Break (4 page)

“She’d take care of him,” Charlotte says.

“I know she would. I’m just not sure if what he really needs is another set of hands trying to take care of him. He gets annoyed enough with me sometimes, and he needs me.”

“She likes him, Jonah.”

“All right. I’ll talk to him.”

“So,” she says. “My choral director gave me this huge solo at our next concert.” We’re getting close to work, now. Damn.

I smile at her. “That’s awesome.”

“Right, right, yeah. But it’s the
alto
solo. He gave me the alto solo. And I’m a soprano.”

“Oh.” Yeah, I’m not following this at all, but
God
I could watch Charlotte complain for hours.

She says, “So now I’m at this weird impasse. ‘Cause if I remind him,
Hey, I’ve been a soprano since I was in diapers,
I lose the solo, right?”

“Oh, no, don’t do that.” Possibly the only thing better than listening to Charlotte complain is listening to her sing. And also listening to those little moaning noises she makes when we kiss, like she’s eating chocolate cake. . . .

Oh, she’s still talking. “. . . keep it, I’ll probably sound awful trying to sing in a vocal range I usually don’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”

“I really don’t think you sounding awful is within the realm of possibility.”

“These are ill-timed compliments, Jonah.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes! You are supposed to be helping me plot my next move, not making me blush. Tsk tsk.”

“You’re not blushing.”

She is smiling, though. “Clearly I stay on task better than you do.” She pulls up to the curb. “What time are you off? We can continue our brainstorming. I’m thinking poisoning my choir director might be the best solution?”

“Don’t get off until seven, sadly.”

“Do you need a ride home?”

“Nah. Jesse’ll pick me up.”

She tilts her head to the side. “So can you kiss me with your jaw like that?”

I do the best I can.

The door jangles as I nudge it open. Max and Antonia are behind the counters, feet on the sensors that make sure no one runs away with the DVDs. Antonia tosses gummi worms into the air and catches them in her mouth three at a time. No one eats gummi worms like Antonia.

“Hey.”

They turn around and freeze. “Holy mackerel,” Max says. “What tree did you fall out of?”

Antonia coughs and scoots her ass off her knee-length blond hair. “Ugly tree, clearly.”

I sign in. “Thanks, Toni.”

“Shit, give him some java, Max. He’s going to need it. Seriously, what happened?”

I catch the bag of coffee beans Max hurls over. “Skateboard accident. I’m fine.”

“What’d you break?”

“Two ribs, wrist, jaw.” I take out two coffee beans and swallow them like pills. The bitterness burns the hardware in my mouth.

Antonia decapitates a gummi worm. “You break more bones than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s not a compliment, Jonah.”

That’s what you think.

“How long are you in the cast?” Max asks.

“Probably, like, three weeks. So, enough. What have you guys been up to?”

Max clears his throat and Antonia straightens her little string vest.

“Oh.” I clear my throat. “Never mind.”

No one comes to the store this early, so Antonia and Max use it as a personal kissing booth when I’m not around. It would be irritating if they both weren’t so damn cute. They’re like Martians.

“Come on.” Antonia dives into the candy display, her pale lower legs flailing about like fish from her denim skirt. “I was just about to dig into the malted milk balls.”

I step behind the counter and plop down beside the cash register. “So you guys remember Charlotte?”

Max and Antonia go to this hippie private school down the street. All they know of real life is what I tell them. They’re my science experiment.

Antonia’s eyes light up. “She’s the one with the puff-paint flowers on her license plate,” she chimes.

“Right.”

Max gestures big boobs with his hands. Antonia throws a malt ball at him.

“So all’s not right in wonderland?” Antonia licks chocolate off her fingers.

“It’s not that. She’s got this little sister she wants to set up with Jesse.”

Max looks up from the late returns. “Isn’t Jesse, like, dying of AIDS?”

Antonia’s mouth drops open. “Max!”

“He does not have AIDS,” I say.

Max hands
Fight Club
to Antonia. “Well, he’s dying of something, isn’t he?”

“Food allergies,” I say. “And he’s not dying. But if he dates Charlotte’s little sister, isn’t that practically incest?”

Antonia says, “I thought you and Charlotte
weren’t dating
.”

“We’re not. Hush.”

“Then it’s not incest.” Max stamps two movies. “It’s merely two brothers enjoying the company of two girls who happen to be related.”

“Yeah, but . . . enjoying to what extent?”

“Ew.” Antonia picks up a few movies and shoves them under her arm. “Come on. I’m bored of dissecting Jonah’s love life.”

“Not-love life,” I correct.

She rolls her head around. “Whatever. I’m going to the back. Let’s go have a screening.” She grabs Max’s hand. “Coming, Jonah?”

I shake my head. “I’ll watch the register.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah. Who knows. Someone might come.”

I spend almost an hour at the register trying not to think about Jesse and Mini-Charlotte and trying not to listen to Antonia and Max make slurping noises. Eventually, customers start to trickle in, and I go through the motions.

See, the whole job is fucking worthless. I come here for a few hours after school a few days a week and slog through movie advice and cash-register Olympics like I actually know anything. At least it gets me away from my family for a little while. But I wish I were with Charlotte.

At about four thirty, I point a girl toward the docu-mentaries and rescue my ringing phone from my pocket.

“Can you come home?” Jesse says. “There’s milk everywhere and I’m throwing up.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I’ve thrown up four times in the past, like, twenty minutes. Can you get home?”

“Where the hell is Mom?”

“Took Will to the doctor. Jonah, seriously. I’m sitting outside so I don’t have to smell it, and it’s fucking cold.”

“Did you take Benadryl?”

“Yeah. It stayed down for a good thirty seconds.”

This is as close as Jesse ever gets to angry, and I think he’s pissed-off more seriously than he’s sick. That’s easier to deal with, at least, though I still feel bad for the kid. “I can get out of the shift if you need me,” I say, “but do you think you could pick me up? I don’t have a ride out of here.”

He makes exasperated-disbelieving noises.

I say, “It’d probably do you good to get away from the house.”

He coughs and says, “I’m going to throw up again.”

“All right,” I relent worthlessly, as his footsteps rush away from the phone. “I’ll get home.”

I finish checking out the last customer and venture into the back for Max and Antonia. They scoot away from each other as soon as I open the door, like they’re afraid their cuddling will bruise my eyes.

I say, “So you know my brother who’s dying of AIDS?”

Max cleans his glasses on his shirt. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, well, he’s having, like, an AIDS attack. So I need to get home.”

He looks at me critically. “Everything okay?”

“He’ll be fine. But he’s home alone and I need to get to him. So—”

He waves his hand. “Take the shift off. Antonia and I can handle.”

“That’s not it. I sort of need a ride.”

He chews his cheek, studying me, then turns to Antonia and speaks to her in some sort of romantic hippie language. She nods, pulls her hair over her shoulder, and traipses out to the front desk.

“I’ll drive you home,” Max says, shoving his arms through the sleeves of his denim jacket.

“Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

He shrugs.

Max’s van has a bench seat at the front and endless empty space in the back. I climb in and sling my backpack onto the dirty floor. He starts the engine. His feet barely reach the pedals. I push back against the headrest like I’m on one of those carnival rides and the floor’s about to drop out. I don’t know how to tell him to drive faster without sounding like a nervous wreck. So I just wait until he gets to my house, then smile and thank him and shake his hand.

“Jesse?”

He’s throwing up. I hear it through the bathroom door. My stomach squeezes, but it’s hard to be too squeamish when you’ve got a brother who throws up as much as he does.

I lean against the door. “How you feeling?”

He runs the tap, probably to drown out the noise.

I say, “How is there anything left in your stomach?”

He shouts, “Guess I’ve been saving up!”

“I’m going to clean.”

He retches.

“You okay? You didn’t touch any of it, did you?”

“If I touched it, I wouldn’t be breathing.”

Good point. The boy’s unbelievably allergic to milk. It’s dramatic even for him.

The kitchen is a wreck. The refrigerator’s propped open—great—and one of Will’s overturned bottles drips onto the floor. There’s a saucepan full of milk on a burner that’s still hot.

“Solved the mystery,” I yell to Jesse. “There’s milk on the stove in here.”

He steps out of the bathroom, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Great.” He’s covered in pink nickel-size spots—calamine lotion over the hives.

I make my responsible older-brother face. “Go into the living room and lie down, all right? I’ll clean up in here.”

I take the pan off the stove and rinse it in the sink, watching all the milk run down the drain. I put the bottle in the refrigerator, close the refrigerator, and give the countertops and floor a good scrub. Wash my hands. Open all the windows. The October wind stings the back of my throat.

“It’s going to get cold in here,” I tell him as I flop down on the couch beside him. “I’m airing the kitchen out.”

He pulls the quilt off the back of the couch and drapes it over us.

“It’s kind of a problem that you get this sick just from the smell,” I say.

“I know.”

“And I know food challenges suck, but you’ve got to get more tolerant than this.”

Jess used to do challenges where he had to eat tiny bits—like,
really
tiny bits—of something he’s allergic to every day. The point is that your body deals. Starts to accept it. And then you eat a little more, then a little more. Just building up. Immune system overcomes the challenge.

But Jess always ended up getting sick as hell whenever he was in a challenge, and a few years ago he said he wouldn’t do them anymore.

He rolls his eyes and lies down, his head next to my knee.

I shove my hand in his hair and turn on the TV to some game show. “Let me know if you get bad, okay?”

He says, “Okay.”

The show’s so boring that Jess falls asleep within minutes. And I’m only half-conscious when Mom turns the key in the lock and slogs in, screaming baby on her hip.

Jess groans and throws a pillow over his head.

“Want to take the noise somewhere else?” I say. “He’s in the middle of a reaction.”

“Gosh, really?” She hovers over him, mothering to the best of her ability when she’s not allowed to touch him. “What happened?”

I hold the pillow over his head so he’ll stay asleep. “You left milk on the stove, is what happened.”

She touches her forehead with her non–baby-wielding hand. “I didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did. Which is irresponsible enough considering the whole fire hazard thing, but you might as well have left frickin’ cyanide boiling—”

“Jonah, I don’t need a lecture.”

I shut up.

She says, “Are you going to be okay, Jesse?”

He nods and the pillow shakes. “What’d the doctor say?”

She walks back and forth with Will, bouncing him with her shoulder. “He doesn’t know. He said it could still be colic, that sometimes it’ll last this long.” She pauses, hand in her hair. “I’ll bring Will upstairs and give him a bath, okay?” She directs this to me.

I say, “Okay.”

Jesse falls back asleep, snoring through his congestion, and I’m left with this awful feeling in my mouth, like I’ve been swallowing carpet. I’d get up and drink something, or walk around, if it weren’t so damn cold and I didn’t have a responsibility to watch Jesse. I need to just shut up and be here for him.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to distract myself.

So. Distraction.
How about another bone, Jonah?

My mouth twitches up.

How about tomorrow?

WHEN I WAKE UP AT 5:57 THE NEXT MORNING AND
hear the squeak-squeak of Jesse on the rowing machine, I trudge downstairs and find Mom eating toast at the kitchen table, baby tucked under her arm.

“Hi.”

Her mouth’s full, so she waves. I rescue Will. He’s turning purple from crying so hard.

When you hold him close enough to your ear, it’s impossible to think.

Sort of nice.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Mom says.

What is it about that sentence that makes your stomach curl up?

She pats the table across from her. Will’s getting as close as he ever is to quiet, just doing his pissed-off whine. I sit down and try to concentrate on Jesse’s rowing and Will’s whimpers instead of her.

“I haven’t really gotten to speak with you since the accident,” she says. “How’re the breaks feeling?”

“Okay. I took some aspirin.”

“Good.” She rakes her hair back in one hand. “Been praying?”

Shit. “Yeah, Mom.”

She sighs and takes my hand. “We feel guilty about this, Jonah.”

I wonder if it’s only religious parents who always tell you how they feel. And I wonder if it’s only terrible children who don’t want to hear it.

“Why?” I say. “I’m just clumsy.”

She lays her fingertips over her mouth. “If there’s something going on—”

“Nothing’s going on.”

Will’s loud again, and Mom has to shout. “You know your dad and I love you very—”

“I know, Mom. Thanks.” I’m at a loss for what this had to do with anything. I stand up and cradle Will over to the sink, start sponging the counter.