Wake (13 page)

“Actually—” She starts the blender and cuts me off.

The phone rings and Willa goes into the living room to answer it while the blender runs. Her side of the conversation is all yeses and nos, except for the “Hey Luke,” at the beginning. What the hell does he want now? He’s already got her involved in some project that has taken over the whole Kirk garage. And Willa doesn’t strike me as the kind of girl to like construction—I bet she has an ulterior motive for helping him.

While she’s on the phone I take bowls and spoons out for serving. It’s a short call , and when she hangs up the first thing she says is, “Let’s eat.”

I grab the blender handle to pour the soup into bowls. The heat of the glass takes me by surprise and I drop it with a curse. Steaming hot soup spills down the front of my shirt and all over the counter.

“Shit!”

Willa grabs me by the arm and tows me down the hall into the laundry room. “Take your shirt off, I’ll wash it right away.” It’s so uncomfortably hot that I pull it over my head without protest and hand it to her.

She tosses it in the washbasin and runs hot water over it. Most of the soup comes off, but there’s a big orange stain that she covers with spray-on stain remover. Mom is going to give me hell for ruining a new shirt.

“Are you burnt?” Willa looks over at me for the first time and her eyes settle on the middle of my chest. I look down. The outline of my Hickman is visible through my undershirt. I turn my back to her and stupidly clap a hand over it, as though hiding works retroactively.

Willa leaves the basin and goes to one of the baskets of folded laundry. “Here.” She passes a faded polo over my shoulder. “It’s my brother’s. It might not fit, but…”

“Thanks.” I pull it over my head. As I’m buttoning it up to the col ar Willa leans close to my shoulder and whispers, “I don’t think it’s weird or disgusting.”

Shoot me. I leave the laundry room without a word and start to clean up the orange puddle on the kitchen floor. Lunch is ruined, but Willa dismisses it readily. “Second shelf of the fridge,” she says, and waves me away from the kitchen so she can mop the worst of it up. When I try to help she banishes me to the table and reiterates her statement about the fridge. When I open the door I find little Tupperwares of green Jel -O stacked and waiting.

“Kirk…”

“Just shut up and eat. You need to keep your energy up.” I hate being reminded how fragile I am.

Nonetheless, I take a cup of Jel -O and sit down to eat it.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

*

Willa’s project with Luke involves framing a greenhouse. Frank has been looking into reasonably priced glass for the walls and ceiling. The plan is to erect it in her grandma’s garden. It’s not Luke’s project after all, but the fact that he’s involved still makes me suspicious.

“So is Luke helping to be a kiss-ass?”

“He likes building things. He gave my car a tune-up when I bought it.”

“Have you ever thought about saving up to buy a car that was built in this decade?”

“Cars today aren’t built to last,” she says. “Sales are leases in disguise. That car is older than your sister and it runs like a dream.”

“A really slow, loud dream with low fuel economy?”

She mutters something under her breath that sounds rude and shoves a notebook and pen into my hands. “Make sure we’re following he blueprint.”

We go up and down the loose beams, verifying that she’s measured all her markings correctly. All that’s left to do it screw it together. Her brother doesn’t have an electric dril , so Willa has to do it by hand. Every hour or so she gets up and comes back with another Jel -O cup.

“I’m not going to pass out,” I assure her the third time she does it. “It’s not like I’m diabetic or anything.”

“You know you’ll get sick less if you graze.” I have nothing to say to that, so I just eat the Jel -O and pass her screws. It takes us three hours to get one side of the greenhouse framed. Willa plans to store it in the shed out back, to make room to frame the other walls on the garage floor.

We have to move some stuff around in the shed to make room for the frame. The shed smells like stale fishing tackle and wet wood. It’s not insulated, with just plywood walls and a sheet metal roof.

We’ve just got all the stuff put away when the sky opens and hail starts pouring down.

“Aw, hell,” Willa says. We stand back from the door and wait for the storm to let up before venturing back across the lawn. It can’t hold out long at this rate. The shed is too musty to close the door so we leave it open and watch the hail fall .

Willa leans her shoulder against the shelf and begins to twist her hair around her finger absentmindedly. “At least it’s not as bad as Newfoundland,” she says.

“Are you and Luke a thing?”

Dude, you really need to work on delivery of extremely dumb questions.

Willa looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Inappropriate question.”

“Fine. He just seems a little young, is all.” She doesn’t say anything. I can’t stand the silence. “What is he, sixteen?”

“What kind of cancer did you have?”

“Brain tumor.”

She laughs in my face. “You are so full of shit.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“You are a liar.”

“Why would I lie about that?”

“You are lying.” She grabs my wrist and shakes my hand between us like a puppet. “Those scars on your hands are from graft-versus-host.”

I yank my hand away from her and pull my cuffs down over my palms. “What are you, a doctor?”

“You had some kind of transplant, and it wasn’t for a new brain. That might have helped though, come to think of it.”

“Go to hell.”

“Shouldn’t have lied about it.” When is this hail going to let up? “And no,” she says calmly, “Luke and I are not a thing. Our families are very close.” Oh, how I hate her. I hate her smirk and the way she looks at my hands like she knows something. I hate it that she won’t let me lie to her and I hate how exposed she can make me feel without giving away any of her own insecurities in return.

“Did your sister die of cancer? Or did she kill herself when it became inevitable?”

Willa looks at me with haunted eyes and doesn’t say anything. After a minute she doesn’t seem so haunted anymore—it feels more like she can see right through me and all the bullshit that surrounds this messed up situation.

“Thought about that, have you?” she murmurs. “Pills or rope? Or do your parents have a gun? Were you going to asphyxiate in that nice car your dad drives? It would take awhile, in that big three-car garage. Wrist-cutting is too dramatic, even for you.” She says all this in a slow whisper like she’s lulling a child to sleep on promises of sweet dreams. “No,” she says. “You were never going to kill yourself; you don’t have it in you.”

I feel like I’m about five inches tall and naked in front of a crowd. How dare she pretend that she knows me? Why can’t she just tell me to piss off when I’m an asshole, like a normal person would, instead of pushing back and digging into painful places?

“You don’t know a goddamn thing,” I whisper back.

She smirks sadly. “Pills were your first choice. Your mom’s an insomniac. She told me. You were going to attempt suicide like a woman so someone could have time to find you and rescue you and fawn over you some more.”

I shove her back against the shelves in a knee-jerk reaction. Willa goes limp and absorbs the blow with her shoulders. I shouldn’t have done that.

She rights herself and rolls her shoulders to stretch. “Did you have a cancer with a low cure rate? Let me guess: lymphoma.”

“Will you stop asking me about what I had?” I say through clenched teeth. The hail has slowed to a sporadic patter. I can’t stand to be in here anymore, so I march across the lawn to get away from her.

The back door leads to the kitchen, and once there I stop and debate whether I should stay and fight with her some more. She can’t just say shit like that and get away with it.

Willa stops in the threshold of the back door and watches me with a grim expression. “Just tell me.”

“It’s irrelevant, Kirk,” I growl at her. “I don’t have it anymore.”

Willa folds her arms over her chest and shakes her head slowly. “It’s not irrelevant. It’s still killing you faster than I ever could.” Hearing that makes me feel cold in an entirely unpleasant way. It’s the fear of imminent death, creeping back from its recent dormancy.

“Do you ever say anything that isn’t total bullshit?”

“Why does it bother you so much that I want to know what kind of cancer you had? How come you never want to talk about it?”

“Because!” She’s pissed me off to bad I can’t help but shout. Raising my voice is the only way I can keep myself from tearing her head off. “It’s the most obvious fucking thing about me! It’s what everybody notices! I was a
person
before, God damn it, not a fucking diagnosis! I don’t want you to have any details because I don’t want you to think of me in terms of my illness! Do you know how humiliating it is to be reduced to numbers and labels and a fucking progress chart, taking poison for medicine and feeling like shit all the time?”

I kick the nearest thing—a dining chair—and it goes flying across the kitchen tiles. Willa jumps back to avoid it.

“You think it’s a big joke, making light every time I puke in class or miss lectures to crash in the nurse’s office. Fuck you. You have no idea what I put up with, and on top of it there’s your stupid questions and remarks about how I look and you think you know everything about me. You don’t know a
single thing,
Kirk. You’re such a—!” There is no word for how much I hate her right now. I abandon the search for the right insult and yell ‘Fuck you!’ at her.

I turn on my heel and march out through the living room. It’s drizzling again as I cross the driveway and slide into the car. Jesus, my stomach hurts. It’s knotted up with stress and my hands are shaking as I try to put the key in the ignition slot. I drop the key in the dark around my feet.

“Shit.”

The passenger door opens and Willa slips into the seat beside me.
What else you got?
her face says.

Nothing. I have nothing left. You’ve taken it all.

I have no more energy left to fight her. I spent it all in the shed and kitchen and now I’m just sore and miserable and want nothing more than to crawl away to lick my wounds.

My head falls forward until my forehead rests on the steering wheel. My stomach hurts. My head hurts. I can’t believe I said those things to her. Why did I kick her furniture like a kid throwing a fit? How could I have asked that about her dead sister? What the hell is wrong with her that she comes back for more abuse?

This is possibly the most ashamed I have ever felt in my entire life. I curl my arms up around the steering wheel and dash, surrounding my throbbing head.

I feel Willa’s hand on my back. “Come inside,” she says. “You shouldn’t drive when you’re this upset.”

“I’m fine.” I slowly straighten up. I am
so
not fine.

“If you’re leaving, I’m coming with you,” she states calmly. “Or you can stay here a while longer. Come inside. I’ll make us tea. We can talk.”

Her hand is still on my back. “Please don’t touch me.” She takes her hand away. The moment it’s gone I almost wish I had it back. Almost.

I open the door and step out. “I’m sorry—about your sister.”

Willa laughs and closes the car door. “She would have hated you.”

“Do you?”

“You’re growing on me.”

*

I warm my hands around my mug while Willa puts the milk back in the fridge. I’ve straightened up her kitchen and apologized for kicking the chair. She accepted it graciously. Willa is being nice for once.

She brings her mug to the kitchen table and takes the seat adjacent to mine. She sits in it sideways, facing me, and moves her hand gently around the back of my col ar.

“Y’know,” she says contemplatively, “you’re sort of beautiful, even when you’re upset.”

She takes her hand away and I mumble an excuse about needing to use the bathroom. Once removed from her, shut up in that private little room, I hang my head in my hands and wonder how the hell I got into this mess.

I regularly fight with my only friend. Everyone wonders why she bothers to hang out with me. She must wonder, too. It’s only a matter of time before she begins to dodge me.

You’ve got a thing for her, you know. It wouldn’t matter so much, otherwise.

Hell, if Elwood was the one hanging out with her every weekend he’d have her on the couch downstairs by now, breathless from making out and her clothes stretched out of shape from being groped.

But does she want to be treated that way?

It’s a nice mental picture…of her, anyway.

And me? What do I do? I pick a fight with her and then insult her dead sister. In theory, I wouldn’t even do that to someone I really hated. (No, not even Elwood.) Willa opens the bathroom door and I lift my head out of my hands. “Can’t you knock?”

“Knock knock.”

“Jesus, Kirk.” I hang my head again and pray for the strength to deal with her ridiculous bullshit.

“Knock knock,” she repeats more insistently.

“Who’s there?”

“You look like you need a hug.”

“That’s not a joke.”

She comes in and takes a seat next to me on the edge of the tub. This is starting to feel like an intervention.

“I wasn’t going to kill myself.”

She wraps an arm around my back. “I know. I said I knew you didn’t have it in you.”

“You make it sound like a weakness.”

Willa chuckles darkly. “I think you’ve got more optimism in you than you let on. You wouldn’t give up on something unless it was really and truly hopeless—but that doesn’t mean you didn’t think about it.”

“Don’t pretend you know me.”

She smiles to herself like that’s funny. “I don’t know why Paige thinks you’re hard to read. Everything you think shows in your hands.” She pokes my third knuckle. “Must be because you’re a musician.”