Faking Normal (27 page)

I don’t react to her kidney punch. “Do they teach you to make threats at the bank or something? I didn’t tell Craig anything.”

“You told him to leave me,” she says.

“I did not. Why would I do that?”
Besides the obvious.

“Because you hate me and you’re jealous and can’t stand for me to be happy.”

“Kayla, I don’t hate you. You’re my sister.”

“Craig’s always been your little hero, and I’ve always been the witch,” she says.

“He is
not
her hero.”

Kayla must have forgotten that Bodee was in the room, because she whips around at the sound of his voice.

“What would you know? You’ve been here a month.”

“Thirty-four days, and I know more than you,” he says, and leaves his perch on the edge of my bed.

I know that tone. He’s going to make good on his threat to tell her right now. “No, Bodee,” I say, trying to calm the storm.

“Yes, Alexi,” he says back.

“I’m not stupid. You’re both hiding something, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Craig.”

Bodee is between Kayla and me. “No, you won’t.”

She smacks his chest.
Thwack. Thwack.
“You don’t get a say in this.”

He catches her wrist, and though he’s gentle with her, she tries to jerk away as if he wants to beat her.

“Too bad, because I’m going to have my say,” he says.

Oh shit. Oh shit. “Bodee.”

“I know all about you and Craig
talking
while you were supposed to babysit Alexi,” he says in her face.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
He’s winding up. “You know what I mean, Kayla,” he says in disgust. “What kind of person threatens a six-year-old? And you’ve been making these threats all her life. Well, you’re done. You’ve threatened Alexi for the last time. And I swear, you try me, you’ll find this is no bluff. I’m the one who will make sure Craig never comes back.”

I take a breath when he’s finished. Partly because he hasn’t told, and partly because I’ve never heard him talk this firmly.

“You’ll regret this,” Kayla hisses, her face ugly with fury. “You’re going to be so sorry.”

“Oh, trust me, I already am,” Bodee says. “Lex, just tell her.”

“Nothing to tell,” I insist.

“Fine,” he says, and goes to the door. “You’re on your own. I’m through.”

“He’s as crazy as his father,” Kayla says when Bodee has gone.

“Don’t. You.
Ever.
Say. That.”

“Now who’s making threats? What did all that mean anyway?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”
Everything.

Kayla is half in my room, half in the hall; her knuckles wrap the door facing. “I want him gone, Lex. I want him out of this family. And I’m going to make sure of it.”

She leaves before I can say, “He already is.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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..................................................................

chapter 26

THE
towels in the bathroom aren’t wet when I drag myself to the shower. There’s no half-torn Kool-Aid package in the trash. And no wet toothbrush at the sink.

Remnants of Bodee.

Gone.

And there’s no Bodee, sitting, legs crossed at the kitchen bar, waiting to see what boxed breakfast food we will split today.

Mom’s head is in the fridge. “You hungry?”

“Not this morning.”

“Bodee left you half of his granola bar.”

“Left me?”

“Yeah.” She slides a box of apple juice across the bar toward
me like she’s working downtown at a honky-tonk. “Ben picked him up today. He didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

I drift out of the kitchen and up to the bonus room.
Ben picked him up,
I hear my mother say. Is he moving out? Going away? Not coming back?

He can’t keep doing this, he said.

Proof. I want proof that he’s staying. Proof I didn’t see in the bathroom.

But the first thing I see is Cinderella. Faceup in her yellow dress. Smiling across the bed like she has no idea I’d rather never see her again. The little stack of whites, the underwear that made him blush in front of me the first time, is gone. Three plaid shirts that usually hang on plastic suit hangers instead of the old wire ones: gone. And Mrs. Lennox’s diamond earring is gone too.

I lift the bed skirt, wondering how I can face the final nail in this coffin.

The boxes are stacked under the bed.

My whole world rocks and sways, as if I’m standing up on a raft in the pool. My knees sag and I sit, and then stretch out facedown on his bed.

I can’t keep doing this.

I push the decorative pillows to the floor and . . . my hand touches what I was afraid I wouldn’t find.

Hatchet.
The worn cover is back on.

I open the book with its Scotch-taped spine and read:

To Bodee

My brave little Brian. I love you.

Mom

He took everything else and left this behind.

For me.

“Lex,” Mom calls from the kitchen. I let her yell. Even when I hear her on the steps, and the landing. I lie on the bed, running over those words from his mother with my thumb.

“Heather’s here,” Mom says.

“Did he say when he’d be back?” I ask.

“No. He said he needed some time with his brother.” She pats my leg. “You worried about him?”

I nod and sit up, letting Mom see my tears, but not the book and the note from his mother. She assumes these tears are for Bodee, instead of for her daughter.

“It’ll be good for him to be with Ben. They need some time too. Maybe he’ll talk to his brother.” She looks away and gives me space to wipe my face. “Heather’s waiting,” she reminds me.

I love this about her. That she is like me. Emotional, and embarrassed about being emotional.

I tuck
Hatchet
into my bag and walk like a zombie to Heather’s car. Liz is back in the front seat.

“You had one more minute,” Heather says. “Where’s Bodee?”

“With his brother.”

“He’s not moving out, is he?” Liz asks. “’Cause he doesn’t normally go see his brother, right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Our threesome, turned foursome, turned threesome again, is quiet. Thinking of Bodee.

Heather says, “Well, huh,” and Liz sighs, eye-checking me in the mirror. I shift and turn my face to the window where she can’t see me. And cry slow, silent tears.

Hayden takes my hand at the front door and leads me, like a limp doll, to homeroom. He kisses my cheek, as if his reveal of Captain Lyric allows him this new license to touch on school grounds.

Bodee is not in homeroom.

And not at his locker afterward.

When Hayden realizes I have spun the dial on my combination lock twice without opening the locker, he asks for the combination and takes over. For the first time, he notices my glazed-over state.

“You okay, Lex?”

“Not really,” I say as my locker swings open.

“Can I do anything?”

“Not really.”

Hayden hands me the two books I point to and says, “I’d ask you what’s wrong, but you probably won’t tell me.”

He’s right. So I say, “Thanks,” and walk away, with my locker still open and the lock still in Hayden’s hand.

I don’t take my book to third period, and we have an open-book test. My name is the only thing I write.

I realize something as I walk through the hall.

Any ability I have to move forward—even stupid moves like choosing Hayden because he doesn’t
know,
or thinking I could have a normal relationship and forget all about Craig—is all because of Bodee’s strength. I don’t know how to do it without him.

I lay my head on the desk in fourth period, the blank desk, and close my eyes.

“You aren’t going to write?” Heather asks.

“I’m out of words,” I tell her.

When the bell finally rings, I check myself out of school under the guise of a migraine, and walk home and straight to the fort.

When I reach the top I see a bird, no bigger than a minute, land on my window—the one where Bodee and I brush shoulders as we look out over the woods.

“Chirp,”
the bird says to me, twitching his wings.

“It’s October, buddy. Your friends are halfway down I-65 by now,” I tell him.

He chirps again.

“Sucks, huh?”

The bird plucks his gunmetal-gray tail feathers, and one
floats to the open sill.
“Chirp. Chirp,”
he says.

“Be that way. Probably why they left you behind.”

“
CHIRP
.”
He flies away, leaving his feather.

This morning, for one second between my pain and the fear that Bodee would tell, I imagined what it would be like to be free.

That’s what Bodee is imagining for me, I think. What he wants for me.

Freedom.

This choice is mine, I realize. I can be the bird clinging to a windowsill in Tennessee when all my friends are in Florida, or I can be the bird who flies away.

I can be free.

I decided to keep my secret, and now, I decide to let it go.

I want my life back. Want the lies and the loneliness to end. I don’t want to settle for cute-boy Hayden just because he doesn’t know about me. Hayden, who Googles his lyrics and drinks his whiskey. I’ll never fall in love with him.

But right now, if I don’t take a risk, I’ll fall into a breathing-next-to-each-other relationship because it’s easy. Easy is empty.

Hayden’s good on a desk, but he isn’t good for me. And I already have a boy who knows me.

If he’ll forgive me. Trust me. After I turn the lies to truth.

Bodee once told me—the one time he sat in the closet with me—that what I couldn’t say, I should write down. “Words will lead to voice,” he said.

Careful not to damage the book, I untape the cover and dig a pen from the pocket of my backpack. The inside of the cover is blank, waiting for my words.

It takes courage to write the obvious.

Craig raped me.

I chew my pen cap and let the words come. At first, they are summer rain on the beach, making tiny dents in the sand that the wind will smooth away.

I didn’t call it rape, because I didn’t actually say no. But he knew. He KNOWS he was wrong. That a twenty-six-year-old man doesn’t have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. He used a condom, so he had time to think and to stop. And he’s had time to set this right. To tell. Which can never set everything right, but it helps. Instead, he wants me to pretend that it never happened, to stay in his life so he can kiss my sister and feed her lies. That he is still a good guy. He may be again, someday, but not to me.

Then my anger becomes rage, and I bear down with the pen to write the words I should have said to Craig.

Your hurt is not an excuse to take.

Your loneliness is not an excuse to cheat.

Your desire is not a reason to rape.

You raped me, and now, I’m going to rape you.

Of Kayla, of our house as your second home, of your job, of me as your sister-in-law.

And it will hurt, but it won’t hurt the way you hurt me.

I won’t be sorry for this. You are not my BEST BUDDY, you are a selfish asshole, and I hate what you did to me!

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

chapter 27

WHEN
I get back to the house, Kayla and Craig are in the den. They aren’t touching, but they’re on the same couch, and they’re sitting close together. My manifesto, the end of Craig’s normal and the beginning of mine, burns inside me.

Craig raped me. I hate what you did to me.
And all the words in between.

But Bodee isn’t here, and I want him to be.

He’s mad at me, but I know him. If I say please, he will come, and forgive me long enough to stand beside me and hold my hand, while I tell Craig to go to hell. The boy who taught me to stand up should be here for the standing.

So I will wait.

But Bodee doesn’t magically appear. I can’t wish him here
the way I wished his hand in mine the day we kicked acorns on the way home.

Dinner comes, and I pass Craig a slice of pizza, barely able to contain the fury in me, now that it’s at the surface. And then I pass the celery and then the ranch dressing and then more Sprite. I want to dump the Sprite over him and scream like a two-year-old.

There is a change in Craig. The camouflage and the lies aren’t working for him, either. He doesn’t look at me like we’re best buddies anymore. He doesn’t eat any of the things I pass him at dinner. He doesn’t eat much at all, I notice. His weight loss, my neck; we’ve blown each other’s covers.

But I won’t feel sorry for him. The way I used to.

“Where’s your
boy
friend?” Kayla asks.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say without looking at her. “He’s gone. With his brother, Ben.”

She says,
“Good.”
And ignores the disapproving looks she gets from Mom and Dad.

In moments like this, I can almost lump her into KaylaCraig. One word, one being, one person, to despise for what they do to me. But they aren’t the same, and she is my sister. Sorrow for her quenches my anger, because I can’t ruin Craig’s life without ruining hers.

She might not forgive me for this.

She might hate me for what I take from her the way I hate Craig for what he took from me.

She might tell Mom before I’m ready.

On the surface this is a normal meal. We eat, we talk, and we pass the food and clean up the kitchen. But in my brain, the lists of “mights” concerning Mom and Dad have started. They might make me see a counselor. Might watch me too closely. Might pity me. Might treat me like I am an antique heirloom that can be seen but not touched.