Broken Together

by Cassie Beebe

  He was right about the timing. He wasn’t even the first person to arrive, though most of the seats were still empty. His breath stopped for a moment when he realized that he might have to explain to Callie why he wasn’t in Biology that morning, but luck was finally on his side, as Biology had apparently run late that day. She showed up a minute after class began, giving Doctor Bell a sheepish grin as she pulled the door silently closed behind her and tiptoed to her seat.

  He could feel her eyeing him throughout the class, and he sighed, trying to come up with a believable excuse for his absence that morning that wouldn’t beg a lot of questions. Sure enough, when the professor dismissed the class, she turned toward him as she put away her things.

  “You missed a fun class today,” she began, looking up at him with questioning eyes.

  “Oh?” he asked, hoping that would be enough.

  “Yeah,” she responded, and for a moment he thought that would be the end of it. “Where were you?”

  He suppressed a sigh. “I just wasn’t feeling great this morning, so I decided to sleep in,” he answered quickly, having determined during Doctor Bell’s lecture that that would be the simplest fib.

  “Oh.” Her forehead creased in concern. “Well, are we still on for today?”

  Jacob stared at her blankly for a moment.

  “The project?” she reminded him. “We were supposed to do our observations today, remember?”

  “Right,” Jacob recalled, huffing out a breath and rubbing a hand over his sleepy eyes.

  Callie’s face fell, and she shrugged. “It’s okay. We can do it another time.”

  “No, no,” he quickly objected, grasping onto anything that would keep him from having to spend the rest of the day in his room, alone with his thoughts. “I’m good. Everything’s good,” he gave her a smile that even he almost believed.

  She grinned back happily. “Great! So, should we start with the grocery store or the mall?”

  “Okay, so I thought we could separate the results into five categories,” Callie prattled on, quickly squaring off a page of her notebook into five sections. “Number one being a group of both men and women where the guy opens the door, number two being a group of both men and women where the woman opens the door, and then we could record the groups of only women and only men, and see if they open the door for their friends. And then maybe a fifth group, where nobody opens the door for anybody else.”

  Jacob took a sip of his mocha. They had decided to go to the mall first, after a quick stop at the local drive-up coffee shop. Callie had weaved around the parking lot for a few minutes, waiting for a spot close to the front doors to open up. When one finally did, she snagged it quickly and they settled in for their observations.

  In natural Callie-style, she already had everything planned, which was a quality that used to irritate Jacob in his high school project partners. Nobody likes to be paired up with a total dud, but Jacob wasn’t passive enough to enjoy a partner who took control of everything, either. However, after recent events, he was happy enough to sit back and let her do the mental work while he observed shoppers comings and goings, reporting each aloud to Callie as she ticked off tally marks in the appropriate boxes.

  After a while of their routine, Callie frowned at her notebook.

  “I don’t know if we’re doing this right,” she shook her head. “Is it too broad? Maybe we should only be looking at couples? Like, if there’s one guy and one girl, who will open the door for who? That might be easier than this jumbled mess,” she grimaced, flipping through the pages that now held seven different categories of boxes, two more having been added once it became clear there were more variables than she had originally anticipated.

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Jacob replied, sipping his drink. It’s what he had planned to say, regardless of whatever her suggestion was going to be, but he actually did think it was a better plan. “And maybe a third box, if neither of them opens the door,” he added.

  “Well, one of them has to open the door…,” Callie trailed off as she flipped past the used pages and started on a fresh, blank sheet.

  “Well, yeah, obviously,” he rolled his eyes. “I mean if they just open the door and walk through, without holding it open for the other person.”

  “Oh. Right,” she replied, her cheeks growing pink at the obvious clarification. She sighed. “This is more complicated than I thought it would be. I hate research.”

  Jacob chuckled. “It’ll be fine. It’s mostly just for practice, I’m sure. To make sure we understand the process.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Callie muttered, unsatisfied with his attempt at encouragement.

  He appraised her rigid shoulders as she squinted at the door, trying to make out the genders of the people walking through. She put another tally on the men’s side of the page and tapped her pen impatiently against her notepad.

  “Maybe we should take a break,” he suggested. “Take five and then head to the grocery store.”

  She protested at first, but apparently there was a shoe sale going on in one of the mall boutiques. Callie requested they stop in to check out the selection of nursing shoes available.

  “There are so many rules about what kind of shoes you have to wear,” she explained, sifting through the boxes on the shelves. “I just want to be prepared for when my volunteer application is accepted.”

  “Can I help at all?” Jacob absently paced the aisle while she pulled out some maybes.

  “Hey, Callie,” a man’s soft voice spoke from behind them, and they both turned around.

  There was a slight, young man lifting his hand in a timid wave. He wore a high-buttoned shirt and a wide smile, holding a pair of white shoes in his other hand and shifting nervously on his feet.

  “Tyler, hey!” Callie greeted with a matching grin.

  Tyler blushed at her knowing his name, and briefly looked at his feet, pushing up the thick-framed glasses that slid down his nose from the movement. “I see you’re taking advantage of the sale, too,” he lifted up the shoes in his hand.

  “Totally,” Callie replied, picking up a pair from one of the boxes she had laid out on the bench to double-check the size. “You know how expensive these nursing shoes can be.”

  “Yeah, for sure,” Tyler nodded, glancing back and forth between her and Jacob. “Um… I’m Tyler Bennet,” he announced, extending a slightly sweaty hand to Jacob.

  “Oh! Sorry,” Callie shook her head at her poor manners. “Jacob, this is Tyler. He’s a fellow nursing student,” she explained as they shook hands.

  “Hence the shoes,” Tyler held up his pair and let out a small chuckle.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Jacob replied

  “Jacob goes to Westbridge, too,” Callie added. “We have a few classes together.”

  Tyler looked between them again. “Oh,” he nodded, not-so-subtly giving Jacob a once-over, his shoulder sagging a bit at the result of his appraisal.

  “Uh, we’re working on a Psych project together,” Jacob explained, tossing the poor guy a bone. “That’s why we’re here. Just taking a break.”

  “Oh,” Tyler repeated with a bit more enthusiasm this time. “Well, that’s cool. If you need a hand with anything, let me know. I love psychology. You, um… you have my number, right, Callie?” he stammered, pushing his blonde hair away from his glasses.

  “Yeah, I think so,” she curtly replied, putting a few unsatisfactory pairs of shoes back on the shelf.

  Tyler’s face fell at her brief reply. “Okay… well, I guess I’ll see you in class, then.”

  “Yeah, see you,” she said, looking up from the shoes she was trying on and giving him a smile and a wave.

  He returned her grin brightly and headed toward the cashier with pink cheeks.

  Jacob smirked at the exchange, appraising Callie’s blissful ignorance as she pursed her lips at the shoes on her feet, stepping around on them to get a good feel. With a grimace, she sat back on the bench and removed them, putting the
box back on the shelf. She huffed out a sigh and turned to Jacob’s amused expression.

  “What?” she asked with widely innocent eyes.

  He chuckled. “Seems like somebody’s got a crush,” he nodded toward the registers.

  Her eyebrows pulled together as she glanced toward the front of the store, and her cheeks reddened. “He doesn’t…,” she began, but trailed off as she pondered the thought.

  Jacob laughed again. “He seems like a nice guy. You should give him a call,” he encouraged.

  Callie turned her flushed face back to him. “I don’t know,” she shook her head.

  “Why not?” he asked, absently checking out the men’s shoes on the shelves behind him, not that he had the money to buy any of them anyway.

  She didn’t answer. When he looked back, she was staring at him, but she turned away when he met her gaze, biting her lip and tucking her hair behind her ear.

  “I don’t think I’m gonna find anything today. I can come back another time,” she shrugged. “Should we get back to it?”

  He was taken aback by the abrupt change of subject, but he agreed, and they headed to the grocery store. They chose multiple different venues for their observations, so as to get a wide variety of shoppers to unknowingly participate in their experiment.

  The rest of their work passed by in relative silence, and much to Jacob’s dismay, only took up a few hours of the day, leaving him the rest of the evening alone with his thoughts again. He didn’t have much homework to get through, so he wasn’t looking forward to heading back to his room. He even wandered casually into the kitchen, hoping perhaps to stumble upon the girl from the night before for another distraction, but the room was empty.

  As he plopped onto his desk chair, he swiveled mindlessly and let the slight rush of vertigo jumble his thoughts enough to create the illusion of a clear mind. Pushing himself over to the nightstand, he reached for Maggie’s journal, tucked away in the single drawer. He figured since he was already depressed, nothing in the book was bound to do much more harm.

  He flipped it open to his makeshift bookmark and began reading the next entry.

  April 15th, 2004

  A cop came to the house today. Jake was out getting dinner, so it was just me and Dad, and they barely even talked to me at all. They asked us both some questions… in the same room…. As if I’m going to say “oh, yeah, all that noise last night was my Dad beating the shit out of my brother, so you should probably arrest him” right in front of the guy.

  Apparently one of the neighbors heard shouting last night, which is no surprise, given how hard Dad and Jake were going at it, so they called the police. Not sure why it took almost a full 24 hours to come check it out, but I don’t know, I guess they had more important things to do.

  I don’t know how to feel…. On the one hand, I’m happy to see Jake standing up for himself more. I’m always wishing he would stop rolling over and just do something for once. And sometimes, like last night, I can see something snap in him and he does. He fights back, and I can’t help but feel proud for a minute.

  But on the other hand, it never seems to do any good, and he just ends up with more marks to cover.

  As usual, I don’t know what to do, but I know I have to do something. I have to. This is on me. He wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for me. He would be off at a far-away college somewhere… probably studying culinary arts, or French, like Mom. Maybe he would meet a nice girl and get married. I wonder, sometimes, if he would have kids. Maybe. He probably thinks he wouldn’t be a good dad, but I know he would be. I wouldn’t be around to tell him that, but maybe the right girl could convince him.

  His life would be so much better if I wasn’t here.

  Jacob shut the book and tossed it across his desk. It wasn’t the end of the entry, but his vision was too blurred to keep going. With a jagged breath, he wiped the wetness from his cheeks. These were the hardest entries to read. He always knew his sister was a dreamer, but what he didn’t realize until after she died was how often she dreamed for him, more than she dreamed for herself. She dreamed for him to have a normal life, just as he dreamed the same for her, and it crushed them both to know it would never happen. It crushed her enough to move her to pack a bag, walk out their front door, and leave everything behind, in the blind hope that her absence would set him free, somehow. Free from her, free from their father, free to grow and learn and have a life of his own. Free to fall in love.

  His eyes welled again when he thought of Sarah, and he wondered what Maggie would think if she could see him now.

  Sorry, Mags, he thought. This was the one thing you wanted for me, and I blew it.

  His sadness was rapidly turning to frustration – anger, even – at himself, for screwing everything up. Of all the ways he tried to make her life better, to sacrifice for her, in the end, Maggie had been the one to make the biggest sacrifice of all. She gave everything. Her friends, her home. Her life.

  She wanted him to live, even if it meant she had to die, and here he was, squandering it all away. Every choice he made, from her death to his arrest, was a slap in the face of that sacrifice. She wanted him to be free, and he stubbornly insisted on keeping himself in bondage.

  And yet, despite all of his reckless choices, every stupid thing he did in the past sixteen years, he had been granted the most miraculous of second chances. His chest ached at the injustice of it all. If anyone deserved a second chance at life, it was her, not him, and that truth held him down, tied him to her in the grave of their past. But… is that what Maggie would have wanted?

  Of course, he knew the answer to that. He knew exactly what she wanted for him. He didn’t even have to guess at it, as it was written time and time again in the book before him. And no matter how much she deserved more, he would never be able to give it to her. He would never be able to bring her back, and that painful realization stabbed him like a knife in the chest. He couldn’t give her the dreams she had for her life. Not the tiny stone cottage in a field of daisies she doodled in her journal. Not the love of the boy on the baseball team who made her blush and called her “Freckles.” Not the trip to Paris she always gushed about. Not even the simple aspiration of working as a maid at a hotel, because she thought it would be fun to see a peek behind the curtain of what the rest of the world is allowed to see.

  That was supposed to be her future, and it was gone. And if he couldn’t give her that, the least he could do was give her his.

  He would do all of the things she dreamed for him. He would stay in school, he would meet a girl, he would get married, and maybe even have kids. Because deserving or not, he had been given a second chance at life, and it was time to start living it.

  With that thought, he rubbed away the last bit of water from his eyes, tucked Maggie’s journal away in the bottom drawer of his desk, and walked out the door.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL HE was stepping out of the dorm building and into the brisk, evening air that he realized he didn’t have a clue where he was going. To live life, sure, but how, and where? So, aimlessly, he wandered.

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. It was one of the many habits he had picked up whenever he felt anxious, and the fraying ends of the pockets inside indicated that must happen often. He strode down the pathway that led away from the main classrooms and toward the rest of the dorm buildings, where any action the night might hold was more likely to be found. Sure enough, as he rounded the corner of the next building, he could hear the faint beating of heavy bass, and in the distance, he saw a few heavily made-up girls clutched arm-in-arm, headed into the Cooper-Heath dorm hall.

  The music in the lobby was obnoxiously loud, and it hit his eardrums hard before he even stepped in the door. The space was filled with sweaty bodies, the heat radiating off of them all as he pushed through the crowd and settled in a somewhat empty nook by the drinks. He scanned the table for something safe, but none of the concoctions in the plastic bowls had labels, so he figured it was best
not to risk it.

  His previous ambitious confidence had completely waned by now, as he looked out at the crowd.

  Alright, Mags. I’m here, he mused. Now what?

  “Jason!” someone exclaimed from a few feet away, and though it wasn’t his name, the greeting seemed to be directed at him.

  He turned around to see Amber Kingsley, his partner in Biology.

  “Hey,” he said, surprised by her wide smile as she stumbled over to him, landing herself much too close for comfort. He took a discreet step back. “It’s Jacob, actually.”

  “Oh, right!” she yelled much louder than was necessary, even with the pounding music. “Well, get over here,” she grabbed his forearm, sliding her hand along his skin with her sweaty palm until it rested in his. She dragged him across the room toward a group of three other girls who all sported her same look of bright lipstick and too much artificial tanning.

  “Guys, this is Jacob,” she said when they reached the cluster of girls, very noticeably not letting go of him. Instead, she weaved her arm through his, palming his bicep as she gestured to the girls, spouting off names that went in one of his ears and out the other.

  They seemed to be waiting for a response from him, so he said “Nice to meet you, ladies,” which, for some reason, sparked a round of giggles from the girls.

  “He’s cute,” one of them said, nudging Amber.

  “Right?” she replied, as if he wasn’t standing right there.

  Much to his gratitude, the other girls quickly lost interest with his presence, turning their attention back to their drinks and cell phones.

  “I just don’t get what he sees in her,” one girl said to another with a grimace, continuing a conversation from before Jacob’s arrival. “She’s so… blah.” She let out a snicker and added, “I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if her favorite show was, like, Little House on the Prairie or something.”