by Amy Sparling
Ben slides his phone out of his jeans pocket, reads the screen and then types out a reply as he talks. “Running away from your problems won’t solve anything, Lex. You should know that.”
“So you’re admitting that your problems weren’t solved when you ditched Mom and me two months ago?” I spread my arms in an arc, encompassing our surroundings. “Because you seem pretty damn happy to me.”
“You win. I am happy here.” With that, Ben sprawls out on the couch, wrapping one arm around me and one around Jill. I can’t see her with his body in the way, but I know she’s turning a deep shade of crimson right about now. “If my baby sis needs to run away to be happy, then I will allow it.”
The pain in my chest from talking about Daniel disappears just as fast as it arrived when I hear him say that. “Want to know what else would make me happy?”
“Uh oh.” Jill stifles a laugh as Ben mutes the television and makes this big scene about turning to face me with his arms folded in his lap. “Please tell me.”
I muster up my most charming smile. “A cell phone.”
Ben stares at me for a moment, trying to pull off this look of astonishment. But he’ll crack. He can’t say no to this baby sister.
He looks at Jill. “Can you believe this kid?” She shakes her head and blushes because forming coherent sentences around Ben is like asking her to jump the Grand Canyon on a skateboard.
As the top 10 football coaches of all time scroll across the TV, Ben turns to me and flashes me his perfect smile. He’s truly in an awesome mood tonight. “What?” I say, after an uncomfortably long time of him giving me that look. I shove his face away from me. “All you have to do is say no. Don’t look at me like I’m a child.”
“Be nice,” he says. “Because tomorrow I’m getting you a phone.”
Chapter 3
Every summer Ben works as a part time life guard at the YMCA. The pay sucks, but I know he only works there to meet girls. Sometime in the month after graduation, Ben had found a way to trade in his old Ford Ranger for an almost-new shiny red BMW. I slide into the creamy leather passenger seat the next morning. “Are you still working at the Y?”
“Yes ma’am.” He pulls on his seat belt. “This one chick I work with is smoking hot. But she has a boyfriend.” He starts the engine and we admire the rumbling for a moment before he backs out of the driveway and zooms out of the neighborhood.
“Did Dad help you buy this car?” I cross my arms over my chest as the anger sets in. “That’s not fair. He said he didn’t have money when I asked him for a car for my birthday.”
“Chill, Lex. Dad didn’t buy it. I did.”
My mouth falls open as I wait for some kind of explanation. We stop at a red light and he looks over at me. “I fell into some money.”
“How do you fall into money?” Jealousy boils inside me. “I want to fall wherever you fell.”
“It was an investment opportunity,” he says, giving me a smirk. “Just don’t worry about it.”
“Did you steal the money?” It seems entirely too crazy to be true, but my brother is acting like a completely different person from the last time I saw him at his graduation. He’s unusually happy, for one.
“Jesus, no. I didn’t steal it.” He turns up the radio to end our conversation. “Just stop asking questions.”
When I was six and Ben was eight, our grandma came to visit us for a week while our parents went on vacation. Grandma gave us each ten dollars and took us to the toy store to get a prize. Ben instantly found a Ninja Turtle action figure for nine bucks. It was the last one he needed to complete his collection. But I took my time going up and down each isle several times, picking up toys and admiring them only to put them back and consider something else. The ten dollar bill in my pocket was a lot of money and I didn’t want to waste it on just any old toy. Then I saw it—a fairy princess doll complete with matching outfits. She was beautiful; the first doll I’d seen with dirty blond hair like me. As a first grader, I knew that its price tag of $14.99 was more than what I had in my pocket.
I showed it to Ben, thinking he would help me convince Grandma to give me more money. “Bubba, is this doll under ten dollars?”
He looked at the price and then back at me, into my innocent puppy dog eyes that I was just then learning how to perfect to get what I want. “Yep, it is,” he said, grabbing the doll and placing his action figure back on the shelf.
Later, I overhead Grandma telling Ben how proud she was that he did such a selfless thing for me. “I just wanted her to be happy,” he had said.
Now, in the cell phone store at the mall, I’m reminded of the princess doll. “I really don’t want you spending that much money on me,” I say, walking back to the selection of cheap phones. Ben holds out the three hundred dollar special edition pink phone that caught my eye when we walked in the store. “This is the one you want, and I want to get it for you. No sister of mine is going to have some piece of crap cheap phone.”
After a pizza and pretzel lunch in the food court with ice cream in a waffle cone for dessert, Ben and I spend the next few hours shopping. We search every store for the exact perfect pair of sunglasses. Ben wants something with thick frames and extremely dark lenses. He tries on a million pairs and asks if I can see his eyes. After about fifty times, we finally find a pair of black Ray Bans that block every bit of light.
Spending quality time with Ben is exactly what I need after the last two months of living with Mom. Things weren’t too bad when he lived with us, but after he moved out Mom went ballistic. My nights of hanging out with Ben and his friends, playing foosball in the garage had turned into me sitting in my room all day hoping Jill would visit.
I always had friends at school but Jill is the only friend I hang out with outside of school. And now she has Jordan, and the only place I belong is playing third wheel on one of their escapades. So perhaps the petty fight I had with Mom was fate. Maybe I was meant to run away to Dad’s house and get this quality time with Ben before he starts college in the fall. And if fate is giving me this advantage, I’m going to make the most of every minute.
“You know Jill hardly ever hangs out with me anymore,” I say. We’re standing in line at an incense kiosk. “She’s always stuck up Jordan's butt.”
“She was over last night.” Ben smells a stick of incense and holds it under my nose. “Yeah but that was the first time in a week,” I say. I sniff the incense and stick out my tongue. He puts it back on the rack. “Plus she only came over because she wanted to hear about my drama with Mom.”
“Yeah, that sounds like her.” He holds another stick under my nose and this time it gets a thumbs up from me. “You think this will make my room smell better?” he asks. I nod and he grabs a bag of the vanilla scented sticks.
“The whole house smells gross. You better get a hundred of those.”
He laughs and grabs another bag. The smile hasn’t left his face all day. Ben has never been an agnsty teenager or the quiet, shy type. He’s always been friendly and popular. But his happiness today is weird. No one can be this happy all the time; it would eventually become too much and explode their brain.
I have to be imagining things. Ben is just normal, happy old Ben. His phone rings and he answers it with a smirk. “Hello, beautiful.”
I watch in awe as my tough-as-nails, womanizing brother crumples into a pile of mushy goo, hanging on to every word this mystery girl says. “Of course I’m free tonight,” he says, looking over at me. I’m happy for him, but I can’t stop my face from sinking. Jill ditched me for Jordan and now Ben is ditching me for some girl. Another night in that empty house, all alone.
He winks at me and hands the cashier another wad of cash to pay for his huge amount of incense. “You want to meet my little sister? She’s spending the week with me.”
I don’t know what the girl says, but it makes Ben blush. “She’s sixteen. Yeah, she’s cool. I promise.”
An hour later, we’re on our way to the beach to hang out
with a girl named Marla. A girl who has somehow managed to capture my brother’s heart and keep it for more than twenty-four hours. As we drive, Ben talks about her like he’s a kid with his first crush. He tells me how she’s beautiful and witty and how she knows every line to all his favorite movies. She is perfect.
If he’s happy, then I guess I’m happy too. But more than anything, I’m happy knowing that I wasn’t imagining anything. Ben is different.
Chapter 4
When we get to the beach, Ben parks between two sports cars in front of a huge camp fire. There are chairs and BBQ pits and people everywhere. It’s the perfect weather for swimming, but Cristal Beach isn’t known for swimming after dark due to the seaweed and creepy black water. It’s the place cool people come to hang out and underage teenagers come to get drunk. I’ve never been here this late.
As we get out of the car a mild panic rises in my chest. Who are these people? I don’t recognize anyone from Ben’s soccer team and most of these people look older than high school seniors. I guess a lot of things in Ben’s life have changed since summer started.
“You can find a spot by the fire if you want,” he tells me as he runs his fingers through his hair and adjusts his sunglasses. It’s already dark, but he wears them anyway. “I’ll go find Marla and introduce you.”
He jogs up to the main group of guys and fist-bumps each of them as a hello. Then he disappears around another line of cars, leaving me totally alone on the beach with strangers. I lean against the hood, watching the fire dance a few feet away. Some guys toss a football around and another guy sits on a log playing an acoustic guitar. Because he was so artsy, he had a couple girls hanging onto every word he sang. The girls however, didn’t look very artistic.
I play a game of Tetris on my phone, crunching up my eyebrows in concentration so it looks like I’m a normal girl busy with her phone—not an awkward loser without any friends.
Ben was right about Marla being beautiful. He hadn’t told me the exact category of beautiful. I’ve met many of Ben’s girls over the years and none of them stood out much from the one before her. Blond, tan and bubbly—that kind of beautiful. Marla is different.
Marla isn’t a blond beanpole, for one. She has L’Oreal number three jet black hair down to her waist, curvy hips and bright red lipstick. Her nails are long and square at the ends with black tips. She’s wearing black leggings and a gray slinky tank top. If Scarlett Johansson had an evil twin, she would look like Marla. Even though the sun has dipped below the shore line, it feels like there’s a spotlight shining just on her, illuminating her pale skin and making her glow.
“So this is the infamous Lexie Frost?” she says, sliding her arm around my shoulders. She’s tall and smells like fresh laundry, despite spending an afternoon in this sticky salt water air.
“That’s me,” I say, trying not to sound like a buffoon. She keeps her arm around me and runs her fingers through my hair. Her eyes are lined in thick black, and they look right into mine for a moment. “She is the most beautiful sophomore I have ever seen.” She says this to Ben I guess, but she’s looking right at me.
“Trust me, I know.” Ben beams at me. “It’s a full time job keeping the guys off her.” My heart flip-flops. Where was he when Daniel was ripping my heart out on the porch that night after prom? Oh, that’s right. He was at Dad’s house—his new home away from me.
“I can imagine,” Marla says. She leans in and puts her lips to my hair. “Let’s be friends.”
It’s ludicrous, of course. I’m not anything special. That’s just stuff girls say when they meet their boyfriend’s sister. And it’s also just stuff big brothers say when introducing their sister to their girlfriend. But still.
I like her.
Ben had never willingly taken me on one of his dates before. There was the time in eighth grade when the fair came to town. Mom and her best friend Jackie took me to it every year and spent more money than she could afford on rides, games and carnie food. But that year Mom came down with the flu and forced Ben to take me along on the night he was taking his girlfriend. He didn’t seem like minded too much, but the girl really hated me being there. She refused to ride the tilt-a-whirl so Ben rode with me while she watched from the crowd. And then Ben was dying to ride the zipper, but again she refused to ride it so I hopped in with Ben because I wasn’t scared of any rides. I remember watching her scowl at us from the ground as our bodies flip-flip-flopped around in the metal cage.
Later when Ben was driving us home, I pretended to fall asleep in the backseat of Mom’s car so I wouldn’t have to put up with the awkward silence. It didn’t stay silent. The girl lashed into him about how wrong it is to bring your kid sister on a first date. Ben said if she liked him then she should learn to like his family. Then she said something I’ve never forgotten. You spend too much time with your sister. It’s like you’re in love with her or something.
After that I felt really weird being around Ben in public. I had this fear that everyone who saw us together thought we were some kind of freakish incest couple or something. Finally I told him this fear during one of our family counseling sessions after the divorce. He laughed it off, explaining that any brother who didn’t love his sister unconditionally—but in a non-creepy way—didn’t deserve to be a brother.
A piece of firewood at the top of the pyramid had burned too deep through the center and it cracks in half, dropping into the fire with a loud snap. A few bits of embers fly in my direction and thud to a stop in front of my sandal. The unexpected crackles bring me out of my daydreams. I jerk my foot away when the glowing chunk of wood threatens to burn my pinky toe.
A voice comes from behind me. “Maybe you should back up a bit.” He sounds like he just woke up at two in the morning to answer the phone.
“Maybe,” I say, lifting up on my hands and pushing myself back before settling into the sand again. Now I’m sitting next to him. I’m close enough to smell his Axe body spray. He’s wearing a white shirt and jeans, but that’s all I can see in my peripheral vision.
Almost directly in front of me but across the fire, Marla’s arm wraps around Ben’s elbow as she snuggles close to him. The flames dance across their faces, blurring them and then bringing them back into focus. Marla’s smile is a mixture of sexy and innocent, something that captivates Ben. He has those lazy bedroom eyes as he talks to her, smiling, laughing and occasionally touching his forehead to hers as they share words that can’t be overheard from the fire. I’ve never felt like that with anyone. After millions of girlfriends, Ben somehow found Marla. And I’m happy for him.
“They should get a room,” the guy next to me says in his silky yet raspy voice. “It’s bad enough that I have to see them do that kissy-face crap at work every day. But this is my weekend off, shit.”
I look over at him as he traces lazy designs in the sand with a stick. “You work with Ben?” I ask. “At the Y?”
“Definitely not.” He turns toward me. I don’t think I physically jump, but I want to. He has a unique look about him. Yeah he’s hot, but so is every other guy here. He isn’t like everyone else in this tiny town. He’s dark skinned, for one. His black hair is shaggy, unkempt but still sexy as it rests on his shoulders. His almond-shaped eyes are dark, and now they’re staring right into mine. Shit, I’ve been staring at him entirely too long.
I shake myself but disguise it by stretching out my arms and yawning. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
His mouth cracks into a smile as he thinks carefully about what he had to repeat. Then he smiles. “I said no.”
“Oh, okay.” I’m an idiot. In three seconds flat, I’d managed to ask a question then totally forget what the answer even meant. I have this magical ability to turn into a mumbling idiot whenever a hot guy is around. I pull my knees up to my chest and gaze around the beach, letting my head bob to the beat of the music playing somewhere in the background. He gets up and walks away. Crisis averted, I guess. Why would a hot guy randomly talk to me, anyhow
?
Watching Ben and Marla eye-sex each other starts to annoy me. They are the only people I know here and they aren’t including me. Marla had whispered that we should be friends. Where is that friendship now? Just go ahead and leave the kid sister alone on the beach, surrounded by older, cooler, better people who are too absorbed in their funny stories and alcoholic beverages and stupid volleyballs to care about me. Sure. Great.
Awesome.
“Cherry Coke fine with you?” The tanned guy with gorgeous features hands me a dripping wet can and sits next to me. “It was the only thing I could find that wasn’t beer.”
“Um, thanks.” I pop the lid and take a drink. Cherry Coke isn’t my thing, but it feels great fizzing down my dry throat. “Why didn’t you bring me a beer?” I ask, having never actually drank beer in my life.
He nods toward Ben. “So your brother can kick my ass? Not happening.” His voice and the slow way he says each word makes me smile. He sounds permanently sleepy but his eyes say otherwise.
“How did you know he was my brother?” I ask.
He shrugs, drinking from his own Cherry Coke. “Same eyes.” He studies my face. “Same jaw line and ears and, well everything.”
My mouth falls open. “You’re saying I look like a boy?”
He shrugs again. “Maybe I’m saying Ben looks like a girl.”
“Ugh,” I groan, taking another sip of my drink to avoid throwing it at him. He leans closer to me, his manly scent catching me off guard. He puts his lips to my ear to tell me a secret. “Or maybe Ben told me his little sister would be here tonight.”
“Well that’s a relief.” I laugh and it comes out a little like a hyena, revealing my dorky side. I keep talking to drown out the memories of that stupid laugh. “For a second I thought I was manish.”