The Last to Let Go

by Amber Smith

  I feel like I’m watching a play, something choreographed, steps on a stage.

  “That doesn’t look . . .” But when I turn back around, Callie’s gone. “Good,” I finish, talking only to myself. The stench of cigarette smoke wafts up through the window. Looking back down, I see that Aaron now sits on the front step, hunched over with his elbows planted on his knees. The sun drops below the buildings, casting a deep shadow over the street. He brings the cigarette to his mouth, the burning tip glowing brightly as he inhales.

  I wait for a while. I plan on asking if everything’s okay, but he doesn’t come back up right away. In my bedroom I pull out the stack of eight different summer reading books I was supposed to have been plugging away at over the past two months. Then I pull out the gigantic AP Psychology book I ordered online the day I found out I’d be going to Jefferson, before all of this happened. I even had it delivered priority. I planned on reading it cover to cover over the summer. I planned on memorizing everything. I wanted to be prepared. I wanted to show my new teachers how worthy I was of being there. But I haven’t so much as peeled the plastic wrap off.

  I feel a tiny point of pressure pinch somewhere inside my rib cage—the familiar knot of panic, the shortness of breath. I rifle through my desk drawer until my hand finds the smooth plastic bottle. I quickly twist the cap off and pop four almost-expired aspirins into my mouth. Then I place my hand over my heart. I breathe air into that small bundle of tangled nerves, and something inside of me seems to loosen its grip, the pressure in my head and chest and lungs beginning to retreat.

  I grab the book and my favorite orange highlighter and bring them out to the kitchen table, where I’ll wait to talk to Aaron. I sit down and rip off the vacuum-sealed plastic wrap, flip open the cover, and start reading the introduction. I uncap my highlighter and mark a passage. I’m halfway through the second unit—“Memory”—when suddenly I look up. Outside it’s darker. Time has passed. Aaron still hasn’t come back.

  My eyes ache from reading for so long. I blink hard a few times. I’m tempted to call it a day and go to bed. But no, I have a little more in me, I decide. Just need to rest my eyes for a minute. I fold my arms over the hefty psychology book and lay my head down. Only resting my eyes, I tell myself.

  FAULT LINES

  I AWAKE WITH MY face in the folds of my textbook and glance at the clock. It’s 5:30 a.m. Aaron is asleep on the couch in the living room. I gather my things from the table and on my way to my room peek inside Callie’s. She’s sleeping with her covers thrown off despite the cool night air. I glance at her desk—my old desk—and see my old globe. A memory arrives in my mind like it has been on pause, waiting for me to hit play.

  I see myself as a thirteen-year-old in the room, back when Callie and I still shared it, back when Aaron lived with us the first time. Before the day on the roof, before he moved out, before I took over his room and claimed it as my own.

  I remember how I’d run my fingertips up and down the lines of longitude, across the lines of latitude. But one moment rushes forward.

  It was October; I was in eighth grade. I had just spun the globe and set my finger down slowly, letting it skim against the molded surface. A sandpaper sound emitted from the sphere until finally it slowed to a stop, spinning to a time in the future. I took a breath and moved in closer to get a better look.

  “So?” Callie asked me. “Where are you going to live now?”

  “In the middle of the Indian Ocean.” I sighed, genuinely disappointed. Sometimes the middle of nowhere happened. Then again, sometimes it was Bali or Fiji. Sometimes Quebec or Malawi. Hawaii was my favorite. I looked at the big island dreamily and sighed again—I was big on sighing back then—“Someday.” I added Indian Ocean (?) to the list that I kept in the back of an old notebook. It was pages and pages long by the time I stopped, by the time I realized I was going to have to stay put, at least for a while.

  I walked over to our bookcase, cradling that precious globe in my arms like a baby—my only connection to the great, big world out there, a world full of better places, places I’d rather be, places that I was convinced were waiting for me—and set it back down in its spot on the top shelf.

  I turned to Callie, my face suddenly serious and pinched in now that my daily allotted daydreaming time was over. “You have your geography test tomorrow, don’t you? What is it, capitals?”

  She moaned and rolled her eyes—she’d been getting really good at that—and simply continued playing with her dolls on her bed. With a Barbie in each hand, she thrust the one on the right forward at arm’s length so that it was facing me. “You think that because you’re in eighth grade and I’m only in fourth, you can tell me what to do!” her Barbie accused me in a voice slightly higher than Callie’s, her whole plastic body being shaken for added emphasis. “Just because you’re the smartest person in your class doesn’t mean that I should be smart too!” Then the Barbies went back to talking among themselves, an indecipherable murmur passing between them.

  “Shut up,” I mumbled, so casually that neither Callie nor the Barbies seemed to hear me.

  Then there was a big crash out in the living room, shaking the walls and the floor like an earthquake, like a fractured fault line on my globe had just cracked the whole world wide open. I jumped, but Callie barely seemed to notice.

  Mom shouted, “Stop it!” She was already crying. “I told you I don’t have it! Listen to me. I swear. Please, calm down.”

  “Don’t!” he screamed—screamed. “Lie. To. Me.” Every word matched with a bang-slam-bash-boom.

  Callie started humming.

  Money.

  He always thought she was hiding money from him. She might have been too. But it was her money, after all.

  “Mrs. Allister’s gonna call the cops again,” Callie said in her singsong voice, more to her Barbie than to me.

  “Did you study?” I asked her, trying so hard to ignore what was happening on the other side of our bedroom door. I walked over to our laptop to turn the volume up on the music. Underneath the arguing and the music and Callie’s humming, and me pretending like nothing was happening, I could hear the steady rhythm through the wall our room shared with Aaron’s. It was the bump-bump-bumping of Aaron lying on his bed tossing a tennis ball against the wall and catching it, over and over again.

  “Sorta,” she finally answered.

  “Sorta . . . is not good enough,” I scolded, as I thought was my duty. “Nebraska?” I asked her, even though I was almost unable to hear myself think through all the layers of noise reverberating through the house.

  Callie rolled her eyes and fell over sideways onto the bed.

  Here we go.

  “I don’t wanna do this,” she moaned again, opening her hands dramatically to let the Barbies fall lifeless to the floor with a dull clatter.

  “Nebraska,” I demanded.

  “Omaha,” she growled into her pillow.

  “Wrong. Lincoln.” I lay down on my bed, across from hers, on my stomach, getting fully into quizzing mode. “Rhode Island?” I asked, some part of me taking pleasure in the structure of it all—the rightness of having clear, definitive answers. I could feel myself kicking my feet, swinging them up and down, alternating, left-right, left-right, left-right.

  “No, Brooke. Pleee-ease.”

  I threw my ancient Care Bear at her head. “Come on!”

  “Ow,” she whined. “Providence, jerk!” She threw it back at me, but I blocked, and it ricocheted off my arm into the wall, then fell softly onto my bed, before tumbling soundlessly onto the floor with Callie’s Barbies. She stuck her tongue out.

  “Vermont?”

  She shrugged—she could never remember Vermont, for some reason.

  “Montpelier. You can remember because the end of ‘Vermont’ is the beginning of ‘Montpelier.’ Got it?” She continued to stare at me, expressionless. “Okay, Kansas?”

  “Toe-picker!” she shouted—she really did enjoy annoying me.

  �
�It’s Toe-peek-a. Topeka, okay? Be serious, Callie. New York—you better know this one.”

  I watched this little smirk twisting up the corner of her mouth, a dimple indenting her cheek, and I could read it on her face—she was probably daring herself to say “New York City,” like the last time, but decided against it. She took a cue from me and sighed through the word “Albany,” managing to stretch it out over one long syllable.

  “Yes. Tennessee?”

  “Nasssshhhh-ville” she said, sitting upright again, suddenly alert, bouncing up and down, having found a way to amuse herself.

  “Right. North Dakota?”

  “Bisquick!” she shouted, totally losing it, dissolving into that stupid full-body laugh of hers that was nearly impossible to withstand without joining in. I bit down on the insides of my cheeks to keep from smiling.

  “Fine. Enough, okay? Are you done?” I waited until she stopped. “All right, Arizona?”

  She gazed up at the ceiling thoughtfully, trying to come up with something clever. But then the door slammed, giving the whole apartment one last rumbling aftershock. I could hear his footsteps on the stairs. And Mom gasping through her sobs in the living room.

  My eyes closed. There was a tiny ice pick somewhere deep in my brain, jabbing away at my frontal lobe. I buried my face in my folded arms. My legs went limp as they flopped down against the bed. It was over. It hadn’t been that bad. It wasn’t always super awful; sometimes it was just loud more than anything. But no matter how bad or not bad, it always affected me the same, stirring up all kinds of chaos inside of me, the way a storm churns up all the mud and scum at the bottom of the river.

  “Phoenix,” Callie answered.

  On the other side of the wall the bouncing of the ball had ceased, and I could hear Aaron wrestling his window open—a clang followed by a screech, always. Then his careful footsteps pinged the metal stairs of the fire escape. He was on his way up to the roof to smoke.

  I lay there, trying to still the rolling waves of anarchy surging through my body.

  “Phoenix,” she repeated, louder. “Brooke, Phoenix!”

  Something took hold of me then, as it sometimes did. I lifted my head to look at her, and when I opened my mouth, it was someone else’s voice. “Shut up, Callie—just shut up!” The words raked through my throat like fingernails on a chalkboard, sending chills up and down my spine. “Shut! Up!” I screamed into my pillow, the words strangling me.

  She did. She shut up.

  Without another word she got up and switched the light off, turned the computer speakers down.

  By morning Mom had cleaned everything up, like nothing had ever happened, and Dad was sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal, already showered and dressed in his uniform, looking clean and composed, polished and calm. I used to love the way he looked in the mornings, almost like it was truly a new day, like maybe things could be different, like maybe we could all start over and be better.

  He looked up from the paper as we walked in.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he called out to Callie.

  To me, he gave a single sharp nod.

  “Hi,” Callie mumbled, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  I rushed out past her, trying to ignore the cool suspicion on my father’s face as he looked at me. My wet hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail that swung from side to side, smacking me in the face as I lugged both of our backpacks out and set them down by the front door. “Callie, go get dressed first, then eat your cereal. You have twenty minutes, so hurry—I’m not going to be late again!”

  “Calm down,” Dad said through a mouthful of cereal. “You have plenty of time.”

  “Not really.” I sighed as I bent over to tie my shoes tight. I looked up just in time to see Dad shoot me a warning look, a courtesy he never afforded Mom.

  “Both of you come sit. Eat your breakfast,” he ordered. “Aaron!” he shouted.

  “Dad, I still have to make our lunches,” I protested. “And Callie takes for-ever to eat.”

  “I said”—his face flamed pink for a moment—“come sit. Now. Aaron!” he yelled again.

  We sat. And finally Aaron emerged from his bedroom. Thankfully, because I was about to run in there and drag him out if he made Dad call his name one more time. He didn’t say anything as he slumped into his seat at the table. Dad’s face cooled off then.

  “Shouldn’t we wake up Mom?” I asked.

  This time Callie shot me a warning look.

  “Let her sleep,” he said, folding the paper in half and setting it on the table next to his bowl.

  “But . . . ,” I began, my eyes fixed frantically on the time on the stove. “But isn’t she going to be late if—”

  “What did I just say?” He brought his fist down against the table so hard that my spoon jumped out of my bowl. Aaron sat up straighter. I could see him clench his fist in his lap, preparing to step in if this suddenly blew up.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Don’t be sorry, stop with the worrying. Let the parents do the worrying. You be the kid, all right?”

  I could feel my jaw muscles clench as I nodded carefully, clamping down on the words already in my mouth, begging to come out.

  “Good morning,” Mom yawned, coming out of their bedroom wearing her fuzzy purple bathrobe and matching slippers—the ones we picked out from some catalog for Mother’s Day two years earlier. I turned around in my seat to look at her. Her eyes were still puffy from last night’s crying, but that was all. No marks on her face, which was always good.

  Dad looked up but didn’t speak to her. “Say good morning to your mother,” he ordered us instead.

  “Good morning, Mommy,” Callie and I said in unison.

  “Morning,” Aaron added, a second too late and a tad too unenthusiastically. Which, we knew, was all it really took to set Dad off when it came to Aaron.

  Dad grabbed Aaron’s wrist abruptly, making him drop his spoon, splattering milk across the table. “What’s this?” he asked, inspecting Aaron’s hand in his own.

  “What? Nothing,” Aaron mumbled, quickly using his free hand to sop up the stray drops of milk with his napkin.

  “You need to cut your fingernails.” It wasn’t a simple observation, though; it was an accusation. “What have I told you about that? And what did you do, sleep in those clothes? You look like you just rolled out of bed. You don’t take any pride in your appearance.”

  Aaron snatched his hand back and ran it over the front of his shirt. “No,” he said quietly. “It’s just wrinkled.” Then he smoothed his hair back and tucked the unruly strands behind his ears, all of us anticipating what would come next. I tightened my ponytail, in case Dad happened to examine my appearance.

  “Ally, the boy needs a haircut. Unless you want to look like a girl?” Even Aaron knew not to answer that. “Listen,” he said sharply, jabbing his finger into Aaron’s shoulder. “You clean up before you step foot out of this house. Can’t have you walking around town looking like a bum. Understood?”

  Aaron nodded.

  Mom sat in her spot next to Dad at the table and poured herself a glass of orange juice. Both Callie and I saw the gray-blue bruise circling her wrist as she reached across the table. “No problem, we can go after school.” She smiled like things were just perfect. “Right, Aaron?”

  He nodded again.

  Everyone was finally quiet. And I remember thinking that if we could stay just like this, then everything would be fine. I ate my cereal one Lucky Charm at a time, trying to make it last a little longer, not even caring about the time on the stove or our unmade lunches or being late to school.

  RAVENS

  LATER THAT DAY AT WORK I’m exhausted. Thankfully, it’s been a slow morning. Jackie’s had me detailing the espresso machine and the coffee grinders. She told me that today would be the day I’d learn more on the register; up until now she’s had me on menial, pointless tasks.

  The bell dings. I hear Jackie call out across the shop, “Hey, Owen!”<
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  They make small talk as he comes behind the counter and pulls an apron over his head, tying the straps behind his back, working his O charm on her, too. I do my best to make it seem as though I haven’t taken notice of any of this. And then I feel their eyes on me. I look up again only because I hear my name.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I was just telling Owen how you’re going to be picking up a few hours here and there.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I tell him. Stellar, Brooke.

  “Sweet,” he says in this way that makes me feel like he thinks the idea of working with me is the exact opposite of sweet.

  “Nice to meet you,” I offer.

  He looks at me, a slow grin turning the corners of his mouth upward. “We’ve gone to the same school since kindergarten,” he tells me as he pulls on his JACKIE’S hat over his now-shoulder-length dreads. As he stands there in front of me, with his brown skin and deep eyes, I can see why all those other girls, even guys, are in love with him. I can’t help but think about how much simpler life would be if I could just have a crush on him too, like everyone else.

  “Yeah, but . . .” All right, so I look stupid. That’s okay, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter. I pretty much always look stupid when it comes to my fellow Riverside students. “Well, anyway. Not anymore. I’m going to Jefferson this year.” I don’t know why I’m saying this; I realize how snotty it sounds the instant it’s out of my mouth. I am seriously socially impaired.

  The phone rings behind the counter and Jackie goes to answer it. Then Owen and I are left standing there together.

  “Why would you wanna do that?” he finally asks, as if going to Jefferson is the worst idea he’s ever heard.

  I don’t know how to explain the million reasons why. “Well, they offer a lot more AP classes there,” I tell him.