Vengeance (5 page)

I slammed the car door and marched up the front steps, not even looking at her.

She held her phone out between us, like a shield. “Kevin called me,” she said.

“Kevin called you,” I said slowly. So much for him understanding me. “Did he also tell you I wanted to be alone?” I ran a hand through my hair. Looked at her nails, which were cut extra short. At her jean shorts, which were probably pants at some point, because they were frayed at the bottom. At her white tank top, which was loose and had buttons, but the top
ones were undone. Her hair was twisted off her neck, held up by a clip.

“No, he just … He said you left and he wanted me to know and I said I’d make sure you were okay, because he was worried. So here I am.”

I brushed past her, up the front steps, not looking at her face. Opened the front door, felt the blast of cold air through my undershirt. Saw Delaney’s long legs still standing on my front porch while I was sweltering in black dress pants. “Why are you dressed like that?” Accusations layered under accusations.

She looked down at her outfit, like she was confused. “Because it’s nine thousand degrees?”

“Why weren’t you there?” And when she didn’t respond, didn’t even let the air out of her lungs, I said, louder, “Even
Maya
was there.” Which had nothing to do with Delaney at all, and she knew it. What I really meant was that Delaney had done more for Maya than she’d done for me. That Maya wouldn’t know any of us yet if it hadn’t been for Delaney twisting her frown into a lie, saying, “Welcome to town,” when Maya stood in her backyard, watching us, watching her house. Everything for a stranger who had a parent who was about to die. Nothing for me. I gritted my teeth and asked her again. Demanding she tell me.
“Why?”

“So you could yell at me? So you could kick me out of a room again?”

“It was my father’s funeral.”

“You made it perfectly clear that you didn’t want me—”

“How the hell do you know what I want?”

I felt her pause. Everything pause. “Do you want me to
come in?” she asked, and everything shifted in her face. It was painful, how much I could hear in her question. Questions layered under questions.

I didn’t answer. I wanted part of her to come in, I wanted to scream at a different part of her. She stepped onto the hardwood, barefoot, like she had been the night he died. Her toenails were still purple. Too close.

I put a hand up. Tried to think. Tried to clear the anger. Tried to remember all the fights we’d had, and recovered from, our entire lives. “You were right not to come,” I said. I would’ve done to her what Janna had done to her at her brother’s funeral. I would’ve blamed her. I would’ve hated her.

“I need some space,” I said. An empty house. An empty head. I needed not to think of her, I needed to have a memory without her in it.

I saw her spin on her toes, turning to leave. She put her hands on the doorjamb and paused for a second. “I need to tell you something,” she said.

I wanted silence. An empty house. I didn’t want to hear her. I couldn’t even look at her. She didn’t get to stand here in cute summer clothes while I was at my dad’s service. She didn’t get to stand here trying to make things right when she’d completely betrayed me. She didn’t get to stand here at all.

“No. No, you don’t. You
needed
to tell me something.
Before
. Right now, you need to get the hell out of my house before I throw something against the wall.”

She didn’t look at me. She walked away. No, she ran.

She ran with a hand over her mouth, and she slammed
the front door of her house, and it took me a second to realize what had just happened. She had asked to come in. I had said no. No, I had just threatened to throw something at the wall.

We weren’t arguing. We’d spent half our lives arguing about everything and nothing—I loved it, and I’m pretty sure she did, too. But I’d never told her she couldn’t come in. I’d never threatened to throw something against the wall. We weren’t arguing now.

We were done.

I took a blue vase off the mantel above the fireplace—it was a gift from my father to my mother, years ago. It held flowers back then. The flowers died, but she kept the vase. I turned it over, tossed it up in the air like a baseball, caught it against the palm of my hand. Then I pulled back my arm and hurled it against the wall.

Honestly, I felt a little better.

I heard Delaney leave for work the next morning. I stood at my bedroom window, and she didn’t even look up. Didn’t even pause in the driveway before opening her dad’s car door. I was in my room where time had stopped, but she kept moving. Everyone kept moving. I didn’t go to work. Didn’t call in to explain or ask for time off or anything. I just stopped going. There were only two weeks left until school started anyway.

Delaney kept going, every morning. I heard her car door close, every morning, at the same time, a second after her father’s. I saw Maya eating dinner at her house, night after
night. I saw them sitting on the porch swing together after, Maya’s voice carrying across the yard while Delaney rocked in silence. In the beginning of the summer, when I had been not so subtle about wanting more time with just Delaney, and less with Maya, Delaney told me to cut her some slack. Her brother was spending half his time in Portland, where they moved from. Her mother needed full-time care. Delaney said Maya needed someone.

Joanne, for once, took my side. “What happens after?” she’d asked Delaney. “Where’s her dad? Where will she go?” But Delaney said she wasn’t about to bring that up, and Joanne kept making the poor girl—her words, not mine—food and sending the leftovers home for her mom.

Funny how I’d been so scared of losing her.

I’d spent six days in the hospital with Delaney, waiting for her to wake up.

I’d spent eight months after, scared she’d disappear.

But in the end, I was the one who told her to go. She listened. And she went to work, on time, the very next day.

I hadn’t left the house in nearly two weeks, and I was not looking forward to setting my alarm tomorrow and going to school, pretending everything was normal.

“Decker?” my mom called from somewhere in the house.

“Yeah,” I said. She didn’t let me stay in my room all day. Not after the first week. I wandered down the stairs and fell onto the sofa, remote in hand.

She was searching through the drawers in the foyer. “Getting out of the house today?”

“School starts tomorrow. I’ll be out of the house all the time.”

She sighed. “I’m leaving,” she said, pulling her hair back into a ponytail.

These are the things that are supposed to happen on Labor Day—the things that happened last year and the year before that: One, Main Street gets blocked off and people hand out free food and paint kids’ faces and Delaney and I share a whole pizza before noon, because it’s free, but only before noon. Two, we meet up with our friends and Tara’s grandmother tells fortunes, and we all crowd around, listening to what she says about the lines in our hands and the rings in our eyes. Three, we go to Justin’s lake house to celebrate the end of summer. Which in hindsight makes no sense anyway.

“You sure you’re not going out?”

“Yep,” I said. One, I wasn’t hungry. Two, I didn’t want to hear any more lies about my future. Three, Maya’s family had moved into Justin’s lake house over the summer. Permanently.

And four, it was the first time I’d had the house to myself.

After the funeral, we had visitors come visit us and mourners come mourn with us. And now our fridge was full of food and Mom was antsy to leave and I was antsy to get my house back.

“Okay,” she said, smoothing back the sides of her hair again. “If you change your mind, I’ll be at the Graysons’. Otherwise, I’ll bring you back some dinner.” The Graysons were my
parents’ best friends. My dad worked with them both, which meant they were probably all going over paperwork with my mom. Wills or what ever. No thanks.

I turned on the television the second she was out the door. My phone buzzed sometime around lunch, but it was on the other side of the couch. I’d have to get up. Then it rang—I could see Kevin’s name glowing from the display. I focused back on the television, but this red banner scrolled across the bottom, a weather alert, ruining the movie. It cut off the gun in some guy’s hand, so I couldn’t tell where it was pointed.

Flash flood warning
. I looked out the window. Not a cloud in the sky. Liars.

The doorbell rang, followed by persistent knocking before I’d even have time to get to the door, which I wasn’t doing. But that’s how I knew it was Kevin. Then his face was in the living room window, hands cupped around his eyes as he squinted. He saw me looking and waved vigorously, ignoring the fact that I was obviously ignoring him.

I opened the front door and he ran his fingers through his even-shorter-than-normal hair. “So,” he said. “Funny story.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I heard you’re not talking to Delaney.”

Yes, because that was the most important thing to happen recently. “What did she—”

“Maya told me.”

I rolled my eyes before I could stop myself. I mean, I get what Kevin saw. What every guy saw. And I got what Delaney saw—what she felt—as we drove by and saw a girl unloading the back of a car, balancing a crate on her hip as she walked
into Justin’s lake house. Delaney had been worried it was her—we had to get closer to be sure. We had to get too close to be sure. Close enough to see the guy carrying a wheelchair over his head as he walked up the makeshift ramp that hadn’t been there the week before. Close enough for Maya to see us watching.

But their whole friendship was based on a lie: that Delaney was friendly, when really she’d just been drawn to her house. And to me, Maya was just another reminder of what I’d done to Delaney.

Part of me thought Delaney liked having her around, despite what she said, because Maya didn’t know anything about her. Didn’t know the history here, never knew Carson or Troy. Never understood why everyone, except me, kept a little distance.

“Is it because she didn’t show at the funeral?” Kevin asked. “Because, not that I’m going Team Delaney or anything, but she doesn’t have the best history with funerals. …” The last funeral she’d been to, Janna had jabbed a finger at her chest and blamed her for Carson’s death. In front of everyone. Nobody stood up for her. Nobody told Janna to stop. Not even me.

I cringed just thinking about it.

“Nope,” I said, swinging the door closed.

Kevin jammed his foot against the door frame to block the door as I was swinging it shut. “Funnier story,” he said. “Janna’s back.” He seized on the fact that I’d paused. “So. We’re going to Justin’s. I’m here to kidnap you. It will be easier if you don’t resist.”

Kevin would follow through. He would drag me there.
He’d think it was hilarious. If he wanted to, he’d win. I could probably take Justin. I used to be able to take Carson. I couldn’t take Kevin. I learned that lesson in eighth grade when he held my face in the mud after I told his then-girlfriend about his other then-girlfriend. I’d since learned to keep my mouth shut in all things related to Kevin and girlfriends.

I’d also learned not to resist when he tells me not to. So I didn’t.

There wasn’t any history in Justin’s basement. Not like at his lake house. Here, we couldn’t see the lake or the trees. We couldn’t look at all the places Carson should’ve been. We couldn’t see the ghost of him running through the kitchen and straight out the back door, cannonballing into the freezing water.

Janna stood up from the couch when I reached the bottom of the stairs. She was tan. Skinny. Her blond curly hair was longer, past her shoulders now. So not like I remembered her, as Carson’s shadow. I walked over and gave her a one-armed hug. “Hey,” I said. “How was Arizona?”

“Hot,” she said. “Oh, and turns out my brother’s dead there, too.”

She fell back onto the cushions and cut her eyes away from me. “Heard about your dad. Sucks.”

“Yeah,” I said. I liked the way she talked about death. Like you could be mad at it.

“You guys back for good?” I asked. Their house had sat
empty—deserted—since February. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if she was gone for a while or gone for good.

“Me and my mom, anyway.” She tapped her foot on the coffee table.

Tara strode over to the couch and leaned down to give Janna a hug. “I missed you,” she said. Then, to me, “You okay?”

Then Janna scanned the room—we were all there: Kevin, Justin, Tara, me. Everyone except Carson. And …

“Where’s Delaney?” she asked.

“He dumped her,” Tara said.

Janna tilted her head to me. Raised her eyebrows.

“Sitting right here, Tara,” I said. Like that made any difference to her. “Any more gossip you’d like to fill us in on?
Oh
. Kevin and Tara were together until he dumped her for the girl living in the lake house.”

There was a moment of silence—I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d mentioned the lake, or the house, or just the fact that I was being an ass to Tara.

“Screw you, Decker,” she said. She got up, then looked over her shoulder. “And he didn’t dump me.” But she had to whisper it since Kevin was on the other side of the room and he did, actually, dump her. I was there. I didn’t hear what he said, but I heard Tara say, “You’re such a dick,” and saw her walk away.

I mouthed the words,
He totally dumped her
, at Janna.

“God, I missed you guys,” she said. Guess she didn’t remember not calling. Not answering her phone. Not telling anyone she was leaving a month after Carson’s funeral. She looked
around the room, at all the places she didn’t see him. I did the same thing. Last year at our Labor Day party, he’d said, “
This’ll be the best year ever
.” And then Delaney almost died. Carson did die. So did Troy. So did my dad. I thought of Delaney’s bullshit statistics.

“I want to do something,” Janna said. “For Carson.”

I pretended I hadn’t heard. Was that what happened? You got over someone’s death and held some memorial and then you moved on?