Pieces of Us (21 page)

Kyle

~
The Lake House
~

I
f it weren’t for your grandparents wanting to see you and Alex, you’d have skipped the lake house this year. Too much has happened. It’s not a break anymore. Not relaxing. Not fun. You can’t go back to playing Spit with Julie, not like before. When she spits on the ground now, you’ll be too focused on watching her mouth, remembering where it’s been, what it’s said.

She’s trying, you’ll give her that. Maybe spending time with her Ice Queen mother has changed her, but she told you she gets it now. Gets that Katie must be in pain. Gets that people saying things to
her
was a way to get back at Katie. And you gave in, too. You told her that no one should have said anything to her. That she doesn’t deserve that. That you understand the last two months haven’t been easy for her, either. That last sentence makes her giddy, silly, so happy. Like last summer’s Julie, like a Julie who cares about other people and not just herself. But there’s something between the two of you that’s changed and can’t be fixed. All you did was give Katie a break, and it’s as if you committed a sin.

Then there’s Alex. Who couldn’t wait to get on the road. Who’s jumping out of his skin to get to the lake house. Who never brought a parade of girls home, even after the video. He broke things. He cursed. He screamed. He probably got some somewhere. But he left you alone.

Right after
it
hit the Internet, you kept your door locked. You avoided Alex’s room, didn’t even join him in the kitchen. But there wasn’t a need. Soon, you accepted the comforting silence. Now he’s humming to the radio, tapping to the beat on the steering wheel, enjoying the feel of the open windows.

You’re almost at the Catskills when he says, “We’re cool now, Katie and I. So, if you were staying away from Julie for my sake, you don’t have to.”

“You’re cool? I thought she was a ho.”

“Yeah, well, so is every other girl. I think I can get past it. We’ll see what happens.” He smiles too big. You feel him glance in your direction. You don’t check to be sure. That feeling you used to get in the pit of your stomach is back. You turn the radio up loud to block out his humming.

Soon, you’re pulling onto the gravel path. Your grandparents are waiting by the cottage, huge grins, squeezing each other’s hands. So happy to see you. Alex parks the car and sprints to them, giving them a big hug. His smile doesn’t waver. The skip in his step seems real. You plaster a smile on your face and let your grandmother pinch your cheeks. You look at the girls’ cottage. Just darkness. Julie is not coming until tomorrow. You wonder how Katie is.

Grandma leads both of you in, talking nonstop about the pies she baked, the spread that’s waiting on the table. Alex kisses her cheek. “Thank God. I’m starving.”

“What about you?” she asks, looking past your smile like she always can. Like your dad always could. “Something?”

You nod and pick at a baked apple, normally a favorite. Alex wasn’t kidding about his need to eat. He inhales sandwiches, fruit, bread, soup. Your grandparents laugh, so pleased. But you know better. It’s only a matter of time until you find out. The apple sits in your stomach, and you can feel its skin, seeds, all of it, shaping itself whole again.

Katie

I
’ve spent three weeks just lying in bed with the shades drawn. When Babushka brings me food, she sits beside me while I eat but doesn’t ask any questions. After the first week, I ask her why she doesn’t. Doesn’t she want to know what really happened? She strokes my hair and tells me she knows. Knows me inside and out. I don’t have to tell her anything. So I save my voice for Alex, because I know he’ll want to know everything I can explain and can’t.

Week two, Babushka and I play cards, and I help her cook. In the evenings, I go down to the creek myself and throw stones. Week three, Dedushka says I still spend too much alone time. It’s isn’t good for me. So every morning, I wake before sunrise, put on sweatpants and flannels, and go berry-picking with him. We watch the sun rise together, pick more berries, and bring them home for Babushka. De-dushka tells me to listen to the animals while we pick, to listen to the creek, to the sun leaving the clouds. Dedushka tells me he hasn’t seen me swing, and the two of us walk to the swings and swing high. He tells me to listen to the swings—the higher I swing, the louder the swings will cheer.
Listen
, he keeps repeating. The way he says it, it’s like he knows there are other voices trying to break through. I do what he says. I spend my last week of solitude listening. And soon the voices are barely a whisper.

Julie

~
The Chickens
~

O
nly two days here, and already it’s chicken time! I feel my adrenaline pumping. The squawking gets louder as the pickup speeds over the gravel, sending bits of rock flying toward the cottages. I feel one scrape my cheek and wince. Dust gets in my eyes. I rub them and when I move my hands, Alex is by my side.

“Shit, what’s that?” He grabs hold of my chin and turns my face towards him. I try to pull away and he holds tighter. “That’s a nasty cut. You got peroxide?”

I’m shocked by his concern. “Uh, in the bathroom.” He follows me inside, and I hand him the bottle and cotton.

He soaks the cotton in peroxide and rubs it across my cheek. It stings and I jump. “Hold still,” he says, then rummages in the medicine cabinet for a Band-Aid. He puts it on my cheek, surprisingly gentle. “God,” he says, “what’s with the doe eyes? The gash was making me yak.”

I turn red. Not like I like him. Just nice of him, that’s all. And, yeah, he’s hot, but Kyle—even with the recent weirdness—is more my speed. Even if he wasn’t, Alex is Katie’s. Kyle tells me he thinks they’re going to work things out. So I guess, tainted or not, she’s still better than me.

“No one is making eyes at you,” I snap. “I just never saw this side of you before. Uh, what would you call it? Oh yeah. Human.”

“Whatever.” He’s already heading toward the lake house door. “We’re missing the chickens.”

I run after him, and we get out in time to see the knife cut through a feathered neck. My cheek throbs. This chicken doesn’t fly. It just flops straight to the ground. Alex shakes his head, disappointed.

“Right?” I say. “Like, where’s the show?”

I hear the faint sound of swings in the distance and know Katie and Kyle are on them. I hate that they’re together. I hate that they’re both so … so weak. No, just Katie. Not Kyle. I push the thought out of my head, but Alex grabs it.

“I guess we’re the ones with the balls.”

I try to sound tough. “If you don’t have balls, they walk all over you.”

“True dat.” He nods appreciatively and gives me a fist bump. We stare at each other a beat too long.

Screaming. People move back. Flailing legs knock over benches.

The squeak of swings stops.

“What the fuck?” shouts Alex, and I see that our clothes are splattered with blood.

The butcher is embarrassed. He apologizes to everyone. I notice it’s not Wilbur. His name tag reads
Brett
. Poor Brett. But he had to know “Bretts” are not made to kill chickens. To model shirts with a chicken logo, maybe, but not to kill them while wearing old, stinky overalls. Brett tells everyone they can get a chicken for half price and if they buy two, they’ll get a third free. Everyone still has blood on them, but the discount calms the masses.

“Shit. Way to ruin a good time.”

“Yeah, but I feel a little bad for him, you know? What are the odds he’ll be back again?”

Alex snorts. “Not my problem. Guy should know how to do his job.”

In the distance, the swings start up again. They seem to be louder and faster this time, working double to block out the noise from seconds ago.

The butcher picks up another chicken. This one’s brown with a little red dome. It flaps its wings while the man holds its legs. I look at Alex. He’s leaning forward, almost salivating. The chicken flaps harder and I feel sick. I want to be brave. Because Katie isn’t. Mama said the other day that I was strong. I had those kinds of eyes. She said she never had strong eyes. She said she never noticed it before, but Katie’s eyes are shaped like my father’s. I wondered whose eyes I have, then. It didn’t matter, though, because I have something Mama wanted.

Squeak, squeak, squeak. I picture the swing really high in the air. I wonder if I’d have the guts to jump off.

The knife slices clean. The wings stop flapping, and the chicken drops to the ground, not even a twitch.

“Bullshit,” mumbles Alex.

“Totally,” I say, but my heart is beating quickly and the sound of the swings is hurting my eardrums.

“What’s the matter with you? I think you’ve been spending too much time with Kyle.”

The ground spins. “Shut up.”

Alex laughs. He squeezes my knee. “Chicks. You’re all the same.”

But I’m not. I block out the noise of the swings. The squawks of the chickens. The clucking of the grandparents. Just focus my eyes on the knife as it slices through one throat after another. Chicken after chicken falls on the ground. I hate them all for not fighting back.

Katie

A
lex has been here three days and still no word. But I think we will talk tonight. I think he’s psyching himself up. And the chickens were here yesterday. He’s always in a better mood after the chickens.

I try to psyche myself up, too, to rehearse what I’ll say, but it’s hard to think. Especially with Julie’s blood-stained shirt lying at the foot of my bed. I don’t think it was an accident. It’s still here because I refuse to touch it. Last night I dreamt I slept in a grave of bloody carcasses. I couldn’t catch my breath, woke up sweating. The only comforting part of the dream was that the pit was warm.

It’s dark outside now, and I can feel him coming. Then I hear him. His familiar knock of “Shave and a Haircut” on the screen door. I whip open the door and run into his arms without thinking. It’s been so long. He doesn’t pull away. Not immediately. But then he’s rigid, like he just remembered this was a different girl than the one from summers past.

“We should talk,” he says, and takes my hand.

I nod too eagerly, so happy he’s still willing to hold my hand.

We walk to the creek in silence, and when we get there, he walks to the rocks and starts skimming them on the water. I don’t feel like joining in and prolonging the inevitable. “Talk,” I call over to him. My voice startles him and his rock falls into the water, creating a big splash. “Sorry,” I mumble. But not for him to hear, just for me to try out the word in my mouth again, to see if it means anything anymore, if it sounds any different from overuse.

He sits beside me on the grass and taps my toe with his. “Where do we go from here?”

I raise my chin to look at him, and there’s something different about his face that I can’t pinpoint. He looks exactly the same, but there’s a lip twitch that wasn’t there before, a darkening of the eyes … not necessarily sinister, more like a shadow, a blackness that covers what his eyes used to be, a curtain hiding the real Alex.

“I think that’s up to you, isn’t it?” I say.

He rips chunks of grass and throws them in the direction of the lake. “Why just me? There’s nothing you want to say?”

I feel heat in my toes. My fists clench. When I lay in the dark of the cottage, I thought of a million different ways I would apologize to him again. New ways to explain, but he didn’t want to hear any of it before.

“I’ll listen,” he says, as if reading my mind.

I take a deep breath and tell him everything. What Pyramid Girl Katie’s life was, the party, the alcohol, the bed, Ethan then Chris, how I thought I said no, the pain, the flashes.

He puts his hand up as a stop sign. Gets up, grabs a big rock, and throws it far into the creek. He punches a tree. He screams. “Fuck! You were drunk. They shouldn’t have done that when you were drunk. Fuck!” He mumbles to himself, like he’s struggling with the images. I get that. I still do. Then he stops, looks at me. “But I saw the video. You weren’t drunk in the video.”

I bite my lip, shake my head no. His eyes flash Jasmine hate. He turns away from me but doesn’t leave. Finally, he says, “Say everything you want to say.” But he still doesn’t turn around.

I tell him about how Chris wouldn’t leave me alone, what he kept doing, how I slept with him again to keep him away.

He puts his face in his hands. “You let me think … I thought … I waited … fucking A.” He paces. Throws another rock. His knuckles are bleeding, and I walk toward him. He’s not looking at me, but he hears me. “Don’t touch me right now,” he says. “Please.”

I sit back down and wait for him to tell me he’s ready to hear more.

“Go on.”

I say that the summer
after
saved me,
he
saved me, our first time was
real
,
he
—no one else—was the best I ever had. I hear his breath come our jagged. Is he crying? I can’t get up and look. I can’t see his eyes. I want to. I don’t.

“Go on.”

I tell him about that afternoon at my locker, how they showed me a video of that night, how they said they’d make it go away. How I followed them and did what they wanted and how they hurt me. How I did everything for us (or was it me?), how I had no idea they’d recorded everything again. How I didn’t, I didn’t, I
didn’t
like it.

There’s silence. He turns around. “The
first
time”—he counts off on his fingers—“you were out of your mind drunk. You slept with two of them. You probably said no, or tried to.”

He gets it. I’m relieved. “I did.”

“Just be quiet. The
second
time”—he raises two fingers—“you weren’t drunk, but you wanted one of them to go away, so you fucked him.”

I flinch. He looks at me like he wants confirmation. I nod slowly.

“And you don’t tell me about any of it. But you know what? I can almost get that. I fucked my share before that summer.”

He’s scaring me. This is not my summer boy. This isn’t the Alex/Sasha I think I know.

He walks closer to me, stops himself, and goes back to the tree again. “What I don’t get is that after you and I did it—after I do everything for you, things I never did for anyone else—after I give up all the bitches back home, you fuck the both of them
again
. You say you did that for
us
? Where was
I?
I don’t remember getting shit out of this.”

The tears are flowing down my cheeks and I gulp back more. I can’t see his eyes through my tears. “You hate me,” I whisper, and get up to leave. I hate me too.

“No.” He comes to me and pulls me toward him and kisses me deep, like he’s trying to get out anything I may not have told him, expose more than I let on. But there’s nothing else. He pulls away like he’s disgusted, with himself and me both. “I’ve tried but I can’t. What the hell does that say about me?”

“That means we have a chance. I can still fix it.”

His eyes are black. “It’s worth a shot.”

“Anything,” I say.

“I know the perfect spot,” he says, walking up the hill, toward the dumpsters. I shiver but I follow.

He pushes me down on the grass, and I pull him to me. He pulls at my hair. His hands grip my arms too tightly, and it hurts. I bite my lip to stop from screaming, and he pulls at my pants.

He rips my shirt and squeezes my breasts too tight. I know he knows he’s hurting me, but I say nothing and he doesn’t stop. The smell of rotted chicken carcasses seeps through the dumpsters and fills my nose, and I keep my mouth shut tight to stop myself from throwing up.

He pushes inside me, pounding, pushing my head against the cold dumpster. I try not to think about the pieces of chicken flesh coating it and bite my lip harder. When he’s done, he pulls up his pants and walks away.

We’re even now.