Damage Done (22 page)

There didn’t seem to be any danger of Michael moving; he appeared to have turned into a statue, his back melting into the wall, his jaw practically on his chest. His lips were moving, like he wanted to say something, but nothing came out. I could see his love for me harden into cracked bits, like drying mud, and fall in a shower to the floor.

I wiped my eyes again, smearing him across the room. “I promised my brother I would tell the whole truth,” I said. “So here it is.”

Re: Ryan Vann, age 17

Noor and I pored over the records of the shooting for three hours last night, side by side in a dim, dusty records room, our eyes straining to read each line of type and examine each model of the room.

Noor was finally convinced of my interpretation. “I have a friend who will help you when you get there,” he said. “Another officer. One who’s not opposed to taking ‘gifts’ in exchange for his help.” I appreciated Noor’s frankness. “His name is Joseph Goodman. I’ll give you his card.”

I went in to see Ryan early this morning, the earliest the police would let me. “I believe you,” I said. “And I’m going to help prove it.”

He sucked a breath through his teeth, like my words had hurt him, but then he nodded. “Thank you,” he whispered, and turned away.

If what I’m beginning to suspect is correct, Ryan Vann is not the most dangerous person in his family.

I need to go to Sunny Vale.

I remember everything.

Once upon a time I got sick of waking up early to take my yappy little dog for walks and of spending half my allowance money to buy its stupid food. When my brother asked if he could take the dog apart to see what it looked like on the inside, I said okay. As long as I got to watch. And when we got caught, he took the blame.

I remember everything.

Once upon another time there was a fire. It wasn’t a big fire, not a house, not a school. It was the tree house of a girl who had made the grievous offense of making fun of how close my brother and I were. I wanted her dead. No, I wanted her to burn.

He lit the match and touched it to the tree, but we stood together to watch it burn. And when the girl’s mother spotted us through the trees, once again, my brother took the blame.

I remember everything.

I haven’t been entirely honest.

Take driving. It is true that I didn’t drive after Aiden’s accident. It is also true that I didn’t drive for a while before that, even though I’d taken driver’s ed and passed the written exam and had done my requisite six hours with an instructor and many other hours with my mom and dad.

The California provisional permit allows you to drive at age fifteen and a half, as long as you’re accompanied by someone twenty-five or older. For my brother and me, that meant we were required, officially, to drive with one of our parents in the car. What that meant, unofficially, was that, starting at age fifteen and a half, we would often just drive, the two of us, one of our parents’ licenses pocketed just in case. We’d switch off and go for long cruises down deserted roads, fantasizing that everybody in the world but us had been cleared out by a plague or a nuclear attack or face-eating aliens. It wasn’t that we wanted anything like that to happen—not exactly, not explicitly. It was more planning for a just-in-case, pondering what might happen if everyone else on the planet should just up and vanish. Not painfully—I can’t stress that enough. Just dissolve into the air, or sink through the ground, or give one last exhale and disappear.

The day it happened was one of those crisp fall days where the air snaps between your teeth and the leaves are such brilliant shades of red and yellow you just want to tell the sunset “Why bother?” I was driving, and Ryan was in the passenger seat, flipping our father’s license over and over between his fingers.

“It was a meteor,” I said, starting our game. The country road ahead stretched long and bright, with no houses to mar the beauty. “It struck in the Midwest, triggering the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Ash blanketed everything from Nevada to New York. This strip of coastline is the only clear place in the US.

“Of course,” I hurried to add once I saw Ryan raise a finger, “the meteor strike and ensuing eruption and all the ash caused a dramatic change in climate. Nobody could buy food. Everybody in the urban areas died or fled overseas or south. Only those of us used to working the land were able to eke out a spare existence.”

Neither of us had ever done so much as water a vegetable plant, but this was all hypothetical. How hard could it be to grow some potatoes or something, anyway? Just enough for the two of us. We had no plans to feed anyone else should this hypothetical world ever actually come to be. “Naturally,” I continued, “once the ash cleared, within a year or two, everything settled down. There was no more humidity and no more fog. It was a balmy seventy-two degrees, dry and warm, every day of the year, in Elkton, California.”

“Seventy-two is too warm,” Ryan said.

“No one cares.”

“You care.”

“Fine, I care. It can be seventy-one.”

“Sixty-eight.”

“Seventy, and that’s my final offer.”

“Deal.”

I sighed and focused on driving again, but was immediately distracted by something moving by the side of the road. No, not something. Someone. A runner, spandexed, red-bearded, old. Maybe forty. Panting. “Do you see that?”

Ryan looked. “That guy?”

“Yes, that guy. What else would I be pointing at?” My heart sped up. “He’s ruining everything. How can we live in this empty meteor-world when he’s here, chugging through it?”

Ryan squinted at him. “Go faster,” he suggested. “We can leave him behind and pretend he wasn’t even there.”

My heart sped up again, to the point where it practically vibrated in my chest. “That’s not good enough,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Ryan said. His voice was tense, alert.

I nodded and lifted my hands from the wheel.

Ryan reached over and jerked the wheel. One motion, one second, and our car slid off the side of the road and plowed into the runner with the stomach-turning crack of a butterflied chicken. I didn’t hear the man cry out. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just bounced off the hood of our car, his head twisted in the most wrong kind of way, and slipped bonelessly down the hill beside the road.

I turned to watch, and Ryan jerked the wheel again. “Go, go, go!” he was yelling. With one last glance over my shoulder, I placed my hands back on the wheel and went, my heart pounding against the inside of my ribs with every pump of the gas pedal. I didn’t remember driving home, but somehow we made it without spotlights zeroing in on us from above or sirens wailing behind us. My brother was good with cars, and so as soon as we pulled into the garage he suctioned out the dent in the hood and polished off the drying blood the runner had left behind. The windshield had cracked, but the next day he fixed that, too. I wasn’t sure exactly how. Somehow he was able to fix everything but me.

We found out later that the jogger died. I hadn’t been surprised in the least; no human head could turn that way, unless they were part owl. His name was Joe Johnson, a generic name for a generic thirty-five-year-old insurance salesman, doting husband, loving father to two young boys and a Labrador retriever generically named Fido.

His death hadn’t been what stopped me from driving, though.

No. It was the thrill that pumped through my veins as I watched his lifeless body tumble off the road. It was so easy, and the payoff so great. I couldn’t be tempted, because someone could catch me, and then I’d go to prison. That was what convinced me I could never drive again. The thrill was what convinced me I was beyond fixing, that my brother or I or anyone else could never make that part of me normal, whole, the way he’d suctioned out that dent.

Joe Johnson was the first. That is not a lie.

I’m stalling. To get straight to the point, I am a liar. A good one, yes, but a liar nonetheless. And no matter how good a liar you are, the fact of the matter is, the truth will always come back to haunt you. And no matter what happens in this room, whether I have five minutes left to live or five hundred years, I know it has come back to haunt me now.

My brother and I were born hand in hand. We grew up leaning on each other, sometimes Ryan holding me up, sometimes me him. On chilly camping trips, we’d huddle together in our tent for warmth. We’d watch movies together on the couch, and I’d fall asleep on his shoulder, feeling safe and warm no matter how bony that shoulder was, with his arm tucked behind my back.

It was only natural our relationship would develop. We were everything to each other emotionally, mentally, spiritually. It was only natural we would become everything to each other physically as well. It was only natural. It was only natural.
It was only natural.

He kissed me for the first time when we were fourteen. Sure, we’d kissed each other plenty of times before that: when we were little kids playing at being a married couple, on the cheek like dutiful siblings, tentative good-night pecks in front of our parents. But this kiss? This kiss was the real thing.

I’d spent all day at band practice, learning the wonders of the clarinet and the horrors of a splintered reed. That was back when Ryan was in band, too; he’d taken up the trumpet, though, and as brass and woodwinds practiced separately, I didn’t see him until we met up for the walk home. We strode along the side of the road together in a comfortable silence, my clarinet case tucked against my chest, his trumpet case swinging by his side. Light from the setting sun filtered red and orange through the autumn leaves rustling overhead. “So how was practice, Dizzy?” I asked.

“What?” His eyebrows, thick and heavy as caterpillars, bunched together quizzically.

I sighed. “Dizzy? You know, Dizzy…” I couldn’t think of his last name. “Dizzy something. The famous trumpet player.” It came to me. “Gillespie! Dizzy Gillespie.” I sighed again. “Never mind. The moment is gone.”

“You killed it,” Ryan agreed. “I would counter with a famous clarinet player, but I don’t think there are any.”

“Of course there are!” I went to name one, but my mind was blank. “There are lots. I just can’t think of any.”

Ryan smirked. “Yeah, okay.”

“I would hit you, but I wouldn’t want to hurt my baby.” I clutched my clarinet case harder against my chest for emphasis. “Anything exciting happen at practice?”

Our feet crunched over dead leaves. A chilly wind whisked by, and I shivered, goose bumps popping up on my arms. “Kind of,” he said finally. “Esther asked me out.”

“Esther?” My mind went blank again, and then I remembered: Esther, a tall girl with arms too long for her body, who liked to braid her hair into intricate styles all over her head, who had pale blue eyes that sparkled in the shine off her mellophone. Nobody liked the mellophones. They were always off beat. Only failed trumpets switched to the mellophone. “What did you say to her?”

He shrugged. I watched his shoulders slope up, then down, so easily, as if he wasn’t tipping the earth off its axis. As if he wasn’t changing the way things had always been. “I said maybe. It felt weird.”

My breath came in shallow gasps. “It
is
weird. Neither of us has ever gone out with anyone before.”

There went his shoulders again, up and down. “Maybe we should,” he said. “We’re going to have to do it someday. Marriage, kids, the rest.”

I darted a glance at him. He was staring off ahead, squinting as if into the sun, though it was actually setting behind us.

“Why?” I dared to ask, then held my breath.

He turned to look at me, still squinting. “What?”

“Why do we have to go out with other people?” I said. My heart pounded through my entire body. “Aren’t we enough for each other?”

The crunching slowed, stopped. “Are you saying…”

“You are everything to me.” The words burst from my chest. “I don’t need anyone else.”

“But…” He studied me as if through new eyes. I looked right back at him. It was physically painful; every nerve in my body screamed for me to look away, but I held fast. “Are you saying…”

“Kiss me.”

A heart-stopping yearlong moment passed, one where everything might have stopped and fallen dead around me, but then he leaned over, let his trumpet case fall, and pressed his lips against mine. I drank him in for a few seconds before he pulled away. He looked stunned. “Was that okay?” he said.

I responded by pulling him back down to me, my hands traveling over the sculpted muscles of his back.

His trumpet was never the same. I went back to the side of the road the next afternoon to see what I could salvage and found it dented, dinged, tarnished, as if it had aged a hundred years in a day.

We moved slowly. It was necessary, of course, to keep it hidden from our family and friends and society as a whole; as much as I wanted to kiss him in public, to press up against him in the food court or against my locker at school like the other kids, I knew nobody would accept it. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t okay. We were two people who cared about each other. Why should anyone concern themselves over the blood in our veins? It wasn’t like we were making them take part. This was America. Land of the free.

By the next school year, though, people were growing suspicious. Liv included. She’d broken up with her boyfriend. On the prowl for a new one, she’d set her sights on Ryan and, by extension, on me. “You’ve never had a boyfriend, have you, Julia?” she asked, her eyes narrowing into slits. “But you’re so pretty. Are you a lesbian or something? Because if you are, that’s totally cool, you know. Even if you have seen me in the changing rooms at Forever 21. Just tell me.”