Twisted Fate (13 page)

I want her to come up to my room and sit and talk. I want to make plans with her about what we’re going to do.

Just knowing her makes me feel like I can go back to school. At least there would be a reason to be there. To pass her in the halls or maybe have a class with her.

She’s the most interesting person I think I have ever met. I loved talking to her in the car and I loved talking to her after when I brought her home. I love all her different expressions and the way she talks.

I’ve never known anyone with such a direct yet hidden way of being.

I want to uncover all of it. If she has any secrets. I want her to tell them to me.

Like I tell her mine.

I want to know how she became the girl she is.

I
think the thing I loved about her most, the thing I miss most now, is how funny she was. How daring. How she would make me do things I didn’t think I could do. She was the one who wanted to go on the roller coaster. She was the one who insisted Daddy take us out on the boat that first time when we were still so small and she was not afraid to be out there.

When we were little she had such a funny way of getting me to do things. If I worried that she was climbing too high in the pine trees she would tell me to come up with her.

“C’mon, you be the prince and climb up my long hair,” she’d say, hanging by her knees from a branch and letting her hair hang down. And once she got me to get into the low branches she always looked so happy and would make up stories about how we were explorers. Soon I’d be
so drawn into what she was saying I wouldn’t notice how high we were.

I remember one time we were so high—up in the narrow branches near the thin trunk at the top of a pine—and I could feel the treetop swaying beneath our weight. I started to get scared but Syd laughed. She couldn’t have been happier that we were all the way up there. She couldn’t have been more relaxed. If something was frightening, if it was hard, it was like she actually got more relaxed.

“It’s not going to break!” she shouted to me. “It’s going to bend with our weight. It’s going to hold us.” And she began swaying back and forth—we were up so high we could look down on other trees and on the top of our house and she had not a moment of fear that our feet would slip.

“Calm down,” she said, and I did. I let myself sway in the treetop and look out at the blue sky and the rooftops and I didn’t care about the sticky pine tar on my hands.

Those are the moments when I realize how much she gave me. If only I hadn’t thought she was trying to push me away.

I
watched from the window as Ally stepped out of the Austin in Graham’s driveway. There she was like a princess being brought home by
literally
“the boy next door.” After the talk with Richards, this made me more sad than mad. But I was beginning to get mad anyway. I bet the main reason Ally decided she liked Graham is because he actually
is
the boy next door and that fits so well with her tiny-town-blueberry-picking-goody-goody way she decided she had to add him to the list of clichés that she lives by.

I would also be more angry at her if not for the fact that I had to protect her. It was weird the way Graham talked about Eric; he seemed to want Ally to be his new best friend, his new Eric, and he wanted me to take his drugs. She just wouldn’t see that there was anything shady about Graham. Even if it was becoming plainer to other people. That this is one more way her trust in all people being good will get
her into trouble. How on earth could she have had
me
for a sister for all these years and still think all people are good?

I slipped down the back stairs as Ally entered the house, and ran across the driveway into the bushes outside Graham’s garage and watched him. He was standing by the car, looking kind of dazed with this grin on his face. His hair looked windblown and I could tell they had been making out. I was sure he had driven her out to the beach and she had told him stories about how our parents used to take us there when we were little or how our dad built all the beautiful old ships you see at the yacht club. I was sure she gave him our whole life story—her version of it.

The idea of her being so trusting to this weirdo, who moved from the south and who for some reason has been out of school under some questionable circumstances, circumstances that he’d maybe even been arrested for or his parents had been sued for, shocked even me. Ally had always been very selective about the boys she dated. The only thing I could think is that: A) this guy’s looks had gone to her head, B) she had found some way to irritate me beyond telling on me when I smoked and complaining about my music, or C) Graham was a master at manipulating trusting girls. I decided it was probably all three and then walked around the hedge and into the garage. He was startled to see me.

“Stay away from my sister,” I said.

“Whoa.
What?
”

“You heard me. I said, stay the fuck away from my
sister. Or you will pay for it.”

His face fell. “Hey . . . uh . . . are you
okay
?”

“I’m fine. You’re the one who’s not going to be okay.”

He took a step toward me. Touched my arm—and looked at me with his pale-blue eyes; pale, blue, screwed-up eyes—the pupils wide and black from all the shit he was taking. Some weird cocktail that made him hyper-focused, not afraid of anything, and never upset. I thought, That’s just the kind of cocktail that’s a recipe for disaster. And weed is illegal? Seriously? Something’s not right in this world.

“Take it easy,” he said. He ran his hand down my arm and then took my hand in his. I was about to pull away. I couldn’t believe the nerve he had.

“You better—”

“Shhh,” he said, putting one finger against my lips. I glared at him, but he pulled me closer to him. “I like you.”

Then before I could say anything he leaned down and kissed me quickly on the mouth. I pushed him away and he just laughed. I stared at him, trying to figure out just why he thought he could get away with this. Who the hell did he think he was? I looked into his relaxed face and thought again about what Richards said about always being tough and I thought again that I’d like to try whatever he was on. Pills weren’t my drug of choice but he was clearly having some kind of wonderful time just being himself.

“C’mon,” Graham said. “Let me kiss you again. I really do like you. Even when you’re like this.”

Maybe I would let him kiss me again, I thought. Maybe that was the best way to find out who he really was and what he had going on. Maybe I liked it. And that’s the hardest part to admit now. That maybe, in spite of everything my head told me, every creepy feeling I had about the whole situation, everything I knew about Ally falling in love with him . . . maybe, just maybe, I liked it.

I felt like that for maybe a week.

And then it all came crashing down.

Y
eah,” he said. “I don’t think he’s right either. I spent the whole day dragging him around the halls and he acted like . . . I don’t know, some kind of smarmy spaced-out aristocrat. You know what I’m saying?”

“I do!” I told him. “I totally do! Becky and these girls at school seem to think he’s some artist heartthrob Abercrombie model. Bitches be crazy.”

“Yeah, well, the boy’s hot,” he said. “I’ll give him that. But yeah. He’s weird, and I don’t mean weird like you.”

“Hey!” I laughed and he put his arm around me. We were taking the back way home, meandering past the harbor and seeing the tall masts stately rocking in the distance. Walking out to the old pier, the one totally abandoned because the foundation was so badly eroded. The place was a briny brackish barnacle-covered part of the town that time forgot and I loved to walk there with
Declan—it was solitary and nostalgic and felt a little dangerous.

“He is hot,” I said. “But not hot like you.”

He gave my side a little squeeze. “Let’s go to the old playground.”

“Yeah. Let’s do it,” I said. We would go to the town hall playground and swing until nearly dusk and when everyone had gone home for dinner we would climb into the sprawling wooden jungle gym that looked like a castle. There were actually little rooms in there. And we would sit and get high and talk and do anything we wanted. After being interrupted by Ally, I was dying to touch him again. Feel his warm skin and his hard muscles.

We put our boards down and skated so we could get there faster.

Coasting from a distance we could see Graham’s car parked across the street from the swing set.

As we approached the park, we could see him sitting there, wearing a red baseball cap, his messy blond hair hanging out beneath it. At first it looked like he was alone, but as we got closer we could see he was talking to a little kid—a boy maybe ten years old who was wearing an Iron Man T-shirt, a blue Windbreaker, and jeans.

“Sweet shirt that little dude has,” Declan said. “I wonder where he got it.”

“From his parents, duh. It’s not like he can drive himself to the mall.”

Declan laughed. “Does Graham have a little brother?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He strikes me as the ultimate only child.”

“Takes one to know one,” Declan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Just kidding, Tate. Wait. Hang on . . . shhh.”

We picked up our boards and tiptoed quietly to the edge of the trees that flanked the swings and jungle gym. Graham hadn’t noticed us and if the kid did he didn’t think much of it.

We walked through the trees and stood silently listening.

“Oh yeah?” Graham was saying. “I had no idea. I always thought that Wolverine got bit by a wolf or something to get his powers.”

Even from far away you could see the kid give him a little condescending smirk when he said it. The kid’s voice was high-pitched and he talked some more while Graham nodded his head, listening.

“Spider-Man,” Graham said. “You know, ’cause of the web shooting. He’s pretty much a regular guy, lives with his aunt and all that. I think he’s the best. When do you usually get out of school?”

The boy told him and Graham took out a little notebook. The same one he’d used when talking to Becky. At that point Declan and I looked at each other and slunk out from behind the trees.

“’Sup, G?” Declan asked him.

“Oh, hey guys.” Graham seemed completely relaxed. “This is my friend Brian. He’s a mutant with a metal-alloy skeleton who fights crime.”

I was worried for one minute that Graham would act all weird because of what happened in his garage, but there was nothing strange between the two of us at all. He was focused completely on Brian.

The kid laughed and looked happy when Graham said it. He was obviously proud to be talking to a big kid and thrilled to have an audience for his information about the X-Men. I noticed that he was wearing a necklace. A cord with a piece of sea glass at the end of it. The letter
W
drawn on the glass with Sharpie marker. Becky’s handiwork, of course. Pretty soon the whole town would be covered in sea glass jewelry and running on apps built by one adorable little stoner with a nose ring.

“Hey, Brian,” we said.

He waved at us even though we were two feet away from him.