Upstairs, the sobbing had calmed. Barely audible sniffles were all we could hear between Cindy’s empathetic murmurs and her daughter’s muffled replies. Caleb chortled at another of Charles’s opinions concerning Carlie’s ex – who would be wise to never show his face near the Heller men again if he wanted to keep his nuts intact.
Carrying my plate to the sink, I crushed the envy I wasn’t entitled to feel with the only weapon on hand – my shame.
You’re the man of the house while I’m gone. Take care of your mother.
I’ve never faulted anyone for wanting to be part of a group. Just because I shied away from frats and other campus organizations – exception: those with career-geek networking potential – didn’t mean other people felt the same, and that was fine.
Still, some people on this campus couldn’t seem to dress themselves in the morning without their Greek affiliation stitched or glued on to some article of clothing. The girl speaking with Kennedy Moore before class was one of these. She was doll pretty – but every time I’d seen her, she wore a T-shirt, sweatpants, shorts, jacket or shoes with the letters of her sorority prominently displayed. Sure enough, today was a lettered baseball cap with a sleek ponytail pulled through the back.
She leaned in to say something to him, laying a hand on his forearm, and he cast a glance over nearby socializing classmates. His gaze glided right past me – and everyone else, so I assumed he was looking for Jackie. He caught sight of her just after I did. Back to him, she was laughing with a friend across the hall, out of earshot.
He removed ZTA girl’s hand from his arm but held on to it a degree past appropriate. I’d seen this girl talking to Jackie before. Maybe they weren’t close friends – but she had to know that what she was doing was out of line. As I came closer, their conversation became audible.
‘Come on, Ivy,’ Moore said, glancing towards Jackie again, ‘you know I have a girlfriend.’ There was a note of regret in his voice. Regret. Son of a bitch.
The girl flicked a sidelong glance towards Jackie and back, too, before batting her eyes at him. ‘I wish you didn’t.’
As little as I thought of the guy and as much as I didn’t believe he was worthy of the girl I couldn’t get out of my head, I hoped he’d surprise me and say something to explicitly dismiss this girl’s ill-mannered wish.
But no. His eyes grazing over her head to toe, he murmured, ‘You know you’re too sweet for me. I can be kind of a dick.’
Her eyes sparked. ‘Mmm. Promise?’
I turned sharply into the classroom and dropped my backpack on the floor. Not my business. I clenched and unclenched fists that wanted to pummel him. How could that lucky bastard have a girl like Jackie committed to him and see anyone else, let alone entertain that kind of suggestion?
Five minutes later, he and Jackie entered the classroom together, his hand at her lower back as they moved down the steps towards their seats. Ivy slid into her chair a dozen seats away and a row up from them, her gaze lingering on Moore. When Jackie twisted to grab her textbook, he turned to smile over his shoulder. Ivy’s expression altered to a quick, saccharine smile when their eyes connected.
I returned my stare to the sketchbook on the desktop in front of me, pulling the pencil from behind my ear. Shading the illustration of a guy I’d seen skateboarding up the drag this morning, I made every effort to convince myself of the thing I knew to be true: Jackie Wallace’s heart was not mine to defend or protect against treacherous friends or disloyal boyfriends. Nothing about her, in fact, was my business.
I flipped a few pages back to the second drawing I’d allowed myself to do of her, during my rainy-day filing shift. Hearing her soft thank you in my head all morning, recalling her smile, I hadn’t been able to banish her face from my brain until I consigned her to paper. Even then, I couldn’t forget her bright blue gaze, so close, or the friendly expression I seldom got from any student when wearing that goddamned uniform.
I turned back to the unfinished skateboarder, but minutes later, made the mistake of glancing down the slope of desks to where she sat three days a week, unaware that I watched her. Unaware of my continual internal battle not to. Unaware of me.
Her fingers stroked metrically across the side of her leg – one-two-three, one-two-three – and I imagined that if I was the one sitting next to her, I’d open my palm and let her trace the music she heard on to my skin.
Then Moore reached over and placed his hand over hers, stilling her. Stop, he mouthed. Sorry, she mouthed back, self-conscious and curling her hand into her lap.
My teeth clamped together and I concentrated on breathing slowly through my nose. Stupid, stupid bastard. It was good I had a sparring session scheduled at the dojang tonight. I needed to hit something. Hard.
5
Landon
The fact that my grandfather and my dad didn’t get each other was weird, because they were like the same person born thirty years apart. I’d never noticed that before we moved in with Grandpa. Maybe because Dad had done everything he could to escape who he’d been, or who he might have been. He’d grown up here, in this house, on this beach, but he didn’t have my grandfather’s drawl, or any accent at all, really. Like he’d worked at obliterating it.
Grandpa quit school at fourteen to work the fishing boat with his father, but my father completed high school, left home for college at eighteen, and hadn’t quit until he had a PhD in economics. People in town seemed to know Dad, but he hadn’t lived here for over twenty years, and whenever we’d visited, he hadn’t hung out with any of them. Those people kept their distance now and he kept his, spending his days on the boat with Grandpa. I imagined them out there, all day, saying nothing to each other, and I wondered if that was how Dad and I would be. If it was how we already were.
He’d given away his nice suits before we moved – all but one. We left our furniture and electronics, dishes, cookware and his library of finance and econ and accounting books. I brought most of my clothes, my video games, some books and all my sketchpads – anything I wanted that was mine – but only what would fit into the car. Cindy boxed all the scrapbooks and framed photos, and wrapped Mom’s paintings with brown paper and lots of packing tape. She and Charles took some of them to their house.
Whenever we’d visited Grandpa before, it had been summer. I’d slept on a sleeping bag on the screened porch, or on the shabby, stale-smelling sofa in his living room – which was actually the only room in the house besides the kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. I didn’t really think about where I would sleep until we got there, two days before Christmas.