The Big Sister - Part One

by Lexie Ray

  “I thought I saw someone I knew,” I said, gently shrugging off Sol’s concern. “I didn’t really want them to know that I worked here. It would’ve brought up too many questions.” That was true enough, and hopefully it would stymie any questions that my friend had.

  “Oh,” Sol said, craning her neck around to see if she could ferret out just whom I was afraid of. “What, like a boyfriend or something?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, right. Like any of us have time for boyfriends.”

  Sol looked like I’d socked her in the belly, and I remembered how she’d been crying in the dressing room, how our coworker had so casually remarked that it looked like boy trouble. I’d had so little experience with the other sex that I couldn’t imagine being so torn up about another person.

  Then again, I sometimes felt like crouching in a corner and crying my eyes out about what had happened to my brother. It didn’t have to be romantic, those feelings. It just had to be about someone you loved.

  “I mean, I wish I had time for one,” I said. Sol didn’t look convinced, so I tried to extend to her a small olive branch with a kernel of truth. “Okay, so I kind of kissed this guy, and he doesn’t know I work here, and I wasn’t planning on telling him I work here.”

  Sol gasped and seemed to be trying very hard not to look delighted.

  “But that’s wonderful,” she said. “You’ve never had a boyfriend.”

  Well, when she said it like that, it sounded downright pathetic.

  “He’s not really a boyfriend,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Ah,” Sol said, nodding wisely. “Friends with benefits. Keep feelings out of it. Feelings only complicate matters.”

  Everything about Adam was complicated — most of all that I was actually pretending there was something between us for the benefit of my friend. When was I going to be able to escape my tangle of lies?

  “It’s not really a friends with benefits situation, either,” I said.

  “Oh, so you actually like him,” Sol gushed. “So cute, Faith! But you’re going to have to tell him sooner or later that you work here. You can’t have a good relationship if you’re not honest with each other.”

  I wish I could’ve come completely clean with Sol, but I just couldn’t. I would never want to be romantically interested in Adam, and I would always lie to protect my brother and our family.

  “Let’s everyone welcome Faith to the stage,” Parker said, her voice all honey and dark things. “She’s enough to make you want to convert, isn’t she?”

  “Break a leg,” Sol said, patting me on the shoulder. “We can talk more about your boyfriend later.”

  The word “boyfriend” associated with Adam was almost too much to bear, but I forced a smile and nod and walked quickly to the stage. I was ready to dance these horrible feelings away, ready to lose myself and all my worries — if only for the length of a song.

  My music began and I started the long strut down the catwalk, striking my heels on the wood with every beat.

  Then, suddenly, there was Adam. Again.

  My breath caught in my throat as I tried to keep my face in its sexy pout. There. Adam was sitting at a table just a few yards away from me. I double checked, squinting a little to overcome the bright spotlight trained on me, to make sure it wasn’t just the random blond guy from before, but he was still seated at the table I’d last seen him at, hooting and waving a handful of dollar bills at me.

  I abruptly turned my back to the crowd and kept time with my hips, swaying them back and forth with little stomps to give everything a more tantalizing jiggle.

  How was I going to escape? He would surely see me if I tried to make a run for it — if he hadn’t already recognized me as I danced down the stage. Anything I did at this point would only attract more attention — and suspicion. My only hope would be that he wouldn’t recognize me in full hair and makeup — and my skimpy little lingerie set.

  Feeling like an idiot but trying to play it off, I started working my way toward the pole, not turning around. I dipped and glided, bending forward and gyrating to give everyone a really nice view of my rear — anything to keep anyone from looking at my face. I was sure that Parker was one of the only ones present wondering just what in the hell I was doing up here. Sol was probably taking notes on how to make an entrance. I’d have to tell her to scratch this performance from her memory.

  The cool feeling of metal against my nearly bare back told me I had reached my destination, and I stretched my arms up to grab the pole. I took a quick swing around to gauge Adam’s distance from me. If he happened to have his back to me, all the better.

  I racked my brain yet again as to what business Adam had at the club. I was very, very careful to only give contact information that linked either directly to my cell phone or to Jennet’s. If anyone at St. Anthony’s tried hard enough, they’d probably figure out that I wasn’t actually ever employed at the restaurant I claimed to be. But there was never any reason — until now. My brother’s behavior had given his teacher a reason to dig deeper, and as carefully as I had constructed my lies, in a hard enough assault, everything would come tumbling down.

  Another thought occurred to me. Maybe Adam was just looking to get a quick fix of sexiness. Maybe he liked to pay a visit to the occasional club for entertainment purposes. Maybe he’d picked this club, out of all of the ones dotting the Miami streets, just on a whim. Maybe all of this was just some happy accident that could be laughed off or explained away. If he tried to skewer me over working here — I could say that I only did it on the side, not full time — I could skewer him over being here in the first place. We’d have to keep each other’s secret.

  Feeling confident — and cognizant of the fact that if I didn’t start turning up the volume of my performance soon, I wouldn’t earn money and Parker would want to know what was going on with me — I whirled around and looked right at Adam, shimmying seductively, shimmying to show him I didn’t care a bit that he was there, that he was seeing me do my thing.

  But just as soon as I’d seen him, Adam turned his face upward to meet mine and gave me a cool, appraising look, up and down my body, and then flashed a thumb’s up.

  It was in that moment that I realized it wasn’t Adam at all. Just some other blond guy with a buzz cut. I checked — the first one I’d mistaken for my brother’s teacher was still sitting serenely at the table where I’d last seen him. This new guy was at a new table, laughing with some other guy with a ponytail.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding with a whoosh and sagged against the pole, belatedly remembering that I was supposed to be putting on a show up here on the stage. I swiftly turned on my A game like flipping a switch, swinging around the pole in an explosion of energy and movement, earning myself cheers and hollers. I concentrated extra hard on my pole work, flipping and twirling and sliding just so I wouldn’t have to think about Adam anymore.

  I shuddered as I noticed another man in the crowd with light-colored hair, turning my head forcefully away from him.

  Did every blond guy with a buzz cut in freaking Miami decide that today was the day to show up at Parker’s club? I couldn’t catch a break, and it looked like it was turning out to be a very long, very bad day.

  Chapter 10

  I let myself into the apartment and let out a deep breath. Today had been way beyond insane. Today had been a test on my own insanity.

  The space between both Jennet and Luke’s doors was dark, but I had to talk to my brother. I had to get this mess figured out before it could fester any more than it obviously already had. I glanced at the clock on the microwave in the kitchen — it was nearly three in the morning. Too bad. I was awake, and I wouldn’t get another chance to talk to my brother until much later today — if I saw him at all. I didn’t want him going to school without debriefing about what Adam and I had talked about.

  I let myself into Luke’s room and plopped down on the bed.

  “Hey, Luke.” I shook him lightly. “Wake up. We ha
ve to talk.”

  My brother gave a sharp inhale that I didn’t like, but then he calmed. He was never good at waking up suddenly when he’d been deep asleep. It all harkened to the days when his stepfather would wake him up with violence.

  “What’s happening?” he slurred. “What’s wrong?”

  “Lots of things.” I flipped on the lamp next to his bed and studied Luke’s face as he blinked, bleary, at the sudden light. He was my brother. We shared the same blood flowing in our veins. We were family, and yet we knew so little about each other. Would we ever be as close as I wanted us to be? There were just too many secrets, I was afraid. I had been so busy protecting him from the outside world that I’d built a wall around myself, too.

  Luke waited for me to explain, rubbing his eyes in the meantime.

  “I met with your teacher, Adam — Mr. Shapiro — today,” I said, watching my brother’s face to see what his reaction would be. He hadn’t forgotten, and there was no wince of surprise. There was only a careful wariness, a cautious expression, a blank but politely interested expression.

  My brother was getting pretty good at this.

  “Oh,” he said. “What did he say?”

  “We talked about that language arts assignment,” I said. “And about our family situation. And about our parents — our real parents, Luke. And about you maybe not dealing with it well.”

  “I don’t even remember them,” he said, shrugging. It was hurtful, but true. The things that my brother was having trouble dealing with were much more recent monsters.

  “The thing is, your teacher was having trouble figuring out why a piece that was supposed to be so easy was so full of strange subversion,” I said. “Why couldn’t you just talk about the zoo, Luke? Or about Jennet? Or about getting into St. Anthony’s?”

  He shrugged, and I tried not to lose my temper at him. Snapping or shouting at him would only make him withdraw into his impenetrable shell. He could stay in that state for days, not talking to anyone, staring into space. And what would Adam say to that tomorrow at school when he couldn’t get my brother to say a single word, react to a single thing?

  “I want to talk seriously about this with you,” I said. “I want you to know you can trust me, Luke.”

  “I trust you,” he said, but the words were hollow. He didn’t quite believe them himself.

  “Then trust that if you talk about our past before we came to Miami, there won’t be a future in Miami,” I said. My brother needed to understand this. This wasn’t something he could play around with. This was survival.

  He looked at me, his lips pressed together.

  “Say something,” I said. “Say anything. What are you thinking about?”

  He shrugged again, and I had to look away, had to clasp my hands together to keep from shaking him. I needed something from him, some reaction, some acknowledgment that he understood what we were talking about. He was so taciturn that it reminded me of when we first met, there at the restaurant in Albuquerque. Luke had gradually opened up to me, gradually grown more outgoing — though he’d probably never learn to be boisterous. He was quiet and reserved, but there was obviously something bubbling below the surface that people were beginning to take notice of. This was something I needed to ferret out.

  “I want you to know that you did nothing wrong, back in Albuquerque. Back — back with Steve.”

  Luke flinched at hearing his stepfather’s name, but it cheered me that I was able to elicit something more than quiet indifference.

  “I hurt him,” Luke said quietly. “With a knife.”

  This was a breakthrough. I held my breath, waiting for more, but my brother fell quiet.

  “That’s true,” I said, keeping my voice light but quiet, “but it’s also true that he was hurting you. Do you agree?”

  Luke hesitated for a moment before nodding, barely dipping his chin to his chest.

  “You may have ki — hurt Steve.” I bit my tongue. Both of us knew Luke had killed that evil man, but if Luke wasn’t going to say it aloud, I wasn’t, either. “But what you did, you did to protect yourself. He was going to keep hurting you if you didn’t defend yourself. Do you think that’s true?”

  Luke nodded, his eyes wide, unblinking. God, I didn’t like to make my brother think about these things, but he was obviously in need of a wakeup call.

  “So you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, adding a little more force to my voice. “Do you understand? You did nothing wrong.”

  My brother stared at me for a while before speaking in a voice so soft I almost missed hearing the words.

  “Then why did we run away?”

  I sucked in a deep breath. What could I tell him that wouldn’t scare him? What would be the gentlest way I could break this to him? I decided just to be as honest and as clear as possible.

  “The truth is that some people might not see it that way,” I said. “Some people might think that you hurting Steve was the wrong thing to do. Those people might try to make you pay for what you’ve done, might try to put you away in jail or worse for it. I didn’t want that for you, Luke, because you don’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve anything that happened to you, do you understand? It wasn’t fair that you got adopted into that family. It wasn’t fair that child protective services never came to help you. It wasn’t fair that Steven hurt you all those years and no one knew about it. And it wasn’t fair that he only stopped hurting you because you were forced to stand up to him. Does all that make sense?”

  My brother’s lips were pressed so tightly together that they were white, but he nodded all the same.

  “We both know that you didn’t do anything wrong, but others might disagree,” I said. “That’s why we left Albuquerque. We’re getting a fresh start in Miami. You have the power and the ability to start over, to be whoever you want to be. Not many people get that chance, you know.”

  “I just want to be normal,” Luke said, and my heart broke.

  I gathered him to me roughly, squeezing him in a hug, holding him for all I was worth. I just wanted him to be normal, too. That’s all I wanted, but it was so hard for being such a simple request.

  “You are normal,” I said fiercely, willing it to be true. “You’re just fine. You’re doing just fine.”

  “But Mr. Shapiro —”

  “Let me worry about Mr. Shapiro. You just do me a favor, okay? Focus on Miami. Focus on what you want. Forget about Albuquerque. Forget it ever happened. You can be whoever you want, do whatever you want. Just start over.”

  “Okay.” Luke’s voice was muffled into my shoulder, and I released him, holding him by the shoulders and looking him in the eyes.

  “We are going to get through this,” I told him. “Everything always gets better. It started getting better the second you got to the restaurant, right?”

  My brother nodded, and I could see that he was tired. I shouldn’t have woken him up, not even to talk to him about something as important as all this was. Even so, I was glad I had. I felt like I really got through to him. If he could just understand what needed to be done, we could survive here. Not only survive — thrive.

  “Go to bed,” I said, ruffling his hair, happy that it was shaggy and not in a buzz cut like Adam’s. “You have to get up in a couple of hours.”

  Luke dropped backward onto the bed obediently, shutting his eyes and turning away from me.

  “Good night,” I said, pulling the covers up and over his shoulder.

  “’Night,” he mumbled.

  I watched him for a couple of minutes until his body rose and fell smoothly, deeply, lost in slumber. It was only then that I turned the lamp off and left, cracking the door so that a sliver of light fell across the bed.

  No, nothing was fair. Bad things happened to good people and good things happened to bad people. The world couldn’t be trusted, but we just had to make do.

  So many terrible things had happened to my brother that I didn’t trust anyone but myself to make it right. I could rely on m
yself, but I couldn’t rely on police, judges, lawyers, social workers, adoptive families, teachers, or anyone else. I had to keep all those other people away from my brother, had to steer Luke forward and away from his past. That was the only way he would survive.

  As I lay awake, unable to even attempt sleep, I thought yet again about Adam. Did my brother really require therapy? He was quiet, but he had stayed out of trouble as best he could. And would we be able to trust a counselor or psychologist with my brother’s deepest secret — that he’d killed a man? It didn’t seem likely. Luke would probably be turned over to the authorities. I couldn’t let that happen to him.

  The teacher, however, had seemed to know what he was talking about — as much as I hadn’t wanted to hear it or admit it was true. Something was wrong with my brother, something that I hoped to help him work through.