Across Carina (2 page)

I just stared.

The fire truck pulled up to the house, and uniformed clones jumped out of it, bearing flashlights and axes. They began to hook up their hoses, pushing back the crowd. People peered over their mugs, gawking and whispering. Through my wet eyes it was a pandemonium of firemen and rubberneckers in a burning sea.

Justin grabbed the first fireman that he saw.

“This is my house, and there’s still someone inside!” he yelled. “I think he’s downstairs!”

The fireman asked him some questions and then called for backup so that he could search the house.

“We’ll do our best,” he told Justin, and he and another fireman adjusted their gear and masks and went into the house.

Justin knelt in front of me and babbled through tears. “I’m so sorry, Jade. I couldn’t find him. I looked everywhere that I could, but I barely made it out myself. I think the fire started in the kitchen—” He paused to inhale. “That’s where I first saw it. Unless Garrett was hiding in the pantry or something, he’s going to be okay. They’re going to find him any minute now. They have all the right equipment that we don’t, and if we just . . .”

He trailed off at the sight of his house. The sounds of glass breaking echoed outside as firemen fought for the lives of the house and Garrett. But Garrett wasn’t alive. Otherwise he would have already made it outside, and Justin and I both knew it.

The pandemonium bled into mere fire, water, and night; I saw nothing more. I waited barefoot in the street as the minutes passed, and the house burned and burned and burned. I cried as Justin called his parents on someone’s phone. I heard them scream that they were on their way home. So lucky for them that they had their only son to come home to.

Justin tried to hand me the phone so that I could call my parents, but I wouldn’t take it. My arms were half folded, with one hand in a fist at my mouth, and I wasn’t breathing. My eyes were glued to the front door of the house, and I didn’t want to look away, not even for a second.

I watched.

But the harder I watched, the more I blinked, my eyes trying to wipe away the scene.

In the background, I heard the police and an ambulance arrive, and then someone talking to one of the EMTs.

“It’s the poor girl in the red shirt. I think she lives here. Someone said she jumped out of the window. Do you see her? Up there by the boy.”

Then I heard Justin intercept the EMT.

“She’s fine. This is my house. Please let her be. Her brother’s inside.”

“Sir, if either of you were inside the house, we need to check—”

“
Please
, just give us a few minutes until he comes out.”

“Sir, are you over eighteen? If you’re refusing medical attention, you have to sign . . .”

I didn’t lift my gaze from the front door, and no one bothered me. A few minutes later Justin made a second call, and as he talked, his arms found their way around me. But I couldn’t get warm. Even standing in front of his burning house, I was cold, frozen.

I waited. For a cry of relief from inside the house or a glimpse of Garrett’s coffee-colored hair. I waited.

My parents showed up just before the roof caved in. The two firemen ran out of the house, and Garrett was not with them. My parents looked at me and knew.

There were no words. Only their sagging faces and melted tongues, from the heat of the moment. And they wept.

I don’t know if I wept with them, and I didn’t ask where my youngest brother, Tyson, was. I had left myself, and them, and had drifted to my room, just up the hill, on the intersecting street. I watched them from above, through a second-story window; I watched the nightmare that wouldn’t die.

It took almost two hours to put out the fire. The house was lost, as was my brother—my twin, my other half.

His body was later found in the pantry, the one room that Justin had said would be unsafe. He was buried under a pile of #10 cans and a broken shelf, with a gash across the side of his head.

Many of the pantry’s smaller items had been burned into ash, but the fire marshal did find an open matchbox on the floor near Garrett, and a shriveled match right beside him. When he learned of our game of hide-and-seek, he surmised that Garrett had been bored waiting to be found and had lit a match so that he could see. Perhaps he had dropped the match or accidentally held it on something flammable. Either would have been easy to do in a dark pantry, the fire marshal said.

When I asked why Garrett hadn’t screamed for help, the fire marshal pointed at the gash in my brother’s head.

“He must have gotten scared and run right into the shelf—blacked out.”

I looked away. All I could hear was the tumble downstairs that Justin and I had wondered about. Except this time it was louder. So much louder.

The fire marshal had warned me not to come into the pantry, not to come and see my brother that way.

I still had a thousand questions for Garrett. At seventeen, there were still so many things we had to learn about each other, and now we never would.

Four months later I had worked a summer at a grocery store for minimum wage, turned eighteen, and become an insomniac. That was really all I could say for myself. Weary days spun into weary nights spent reading and writing in Garrett’s room. It was the only place I felt somewhat whole.

On the first day of my senior year, I saw Justin. He breezed by me as I was organizing my locker. Really I was just stalling second period. I knew Justin saw me, but he kept his head down and moved along. I didn’t blame him. I’d stopped answering his phone calls a couple of weeks after the fire. I couldn’t listen to any more of his apologies or take his pitying hugs. I wanted to still love him—my second best friend, my adolescent crush—but I knew I could not. He and I had been branded by that night. Instead of caring where Garrett was, we had occupied our thoughts with the prospect of a second kiss. And after such a damning first.

So, I’d ignored Justin and pushed through the monotonous summer toward school. I wanted to get it all over with.

I had already taken most of my school’s required classes, which opened up my semester to photography, badminton, creative writing, and psychology. Unfortunately, having such easy classes gave me little motivation to attend them. I decided to apply early to as many universities as possible, so that once I was accepted somewhere—anywhere—I could skip the rest of my senior year. No one would ask for my high school diploma if I had a college diploma to show them.

At lunchtime I remembered that I didn’t have anyone to sit with in the cafeteria. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might need friends, not that I really felt like schmoozing. I browsed my options, finally sitting at the nearest empty table. If I was going to sit alone, I wasn’t going to sit at a table that was half occupied. I refused to look like some senior trying to relive her lost glory days by crashing the table of popular underclassmen.

I opened my lunch sack and pulled out a container of cold mashed potatoes, not sure what I had been thinking when I’d packed them. There was no microwave in the cafeteria—not for my use. I rummaged through my backpack for quarters, but as a familiar floating sensation cloaked me, I forgot about lunch. Numbness trickled down my body.

A few minutes later, my old friends Kiera Lockhorn and Lily Fabin set down their lunch trays across from me. I had met them in chemistry two years before when they’d teamed up with Justin and me for a lab project. Kiera was irritable and concerned with how people viewed her, but she had a propensity for fun that attracted everyone to her. Lily was loud and frank. She read my emotions flawlessly, which terrified me as much as her words, always seemingly stolen and rehearsed.

Official as ever, Lily pushed back her curls and clasped her hands together.

“Jade,” she said, “we hope you will rejoin our group this year. The summer was not nearly as enjoyable without you.”

I raised an eyebrow. I should have expected this conversation to take place no later than the first day of school.

Kiera nudged Lily. “Don’t pressure her,” she whispered, but I still heard.

“I will not pretend that this is anything but ludicrous,” Lily said. “Jade, we are sorry that you lost Garrett. You need our support now more than ever, but you have rebuffed all of our attempts to provide that for you. Please, mingle with us this weekend. We miss you.”

Someone spent another summer with her nose in classic literature,
I thought.

I sighed, my tongue hot, but I didn’t reply just yet. I had noticed Justin walking toward us. Well, he was attempting to walk toward us, in slow, tentative half steps, like an erratic walk down the aisle. Maybe one part of him wanted to turn and run, but the other part didn’t, because he kept sneaking glances at me. I watched him steadily, in silence.

When he finally made it to the table, he looked at the girls.

“We’re sitting here?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Lily gestured for him to take a seat.

He hesitated, but then pulled out the chair beside Kiera, almost dropping his lunch tray in the process.

I felt uncomfortable for him, but not as uncomfortable as I felt for myself. With the three of them facing me, I suspected imminent interrogation.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoping to stave their questions. “I don’t hang out with you guys because I know I won’t be any fun.”

I tried to stir my mashed potatoes even though they were congealed and I had no intention of eating them. I looked anywhere but at Lily.

I remembered this one time when we had all been loitering at the school, late on a Saturday night. Kiera had suggested that we break into the gym and play P-I-G. As I’d worked on the double doors with my bobby pin, Lily had recited the steps for picking a lock, probably having memorized them from some website. Kiera had paced between the gym and the library, biting her fingernails with a smile because she loved the thrill but wanted us to think that she was second-guessing her idea. Garrett and Justin had wrestled on the grass, looking up between pinning holds to see which girls were watching them.

If only my memory had come with instructions. Even if I had wanted to have fun, I no longer knew how.

Justin was silent, hunched in his seat, his cheeks aflame. I suddenly felt terrible.

“What’s new, Justin?”

He dropped his spoon, and soup splashed on the table. He looked up at me and froze.

“Justin?” I repeated.

I dug in my lunch sack for my granola bar. It was gone. I tried to remember if I had eaten it on the way to school.

What a lunch.

“I’m trying out for soccer this year,” Justin finally said, and the girls fell silent. “That’s about it. Nothing else is new.”

Garrett and Justin had often played soccer together in Justin’s backyard. They’d been planning to try out for the team together.

Justin went on. “My counselor says I should move forward with my plans and that soccer will be a good way for me to increase my energy and improve my mood. I hope that’s okay.”

He pushed back his chair and left.

Lily sighed heavily. “This is going to be quite the year.”

“Lily!” Kiera snapped.

“I don’t care if Justin wants to play soccer,” I said, “but I’ll leave you two alone.”

With that, I scowled at Justin’s back and stalked off in the opposite direction.

It
would
be quite the year, but I wasn’t certain if it would be quite good or quite bad.

Tangled in my thoughts, I collided with another student. His cell phone smashed on the ground. I tried to help him reassemble the pieces, but he shooed me away.

Bad—it was going to be quite bad.

My drive home was accompanied by a storm that whipped endless streaks of lightning across the sky. Everything was gray, and I couldn’t tell the sidewalks from the trees. I was trapped in a storm globe. A storm globe in Georgia, where even drizzling rain was treated like Armageddon.

I got stuck behind a car that was crawling, and my five-mile commute took me an hour. Normally I would have honked my horn or yelled out the window, but since I couldn’t see past the brake lights of the car in front of me, I clung to them like a magnet. I worried they would turn somewhere I didn’t need to turn and leave me lost in the void. Eventually I forced myself to roll down my window so that I could see if I was even on the right street. I was instantly drenched.

En route I saw four cars on the side of the road and one accident—a burgundy pickup truck T-boned by a minivan. Police cars flashed red and blue, and an ambulance pulled up just as I passed the scene. I thought I recognized a girl from my photography class leaning against the truck. As I tried to watch her in my rearview mirror, the rain thinned, and I saw a tall shadow beside her. I almost hydroplaned off the road. When I regained control of my car, the shadow was gone. I felt light.

By the time I made it home, I was drowning and had a headache from the traffic and my windshield wipers. I abandoned my car in the driveway, not remembering if I’d pulled up the emergency brake or not. I didn’t care.

I squeaked into the foyer of my house. My mother took one look at me and threw me a towel from the hall bathroom.

“I’m working on dinner,” she said, walking into the kitchen. “It’ll be ready in half an hour. Try to dry off. Then you can tell me about your first day.”

I wrung the water out of my hair. I couldn’t stand the way that it clung to my neck. Then I took off my shoes and plaid button-down and dumped them with my backpack at the bottom of the stairs. Even my tank top was soaked through. I knew I’d have to change before dinner; I just didn’t feel like moving at the moment.

I thought of what I had seen at the accident. There had also been a shadow in Justin’s room the night of the fire. I was certain of it.

I collapsed on the bottom step and peeled off my socks, wiggling my toes dry. I could hear my dad laughing at something on the upstairs computer.

Tyson emerged from the dining room. He was prattling to himself as he always did. He walked up to me, looking heavenward, and frowned.