“He’s drunk. How great can he be?” I wish I could pull the words back, but it’s too late.
“He’s not always drunk. This Christmas has been rough for him.”
It’s bad for everyone, I want to say, but the words stick in my throat and I find something really interesting on my Coke can to study. It sounds like an excuse I used to give for Mom. She’s not always drugged up.
“Why are you here, Mac?”
I fiddle with the tab on the can, breaking it off and pushing it inside before I talk. I think there’s a secret society after me and I’m scared. I miss my brother. “I just needed to get off campus. And I thought maybe Tim might have heard from my mom. They talk sometimes. About Amos or whatever.” It sounds so pathetic. I miss my mommy. I’ve survived a semester of Matthews. I should be able to survive two weeks alone.
“If she’d called I would have come right over.”
“I know.” I push the chair back. “I’m gonna go.” As I walk past him, he reaches out and wraps his hand around my arm. The heat from his hand makes me shiver and I stop as suddenly as I started.
He stands and turns me gently so I’m facing him. “Mac . . .” His voice is quiet, hesitant, like he’s scared he might break me if he talks any louder. “Stay awhile. For the whole break if you want. We’ve got movies, video games . . . your mom will call if there’s news. Just stay.”
The beginning of a “no” lodges in my throat because I’m sure staying here with my drill sergeant is so against the rules it’s not even funny. I fight the urge to lean into him. More than anything, I wish the look on his face wasn’t just one military brat caring about another military brat, but something more. Being a normal teen sounds so good right now. Spending Christmas break wasting time, not worrying about Dad being MIA or the possibility of secret societies . . .
“Okay. For a little while.” I don’t promise how long. “I’m going to need some food, though.”
He laughs. “We’ve got Domino’s on speed dial. Follow me.”
The living room isn’t much cleaner than the kitchen. Beer bottles and soda cans cover every empty space there isn’t a pizza box. Sitting on a futon, Tim holds a video game remote, staring at a screen on pause—presumably from when I knocked on the door earlier.
“Ready, Tim? I’ve got some serious ass to kick.” Drill sits down on the futon and grabs the other remote, unpausing the game and beginning to shoot a machine gun almost immediately. Tim doesn’t say anything but he starts playing, too.
“There are some sweats upstairs in my bedroom if you want them,” Tim says. “That is, if you want to break DMA rules in front of your drill sergeant.” He laughs like it’s the funniest thing in the world, his eyes never leaving the screen.
Drill grins when I look his way. “I won’t rat you out if you don’t rat me out later when I drink a beer.”
“Deal.”
He pauses the game again, stands up and walks over to a duffel bag against the wall. When he turns to me, he’s got PT sweats in his hand. “Here, wear these. They’re clean, at least. Take a left at the top of the stairs, second door on the right,” Drill says. “We’ll get your PT gear from campus tomorrow.”
I take them and try to ignore the fact that I’m about to be wearing Drill’s clothes. They smell like fabric softener and some spicy body wash that is totally him. My face heats up and I take the stairs two at a time.
The bedroom is an extension of the downstairs. Boxes everywhere. Running my finger over his dresser, covered in a thin layer of dust, I stop and stare at what’s in front of me: a framed photo of Tim and Amos—one I’ve never seen—of them in country. They’re wearing their desert BDU pants but no shirts. I can’t help notice their smiles. Amos looks happy in the photo. This is not the same Amos who came home last Christmas. That Amos was . . . broken.
“It was the October before we came home on leave. Hot as hell, even then.” Tim stands in the doorway, leaning, just like Drill does.
I reach out to the frame to touch Amos’s face. I’d forgotten the way the left side of his mouth crept up higher than the right when he had a secret. Brushing away a tear, I sit on the edge of the bed and hold the frame in my hand.
“It’s my favorite picture of us.” Tim steps into the room, stumbles, and plops down onto the bed next to me. “Sorry I’m like this tonight. Tomorrow it’ll be a year.”
I close my eyes and have to force the words out. “I know.” It’s hard to imagine that a year ago today my brother was planning his suicide. “I found him, you know?”
“No. I didn’t. I’m sorry.” And somehow from him, it’s not pity. He gets it.
The sun is setting outside and he hasn’t turned on any lights yet. But somehow it’s easier in the coming darkness to tell my secret. “We were supposed to go shopping for Christmas presents. We had just moved to Fayetteville and he had just come home on leave. I walked up the stairs to his room. His door was closed and when I opened it there he was, dangling from the fan in the middle of the room. He’d pushed his bed up against the wall, knocked the chair over. I don’t know how long he’d been there, but I tried to lift him up. I tried to help.”
Tears fall down Tim’s cheek. I reach over to hold his hand but he scoots away.
I don’t know if I should go on, but I can’t stop. Even Dad doesn’t know the details about how I found him. My teeth are chattering now and the room is suddenly way too cold. “I never got to ask him why. He didn’t leave a note.”
Tim reaches out and takes the photo from my hands. “He loved you, you know that? He loved you more than anything. You and the colonel.” He spits Dad’s rank out like it’s poison. “He didn’t want to let you guys down.”
“How could he ever let us down?”
He sighs, pain in his eyes. “I think it was my fault.”
“What? Him killing himself?”
“I told him he should tell. I told him that you guys would understand that he was gay. You’re family, for Christ’s sake.” His eyes are red and full of pain when he meets my gaze. “God, your old man flipped out.”
Some puzzle piece I’d had all along clicks into place and sadness overwhelms me. I should have known. It’s obvious, now that Tim’s said it out loud. The girlfriends who were never serious, the need to please Dad in the military. We’d been so close, but he’d held his secret even closer. “He could have trusted me. I would never hate him for that.”
“Your dad did,” Tim says. Someone in Platoon McKenna not following Dad’s battle plan for our lives. Yes, Dad would have been furious. “Amos called me and put his phone in his pocket so I could hear the conversation. When he told your dad . . . I could hear your old man screaming over the phone. After that, he didn’t want to even try to tell you.”
I remember the fight last Christmas. I heard them yelling in Dad’s office and I just turned my iPod up. Maybe if I had gone down . . .
“All right, Tim. You’ve spent enough time strolling down memory lane for one night. Time to get you to bed,” Drill says, walking into the room and breaking the moment. I wonder how much he heard—what he must think of my screwed up family that values appearance so much Amos couldn’t even trust us with a huge part of himself—a part of him that was so obvious now that the truth is out in the open.
“Bed sounds good.” Tim’s lying down, tugging at the blanket even while I sit on the bed.
Before Drill can say anything to me, I walk to the bathroom, close the door, and lock it behind me.
Thirty minutes later, after the tears have finally stopped, I walk out of the bathroom, Drill’s sweatpants rolled three times at the waist so they don’t drag on the ground. Wrapping a rubber band around the end of my braid, I follow the sound of gunfire into the living room.
Drill doesn’t look up when I walk in, but he scoots over and pats the futon next to him. I sit down, picking at my fingernails and trying to keep my eyes off the screen. Instead of stupid video game characters fighting a battle, I wonder if that’s what Dad’s goin
g through, wherever he is. Maybe he’s hurt, maybe someone’s holding him captive. Maybe he’s scared. Alone. Maybe he’s somewhere thinking about what tomorrow is. Maybe he feels the same huge guilt about Amos that weighs my shoulders down right now.
Drill pauses the game when I sniffle. “Shit. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” Without waiting, he gets up and turns the game off. I shiver and he grabs the blanket behind my head, shaking it out for me.
He wraps it so gently around my shoulders that I have to laugh. “I’m not going to break.” I wrap my arms around my stomach, wishing he couldn’t see how easy it would be for me to crumble. “At least I don’t think I’m going to break.”
He reaches for the remote and turns on the satellite. “What do you want to watch? Comedy? Action? Romance?” He starts flipping channels when he sits down next to me again.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He settles on a channel that shows reruns. There’s a comedy on about nerds and he turns the volume low.
I feel his leg against mine, his arm a heavy weight on the blanket. He’s watching me, probably to see if I’m going to lose it and be all feminine on him. I force myself to keep my eyes on the screen and laugh through the nerd show, then one about a group of friends at a coffee shop. Much later, when the screen turns to infomercials, I turn to him.
“Did you know about him?”
He sighs and turns to face me, leaning back on the armrest and pressing his leg against mine. “Tim told me last Christmas after it happened. I just figured you knew and didn’t want to talk about it.”
I take a deep breath and close my eyes. This conversation is too emotional. It just makes me want to be closer to Drill, and getting any closer to him now . . .
Despite the warning sirens going off in my brain telling me to walk away, though, I settle farther into the futon. Right now, I need him more than I need the DMA. “I think I always knew, somehow, but he never told me. And I thought we told each other everything. . . .” I miss Amos so much right now it feels like I’m crumbling to pieces. The hole in my heart is so big tonight I don’t know how it’s ever going to get better. I put my hand on Drill’s.
“I guess he just thought you had an image of him and he didn’t want to disappoint you, or something. I don’t know. I’m no good at this.” He rubs his free hand over his face, the frustration obvious when he looks down at me. “Mac . . .”
But I can’t stop now. I need to know if this strange thing between us is more than a drill sergeant looking out for his recruit or a military brat looking out for one of his own. If he feels what I do right now. To hell with the rules. I need to be close to him.
I lean in toward him, my eyes on his lips now.
His arm muscles tense under my hand. “I can’t . . . shit, do you know how hard it is to be your drill sergeant?”
That’s not what I expect at all and I’m starting to pull my hand away. “I’m sorry,” I say, the humiliation of being demoted to remedial PT a fresh wound in my mind. “I’m trying as hard as I can—”
He grabs my hand, though, and slides his fingers between mine, locking us together. “No. I don’t mean like that. You’re an amazing recruit. You’re going to make a damn good cadet. But seeing you every day, being in charge of you, knowing that I can’t touch you. Knowing what Matthews says to you and not being able to beat the shit out of him. Knowing that I can’t kiss you whenever I want to . . .”
My heart is pounding. If I move a fraction of an inch my lips would be on his. “Like right now?” The electricity in the room crackles. I lick my lips, suddenly not sure what I’m doing anymore. I feel out of control, like I could do anything I want tonight and no one would hold it against me, least of all Drill.
“Yes,” he breathes out, holding as still as he can as I inch closer. “Like right now.”
His blue eyes are wide, staring right at me. My lips are just a whisper from his now. We’re balanced on the edge of a cliff. One inch closer and we’d be in a free fall.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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TWENTY-FIVE
HE LETS OUT A FRUSTRATED GROWL, LEANING BACK BUT NOT moving off the futon. “God, if you were anyone else but my recruit, we would not be talking right now.”
I lean back, trying to regain my senses. “Well.”
“You don’t say.” He laughs now, still tense but a little more relaxed. “It’s late. You staying?”
I raise my eyebrows. “I probably shouldn’t.” But the thought of going back to the dorm, where one brother won’t talk to me and my other brother’s memory will haunt me in the dark sends a shiver down my spine.
“You can stay.” His voice is quiet, understanding, and he won’t break my gaze.
“If you don’t mind . . .”
When I stand up he throws a pillow at me, breaking the spell. It thumps me in the leg. “Of course I don’t mind.”
“Hey!” I grab the pillow and throw it back at him, the charge of the last few minutes dissipating.
He catches it easily. “Grab the other end and pull up.”
I watch what he’s doing, then mimic the move. The futon that we sat on moments ago is now a bed on a wooden frame. My eyes get big. “I can sleep on the floor. . . .”
“Just go with it. I promise I won’t take advantage of you no matter how much you try to throw yourself at me. Besides, we’re on Christmas break. In my twisted mind, I can make this okay somehow.” He tosses two pillows on the futon and lies down on one half, leaving me enough room to crawl under the blanket on the other half. He turns on his side, looking up at me. “Do you trust me?”
The mattress suddenly looks small, like a life raft in the middle of the ocean. I swallow hard and then lie down beside him. My voice is weak, breathy, but I answer him anyway. “I’ve trusted you from day one.”
The smile that lights up his face is all I need to forget the crap I’m going to have to deal with in the morning. He inches closer, laying his arm over my stomach and pulling me tight against him. “Then I’d better not do anything to screw it up, huh?”
The smell of bacon makes me think of home before everything turned to shit. When Dad was stationed stateside and Amos, Jonathan, and I used to play forts outside, even during the hot summers in Louisiana. After Mom lost her battle to make me a girly-girl and when all of us were equal. Before Dad and Amos started bonding over the military.
When life was good.
I roll over, completely disoriented after my first full night’s sleep in five months. I stretch, enjoying the lazy feeling of sleeping in. Then last night slams into me like a wrecking ball. The truth about Amos, the boundary blurring with Drill.
His side of the futon is cold. Quickly, I unbraid my hair and run a hand through it, trying to tame the bed head before pulling it back into a ponytail. Hushed whispers in the kitchen give me pause, and I stop just outside the door.
“I don’t know what it means. I’ve told you that. Rev and I are looking into it.”
“So meanwhile, I’m just supposed to pretend like nothing’s happening?”
“Pretty much, Dean. If you draw attention to it, they’ll go into hiding. We need proof.”
A loud thump makes me jerk and I bang into the wall. The boys go silent and my face burns.
“Come on in, Sam,” Tim says from the kitchen.
Drill’s face is pink when I walk into the kitchen. His eyes scan my face and I shiver under his gaze, thinking about the feel of his body against mine last night. I’d stayed awake a long time, just being next to him, listening to him breathe.
“Were you talking about me?”
Tim turns slowly, spatula in hand and a Kiss the Chef apron on. “When did you wake up?” He wants to know how much I heard.
“Just a second ago. Is there coffee? I need coffee.”
Drill walks over and sets a mug he’s holding in front of me. “I just poured
it.” He tugs my ponytail as he goes by and can’t help smiling.
I hope Drill woke up before Tim. Tim seeing me and Drill like that, curled together on the futon, would be bad. “Thanks,” I say, focusing on Tim.
He glances between me and Drill then turns back to the bacon he’s cooking on the stove. Drill grabs the coffeepot and pours coffee into another mug. “We were just talking about your KB. Who might have drawn in it?” “Matthews.” Or Jonathan, I think. At this point, I’m not sure what he’d do. But I don’t say that out loud. “He’s the one who found it up on the mountain that night.”
“Do you know who he was with?” Drill sounds hopeful.
“I don’t. I didn’t know anyone well enough back then to recognize them.”
The smile falls from his face and he bangs his hand down on the table, the same thump that had made me jump earlier. A tremor goes through me. With what we might be up against, I kind of like knowing that Drill could be dangerous if he wanted to be.
“So tell us what you do know.” Tim blots the bacon off and sets it on the table. When he pulls the eggs out of the oven, he plops them down, too, and both he and Drill sit.
I chomp down on a piece of bacon to give myself time to think.
“Tim was one of your brother’s best friends. And you said last night you trust me,” Drill says. It sounds like an accusation.
Again, Tim looks at Drill, then me. “Let us help.” The way he says it is genuine, like Amos would say it if he were here.
I rub my eyes and then sigh. “I think there’s a group after me, maybe a secret society. I know it sounds crazy—”
“It doesn’t,” Drill insists, trading a look with Tim that I don’t understand. “You’re a military brat . . . you know they exist.”
“I’ve heard scary stories, that’s all. Look, I’m taking care of it. I don’t want you to risk everything you’ve worked for at the DMA. I can handle this.”
“We want to help, okay?” Tim says. “Have you heard any names? Of people or what group might be after you?”
“The Society. That’s all I’ve heard. Real original, right? And as far as members go, besides Matthews, I think an upperclassman named Evers might be in on it. I don’t have any proof, though. . . .”
Rites of Passage Page 19
