by Emilia Finn
He’s Evie’s uncle, and he knows who’s calling. But death by him isn’t nearly as scary to me as missing her call.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Sasquatch. We’re here.” Her voice is like fresh air, like a gentle breeze on a spring day.
My breath races out on a fast exhale that almost makes me buckle. “You made it safe.”
“Yeah. It’s been chaotic as hell getting the room keys and stuff, but we’re here.”
“You’re in your dorm?”
“Uh-huh. It’s kinda small. Smaller than my bedroom.”
“Sucks for you, princess.”
I turn away from Bobby and lean against the corner of the ropes. I’m more winded now than the whole time we’ve been training. Aiden and Tina went with Evie, which means I’ve been training with Bobby all day while we work on my footwork.
Aiden is their grappling expert. He teaches Rollin On Gym contenders how to fuck someone up while on the ground, and he’s the best at it. But despite the talk we had last night on the front porch – a talk that included threats on my life and limbs – his absence today only amplifies my loneliness and the way I miss his daughter like I’d miss my hands.
Nothing is supposed to change. She’s away, and our daily chats in person are to be replaced by phone calls, but the fact she’s not here heckling me while I train, and her dad is missing, leaves a hole in my chest the size of a bowling ball. It aches and throbs, because for the first time in forever, I’m without the only girl in the world that I breathe for.
I have sisters, and I love them.
I have men I call my brothers. I love them, too.
But nobody lives inside my chest the way Evie does. And everybody knows it. So they don’t give me shit for being soft today. They don’t get mad at me for not focusing. And they won’t get mad at me for taking this call.
“Is it nice there?” I use my teeth to unfasten my second glove and toss it to the floor. It’s hot in this gym, and despite the fact I’m only wearing shorts and my shirt was discarded hours ago, I still drip with sweat and continuously wipe the sting from my eyes. “The campus; is it nice?”
“It’s big,” she says in a low voice. “Like, I don’t even know. Our high school, but times thirty. I don’t even know where I am right now. I won’t know how to find my dorm again once Mom and Biggie leave.”
“It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” I clear my throat, lift my face to the ceiling, and close my eyes. “Call me when you’re moving between classes, and I’ll walk with you. We’ll figure it out together.”
“Hey, Ben?”
“Mm?”
“Love you.”
My heart gives a heavy sputter. I don’t know if she means the familial type of love, or something more along the lines of the kiss we shared yesterday, but whatever she means, I mean it too, so I hide my face from her uncle and murmur, “I love you, too.”
“It’s orientation day tomorrow,” she changes the subject as though her world isn’t spinning like mine is. “We have to go to the commons at noon. I have no damn clue what the commons is, or where, for that matter, but that’s where I’ll get my class schedules and stuff, I think.”
“No new best friends, remember?” I clear my throat when her Uncle Jack passes in my peripherals with his tough guy act. Well… it’s not so much an act, but a statement of fact. Kincaids don’t play when it comes to Evie. “I have the male slot,” I continue, “and Bean has the female. Actually, ya know what? Just don’t talk to anyone at all. Save it for us.”
She gives a watery laugh that I know for a damn fact is her trying to hold onto her shit. She’s scared, and even if her folks are in the room with her right now, she’s lonely.
“Hey, Ben?”
I climb through the ropes and jump down from the ring. I’m done in here for as long as she needs me.
Bobby watches me with a lifted brow, but if he thinks my loyalties are to him or my career when Evie is scared, then he’s going to get a shock when I tell him to take his contract and shove it up his ass.
“Ben?”
“Yeah?” I walk into the hall and pass my stepdad. Oz married my mom a couple years back, and though we fight more often than not, I still give him a low-five and a small smile as we pass. He knows who I’m talking to, and he knows about the chasm in my chest that only the curly-haired girl can fill.
Every other guy in this gym is looking out for Evie, but this guy, this one is on my side. So when all of the others are busy making sure Evie’s okay, Oz will be the guy spotting me and making sure I don’t pass out from my inability to breathe without her.
I step into the weight room at the far end of the gym and take satisfaction in the fact the room is empty except for Bean and Mac. They’re almost always in here, because Bean likes to train Mac, and Mac’s brand-new heart needs the slow and steady exercise to get back to the fitness he once had.
He was fourteen when his heart gave out in the very ring I was just in. A horrible series of fucked-up events and pain medications made for a heart that would simply stop working mid-victory lap after his last fight, which meant death or a new heart. He got the organ, but it’s been an uphill battle since then as he busts his ass to regain his independence and strength.
No one trained in the ring for months after, as though it was haunted with his almost-ghost or something. It took until he was able to come back and complete his victory lap that he effectively cleansed the space and allowed the rest of us to go back in.
If there can be such a thing as soulmates in friend form, then Bean and Mac are those people for me. Add in Evie, and the four of us make up an impenetrable team that can’t be broken, so I don’t walk away again just because they’re in here. They know everything about me. They know everything about Evie.
They both called me separately this morning to check in and make sure I was coping. And when word spread that Evie and I kissed, they asked how it was. We’re so far up in each other’s business, it should be annoying, but it’s really not.
I walk to the opposite side of the room that they lift free weights in, and slide along the mirrored wall until I sit on my ass. “Okay,” I murmur. “I’m sitting and ready to listen. What’s up?”
“I miss you so much it feels like I’ve been gone for a decade already.” Her breath shudders out and sounds the way I feel. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”
“How’s it supposed to be?”
I can almost hear her shrug, and then mattress springs squeaking as she sits. “Either I shouldn’t be here at all, or I shouldn’t be so attached to the asshole guy that was so mean to me for so long.”
I laugh and pick at the hem of my shorts. “Ya know, I’m not even sorry for being mean to you over the years. You’re my favorite person to annoy.”
“And you’re my favorite person to smack down in the octagon. It gives me a sick thrill to watch you cry when I kick your ass.”
“I’ve been going easy on you all these years,” I lie. “I know you’re just a whiny little girl who’ll cry if she loses, so I throw every single fight to make you happy.”
“Well, that fixed it,” she growls playfully. “I don’t miss you anymore. I’m gonna go now.”
“No, wait!” I laugh. Bean’s eyes come up and meet mine in the reflection of the mirror. My half-sister, though we never spent a single moment living in the same home or family. “Don’t go. I’ve been waiting all day for this call. What are you doing right now?”
“Mom and Biggie just dropped me off to settle in for a minute. They left to buy me snacks. The twelfth will be here before we know it, so…”
I chuckle. “Biggie’s got your back. So they drop you off and leave, and the very first thing you do when you’re alone is…?”
“Call you.” She gives a gentle sigh that I swear, I feel on my ear. “You’re my home, Ben. I know we’re not used to being weird and smooshy with each other, but being so far away makes it easy for me to tell my truths. You’re my home, and it feels like I�
��m standing out here in the middle of a seventeen-lane freeway. I don’t know which way to turn. I don’t know where I can rest. I don’t know how to get home, but nobody seems to care as they zoom around me. So once Mom and Biggie walked out, I called you, and guess what?”
I pause and will my heart to slow down. I want to go to her, sweep her up, and take her away from that dangerous freeway. “What?”
“As soon as you answered, I was taken off the road, and now it feels like we’re sitting together on the ratty couch again.” She sighs. “Turns out, home isn’t a place, but a person. Talking to you almost feels as good as being there, so…”
“So you can call me every single day,” I declare. “Every morning and every night. Call me at bedtime, and I’ll be with you until you sleep.”
“Really? You would… really?”
“Really.”
“But we never did that before. We never went to sleep with each other.”
I give a little ha laugh that doesn’t feel like happiness at all. “Distance is helping me see clearer too. I should have been talking to you while you sleep for years already. Hell, I should’ve kissed you long before you felt the need to jump into my lap and be the brave one. It takes forever for me to get to sleep at night, so maybe this is what I’m missing. What time will you go to sleep?”
She pauses, as though to think. “I dunno. Maybe nine? I don’t have to be up early, but you do, so we’ll call at nine and see how it goes.”
“Will your roommate make a stink about you chatting on the phone at bedtime?”
She makes the ‘eh’ noise that makes me smile. “She isn’t even here yet. The other bed is empty, and there are no bags. I got here first, plus, I’ll be quiet. Even if we have to video call and learn sign language. We’ll make it happen.”
“It’s actually kinda nauseating how much I miss you.” I press a hand to my stomach and frown. “Like, I had no clue I would have a physical reaction to this.”
“I know what you mean,” she murmurs. “I’ve felt sick to my stomach since we drove out this morning.”
I glance up when Mac grunts with exertion as he works on a clean and snatch. He lifts the bar above his head and turns a light shade of green while Bean coaches him along. He’s okay, and he has the all-clear to work out, but Bean pushes him to get better.
He wants to fight on the pro circuit, but he can’t make a case and ask for exception if he can’t train for more than three seconds without making himself sick. So they work on it most days after school, and on his off days, Bean is up in his space making him healthy shakes full of all the gross shit no one except a person’s vital organs likes.
“Oh, hey.” Evie speaks away from the phone, her voice followed by the squeaking of her bed. I have a single second to worry that she’s going to hang up on me, but instead, I hear the muffle of her hand and what, in my mind, I imagine is her pants as she drops her hand by her side. “I’m Evie.”
“Hi, Evie. I’m Clair. I guess that makes us roomies.”
“Guess so.” Her voice comes louder as she brings the phone back up. “I’m just on the phone, so… whatever. I’ll go into the hall and finish this. Catch ya later.”
“Bye.” The other girl – Clair – says. Her voice is softer than Evie’s. Shyer, in a way. Poor thing is being paired with the world’s most obnoxious woman. Add in nightly phone calls, and I know I have to call first thing in the mornings too, to make sure Clair didn’t smother my girl in her sleep.
My girl.
It’s funny how that thought fights the sickness in my stomach at her absence.
“Hey, I’m back. I don’t know if this is gonna work for me.”
“This what? School?”
“Yeah.” Her feet echo on the floor, then loud shouts follow.
I know I’m all the way over here, and I know I can’t see her world right now, but I know, I fucking know that those voices are male, and the guys they belong to slow when she comes closer.
It’s the hair. The body. The eyes. The smile.
“Stop smiling, Evelyn.”
“Huh?” She moves from the echo-y hall into something a little more open. Outside, perhaps. “What are you talking about?”
“Those boys that just ran past you? They noticed you.”
“How could you possibly know that?” she laughs. “Are you here?” I can easily see her in my mind, turning a full three-sixty and peering into the space around her. “Are you hiding?”
“No. But I know you. I know exactly what you look like. Your hair is like a beacon, your eyes almost glow, and your…uh…”
“My what?” her words are a smile. I see it in my head. “My what, Sasquatch?”
“What are you wearing right now?”
“Jeans and a gym tank.”
I nod, as though I just proved something to myself. “Your ass, Evelyn. You’ve been squatting since you were three. You’ve lived your entire life in a gym, for fuck’s sake. Those guys notice you, and then they happily watch you walk away. The only thing you can control there is your smile. Where’s your resting bitch face? You’re normally so good at that.”
Her laugh transforms to a grunt as though she’s found a shady patch of grass to drop onto. “You’re an asshole. I’ve never had resting bitch face.”
“Really? That’s not the word on the street around here. Everyone is terrified of you.”
“That has nothing to do with my face,” she argues, “and everything to do with the fact I don’t tolerate nonsense. You know this about me.”
She’s right. She’s almost always right… except when she’s catastrophically wrong.
“This is going to be the longest four years of my fucking life.”
And there it is. The thing that makes us both sick.
“I feel like I left something really important behind. I feel so incomplete now, and it’s making me sick.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “I know exactly what you mean.”
We talk for a few minutes more, but eventually, the call goes quiet. So quiet that I have to ask, “Are you sleeping outside?”
“No.” Her sigh blows straight into my ear. “I’m counting how many seconds I have to survive until it’s time for me to come home.”
“This codependence is probably super unhealthy. We forgot to learn how to live without the other person. Some would argue this is a really important step in our lives.”
“Yeah? Well those people can go fuck themselves. I never asked for their opinion, anyway.”
She makes me smile, when in reality, I want to crawl into bed and wake up four years from now.
“I’ll see you at Christmas, okay? We get to go on a date, and I get to kiss you again to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.”
She gives a tiny little giggle. “It wasn’t a fluke. But maybe this time, you can act more into it. Pushing me away was cramping my style.”
Smiling, I look back down to my shorts and finger the hem. “I was just making sure. I can be your best friend. And I can be your man. But I can’t have the second without the first, and I can’t risk the first because of the second.”
“That was a lot of numbers, Sasquatch. Are you trying to annoy me?”
“No…” I draw in enough breath to fill my lungs and expand my chest, then I let it out again and close my eyes. “I’m trying to say that I love you. And that I don’t wanna mess this up.”
“Three months. I’m gonna speak to you every single day from now until then, and when my plane lands, I expect you to be there to pick me up. I’ll talk to Biggie and make sure he knows the plan. He’ll understand.”
I’m not sure he will, but, “Okay.”
“Mom and Biggie are back,” she murmurs. Sitting up, she grunts like her body isn’t a finely tuned machine able to do impossible things. “I’d better go. They’re flying out tonight, so I wanna spend time with them before they go. It’s like…” She pauses to think. “It’s like I’m missing a massive chunk out of my chest. This giant part of that seems to be
in your hands, but there’s also the bit where my mom and dad and sisters sit. I’m gonna cry when they leave, and then I’ll kick my own ass for being a sissy.”
“Call me when you need to cry, okay? You’ll break my heart if I ever find out you’re sitting all alone and crying because you miss home.”
“I’ll call.” She sniffles with a short, sharp intake, as though emotion genuinely annoys her. “I actually enjoy our codependence, so I’ll call, I promise.”
Evie
Campus Life
I spend the afternoon with Mom, Biggie, and my sisters outside. We don’t go back to my room, because none of us like being cooped up inside. We especially hate being cooped up with someone we don’t even know, so I latch onto the man I considered my first-ever boyfriend – Biggie – hold his hand in mine, and we tour the campus grounds from one side to the other.
I try to pay attention to where we’re going. I really do, but my brain doesn’t work the way most other people’s do. I can’t do numbers, and I can’t do GPS. I take legions longer than anyone else to do simple math, and the moment I’m removed from the tiny town I grew up in, I lose all sense of direction. It takes literally minutes and three turns away from my dorm for me to be turned around to the point I have no clue which way my bed is.
It’s not that I’m an airhead. I’m not dumb. But my brain just doesn’t do numbers the way it should. It boggles my mind why my mom thought a business degree was something I should spend four years on, but Philosophy isn’t my thing either, and I’m not much of a creative. I was given pamphlets and choices, but when they remained on my kitchen table for months and I refused to make a decision, it was made for me.
I’m not becoming an accountant, nor am I doing anything else truly mind-bending for regular-brained folks, but Mom has made it so that when I come back, I can at least run the gym’s business side, should the zombie apocalypse come and kill off all the adults.