote about it. Singers sang about it. Hell, even scientists had theories about what was chemically happening in your brain. But did anyone really know what love was? Or was I the only one who had no real idea?

  I stared up at the stars, fighting the bitter feeling in my chest from blooming any larger than it already had. I didn’t know what love was. And not just romantic love, but the emotion itself. I’d moved from a family I couldn’t recall to a foster home to a collection of people living under one roof. I thought I’d loved my parents, Viktor, and Julian. But what if I was wrong? How can you define a concept that’s so ethereal, so untouchable?

  What was I doing here? Not just with Caroline, but at Wills? I should have stayed in California. My being here certainly wasn’t helping Viktor at all. And now things were complicated. With Josh. With Caroline. With Julian. With everyone. Maybe I should have stayed away. I lay there in silence for several minutes before speaking again. “So many of the stars are dead before we see them.”

  “There’s a cheery thought.”

  “It’s true. The light reaches Earth on a delay, and by the time it does, so many of the stars are already gone.” I wondered how quickly all the light in my life would disappear. My parents, my friends, my dreams. My chest felt heavy. “Kinda makes you wonder why they bother shining at all.”

  We both grew quiet for a long time. Just as I was about to suggest that we head back to the dorms, she rolled on her side and looked at me. “You hate being here, don’t you?”

  “With you? Quite the opposite, actually.” Of course I knew what she meant, but it wasn’t like I wanted to talk about it, exactly.

  But my brush-off wasn’t enough to thwart her curiosity. “At Wills. You hate it here.”

  A sigh escaped my lungs and clouded the air around my face like a fog. “I do.”

  “Were you in such a funk at your school out in California?”

  Lacing my fingers together, I laid my hands on my chest, feeling my lungs fill and deflate as I breathed. “No. But there were no reminders there of my past. I ran away from it all.”

  “Maybe facing it will be a good thing.”

  “You don’t get it. I don’t want to face anything. I can’t get any of what I had back, and I don’t even know if I’d want to.”

  “What bothers you more—that being here reminds you of your parents’ deaths, or that your sister, Grace, is here antagonizing you still?”

  When I spoke, it was through a clenched jaw. The evening had been ruined. What was supposed to be a night of light fun and hanging out had been tainted once again by Grace. “The two are intertwined.”

  “You think she had something to do with their deaths?” She paused, waiting for my reply, but I wouldn’t respond. After a moment, she said, “Did you ever stop to consider that maybe your parents just had a terrible accident in the lab? It happens all the time.”

  “Not my parents. They were so careful.” The heat of anger was making its way up my neck and cheeks. I wasn’t angry with her, but at her insistence that we discuss my situation. It was nobody’s business. Nobody’s but mine.

  “It’s possible.”

  “No. It isn’t.” I sat up, more than ready to just call it a night. I didn’t want to talk about my sister and what happened in that lab four years before. Right then, I just wanted to go to bed and forget about it for a while.

  “Anything’s possible.” Her voice was so soft, but close. I closed my eyes, blocking out the stars, blocking out the pain, blocking out everything. Then I felt Caroline’s lips against mine.

  Her kiss was as gentle as her words, but like her words, there was something deeper behind it. I sucked her bottom lip gently and she pressed to me, slipping her tongue insi
de my mouth. Reaching up, I ran my hand over her hair, cupping the back of her head as we kissed. I imagined what it must have looked like from above us—two people, stretched out on the hood of an old car, linked in a way that I was certain I understood. It was all I wanted, that kiss. For the moment, it represented all that I had ever needed—acceptance, understanding, connection. When our lips parted, we looked at each other without speaking a word. Then she lay back down on the hood, and I joined her. We continued to gaze at the stars. After a long silence, during which I kept touching my lips with my fingertips in wonder, she spoke. Her tone was light, as if nothing intimate or surprising had just transpired between us. “You’re a good kisser.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But don’t get the wrong idea. I was just curious what it would be like.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “Kissing me?”

  “Kissing. Period.” Her words left me at a loss. What do you say to something like that? She looked up at the sky and sighed. “So many more are still alive, y’know.”

  “What are you talking about?” Being with Caroline was like hanging out with a living Rubik’s Cube.

  “The stars. You said that several are already dead by the time we see their light. But how many are still alive, still serving purpose, in comparison to those that no longer exist?” I wasn’t sure if she was really asking, or if she was just being an optimist.

  “Percentage-wise?” I cocked an eyebrow at her before looking back at the night sky. “Actually . . . over ninety-nine percent that we see are still functioning.”

  She turned her face toward me, her voice so low that I had to strain in order to hear what she was saying. “So why focus on less than one percent of what you see?”

  She wasn’t asking about the stars. She was asking about the cloud of pain and doubt that seemed to follow me no matter where I went. She was asking why I chose to see the glass half empty rather than half full. But it was more than that—to me, the glass wasn’t just half empty. It was lying on the ground, broken into a hundred pieces, and would never be fixed again. Maybe it was a chemical imbalance in my brain. Maybe it was just my nature to be pessimistic and suspicious. I didn’t have the answers, and there were too many questions. “I don’t know. I guess it’s easier for me.”