Fade Out (10 page)

“I’m not a brat!”

“Dani. You’re forgetting I
know
you.”

“Oh and I’m fine too, by the way,” I tell him. “I’m doing just great. In case you weren’t too busy bouncing balls off your head to wonder about your little sister. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. I’m not dead.”

He’s silent for a second. “I heard you went to Dad’s,” he says. “Dad told me about the wedding.”

Now I’m the one who gets silent.

“How bad was it?” he asks. “At his house?”

“Bad,” I say.

“Sucks,” he says.

“Yup,” I say.

And that’s all we have to say about that.

We say our good-byes. He tells me to stay out of his room, and I say why would I want to go in there anyway (though I have, to borrow his CDs and to see if he left any money in his dresser), and I shove back into the kitchen and hang up.

“You must miss your brother,” Mom says. “And with me, going through”—she waves a hand in the air at absolutely
nothing—“all this. And with Maya moving away… This must be a really tough summer for you.”

Um, hello. Was she walking around all summer with her head in a paper bag?

But I don’t say anything mean. Not one thing. I know I’m in a difficult situation and I’m allowed to be difficult, but I kinda don’t want to be right now. Casey called me a brat. I’d like to prove that I’m not.

I say, “I guess.” Then, “But I’m okay, really.”

And she says, “I’ll think of something fun for you to do. You can’t spend your whole summer sitting in a dark movie theater. It’s just not healthy.”

That’s when I remember Jackson. And the girl, whoever she is. And Elissa. And the phone calls. And the hole punched in the wall. And I get this new determination. This fire inside me. I decide that this will be my mission for the rest of the summer: to find out what’s up. And if something awful’s going on, to stop it.

There are some things you might not know about me, too. I may daydream more than normal, and make up stuff in my head, and go on and on about movies, but I do know when it’s time to stand up and do something real for once.

I take a big bite of my pizza. It’s cold by now. And it’s covered in green slimy things and all I want to do is spit them out. So now you know I officially really, really don’t like peppers. But you should also know that no one’s going to lie to me again and get away with it. I won’t let it happen. That’s a fact.

9
Holes in the Wall

T
he next day,
I head inside the theater without a ticket. I’ve come before the first show—
The Big Sleep
hasn’t started yet, so there’s no one (and by that I mean Austin) to tell me to pay or go away.

The house phone is in a hallway off the lobby, a narrow passage just before the stairs up to Ms. Greenway’s office. That’s where I find Jackson. He’s on his knees on the floor, patching up a hole in the wall. He’s done enough patching with the spackle that there really isn’t a hole anymore. With his back to
me, he keeps at it, smoothing the spot. Either his aunt told him to make it neat or he hopes to leave no trace of what he did.

“Hey,” I shoot out, startling him.

He jumps, splashing spackle at me. It’s stickier than I expected, like egg whites mixed up with gobs of paste.

“Oh, hey, D,” he says. “Sorry about that.”

I wipe some goop off my arm. “What happened?” I point at the wall.

“Nothing,” he says. “I knocked my elbow into it, no big.”

Then quickly he adds, “Why, did Austin tell you something else?”

“I don’t know, what else would he have told me?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you say what he told you, and I’ll tell you if that’s what happened?”

It’s one of those nonconversations that get me all tripped up.

His eyes narrow. He is standing up to his full height now, making me feel smaller than I even am. There are a few seconds when I wonder if I should be scared. When I think that maybe something bad’s going to happen.

Then it passes. He’s grinning. “Dude, I’m such a klutz,” he says. He points at my chin. “You’ve got some glop there. Looks like a white beard.”

We laugh. Ha-ha-ha. But I don’t know why I’m laughing. I don’t know why it’s so funny that he punched a hole in the wall and I’ve got glop on my chin because he threw at it me.

I wipe off my chin. Whatever went on with that wall, it’s pretty much all patched up now. You know: like it never even happened.

Jackson puts the lid back on the spackle. “So,” he says.

He could admit to anything right now. He could come clean and tell me that he never ordered pizza and he was with some girl named Bella and what would I do then?

But what he says is, “So, how was it at your dad’s?”

I give him the same answer I gave my brother: “Bad.” I figure he’ll say,
That sucks
, and I’ll say,
Yeah, that sucks
, and that’ll be the end to the conversation. But Jackson sits down on the steps and looks me over.

“What happened?” he asks.

I want to tell him, but first I try not to. “I just didn’t want to be there.”

“What was it like? Weird, huh?” And somehow, with these questions and more that come after, he gets me talking. It’s like he really wants to know how it felt then, what it feels like now. Casey barely asked, and he’s my big brother. It’s hard to hate Jackson when it seems like he actually cares what I have to say.

He tells me he gets it, that the weekend must have been rough, and I can’t explain it…. I begin to doubt myself again. Jackson’s a good guy. He wouldn’t—he couldn’t—do what I thought he did. Could he?

“How long have you and Elissa been together?” I find myself asking. I never used to want to talk about Elissa, but everything’s changed now.

“It’ll be six weeks this weekend,” he says with a smile.

“That’s forever,” I say. In school last year when girls would get boyfriends, it lasted a week, two weeks. That was the longest anyone my age has ever been together.

“You think so?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I like Elissa.”

“Me too.”

“I mean I
really
like Elissa.”

“Me too.”

I’m trying to say something, but I don’t know if he’s hearing it. Elissa’s the one, I’m saying. I know she’s right for him now. I realize he’s here for only the summer, but the summer is all that exists right now. And in it, Elissa is the one for him. Which means there can be no one else.

“We should go see her,” I say. “Right now.”

“Now?” he says. He doesn’t move off the steps.

“Let’s get ice cream. Let’s go say hi to Elissa. You have time, right? The first show isn’t until ten forty, right?”

“Right,” he says. But he looks torn. “My aunt’s out, though. I should stay here.”

“But there’s no movie playing.”

“Someone might want to buy an early ticket….”

“Hardly anyone ever does. Besides”—I force myself to say it—“there’s always Austin.”

“True.”

“Also! You really want to see Elissa, don’t you?”

“I guess…”

That’s all I needed. In seconds, I’m dragging Jackson across the street to Taco Juan’s. A guy’s got to eat, right?

“Oh, hey,” Elissa says when the bell over the door jingles and we step in.

Things about Elissa: She’s pretty but not too pretty. She doesn’t look fake. She tries to keep her hair neat, but it’s so curly that’s hard to do, and right now I want to go behind the counter and fix it. I hope Jackson doesn’t want her to be a Rita Hayworth—you know, perfect every second of the day, glamorous. I hope he just likes her for her.

“We’re here for ice-cream cones,” I tell Elissa, taking full control of the situation. “Two scoops on waffle cones with extra sprinkles. I want chocolate-chocolate chunk and mint chunk. What flavors do you want, Jackson?”

Jackson is taking way too long to pick—I mean, seriously: pistachio, vanilla bean, mocha swirl, rocky road, strawberry, lemon-lime, chocolate this, chocolate that, just pick one—and before he makes up his mind, Elissa answers for him.

“I don’t think Jackson really wants an ice-cream cone,” she says.

“Yeah, sorry, Dani,” he says. “But you should still get one.”

“Why not?” I say. “It’s perfectly normal to have ice cream for breakfast in the summer. It’s like, you know, yogurt… just way better.”

“He can’t have ice cream,” Elissa tells me. “He’s lactose intolerant.”

“Oh,” I say. Just hearing her say it out loud, it’s almost like proof of something.

Jackson shrugs. “It’s true,” he tells me. “I can’t eat dairy.”

There’s an awkward silence as Elissa starts scooping and Jackson just stands there, watching. Also, notice how they’re talking to me and not to each other.

I’m reminded of the times before the divorce, when my dad still lived at home and we’d all have dinner together. When we’d sit at the table and my mom and dad would barely say a word to each other, so Casey and I would have to talk for them.

We’d talk about the stupidest things. Favorite flavors of soda. Soccer. TV shows. YouTube videos. Teachers at school. That annoying girl who rides our bus.

It didn’t matter what we said so long as we kept talking. And I guess I should have figured something was wrong by the way Mom would talk directly to me or Casey but never to Dad. And how we’d ask Dad a question and he’d sit there, rolling a meatball around on his plate, and we’d say, “Dad! Dad! Are you even listening? Dad!” And then at long last he’d look up from his meatball and see us and go, “Huh?”

But I didn’t see anything wrong. I was too naive back then. I was only twelve. I know a lot more now.

I turn to Jackson. “Is it fatal?” I ask. “If you eat ice cream, I mean.”

“What?” he says, laughing. “Of course not.”

“But you can’t have milk?”

“No,” he says.

“Or cheese?”

“Nah. I get sick.”

“Like how sick?”

“Just—You don’t want the details, okay?”

“But it’s not like you’d die,” I say carefully, “if you had, I don’t know… pizza.”

I hold Jackson’s eyes. I want to say there’s a flicker of recognition there—like he knows who he’s up against now: me. But no flicker. Not even a blink. He just says, “Nope.”

Elissa’s made herself busy building my waffle cone. She’s also made an ice-cream-free sundae for Jackson: sprinkles, crushed Oreo, and nuts all mixed up in a waffle bowl. We take a table in the back, and Jackson and Elissa speak directly for the first time:

“So what time do you get off today?” Elissa asks him.

“Ten?” Jackson mumbles.

“At night? I thought you said you had the night off.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

“You must’ve heard me wrong. I never get Monday nights off.”

“Ooooo-kay.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re being. Right, Dani? Tell Elissa she shouldn’t be like that.”

I get a jolt from the sound of my name and spill a drop of ice cream on the table. “Oops,” I say. I head off for the counter—away from them—to get a napkin. Once at the counter I take my sweet time pulling out a napkin from the dispenser. I wiggle and finesse it out, as if I want the smoothest, most wrinkle-free napkin ever in the history of Taco Juan’s. As I do, Elissa and Jackson whisper, and I strain to hear them.

Elissa’s mumbling. I think she says, “But you’re never around when you say you’re going to be around.” Or else she says, “But you never wear brown when you say you’re going to wear brown.” Let’s go with the first one.

To that, Jackson mutters under his breath and I catch the words “not true” and “you’re exaggerating.”

Elissa whispers something I can’t hear except at the end, when she says, “Do you?”

Jackson answers her forcefully, and with a whole hidden meaning that’s way over my head,
“Yes.”

I wonder what she asked him.

A few silent seconds pass, so I return with my napkin and clean up my mess.

They’ve completely stopped talking. Elissa picks out a chunk of Oreo from Jackson’s bowl and eats it. Jackson chews up a walnut. Elissa cracks off an edge of the waffle bowl and places it absently on the table. Jackson flicks it off.

What’s going on here, someone tell me, please!

That’s when I notice his hand. He keeps shaking it out. And there’s a purplish splotch on it, like he either smeared it in the raspberry sauce or he’s got a bruise. Maybe it’s from, oh, I don’t know,
punching a hole in the wall when he said he didn’t?

“What happened to your hand, Jackson?” I say.

“Huh? Nothing,” he says, standing up. “I should run. Gotta get the reel ready.”

He walks off but then turns back. I figure he’s about to say something to Elissa, something really cute and surely embarrassing that boyfriends say to girlfriends that I wouldn’t have wanted him to say to any other girl in my presence before today.

(I once had a boyfriend, in seventh grade, for almost six days. He obviously didn’t know how to be one because he’d say things like “Maybe I’ll see you later at your locker.” Or “Are you gonna sit with me at lunch or what?” That was pretty much it.)

But Jackson only says, to me and not to Elissa, “
The Big Sleep
—you seen it yet?”

I shake my head.

“Lauren Bacall and Bogie,” he says. “You know who Bogie is, right?”

“Humphrey Bogart,” I say.

He grins, like,
bravo!
Like this isn’t the most obvious of movie-star questions he could have asked. Then he says, “See you there.” And is gone.

Elissa finishes Jackson’s leftover Oreo crumbs and dusts off her hands. “I should get back too,” she says, and heads up front.

There’s not a customer in the store—it’s too early in the morning for anyone to want a burrito or ice cream, I guess—but Elissa looks alert behind the counter.

What just happened?

I head up front with the rest of my cone and lean against the glass case. I’m making hand-streaks across the fogged glass, drawing jungle animals, which means she’ll have to wipe them all off with a rag before her boss sees, but she lets me do it.