How We Fall (8 page)

But if he couldn’t back off a little, if we couldn’t keep things low-key, we’d have to call it off. It wouldn’t work any other way.

Someone would find out, or we’d end up hating each other.

It was just making out, right? The other half of us was more important. Candyland. Movies. Water fights and family dinners.

I tried to work on college applications for the rest of the morning, but gave up and hit the “add new post” button on my blog. No matter how often Ellie had told me blogging was dying, I refused to quit. I started it in middle school as an outlet for my adolescent angst, but the world wasn’t benefiting from such a close encounter with my twelve-year-old psyche.

I’d taken my early posts down, and the blog morphed into my ramblings about my classic film hobby. Such clever titles as

“My First Date with Citizen Kane,” and “Here’s Looking at Me, Kid,” headed my posts, and surprisingly, people read them.

My hits weren’t high, but my readers commented and shared my posts around much more than I’d expected.

I didn’t know what to title this one.
So many of the films that
make my top list involve nontraditional or taboo relationships,
I typed. The King and I
,
My Fair Lady
,
West Side Story
,
Roman Holiday
,
Sabrina
. Even
The Fox and The Hound
and
Beauty and the Beast
. The bravery of the characters is one of my favorite
things about them. It takes so much strength to love an egotistical
king who stands for everything you’re against. To befriend someone
people say you shouldn’t because you’re too different.

Some of those relationships held up under the weight. Eliza
stays with Henry Higgins. Beauty and her beast work it out. Their
bravery goes past loving someone they shouldn’t to actually fighting
for the relationship.

I wonder if that bravery was misplaced. Selfish, maybe. Most
of those relationships don’t seem harmful to us; taboo then, but not
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Kate Brauning

really that damaging from where we sit now. Rich men can love the
chauffeur’s daughter. Foxes and hounds can be friends. But even if
those relationships should have been allowed, they weren’t. In more
than half those films, we don’t get a happy ending. The characters
say goodbye and move on, because in their time, those relationships
were grim and bloody things. Doesn’t that make them harmful?

Vigilante justice. Riots. Broken hearts. Does the reaction to breaking cultural norms make the act itself damaging?

I hovered my mouse over the “post” button and took a breath before clicking it. Sharing my thoughts publicly always gave me butterflies.

Roman Holiday
’s Princess Ann and I had something in com-mon. I didn’t know how to say goodbye, either.

45

Marcus was gone until lunch time. At lunch, he appeared in the kitchen with Chris, making a sandwich at the kitchen counter. I didn’t bother asking where he’d been, since he’d been avoiding me like he always did when he got upset. Mom was mixing up egg salad and listening to U2 while the twins chattered at the table.

He glanced up at me, and then went back to layering salami and turkey on the requisite nine-grain wheat bread.

I pulled out a slice and spooned egg salad. “Sorry,” I whispered. Apologizing had never been my greatest talent. I would have said more, but Mom was eyeing me.

“It’s fine.”

That was so not true. “You sure?”

He put the two halves of his sandwich together. “It’s fine.”

Translation: I’d hurt his feelings. I’d been honest, and this was what I got. “Okay.” Maybe if we acted like things were fine, things would eventually get there.

Mom raised her eyebrows. “What’s going on over there?”

“Nothing.” I walked into the living room with my sandwich, hoping he’d follow me. He did. “Hey,” I said. “I really wanted to explain what I said this morning. I just—”

“You pretty much said it all,” he said.

“Stop it.” My eyes burned. “Please just believe me. That was a very small part of what I meant.”

His shoulders fell and he glanced at me and then away.

“Yeah. I know.”

But he didn’t know. He didn’t get it. If he did, he’d meet my 46

Kate Brauning

eyes and talk to me. “Sylvia stopped by. She asked me to give you this.” I handed over the paper like I didn’t care.

He took the paper, so clearly he did. “Her number?”

“Yeah. Score.” The words came out a lot weaker than I’d wanted.

He frowned like he was thinking. “She says to text her.”

“You don’t think that’s kinda weird?” It wasn’t, but I hoped he might think so.

He glanced at me. “Girls can’t give guys their number?”

I held his stare. We stood like that in the living room for a moment, me watching him, him watching me. He shrugged and entered her number on his phone.

I set my plate down on the end table and crossed my arms.

“Fine. Text away, Prince Charming. She’s certainly a damsel in distress.” Of course he’d text her the moment he got her number.His fingers moved over his phone, texting. “You wanted it,”

he said quietly.

Oh, no, we were not doing this. I tucked my hair behind my ear and narrowed my eyes. He couldn’t miss that look. “Sometimes it seems like you don’t really get what we’re doing here.”

His eyes snapped up. “Sometimes I think I get it far more than you do.”

I took a step back. My hands curled into fists and I shoved them in the pockets of my shorts. I turned around walked through the hall and back to my bedroom, leaving him standing there with his phone and that angry hurt look he was so good at and everything that was going wrong between us.

I sank down onto my bed and pulled my book off the nightstand, but instead of opening it, I threw it across the room and let it crash into the wall.

I let myself fall backwards onto my mattress and stared at the ceiling. The problem with cousins was they were too much 47

How we Fall

like siblings. No matter how much you loved them, you were also a little bit okay with hurting them.

The fear curdling in my stomach for months now was spreading into every bit of me. That fear and the nasty little edge of me that was angry at Marcus wanted me to call it quits, save what was left and get out before things got worse.

I frowned at my ceiling. I sat up and crossed my legs, reached for my computer. When had I gotten so gutless? I was the girl who let people push her into the deep end of the pool, who blogged about dialogue-driven black-and-white movies because she didn’t give a shit if people thought it wasn’t cool, who kissed her cousin for no reason other than she wanted to.

My stupid little fears weren’t going to get in the way of something I wanted.

After working on my college applications for a while, a notice to approve a blog post comment popped up in my email.

Traveler101, who was actually Travis something or other, was one of my main blog followers. He’d written on my last post something about me being a thoughtful, well-educated teenager.I rolled my eyes but clicked “approve” anyway. People said things like that on my posts all the time, as if teenagers usually weren’t either.

Late in the afternoon was when Marcus and I would normally try to sneak off. With the twins down for naps, there’d be semi-quiet for an hour or two.

If I didn’t want things to get worse, I had to not let them.

I slid off my bed and went upstairs. Candace and Angie were banging around in their room, but the door was swung mostly closed. The room Marcus shared with Chris was at the end of the hall.

Music thumped from behind his closed door. Deadmau5.

So, he was mad. I knocked on the door, but he didn’t hear me.

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Kate Brauning

I knocked harder.

When the door opened, he stood in the space and leaned on the doorframe. “Hey,” he said. His hair was standing on end.

His eyes flicked over me.

“Is Chris in there?”

“He’s out with Will and whoever.” Chris’s friends were mostly from Harris, and from what I understood, Will was their little group’s ringleader.

I almost didn’t have the nerve to say it. “Want to hang out?”

He barely hesitated before grabbing my hand and pulling me into the room. He kicked the door shut and flipped the lock.

“What are you doing?” I whispered and reached for the doorknob. “If someone finds us locked in your bedroom—”

“I’ll say it was an accident.” He looked a little wild-eyed, so I didn’t point out how unbelievable that would sound.

I leaned against the closed door. “Are you mad at me?” He had no right to be mad at me. He was the one avoiding me and pushing our rules and texting some girl.

He looked away. “No.”

“You seem like it.” I crossed my arms.

He stepped toward me. “It’s not fair for you to resent me. I haven’t done anything we didn’t both want.”

“I don’t resent you. Not really.” I looked down at my socks then forced myself to look up. “It’s just a by-product. It’s not the main thing.”

“Then what is the main thing? I’m not sure I know.” He braced a hand on the door behind me and hovered close. “I thought things were good. Then I said I should take you out, and something went wrong.”

“You’re the main thing,” I said. I didn’t know what to tell him about the rest of it. “We’re good. It’s just—it seems like things are getting too serious.”

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How we Fall

That look on his face was what I was afraid of. The determination in the set of his mouth, the hurt in the lines around his eyes, the shade of something just a little too dark in his eyes.

His hands went to my waist, slid around to the small of my back. “I don’t know how to do this,” he whispered. He hesitated with his face close to me, then his lips touched mine. Ache surged up in me. He pulled back half an inch and his hands tightened around my waist. “I get it. I’m sorry, I just—”

I hooked my fingers in his belt loops and pulled him the half step forward that would crush his hips against mine. The weight grounded me. I kissed him back and he quit talking. I drew my thumb along his jawline. After a moment, his shoulders relaxed. His hands slipped under the hem of my shirt and traced small circles on my lower back. When my tongue brushed his, he made a sound that scrambled my brain.

That was what we did. We couldn’t talk things out, because there was nothing to say.

Making him kiss me this way, press into me like this, gave me a strange thrill of power. If it had just been that, maybe we would have been fine. But there was something else that made me love the feel of his hair as it slipped through my fingers, made me memorize the curve of his cheekbone and the crinkle of his laugh lines, made me want him to look me in the eye so I could really see him.

Some addictions slowly took away your self, but some addictions kept you going; they were the water and air you needed to keep on being.

His fingertips, lightly, slowly, moved from the small of my back down to the waistband of my jeans. Starting at the back, he moved his fingers along my skin around my sides and to my stomach. I shivered when they came together.

Screw it. Sylvia could not have him. “Don’t go out with her,”

I said against his lips.

50

Kate Brauning

He pulled back. “All I did was text her—”

“She wants you to. Tell her no.” It didn’t break one of our rules because I wasn’t asking for commitment. I rested my palms on his chest, stroked my thumb up and down against the soft fabric. I wasn’t asking him to stay away from anyone but me—just to stay away from her.

He didn’t reply. He waited, looking from one of my eyes to the other, then said, “I really want to go somewhere with you, Jackie. Not a date. I want to get out of the house with you and do something that’s not chores or errands or whatever. It might take the pressure off.”

Just hang out. No watching for someone to come around a corner, no clock ticking ’til bedtime, no feeling like we had to make out or we would have wasted the time. “Nothing fancy?”

“Some time away from the house. Where we don’t have to lock doors or wait til people leave. Is that okay?”

I met his eyes so he’d know I meant it. “Let’s do it. When?”

A boyish grin split his face and he hooked his hands in the front pockets of my jeans. “Tomorrow afternoon. Come up with a reason to be gone for a few hours and I’ll pick you up around back. Wear whatever, and bring a book if you want.”

“Deal. But we have to be more careful. Here at home, at the produce stand—we can’t do this.”

He nodded. “Maybe it would help for us to get away more.

Keep things away from the house.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way. “As long as we’re careful.”

He unlocked the door, still smiling. “Tomorrow afternoon.

Twenty-one hours.” His lips touched mine one more time. “See you then.”

In my head, I was already there. It couldn’t come fast enough.

• • •

How we Fall

When I went downstairs, Uncle Ward and Mom were

watching the news. “I heard it in town,” Mom said.

“Awful.” Uncle Ward shook his head, his ponytail swishing.

“Doesn’t look like she ran away, then.”

A chill settled in my bones. I stood still until Mom motioned for me to come sit next to her. I moved forward, one step, then half a dozen. I sat on the arm of the couch and she rested a hand on my back. “Someone four-wheeling near St.

Joseph found a backpack out in a field. It had homework in it with Ellie’s name.”

The TV showed jerky local news footage of a field with a clump of trees. The cameraman was having trouble with the focus, which kept switching back and forth between the field and the trees. Photos came up of a blue backpack, flattened and muddy.

The chill turned into an ache and my body physically hurt.

She’d dropped that backpack on the floor of my room too many times to count. My hand went to the bird charm on my bracelet. Her backpack shouldn’t be in a field. Rain had pounded dirt into the fabric, the blue was faded, and her
Beauty and
the Beast
pin no longer clung to the strap.