Brother/Sister (11 page)

I’d always trusted Will. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me . . . he wouldn’t hurt someone I loved. And . . . I guess I decided it must have been an accident. I couldn’t believe he would have done it on purpose.

In the last few seconds out in the ditch, Craig had been thrashing and wrestling on top of me. He’d been pinning me down. It had hurt. Maybe. I don’t know. I’d been scared. And then when Will had shown up . . . I mean, what would have happened if Will
hadn’t
shown up? What would Craig have done? He’d been trying to protect me.

I went back outside. Will had dug one of Keith’s old wetsuits out of the shed and laid it out like a body on the lawn—it was old, out of date, maybe from way back in the nineties. Keith had gone through at least two since then. He wouldn’t miss it. He probably didn’t even remember he had it.

I got the bike from the side of the road and I carted it with me as I followed Will along the path through the woods until we came to the fork where it veers off toward the cliffs.

And there he was. Lying there. Not moving. It . . . there was so much blood pooling around his head. He almost didn’t look like a person anymore. I could feel the vomit edging up the back of my throat. And . . . it was all just too much. I think I just shut down, closed my emotions off completely. It was the only way I could handle it right then.

We didn’t say a word. Neither of us. It would have been too much to talk. It would have made what we were doing real and I couldn’t bear to face the idea that this could be anything more than an eerie nightmare, a movie we’d fallen into. Something I wasn’t really taking part in.

I wasn’t really thinking. My brain was black, totally shut off. Will would give me a direction, and like a zombie, I’d do what he said. I held the wetsuit open. It was all I could bring myself to do, and I kept my eyes shut the whole time. I didn’t want to see it. I kept telling myself, this isn’t Craig. This is something else, something like Craig but not.

Will handled the body, stuffing and adjusting it inside the wetsuit until everything was situated right and he could zip it up. Then he started dragging it by the collar toward the cliffs. I trailed after him, loitering, trying not to keep up.

When I got to the clearing, Will was sitting on a boulder holding his head in his hands—not just any boulder, actually, but his special rock. The one he goes to when he needs to think about his life. Craig’s body was slumped on the ground below him.

“I need your help,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this part without you.”

So, I . . . yeah. I
did
help him. It’s not like I made a decision about it, I—I didn’t have a choice. That’s what it seemed like.

I took Craig’s feet and Will took his arms and we swung him back and forth, picking up velocity, and finally let him go flying into the bay.

Then I waited there, shivering, even though it wasn’t cold, while Will walked the bike down the path back to our yard and hid it in the shed out back.

And when he got back, we just stood there, for what seemed like forever, staring out across the water.

“Here’s what we’re going to say,” Will told me. “He called you last night during the party to say he was going out for a midnight surf. Okay? You were against it. But he didn’t care. He was drunk, slurring, all that. And if you wouldn’t come watch him, he didn’t care, he was going to go alone. We’ll put that idea into the air, just as a quiet rumor. Then if his body washes up, it’ll click for people. He wracked himself over the rocks out there. It’ll all make sense. People won’t think twice. Think you can do that?”

I think I maybe nodded. I was numb. I was only half hearing him.

“Okay,” he said. He squeezed my hand. Then he climbed down to check things out.

I waited for him up top. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. It was almost morning. Streaks of pink and yellow and purple were creeping across the sky. Like it had gotten its ass kicked during the night and now the wounds were beginning to show up. It looked like I felt. And I was pretty sure I’d be feeling that way nonstop for the rest of my life.

Sure, of course.
There were a few scares. People talk, all the time, making up whatever craziness they want, and it’s not like you can control their every thought. It’s just gossip though. It’s not real. It’s not
actionable
. But it can get in your head. Just knowing people
might
be whispering can make things pretty hairy if you don’t know how to keep your cool.

Like, for instance, I went golfing later that week. Tuesday. My usual. Keeping to the pattern. I went out alone and shot nine rounds and then stopped by the clubhouse for a lemonade before heading out to polish off the back nine. It was maybe twelve thirty, one. Right around then. And who was there, slurping on Diet Coke at the bar? Naomi.

I mean, it wasn’t that unusual to see Naomi there. She’s friendly with Sylvia, the hippie chick—well, ex-hippie chick, she’s like fifty now—who’s been working dayshifts there since God knows when. She babysits Sylvia’s kids sometimes, I think.

Anyway, she was slouched over the countertop of the bar, chatting in a lazy way with Sylvia. The TV above the bar was tuned to some sort of Lifetime channel movie, and they were glancing at that a little bit too.

When I walked in, they both suddenly went completely silent. Naomi perked up. She swiveled to face me, bracing her back on the bar with her elbows in a way that sort of pushed her breasts out. On purpose? It seemed like it to me.

“Hey, killer party, Will,” she said. She half smiled and took a long drag off her Diet Coke. “And your house—amazing. It’s like a giant playpen. Like a dance club or something. Asheley says your dad made it.”

It was awkward. Like she’d been rehearsing, thinking up small talk so she’d have something to say when I showed up. And I had no idea if this was because she was into me or because she was suspicious.

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” I said.

“He must have been amazingly talented,” she said.

What was I supposed to say to that? Tell her what an asshole he was? That would have seemed crazy.

She watched me really closely while I ordered my lemonade, freakily so, like she was trying to peer under my skin somehow, and I would have left right then, but you’re not allowed to take the glasses out of the clubhouse, so I took a stool and tried to drink up.

“Hey, where’d you disappear to, anyway? You said you’d be right back and then I never saw you again. It’s too bad. I was having fun talking to you.” She paused dramatically, leaned over to bump my arm with her elbow, arched her eyebrow. “I spent like an hour looking for you, but—”

“You went looking for me? Where?”

“Oh, just around the house. I saw your room.”

“You went in my room?”

“Sure. And I have to say, whoa, dude, what do you do in there? That place is so clean it’s like you don’t even live there. I thought guys’ rooms were supposed to be bomb sites.”

I had to keep reminding myself not to read anything into what she was saying. That if she’d seen anything, or was suspicious in any way, no way would she be acting so flirty.

“I mean, I didn’t stay long,” she said, “just sort of popped in and out.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, Will. It was a party. I wanted to find you. Ask Sylvia, I’m totally shy. And I just, you know, every guy I’ve dated in the past year or so is just such a party boy. You seem like somebody I might be able to actually have a conversation with. Like we used to, back in Mrs. Kelley’s class.”

I was embarrassed. Relieved, ’cause if she was saying something like this, she must have no clue about what happened with Craig, but also, I don’t know, freaked out because I didn’t want her having a crush on me. I didn’t want her rooting around in my life.

I glanced at Sylvia, who was pretending to be caught up in the Lifetime movie, and she gave me a shrug that seemed to be saying, hey, whatever life throws at you, gobble it up.

“We were, like, eleven when we were in Mrs. Kelley’s class,” I said.

Naomi must have got embarrassed then, too. She began futzing with her soda glass and glancing around for something to take her focus off of me. The next thing I knew, she was changing the subject. “Hey, so, Craig and Asheley,” she said. “What’s up with that?”

The heat rushed through me like I’d suddenly been thrown into a volcano. This had all been a setup. She knows. She knows. That’s what went flashing through my mind. She was buttering me up and now she’s pulling out the knives.

“With what,” I sputtered. “What do you mean?”

“Uh, Claudia Jackson? He was playing grabass with her last week at Becca’s? Don’t tell me you didn’t know. Everybody knows. They were right there in the pool, in front of everyone. Think Ash will forgive him?”

Bam! I was pulled out of the volcano and shoved headfirst into a tub of ice cubes. I was suddenly freezing, breaking apart. “Oh, that,” I said. “Yeah, I don’t know. You think she should?”

“I would. He’s completely in love with her. From what I hear, he’s a total wreck about the whole thing. I mean, like not bathing, not leaving the house torn up over her.”

And then the weirdest thing occurred. I was suddenly fine. Suave. Savvy. I was suddenly someone who wasn’t me at all. I was a new Will, a better Will, in absolute control of my situation. I saw my opening and I leapt right in. “Yeah, I heard that too,” I said. “Word on the street is he’s so upset that he’s fled town.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what I heard. I mean, not from Asheley, she won’t even let me mention his name, but from, I don’t know, around. He’s run off to Palm Springs to hang with his grandparents, or something like that.”

“Jesus. That’s too bad.”

“Right?” I touched her arm, lightly flicked my finger back and forth over her skin. I realized that this meant I was invading her space, but I didn’t care. It was mine to invade. It seemed, at that moment, that I could do whatever I wanted and no one would stop me. If I wanted to kiss her, I could have kissed her. “But hey,” I said. “At least I’m still here.”

Glancing at my hand on her elbow, she said, “Very true. And I’m still here.”

“You are.”

I flicked my finger across her skin again, this time with more urgent intent, and she picked my hand up and set it down on the bar, putting a few inches of space between us. But she was grinning. She wasn’t rejecting me.

“Maybe we could hang out sometime,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Like, sometime soon?”

“You know my mom’s out of town until, like, August,” I said.

There was some sort of ache pulsing inside her so strongly that I could see it surging toward me. So, that’s what desire looks like, I thought. I’d never known it was so easy to see. But I didn’t make a move. I’d done enough damage. What I did instead was down my lemonade, touch her arm again, briefly, and leave her hanging.

It wasn’t until I was outside dragging my golf bag toward the tenth tee that I realized I’d given her an open invitation to stop by the house anytime she felt like it.

Jesus, I thought. That’s gonna be trouble.

I was spooked.
No matter how hard I tried to not think about it, those hours out in the dark with Will kept coming back, repeating themselves in slow motion in my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I’d get a flash of Craig’s body crumpled on the ground, stuffed like trash into that wetsuit. And I’d ache. There’d be a tingling at the edges of my heart, urging me to take action, to stop Craig from dying, but I couldn’t—how could I? He was already dead.

Every second of every day seemed like it would be the one when we would get caught.

What I did is I sort of hid out. I stopped going to softball practice. I didn’t return texts from Naomi or anybody else. I barely made it to work most days, sort of racing there just under the gun, punching in, and then zombieing out for eight hours until it was time to leave.

I took these long meandering walks, just going, just moving through the fresh air. They helped a little. Three or four hours of walking like that and I almost felt close to human sometimes.

On one of these walks, I ran into a bunch of my softball girls. Or not exactly ran into. They were sunbathing on the rocky shoreline, those long slabs of black rock that emerge during low tide down around the bend from the state park and I saw them from a ways off as I was coming up from the beach. Ruth, Crystal, Becca and Naomi. They were laying out in their bikinis, watching the sailboats and jet skis skim around in the bay, and they had all sorts of gear with them—sunscreen, plush beach blankets, a cooler full of Diet Coke, a mondo bag of Pirate’s Booty, magazines, a ball and a couple of mitts.

For a while there, I didn’t get too close. I was nervous about seeing them—and I was jealous. They looked so relaxed, so summery. Perfect, really. Like they
were
summer—bright and warm and lazy and without a single worry in the world. All the things I’d never be able to be again, if I’d ever been able to be like that.

But I couldn’t stop myself from creeping closer. I still really wanted to be accepted as part of the group. I hugged the edge of the tree, not really hiding, but not going out of my way to be obvious. If one of them saw me, I’d just wave, I figured, and they’d think I just arrived. I mean, I was already wearing my baby-blue one-piece and a tie-dye wrap. If you didn’t notice the cloud over my head, you’d think I fit right in. Nobody’d know I’d been spying on them.

They were talking about boys. Big surprise. Just gossiping, who’s into who, who’s not so into who, that sort of thing. Turned out Ruth had hooked up with Lewis from the golf team at my party. That was news to me. She’d talked to him twice since then, and he’d been saying all the right things, how he’d been wanting to get close to her for months, how cool it would be if she wanted to stop over one afternoon while his parents were at work and hang out by his pool, all that, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to get too close. She didn’t trust him. “Those guys on the golf team, they’re all sort of pricks,” she said.