by G. Benson
These days, she felt torn in two. As she lay in bed each night, her insides would writhe in her gut. She’d turn into herself and try to breathe through the grasping, choking feeling of missing her mother, with an ache so deep her bones rattled with it.
But she missed her father too.
She’d fall asleep, though, with a want to see Carmen, her fingers curling against her palm as she’d imagine Carmen running her own through her hair.
When she could, she went to the bar, but Carmen could never be sure of the days she’d be there. Ollie didn’t really understand how she could get away with being so flaky at a job, even if her boss seemed to be her friend. Some weeks, though, Ollie would get a wink and the promise of a weekend.
The best promises came with the suggestion of a weekday, a night the place was quiet. The two of them could slip away or sometimes, even better, sit opposite each other and trade stories. That was when Ollie felt she was really learning something about Carmen. She’d bask in the questions Carmen asked, her interest in everything Ollie had to say. Carmen had said impossible, but whenever Ollie walked into the bar, she never uttered that word now. Rather, her face lit up, the smile curling into her eyes.
The feeling Carmen was holding something back faded but never desisted. It was a splinter deeply embedded in Ollie’s mind that she wouldn’t notice until something grazed over it with the slightest touch—something like the way Carmen would glance away as if pretending to scan the bar for something when Ollie asked a seemingly harmless question. But Ollie never pushed. She never wanted to see the way Carmen had reacted the first few times she’d asked more questions, the way her eyes had avoided Ollie’s own, the way something in her shuttered.
Because normally, Carmen was anything but closed off to Ollie. There’d been something in her eyes that Ollie had seen that first time near the lockers and had reached for, something she couldn’t keep away from. To see that something flicker away, even for a second, made her breath catch in her throat.
One night, on a Tuesday, the bar was quiet, and Carmen dragged Ollie into the little office. They surged together urgently, like stars pulled through gravity, like feet to the ground—it was all physics and inevitability. That word always left a sweet taste in the back of Ollie’s mouth.
Inevitable.
It was such a better word than impossible.
A pattern had formed to their movements now. Ollie knew that Carmen moaned, deep in her throat, when her teeth grazed the muscle where shoulder met neck. Carmen seemed to know that if her fingers crawled along the skin at the base of Ollie’s spine, Ollie’s hips would jerk and they’d be flush together, always clawing to be closer.
But now, just as Ollie had melted into her, just as the memory of the way her mother’s laugh used to meld with the throaty one her father gave all faded to nothing, Carmen had pulled back. Panting, Carmen cupped Ollie’s cheeks, their foreheads together.
“I want to take you out.”
Those were not the words Ollie had expected to hear. She looked around the room. “Uh, we’re out of the bar?” That had brought out the smile in Carmen that made Ollie’s insides melt.
“No—out. Like a movie. Or dinner.” Carmen bit her lip, her gaze so genuine that liquid feeling became more like heat. “Or both?”
All Ollie could do was breathe, “When?”
“How’s Sean?”
Ollie jerked her head up at her father’s words. The remains of Chinese food littered the coffee table. Neither had eaten as much as they used to, and Ollie missed the way her mother picked at all the containers, wanting pieces of everything. Her father had always stubbornly persevered with his chopsticks, even with zero coordination. More often than not, he’d use one to stab the chicken, and a laugh would trickle out of her mother as he ate it in one gulp.
That night, he’d sighed like he was exhausted and brought out a fork from the start. She’d tried not to eye it the entire time they were eating.
Those days were before Ollie punished them both for things she didn’t know she was punishing them for. Back before she knew how fast it could all disappear.
Months had passed since she’d ended it with Sean, and her father’s words sliced through her. She’d never mentioned it to her parents, and she never knew why. Now she just wished she’d opened up to her mother when she could have. There was a time once when Ollie told her mother everything. Almost everything. Without her to tell, the chain of information between her and her father had broken, the rails upended and leading nowhere.
Ollie watched the TV flicker images, and her mouth dried up. When was the last time her father had laughed?
The rice she’d eaten was lead in her stomach. “Sean’s fine.”
Mere feet separated them on the sofa, and it could have been a valley, an ocean, an entire galaxy. Her throat ached with the urge to cross it, to slide over and lean into him, into his solid weight. To tell him something, anything: to let him in.
But they weren’t at the table, because her mother’s place there was like a crater, and the sofa didn’t have her scent anymore, and all the air had left the room.
Ollie ignored that her father had turned to stare at her, an imploring look in his eyes in her peripheral vision.
It took no time to gather their dinner remains and then disappear out the door, claiming a group project, the lie so heavy Ollie could swear it bent her double.
She got a late bus. The window shuddered under her forehead, and she let it, hoping it would rattle free some of the anger that flickered at the inside of her chest for no reason. If she could, she’d find Carmen, but she still had no phone. Ollie could show up to the bar and end up there alone, and that thought left her cold.
Instead, she went to Sara’s, who answered the door, took one look at her face, and dragged her outside. On the trampoline and under a cocoon of blankets, unnecessary now that the weather was warming up a little, they stared up at the crystal-clear sky. Did anyone else ever feel like they could bathe in the stars? Like they could pull the sky down onto themselves and roll in it, leaving stardust in their hair? She’d first sat next to Carmen in this yard, a little drunk, with those same stars mapped overhead, the only witnesses to something that had felt so delicate.
Sara was warm along her side as their breathing synced, slow and steady, letting Ollie’s fingers lay over her wrist. “Want to talk about it?” she asked.
Ollie shook her head, so they stared up in silence, the sounds of crickets in the yard clicking in time with Sara’s pulse beneath her fingers.
“I think you should,” Sara said.
Ollie swallowed, a shooting star trailing across the sky, an urge in her fingers to grab the meteor’s tail and finish its journey with it. And if not that, then at least to sprawl the image of it over paper, light it up with colors that could never quite match. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“Why are you here?”
Because Sara was her person. Because home was too hard. “Because some days, I feel like I can breathe again…” Sara’s wrist twisted, and her fingers entwined with Ollie’s. “Others, I can’t breathe at all.”
“Your mom?”
Just those words squeezed Ollie’s throat, and tears pushed down her cheeks. She swiped them away, her fingers damp with the evidence. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Okay.” Something sly played in Sara’s voice. “What about Carmen?”
Another name that made something in Ollie squeeze, but not like with her mom. Carmen was not something Ollie often let them all talk about. She liked to keep thoughts of her close, something just for herself. They were moments she could pull out later and go over, like a mantra, a prayer, her own personal worry beads.
“What about Carmen?” Even Ollie could hear the smile in her own voice, the tears cooling on her cheeks.
&n
bsp; “Where did that all come from? I mean, I knew something was up, with how badly you wanted to find her.”
“I don’t know. There was something about her. We kissed a couple of times. I felt bad because I’d cheated on Sean…”
“And then?”
Ollie blinked up at the sky. “And then she was all I thought about, even with Mom.” Her voice cracked over that word. “Is that terrible?” The sky was a blur now, the stars a wet blob. “Shouldn’t she be all I think about?”
“Hey…” Sara dug her arm under Ollie and pulled her closer. Warmth surrounded Ollie, and she buried herself in farther. “I don’t think that at all. I don’t think your mom would think that either. I think she’d just be happy something makes you happy.”
If Ollie could pay any money in the world, it would be to have her mom saying that to Ollie herself, for her to be doling out that specific sense of comfort from Ollie’s childhood—the smell of her mother, her voice soft and reassuring and safe.
She yanked her glasses off and dropped them behind her, then nestled her face into Sara’s shoulder, rubbing her eyes into the material of her shirt. Sara wouldn’t care. Ollie had done her first alcohol-induced vomit with Sara in range. She was like Ollie’s sister—a tear-soaked shirt wouldn’t bother her. “What about you?”
“What about me?” Sara asked.
“What’s up with that Rae chick? The two of you looked like you wanted to kill each other.”
“Nothing.”
Lies were not one of Sara’s talents. She was the smartest person Ollie knew, along with Deon, but lying laced her voice, bit at her words, marked her syllables. Lying came as unnaturally to her as math to Ollie.
“You guys were in a foster place together?” Ollie prodded.
Unlike Sara, Ollie had grown up in the safety of a family who cared. In fact, before her mother had died, Ollie had been busy feeling like they cared too much, like they were smothering. Now she ached to go back to months and months ago.
Foster care was a foreign idea to her. There were tragic stories, like the hints of Carmen’s in those files Deon had hacked. Then there were stories like Sara’s.
“It wasn’t a great one,” Sara finally said. “Though not the worst. Rae was there before me.”
Rolling onto her back to stare back up at the sky again, Ollie made sure they were still wrapped together, her leg thrown gently over Sara’s.
“You guys didn’t like each other?”
“We barely knew each other.”
No matter what Ollie asked, she got nothing more. Then Sara turned the conversation to a story from school. Ollie let her, questions burning at the back of her throat.
Chapter 16
“Do you like to read?” Ollie asked.
The glass in Carmen’s hand was clean, and she dropped the rag she was using on the bar top as she looked up at Ollie, who in turn was openly watching Carmen, elbow on the surface and head propped in her hand. Days had passed since they’d last seen each other, and Carmen had found herself longing for the days of school. She’d lain on the roof of the warehouse and imagined the ways Ollie and she would be able to sneak off together—to be seventeen, smitten, and with days and days ahead of them to press close together under bleachers, to entwine themselves together against lockers, sparks dancing along their skin at the mere presence of each other.
To be seventeen. And only to be seventeen.
The bar was nearly empty. The music was low, a bass thrumming in the air that Carmen could feel in her chest. She crossed her arms on the bar top too, her arms inches from Ollie’s. Everything smelled like beer. This scene felt like something from a life that shouldn’t be theirs: not yet, not at their age.
“I do. I love to read,” Carmen answered.
The blue of Ollie’s eyes seemed to brighten. Carmen could watch the color play through them all day—the stormy sight when she was sad or lost, like when Carmen had seen her at the bar the first night. When Carmen kissed her, they turned a dark azure twilight with constellations spread throughout. A lighter blue sometimes emerged when she listened to Carmen like she couldn’t imagine doing anything else, a blue just for her.
Did Ollie know she carried the universe in her eyes? Or was Carmen just a sap, a romantic newly discovered?
“Me too.” Ollie’s voice was low, clearly meant just for Carmen. “Though I hate when they make movies into books.”
Carmen couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a movie that hadn’t been in class at school, or something on the TV in the home. But she didn’t want this conversation to end. “You can’t capture a book the same way. You’re doomed to be disappointed.”
“Exactly.” Ollie’s nose wrinkled up, and Carmen had never seen anything so adorable. “If you were stuck on a desert island, what book would you take? Only one.”
Carmen kept so much from Ollie, secrets shadowed in the back of her mind she danced around constantly, trying to get as close to them as she could to avoid lying completely. She wanted to tell Ollie about Mattie, to tell her how he devoured books. How he could read for hours. How the weight of him was all that centered Carmen some nights as he sat against her reading or—rarely now that he was a bit older—when he asked her to read to him.
But she couldn’t do that, so she laid out what truth she could. “When I went into foster care this time, I grabbed a textbook… I think it means I’m a nerd.”
The delight on Ollie’s face planted a seed of warmth in Carmen’s belly. “A textbook?”
Carmen shrugged and picked up another glass. “Yeah.”
“That’s so adorable.”
“Shut up.” The smile on her lips felt almost foreign. “What about you?”
“I’d bring another textbook so you’d have two.”
Carmen slowed down the rag in her hand, staring at Ollie, her cheeks feeling as if they might shatter. “Because we’d be stuck together?”
“Of course.”
Moving forward to kiss Ollie was the most natural movement in the world. Her lips were soft, and she tasted like soda and promises.
Ollie stayed until closing, and they hovered in the street, Dex yards away and pretending to ignore them. It was obvious Ollie wanted to walk her home, that she didn’t want the time to end. If she found out about Mattie, about the warehouse, about the existence Carmen spent balanced on a knife’s edge, maybe Carmen could ask her back, could give her a taste of normal. But none of it was normal, and it was all too perilous, too fragile.
The lies were necessary, and she hated it, especially when Ollie offered her nothing but herself.
“Does your dad know you’re here?” Carmen asked, her breath mingling with Ollie’s, their foreheads together.
Ollie shook her head. That darkness in her eye, the time she looked like a storm, rose up easily. It was always there, rumbling in the background of her irises. Under Carmen’s arms, Ollie still felt thinner than she had the first time they’d been in a bathroom together. Sadness continued to cover Ollie like a shadow, but now Carmen knew its name, and when they were together, she loved to watch it slide away and reveal Ollie underneath.
“He thinks I’m studying.”
“Are you talking to him?”
Ollie tensed under her hands, and Carmen wanted to soothe it away. She shrugged and pulled back slightly from Carmen, looking up and away, avoiding her eyes. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
That look was back on her now, and Carmen met it. “I’m still… I feel…”
Watching Ollie struggle to find the words was hard, but Carmen wanted her to acknowledge whatever had formed inside her, that had taken her over since her mother died.
“I’m still angry.”
Carmen nodded. “That’s okay.”
“Is it?” Ollie’s voice was t
ight, a string pulled too taut.
Carmen kissed her softly. “It is.”
“I want to tell him things…but I don’t know how to start.” The words were whispered, and Carmen kissed her again.
“Start when you’re ready.”
They peeled apart slowly, said good-bye, and just as she was starting to get on the bus, Carmen called out, “Ollie?”
She paused with one foot on the step. “Yeah?”
“I’m still angry too. All the time. I think it’s normal.”
Ollie’s shoulders relaxed as she looked like Carmen had given her a gift. Whether because Carmen had reassured her, or shared something, Carmen didn’t know.
“Thanks.”
Their smiles didn’t fit their conversation, and she watched Ollie get safely on the bus before she fell into step next to Dex as he started walking now Carmen was with him.
“Where’s Mattie tonight?” Dex asked.
“With Rae.”
Dex was bundled in a coat. It made him seem somehow soft, rather than bulky and big like normal. “Those two really get along.”
Carmen hummed and nodded. They did. Mattie could spend hours with Rae, and Carmen suspected it was because Rae trained him harder than she did. But there was something else too, a way they just got each other. Something special. It was a relief to know Mattie had someone else besides her.
It had been months now. Six? Seven? Mattie’s ninth birthday had been and gone. Anxiety lived in the back of Carmen’s throat, prickling and uncomfortable. The closer she crawled to eighteen, the more she worried her plan was beyond fallible: Jia wasn’t sold on it. To be honest, neither was Carmen.
“How am I going to prove to a court that I deserve Mattie?” She didn’t mean to ask. Pushing those burdens onto someone else wasn’t her style. But they burned on her tongue, and she needed to ask them aloud.
