by LP Tvorik
“Nope.” I accepted the shitty half of the Oreo and tossed it in my mouth. “She wants to put me in AP Lit next year,” I said around the cookie, “and Mr. Gideon is recommending me for pre-calc.”
“What?” Alex shot upright, turning to look down at me with pride and confusion in her eyes. The pride had my ego inflating like a balloon. The confusion popped it. “I thought… how… what?”
“You’re in those classes, right?” I asked, shaking off the pang of wounded pride and sitting up to rattle the Oreo package at her. She pulled one out and absently split it, handing me the good half. She didn’t eat hers, though. She just held it in her hand and stared at me.
“Yeah?”
“So we’ll have at least two classes together.”
“Are you gonna stay awake?” she asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at me.
“Probably not,” I said honestly, smushing my two cookie halves together and taking a bite, trying not to roll my eyes in pleasure. There wasn’t a whole lot of joy in my life back then, but I’d have classified that moment as bordering on perfect. I had food, I had Alex, and I had value. Demonstrable, brag-worthy value. I was going to be an advanced placement student. A smart kid. The kind of guy she might smile at in the hallway. “I’m gonna do the homework, though. Maybe put a little effort into it.”
“That’s great!” Alex cried, reaching out and shoving my shoulder. Not exactly the celebratory gesture I’d prefer, but she did seem genuinely happy. Not disappointed in me for once, and that felt really fucking good.
“So, I was thinking,” I said carefully, leaning back on a hand and studying her face, searching for the real answer because I knew Alex was too nice to let me down hard on purpose. “Since we’re gonna be in the same classes, and since I don’t really know how to try in school, maybe…” I swallowed hard, trying to work moisture into my suddenly-dry mouth. “Maybe we could study together?”
I saw the answer in the shutters that dropped over her eyes before they tore away from mine and focused intently on her hands. “We’re just so different,” she whispered, breaking her half of the cookie in half again and staring at the pieces. “I don’t think you’d like me much in real life.”
“Is that really what you’re afraid of?” I asked, trying to keep the hurt from my voice. “How could you possibly think that, Al? You’re my best friend.”
“And you’re mine!” she said, glaring up at me. “But… here. You’re my best friend here and I’m not this person at school. I’m boring. I follow the rules. I wear skirts, Nate. Skirts.”
She said the word with so much disgusted incredulity, I laughed. “Yeah, I noticed that,” I said. “I think they look… nice.”
Nice? Really asshole? Nice?!
Al seemed as amused by my lack of verbal finesse as I was horrified by it.
“Gee, thanks,” she said, but she offered me a weak grin and tossed a piece of Oreo into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “I’m serious, though. You know I wanna be friends with you in real life…”
No, I don’t.
“... I just… I guess I don’t want you to decide you don’t like who I am during the day. Cuz then you won’t like the night version, either.”
“That’s dumb.” The words just spilled out of my mouth on their own, rude and unwieldy. Alex glared at me, and I guess I deserved it. I shrugged, trying to soften my tone. “It is though, Al. You’re the coolest person I know. I love hanging out with you. And you’re not two separate people. You just show different parts of yourself, depending on who you’re with. I’ve always known you toe the line during the day. That doesn’t make me like you less, it just makes me love it that much more that I get to be the person who sees you cut loose.”
Shut the hell up, moron. I was getting perilously close to a dangerous degree of honesty so I clapped my mouth shut and watched her face as she puzzled over my words, praying she wouldn’t read too far or accurately between the lines.
“Can I think about it?” she asked, and I wanted to say no. Alex was the queen of introspection. She’d go way too deep into her own head and wind up coming up with some theory that was as self-deprecating as it was outlandish. Or maybe she’d just muster up the courage to tell me the truth— that her reluctance had nothing to do with what I’d come to think of her and everything to do with how she already thought of me.
You’re a fucking loser. An advanced placement delinquent. You think derivatives and Beowulf are gonna change that?
“Sure,” I said reluctantly. “Get back to me.”
Chapter six
alex
“Girl, you look like shit,” Gemma muttered as I slid into my desk beside her in first period French.
Nate’s proposition had kept me up well into the night, even after I returned home and slipped into bed. I’d stared at the ceiling for hours, trying to wrap my head around what he’d said and what the future might look like if we were more open about our friendship.
He’d made very clear that he wasn’t at all ashamed of me. I wasn’t going to waste time convincing myself that was a lie. I was good at reading people, even ones I didn’t know very well and Nate I knew plenty well. He wasn’t lying. He had no anxiety about the thought of his friends and the world at large knowing he was friends with me.
Unfortunately, liberation from that insecurity left me with the cold, hard knowledge that I was, in a sense, ashamed of him. Not of who he truly was, of course. With me he was sweet, smart, and funny. He was by far the greatest guy I knew.
It was the facade he presented to the world that had me worried. He was a jerk in real life. He cursed at teachers and slept in class and had everyone in the school so scared of him and his legendary rage that the crowded hallways parted like the Red Sea when he walked down them.
I, on the other hand, took pride in staying off the grid. My teachers liked me. My classmates either liked me or didn’t think much of me at all. High school was just a stepping stone to somewhere better and I had to stay the course if I wanted to get where I was going.
How could I stay the course if everyone in school knew I was cavorting with the guy who threw punches with no more incentive than a wrong look? People would ask questions. Teachers would pay more attention to me and question my work. Rumor would fly and, eventually, the unthinkable might happen… someone might carry it to my father.
Why did he have to be so insistent? What was so wrong with what we had? Sure, sometimes funny stuff happened at school and all I wanted was to find him in the crowd and share the joke. Sometimes I had a bad day and I didn’t want to wait until the dead of night to talk to him about it. But those were little things—not worth risking discovery, and the loss of the much bigger, more important thing we had in the safety of the woods at night.
“Uh… hello?” Gemma craned across the aisle between our desks and waved her hand in front of my face. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, pushing her hand away and leaning over to pull my books out of my bag, setting them on my desk. “Yeah, I’m good.”
I wasn’t, though. I was distracted. I didn’t absorb even a second of the French lecture, and I missed three entrances during concert band to the point where the conductor called me out, specifically.
“Do you need someone to help you count the rests, Ms. Winger?” he snapped, after drawing the whole band to a halt and glaring at me where I sat amidst the flute section.
“No, sir,” I mumbled, trying to fight the red hot flush that crept into my cheeks as everyone turned to look at me.
I forced myself to stay tuned for the rest of band, but I drifted back into deliberation through lunch. Gemma eventually gave up talking to me.
“I dunno what’s gotten into you,” she huffed, pulling out a textbook and slapping it on the desk. “But if you don’t want to talk about it I’ll just leave you to your daydreaming.”
Honestly, I did want to talk t
o her. She was smart and no-nonsense and she’d probably have some wisdom to offer. That’s the problem with secret friendships, I guess. They exist in a vacuum, so when things go wrong there’s no external force to bring back the equilibrium. The conflict just spins farther and farther out of control.
I was walking back to class after lunch, still lost in my head, when an office runner found me, holding a slip of blue paper in her hand.
“You need to go to the nurse’s office,” she said, winded from her sprint down the hallway. Did she know the term ‘runner’ was just a word? She didn’t actually have to run.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the paper as a sour ball of dread settled in my stomach. I only ever got called to the nurse’s office when Tom had an incident. Everyone on the staff knew I was the only one who could calm him down during an episode.
Suddenly I was grateful to the runner for taking her job seriously. I spun, backpack smacking me in the back as I sprinted to the nurse’s office to calm my hysterical brother.
Except Tommy wasn’t hysterical. He sat calmly on the exam table, holding an ice pack to his face. When he saw me his face lit up and he lifted his free hand to wave.
“Hi, Aly!”
“Tom, what happened?” I asked, breathless, ignoring the adults scattered through the room.
“Nothing,” Tom mumbled, his natural brightness dimming somewhat as he slumped, looking at the floor.
“Where is he?” I growled. “Where is that jerk, Freddy? None of you believed me when—”
“Miss Winger, please calm down.” The vice principal was in the room. That couldn’t be good. “Mr. Whitehouse’s mother just picked him up and is taking him to the emergency room.”
Oh, God. This was my nightmare. Tom was gentle as a lamb, but he was a big guy and he was a human being. There was always a chance he’d lash out if he was backed into a corner. I told him not to fight, though. I told him that’d make things worse.
“Tom,” I whispered, stepping close and taking his hands, looking for torn up knuckles or some other sign that he’d been in a fight. I found nothing. “What happened?”
“It’s okay, Aly!” Tom said cheerfully, tossing the ice pack aside and pulling me into his arms in a too-tight hug. I couldn’t breathe, but I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed right back, relieved that he wasn’t badly hurt and bore no evidence of having hurt anyone himself.
“What happened?” I asked, turning to face the adults in the room. Tom’s in-school therapist stood by the door, the vice principal sat in a chair nearby, and the nurse lingered by her little cabinet of supplies.
“Well, Ms. Winger, that’s what we’d like to know,” the vice principal said, frowning at me. “Your brother doesn’t seem to want to talk. Nor do Mr. Whitehouse or any of his friends. We were hoping you could convince Tommy, here, to tell us what happened.”
There were very few things that fueled my ire to such an extent as to overwhelm my fierce need to stay under the radar.
My brother was one of those things.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” I said. “I came to you five times this year, telling you Freddy was picking on Tom. You didn’t do anything to stop it. If my brother doesn’t want to talk about what happened, I’m not gonna manipulate him. Now, can I please call our mom to come pick us up?”
“The school day is barely halfway complete, Miss Winger,” the administrator said, giving me a stern look.
“You dragged me out of class for this, didn’t you? Tommy’s not going back to class today and neither am I. Let me call my mom. If you don’t I’ll make sure to tell her all about my repeated attempts to get your help with this and about your refusal to let me call her after my brother was beat up on your watch.”
My mom wouldn’t care about either, but these people didn’t know that and didn’t need to. All three adults exchanged a look before the vice principal sighed and shrugged.
“You can use my phone, hon,” the nurse said, shooting me a small smile as she nodded toward the phone mounted to the wall by her cabinet.
Momma didn’t work, so she was at the school to get us within twenty minutes. Tom and I had passed the time in silence. He just grinned and held the stupid ice pack to his face, and I sat on the edge of my chair, knee bouncing up and down in anticipation. I didn’t really care about my mom arriving, I just wanted to get Tommy away from these jerk adults and figure out what had happened. Once I had all the facts I could work through how to deal with the violence and how to defend him if stupid Freddy Whitehouse decided to retaliate.
“What happened?” Momma asked the vice principal as she signed the requisite paperwork, offering a pale look of concern in my brother’s direction.
“We don’t know, ma’am. Tom’s therapist found him and another student in a hallway during the lunch hour. There was clearly a fight and Mr. Whitehouse is on the way to the ER with his mother. I hope you understand, this is a matter of serious concern, and there will be a full investigation.
“I hope so,” Momma said absently, turning to leave the office and nodding her head to indicate Tom and I should follow her. I hoped the vice principal would see her behavior as some kind of icy power play and not what it really was — disinterest. I wondered if she’d even registered the accusation against Tom.
“What happened, Tom?” she asked once we were safely on the road.
“Nothing,” Tom said, smiling out the window.
Momma just sighed and kept driving and I wanted to scream. You can’t just ask once! You have to persist! He wants to trust you! He’ll tell you everything if you just press him a little!
I spent the rest of the day trying to goad the truth out of my brother. I plied him with food, I took him out to the spot, I promised him a new Lego set. Nothing worked. He just smiled, the bright effect offset by the crust of blood beneath his nose and the bruises working their way up the bridge and swelling by his eyes.
“It’s okay, Aly,” he kept saying, like that was somehow supposed to make me feel better. “Freddy won’t bother me anymore.”
What the hell did you do to him? I wanted to scream, but Tom had enough accusation and distrust in his life. He didn’t need it from me, too.
Daddy showed as little interest in Tom’s appearance as Momma.
“What happened, Tom? Did you get in a fight?” he asked brusquely across the dinner table.
Tom just shook his head, grinning.
“You know what the Bible says, son. Violence gets you nowhere. It’s what bullies want, is to rile you up. In the long term, it’s better to turn the other cheek.”
“What, so he’s supposed to just let himself get beat up?” I asked in spite of myself, scowling at my father.
He glared right back, and I felt my courage whither under the powerful wash of disappointment emanating from him. My father never had to get angry. He just got disappointed, and it always felt like the whole universe agreed with him. Like god herself thought you had failed.
“Don’t argue with me, Alexandra,” he ordered, and I shut my mouth and lowered my gaze to my plate. “Tom, you know better than to fight.”
“I didn’t fight,” Tom said, frowning.
“The school said there will be an investigation,” Momma offered, setting her silverware down and taking a sip of wine. Glass number three if I wasn’t mistaken. “The boy he beat up is the son of a school board member. Freddy Whitehouse.”
“I didn’t beat anyone up,” Tom said, turning his frown to me, tears in his eyes.
“Jack and Millie Whitehouse are in my congregation,” Daddy said with a nod, ignoring my brother. “I’ll talk to them on Sunday. See if we can resolve this quietly.”
Tom’s face was growing blotchy with frustration, his fork tap tap tapping in a staccato rhythm against his plate. I excused us from the dinner table and dragged him up to my room to color while I tried and failed to con
centrate on my homework until bedtime.
I’d all but forgotten the stress of Nate’s proposition by the time the house went quiet that night. I scrambled out of bed as soon as my father’s weight shifted the floorboards on his walk to bed. Hastily, desperate to talk to my friend, I pulled on my dirty old shorts and ragged t-shirt, slipping my feet into sneakers and pulling my hair into a messy ponytail.
It was a rarity that Nate beat me to the spot, but there he was when I arrived, sprawled on the rock and staring at the sky. I leapt over the stream as he sat up, leaning back on his hands.
“‘Sup, Al?!” he said, grinning brightly. The moon was waning, and every night it was harder to see him and easier to see the stars above.
“I had a crazy day,” I breathed, winded from my jog through the woods. I slipped up onto the rock beside him, flopping onto my back and gathering the scattered stars together into my mind, soaking up the steady peace they always offered.
“Wanna talk about it?” It wasn’t a question so much as a prompt. Unlike my mother—unlike me, I realize in retrospect—Nate was good about pressing until he got an answer. He seemed to understand that the truth was just below the surface, begging to be set free.
That night, the truth was already bubbling over. I didn’t even fight it.
“Tommy got in a fight!” I said without preamble, throwing my arms out to my sides as I stared at the sky, finally letting my bottled-up stress and disbelief erupt. “Stupid Freddy Whitehouse cornered him and Tommy beat him so bad he had to go to the ER!” My heartbeat thundered in time with my frantic words. I’d always understood that I would be Tom’s caretaker once my parents got too old. It was a burden I was happy to carry, but times like now the worry rose up like floodwaters.
There was a long pause, during which I took deep, steadying breaths to try to calm myself down. I’d always taken a tentative comfort in Tom’s gentle nature. He’d gotten so big in his teens, it started to scare me. Such a big guy with so little common sense and emotional maturity was a scary thing. I lived in fear of the day he snapped and hurt someone just because he didn’t know better. Now that day had come. How well could I care for him if violence became part of his pathology? Would I have to put him in a home?