Brother/Sister (14 page)

My heart must have lurched. I must have tensed up or something.

Naomi shifted so she could face me. “What’s that about?” she said. She rubbed my chest with the tips of her fingers.

Ash was sitting on the floor, watching us, like monitoring to make sure I was having fun. “Yeah, Will,” she said. “Relax, have some fun. She’s not going to bite you.” She’s innocent—she’s always been innocent—and I could tell, her hopes for me made it hard for her to fathom the possibility that I might not be interested in Naomi. I mean, from her point of view, the fact that someone, anyone, wanted to be my girlfriend was thrilling. Especially if it was someone she liked as much as she liked Naomi.

So I tried. I wanted to please her. If it would make her happy to see me in a kind of compromising position with her friend, I figured, I’d do my best to oblige.

I bounced Naomi on my knee, wrapped both arms around her waist and tucked her in tight to me. “What’s what about?” I asked her.

“Why are you so concerned with Asheley?”

We were whispering, I doubt Ash could hear us.

“I don’t know. I’m not,” I said.

I kissed her, then, and she whispered to me, “You better not be. That would just be sick.”

“Well, you’re what I’m concerned with right now.” I played my fingers across the small of her back.

“Good,” she said. “That’s how I want it to be.”

We started to make out.

And from the corner of my eye, I saw Ash stand up and stretch. She yawned. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “You kids have fun.”

And she padded off toward the stairs, and I just, I panicked. I reached out toward her. “Ash, don’t, no! There’s room for you, too!” I said. I leapt up, not even thinking that Naomi might . . . It’s not like I was trying to hurt her. She lost her balance. She went tumbling off my lap and her head ricocheted off the coffee table.

Naomi laid there, stunned, for a few seconds. And she was bleeding really badly from the cut on her forehead. Then she sat up and held her hands up to her head, like rocking herself, mumbling, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

Asheley ran to her to see if she was okay, but Naomi wouldn’t let her near her. She shook her off, shrieking. “You guys are sick,” she said. “Sick! Sick! Sick!”

She pulled herself to her feet and stumbled to the sliding glass door.

And I chased after her. I had to. I needed to talk to her, at least, to convince her she was wrong about what she thought.

She was in good shape, though. Quick. All that softball training. She got out the door and was down across the yard before I’d even made it to the porch. For a second there I couldn’t find her. She’d disappeared.

I waited.

I listened.

A rustling behind the shed, and then she darted out into the light briefly, saw me, spun, and headed toward the woods.

“Naomi, wait,” I shouted.

She paused and glanced back at me.

“What? What do you want with me?” she said. “Sorry I’m not Asheley, you pervert.”

She took two steps toward me, then she glanced to the side, like into the open door of the shed. She’d done a full circle around it. She saw something there. Her back went up like a cat’s.

Then she shrieked and raced down the trail into the woods.

What had made her scream like that? What had she seen? Then I remembered. Craig’s bike. I’d stashed it there. It was up near the door. Its handlebars and that front wheel with the shielding inside it—that green-slime smiley face sticking out its tongue that everyone recognized as his—were . . . she must have seen it.

And so I chased after her. I’d been barefoot, and I kept stepping on twigs and stones and shit like that, losing my footing. Thinking the whole time, my God, I better catch her, I can’t let her go telling everyone in town about what happened tonight, all the crazy things she thought were going on with Asheley and me—wrong, they were wrong, but still, who’d care about that?—about Craig’s bike and all the questions that would bring up. I had to protect us. I had to protect Asheley. So I didn’t care about how my feet got torn up. I picked up my speed, pushed as hard as I could.

She was getting away, darting through the trees, staying off the path. She took a leap over a downed tree trunk, and she must have caught her toe, because she went sailing head first toward the ground. She was stunned just long enough for me to catch up to her.

And then—well, you know what happened then.

Yeah. That’s her in the second photo.

No! Don’t show it to me again! I’m just telling you, that’s her.

By the time I made it back to the house, I was exhausted. I didn’t even think about cleaning up. Ash was still sitting on the living room floor, like frozen there. She hadn’t moved a muscle all the time I’d been gone. She was staring at the smudge of blood Naomi had left on the hardwood floor, barely blinking.

When she heard the door slide shut, she looked up at me and just seemed so shattered, so vacant and numb.

I tried to comfort her, but when I got near her, she threw her arms up and flailed and said, “No. No no no. I need . . . to think. I need . . .”

“When you’re ready,” I said, backing up, “I’ll be here.”

I walked around behind her and sat on the floor—not too close—and I laid my palm steady on the small of her back, just so she knew I was there, so she’d understand I cared.

After that, I felt like . . .
I mean, I hadn’t
done
anything. I didn’t
kill
anybody. But . . . that look Naomi had on her face before she ran out of the house that night. If she’d thought I was guilty—and she was a friend of mine—and then immediately after her looking at me like that, Will had gone and—I mean, wouldn’t everybody else think I was guilty too? And was I guilty? And if so, what would happen to me if I got caught?

So, I couldn’t just freak out and be sad and all that, I had to worry about being caught. I had to, like, pretend I was somebody else, almost. But I
was
sad. And scared. And totally freaked out. So . . .

Like, for instance, maybe two days after that night with Naomi, I was at work and Luke Pfifer, Toby Smith, and Ricky Thomson strolled in. They were snickering and whispering to themselves—that’s nothing new; they’re always snickering about something. Toby had a pair of World War II aviator’s goggles perched on his forehead. He kept playing around with them, taking them off, putting them back on, and I figured the three of them must have been all hopped up about that. They like that sort of thing. The more obscure something is, the more likely they are to proclaim it to be the coolest thing in the world—especially if it’s got some sort of war-related profile. In our town, with its total rich lefty vibe, loving the military and its noble history is just about as far out of the box as you can get.

When their turn came to order, though, as I scooped out their ice cream and put the sprinkles and marshmallow gunk and what all, they got serious all of a sudden. They stood up straighter. They scrutinized me like I was one of their science projects.

“Rough day, huh?” Luke said to me.

“Not particularly.” I tried to pull a smile, something that had been almost impossible for me to do since the night Naomi had come to the house.

He made a face, a mixture of pity and self-satisfaction. “You’re still in denial.”

Toby jumped in. “That’s the first stage of grief, babe. You’ve got a long way to go.”

“I have no idea what you dudes are talking about,” I said, shoving their cups of ice cream across the counter.

“You’re kidding, right?” said Luke.

“I’m totally not kidding.”

“Naomi?”

The blood started pulsing like hammers behind my ears. Just hearing her name spoken made me lose all my strength. But I kept it together enough to stay on my feet.

“Whoa,” said Ricky. “She really doesn’t know.”

“You should sit down for this,” said Luke.

He was right. I pulled the swivel stool, painted with black-and-white cow markings, up underneath me and leaned back on it. My mind was running through the possibilities, all the variations they might be about to spew, and what each might mean for me and my brother. “Get it over with, already, huh, guys?” I said, struggling to hold my voice steady.

“Okay, you know those rocks out by Monarch Grove where the hippie nudists like to hang out and get sunburns?” Luke had taken a wide dramatic stance, arms out in front of him, like he was going to act the whole thing out. “The ones, they’re like fifteen feet out or so and they disappear underwater at high tide? So, this morning a bunch of them were sitting around down there, doing some sort of sunrise meditation ritual, and that obese one—you know who I mean? With the red hair and the Fu Manchu mustache?—he slipped and his foot shot into the water onto something squishy. So, okay, fine, that was weird. But then, like five minutes later, they’re still doing their mediation, and something comes floating up from the spot where the guy fell. And what was it? Naomi! I’m not kidding you. She was wearing this men’s wetsuit, like, way too big for her but her body had blown up to like twice its size, so it actually sort of fit, weirdly. And her head was smashed in like a crash test dummy. Totally nasty, right?” He waited, eyes bugging out, for my reaction.

“And sad,” said Ricky.

“Yeah, and sad too. I didn’t mean to say it wasn’t sad,” said Luke.

“You two used to hang out, right?” said Ricky.

I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say. They were expecting something, so I tried the first thing that made it through my head. “Just her? They didn’t find . . .” I stopped myself, but not before opening up a whole mess of problems.

They caught my mistake, though. Of course they did. There’s all kinds of crap you can say about those guys, but you can’t say they’re not smart. The twisted up expressions on their faces, the mutters—
What? Huh? What do you mean “just her”?
—I had to come up with an explanation fast.

And so, what did I do? I just started blabbing. “Nothing. It’s just . . . it makes sense now in a sort of way,” I said. “Saturday night I got this weird call from Craig. At like three in the morning. I mean, I didn’t answer. I got it the next morning. But he was acting completely crazy on the message. Begging me,
pick up, pick up, pick up
, and crying about how couldn’t take it anymore, how he was going to . . .” This was a hole I was digging for myself. I knew it. I was slipping. And thinking about how I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t stop my story now that I’d started it, even though I was destroying my life a little more with every new word out of my mouth, was unhooking the emotions from the pits of my heart. I was fighting back tears. “How he was going to kill himself. And Naomi too. They were going to do it together. He said she was going through the same heartbreak he was, over—some guy.” My God, I almost said Will. “It was shocking. I mean, horrifying, you know? I didn’t get the message until, like, noon the next day, and I’ve been calling and texting them nonstop since then. But nothing. No answer, no nothing.”

The guys were staring at me like I was crazy, like shrinks sizing up their inmates in the loony bin. Any second, one of them was going to call bullshit. I just knew it. And then the most painful thought crept through my head. Why shouldn’t they? That’s what I was thinking. Why shouldn’t they call bullshit? They’d be right, after all.

That’s when the tears really started to roll. Because I was wrong. In every way a person could be, I was wrong. I was bad. I was evil. I deserved to get caught. I was howling, completely hysterical.

“My God, my God, my God,” I kept saying. “I couldn’t . . . I didn’t . . . So bad . . . So wrong . . .” The words, when they came at all, were strangled in water.

My body slid away from me. I fell off the stool onto the floor, collapsed on the black rubber mat back there, and curled up into a fetal position, wishing it had been me and not my friends who had died.

Through the ocean in my head, I could make out a few muffled signs of life around me. Luke and his friends were asking if I was okay. They were spooked and concerned, embarrassed to be witnesses to such uncoolness. “It’s not your fault,” one of them mumbled.

Then Luke said, “We should go.”

And after a long pause, Ricky said, “We’re going to leave our money on the counter. So that you can put it in the drawer when you recover. We’re not stealing, okay. We just . . . I mean . . . because—”

“Ricky, just come on,” said Toby. “We gotta get out of here.”

“Anyway, bye,” said Ricky. “Sorry for your loss!”

Yeah, sure, I’m not stupid.
I knew there was a chance people would suspect me. Why wouldn’t they? Weird Willy Wanker, you know?

But I tried to play it as cool as I could.

Like, on Monday, I was messing around on the putting green and Lewis came buddying up to me. Just seeing him strut down the hill from the clubhouse got me going. I was thinking, if he even tries to fuck with me, I’ll take this club and smash him over the head with it. Completely irrational, but you know? That’s where I was right about then. Surging. Anything at all might push me over the edge.

He had that punk-ass smirk plastered across his face, and he was doing his too-cool-for-school walk. I was sure he was going to play that game of his where he pretends to befriend you while subtly pointing out all the ways he thinks he’s superior to you. But when he got to me and pulled his wraparound sunglasses up onto his forehead, he had a look in his eye I hadn’t seen from him before. Let’s call it sympathy.

“Hey man,” he said, “tough times. You doing okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said.

“Craig and Naomi?”

I hadn’t heard the rumors flying around town yet. “What about them?” I said.

“Where you been, man? You must be the last person on earth to know. Double suicide.”