Nobody but Us

by Kristin Halbrook

  She faces the window and she ain’t said nothing to me for a long time and I don’t want her to say nothing.

  There’s a pull-off, like someone started building a driveway but changed his mind, so I stop and flip the headlights off but leave the interior light on and get out. I know it’s cold out here, my brain knows it, but my body don’t feel no chill. I could stand here and freeze to death and never even know it was happening until hellfire thawed me out again.

  What the fuck was I doing back there? Treating Zoe that way. Like she ain’t the most important thing in my life. Causing problems. Do I want the cops to get called? Do I want someone to know where we’re going? It ain’t enough that I got one eye on the road ahead and one on the road behind?

  There’s too much to get us on. To get me on. I watched and waited until Shelly used her debit card in front of me. Until I saw her PIN number. Three days ago, I took her card. Took the five-hundred-dollar max for two days until the card wouldn’t work no more. She figured out it was gone—the card, her money. I don’t know if she figured out it was me. But we needed the extra grand to go with what I’d saved up.

  Zoe still ain’t legal, and it don’t matter how bad she needed to get out of there—they’re gonna call it kidnapping and theft, and if I’m caught, then we’re both screwed. Run. Keep moving. Don’t stop to get into no more trouble. Don’t stop. Gotta keep telling myself that.

  Keep going.

  Keep running.

  We got places to be.

  I walk out a bit and pee in the dirt. It smells like cattle out here. Makes me wonder if there’s a feedlot nearby. Just about the nastiest smell ever hangs around feedlots.

  I get back to Zoe, shutting the door gently behind me after I get in, and try to smile all brave-like. ’Cause I got to do this thing for her. Show her something. That we’re gonna get out of here. That I’m gonna be this better person she needs.

  “I can do better.”

  She nods.

  Nods the same way she did the first time I spoke to her. Back when I asked her if there was someone she needed me to take care of for her. I figured she’d laugh at me, but she nodded, all sad. I didn’t think she would nod, but she did, and we just … connected. A zap kind of connection that I can’t explain.

  And I needed her after that. But maybe she don’t need me like that. Like she’d be better off without me.

  “You act like I’m perfect or something, Will. I’m not. I’m so messed up,” she begins. I poke at the rearview mirror. Turn it toward her so I can see her talking to me through it. “You don’t have anything to prove to me. I’m not going anywhere. But you have to figure out another way to be angry. Or how to not get so angry.”

  “Don’t you think I try? I try all the fu—all the time. It’s like,” I say, kneading the worn leather of the steering wheel. “Like, whatever I do, there it is, this … rage or … something … that owns my blood and it burns … burns my blood ’cause it thinks it’s funny or something. I just …” I grit my teeth, shake my head ’cause this shit ain’t right. “And I get angrier and angrier and then … I gotta do something about it.”

  “You can’t hit everything and think that’s going to make it all better.”

  “I know that! But it feels good to just … stop fighting it and let it control me. Like … I don’t gotta think none or decide or hold back or nothing.” Zoe turns to me with this soft look, and it’s pity, I know it’s pity, but I don’t care. She’s here and it’s gonna get better. “Everyone thinks I’m tough ’cause I fight. It’s all over me like a disease, and it’s easier to let it take over than to fight it. See, that’s the fight I’m too weak to win. Get it?”

  Zoe ain’t even touching me and I feel her surrounding me like a blanket. I don’t need this anger and I need her, but I can’t let either of them go even though they’re opposite each other. If I had her inside me like I have the rage inside me, I know I could beat it back.

  “I feel like I been angry forever.”

  She takes my hand.

  “I’m not going anywhere. Not without you.”

  “You know who’s cared about me like this? Like how you do?” I bury my face in my shoulder so she can’t see my shame. “No one. And here you are, and I’m screwing it up. God, how can I screw this up?”

  “You’re not screwing anything up. And I don’t care if you cry. I’m not going to think any less of you.” She leans in close. Watches me. “We can’t hide from each other.”

  “No. I don’t—”

  She waits, but that’s all I got.

  Then: “We’ll get through this.”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  ZOE

  HE FOUND ME AT LUNCH. THE SIXTH DAY OF SCHOOL after winter break, the first day of Will. I’d hidden away to do Brain Bowl and he found me, bringing his group home buddies into the math room and just watching. Will told Mr. Hart he was thinking about joining, too, so the teacher let them stay.

  All the other Brainers were nervous, intimidated by the foster kids. As though not having parents made them bad people. As though Will and Co. were planning on beating them up after lunch just for being smart.

  But not me.

  I got manic. I wanted to prove to this new guy who’d asked me about my bruise that I wasn’t just some punching bag. So for every fry he ate, I answered a question correctly. And he stared at me the whole time, even when his friends were talking to him.

  When we both realized it was a game, we shared a secret smile, and I had to stop myself from laughing so I could tell the teacher that Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia.

  “You’re smart,” he said, waiting for me when the lunch bell rang. “I ain’t never been smart like that.”

  I smiled and didn’t say anything because my tongue was in knots and my heart was trying to escape my chest under his gaze. I knew I was turning red and I hated that. He was so cute, in a scarred teddy bear sort of way. Even I saw that, and I was terrified to read people for fear they would read me back.

  “If you’re so smart, why do you let people beat up on you? Your dad? Is that who does it?”

  My smile froze and my insides froze, but my face blazed with heat. I walked away from him, stumbled around the first corner I came to so I’d be out of his sight.

  He found me again during lunch the next day, in the library. I was doing chemistry homework and he was eating chips as he walked in, even though we weren’t allowed to bring food into the library. That time he was alone. He sat in the chair across the table from me, shoved his chips in his bag, wiped his hands on his jeans, and stared. Again. I fought the self-consciousness that made me want to drag my bangs farther, longer over my eyes, over my entire face.

  “They won’t let you sand wood in here.”

  “You think I take shop? I’m that type, huh? I don’t take shop.”

  “Yes, you seem like the type.”

  “Not since I sawed off Riley Mercado’s finger last year.”

  I dropped my pencil. “Who?”

  “At a different school. It was an accident.”

  I tucked my hair behind my ear and forced myself to think about science so I wouldn’t start blushing again. If a chemical system at equilibrium experiences a change in concentration, temperature, volume, or partial pressure, then the equilibrium shifts to counteract the imposed change, and a new one is established. “I’ve got a lot of homework to do. And we’re not supposed to talk in here.” But I didn’t want him to leave and I didn’t want him to stay where he sat, either. I was mad at him. I wanted him closer. My equilibrium floundered as it tried to shift, neutralize, stabilize this unexpected disruption.

  The confusion turned my stomach into a pretzel. No one had made me feel that way before.

  “Want some help?”

  “You’ve taken AP Chem?”

  “You take AP Chem? Shit. Ain’t you a sophomore?”

  “It’s an elective.”

  “So you choose to take that? Over, like, pottery or some other fun shi
t?”

  “I like science. And I don’t like cussing.”

  He shrugged. Hid a smile. “Okay. I’ll give it a shot. How hard can it be?” He swung my book around toward him and glanced over the equations on the page. I watched his eyes move back and forth as he read and his lips as he mouthed the prominent words. His lips were perfect. I didn’t notice when he stopped reading.

  “I’m thinking the same thing,” he said.

  I tore my eyes away as a flush of heat crawled into my cheeks.

  “What?”

  “I wanna kiss you, too.”

  “I don’t, I—” Indignation, like a simmering mud pot, mixed with my embarrassment, and I clawed at my book, slamming the cover shut on my finger. I cringed, at the pain and at the smirk I was trying not to look at. My pencil rolled off the table, but I left it on the floor in my haste to get out of there.

  He didn’t look for me at lunch the whole next week, but I saw him in the halls, and every time, he was twirling my pencil between his fingers.

  Then he got in a fight and people suddenly realized I existed.

  “You know that new guy? Will Torres? I guess he beat the tar out of Hank Prosser. Laid him out in the middle of the cafeteria,” Lindsay told me. “People are talking about how Hank said something to him and the new guy just socked him, but nobody knows exactly what he said. Hank’s, like, a foot taller than him and way bigger. But he went flat on his back.”

  People in the halls watched me and Lin when we walked to class. I stared back warily, wondering what they were thinking. Their eyes were so curious, it was like they were seeing me for the first time. Seeing the bruises, wondering where I’d been hiding the whole time. It was horrible being looked at, scrutinized. I wanted to scream at them to look away; no, I didn’t want to make any noise at all.

  “He hasn’t even been here that long,” I whispered to Lindsay.

  “I know,” she said, nodding. “They’re going to ship him to another home if he’s not careful.”

  “What did Hank say?”

  She pursed her lips, then opened her mouth with a loud smack. “Well, everyone’s saying he said something about you.”

  I paused. “Me? What could he say about me?”

  Lin shrugged. “What is there even to say, you know?”

  I stood in the center of the hallway, mouth agape, wondering why this new boy had to cause so many problems.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’ll all blow over by tomorrow.” She gave me a quick, tight hug and dashed into theater as the late bell sounded.

  I left school at lunch and walked two miles in the freezing cold to the McMurray Home for Youth. I fretted over what I would say to him, how I would voice the questions he’d sown in me.

  I wasn’t much of a talker. I talked to Lindsay sometimes. She’d ask, with an optimistic smile, where I was planning on going after high school and the word “go” would bounce around in my head in a million echoes, but I couldn’t grasp a single one long enough to analyze it or understand what the term meant. Go … where? The guidance counselor brought me into his office earlier in the semester to tell me about colleges and my excellent grades and other things, but I didn’t hear a word he said after he passed a stack of forms across his desk, telling me to have my dad look over and sign them. I’d given my dad papers to fill out for sixth grade camp years before, and he’d promptly dumped them in the garbage. Which is what I did as soon as I walked out of the counselor’s office.

  I always gave Lin a tight smile and said there was still lots of time to figure out where I was going.

  Everyone was going somewhere. The need to flee flashed in their eyes as they walked down the halls, discussing playing football at Nebraska or vet studies in Washington. Envy rushed to the surface when I overheard their plans, but the feeling dulled quickly, becoming tired and wilted around the edges when I realized I couldn’t join in their conversations. I had nowhere to go. Besides, when I talked to other kids, they would make fun of me because I spoke like the books I read. Used words like “fretted.”

  It wasn’t worth it. I stopped talking to people long before I’d figured out how to.

  Peeling white paint and a plastic-patched upstairs window greeted me when I reached the group home. I knocked on the door, knowing my tongue would fail me.

  He answered the door in boxers and a white T-shirt and with hair in his eyes. He looked like something from an underwear ad, but his eyes were sheepish when he peeked up at me, when he wasn’t looking at the ground. My knees went weak and my voice was breathless with the only thing I could think to say.

  “I heard they suspended you for a week,” I stammered, the words growing a cloud of fine steam between us.

  He took my hand and pulled me into the entryway, closed the door and helped me shrug out of my coat at the same time. He led me to a room with mismatched couches full of rips and Sharpie marks, and we sat next to each other. I studied his face, the shadow on his cheek where Hank must have gotten one punch in, and almost smiled at how we matched. Almost.

  “Come here.” He pulled me into his lap, knowing I would come, that I wouldn’t say no. He held me, but he never told me what Hank Prosser said to make him send Hank to the hospital for seventeen stitches and a broken cheekbone.

  He never would.

  I look at Will across the car now and wonder, not for the first time, what Hank had said. And why Will won’t tell me.

  WILL

  WE GOT MUSIC ON AND SUGAR HIGHS FROM DRINKING Coke when we enter Utah. The mountains are a nasty reminder of Colorado and pain that came quick and the smell of burning skin. But Zoe, who’s read about everything and knows tons, is all impressed. She’s got big eyes watching out the window. There ain’t nothing to see but snowy trees and signs that tell you the elevation. But you don’t go up where she comes from. It’s so different from North Dakota that we feel like we’ve escaped everything by now. I gotta watch out for that. We can’t get lazy. I adjust the rearview mirror and take a quick look, but the only things following us are a brown minivan and the mountain wind.

  “Amazing. I understand that song now. You know, the one about America the beautiful? I’d always gotten the part about the grain. But not the purple mountain majesties. I get it now.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty.” I guess it is, but Zoe gives me this look. She pulls on her straw with her teeth, and I clear my throat, check the rearview mirror for shadows. Three states down, two to go. We’re fast. Faster than anything chasing us.

  “Are we going to see the Great Salt Lake?” Zoe asks after she’s swallowed her soda.

  “I don’t think we go by it. But we drive through the mountains for a while. Check the map if you want.”

  She checks and I ain’t wrong. She’s bummed enough that I almost change course and head into the valley. But she looks tired, too.

  “How about we get a room for tonight?” I ask. “We can ask around to see how long it’d take to get to the lake and figure something out, okay?”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not? It’s gonna be too cold to sleep in the car. Don’t you wanna sleep somewhere warm and toasty?”

  I wait for her cheeks to flush like strawberries, but they don’t. She looks worried.

  “What?”

  “Hotels are expensive.” Her voice is low, like a shy child’s, and she says this like she’s scared. Like she ain’t too sure how I’m gonna react. I’m not sure I do a good job. She faces away from me when I look at her. I can’t help it. I feel like she’s poking needles in my pride, searching for the raw places and finding them with the tips of her weapons. I’m the man. I’m supposed to take care of everything.

  “We can do a hotel tonight. I saved up. I got cash. A little room somewhere. Cheap. They’re all over the place. Don’t worry about it, Zoe. I’ll take care of it.”

  “I know. I mean, I know you’ll take care of things. But we have to be careful. Things get expensive, and the little things? They add up. We ha
ve to make sure we’re okay for Vegas.”

  “It’s one night. After this we get out of the mountains and it’ll be warmer.”

  “I just don’t think we should waste your money.”

  I downshift, holding the stick harder than I need to.

  “It ain’t my money. It’s ours.”

  “I didn’t earn it. You worked for it. It’s yours, and someday I’ll pay you back.”

  I clench my jaw. Grind my teeth. I don’t want it to be like that. Like me and my money, and her and nothing. I didn’t work for nothing. I didn’t risk getting caught with Shelly’s card for nothing.

  Why won’t she take what I want to give her?

  I reach for my wallet and pull whatever my fingers grab. I push it into her lap.

  “Here. You wanna divide everything? This part’s yours. It’s a gift. Spend it however you want. Rest’ll be mine. Work for you?”

  I ain’t looking at her, but she’s quiet, like, sad quiet. She don’t touch the money. I just want her to take it, to believe I wanna give her everything. I see it out of my peripheral vision, her hand swiping across her cheek.

  Shit.

  I gather the money and put it back in my wallet. I hold it out to her. She won’t take it.

  “That wasn’t cool. I’m sorry, Zoe.”

  She nods.

  “Let’s figure this out now, okay?” I set the wallet in her lap. Try to be soft about it. “This money belongs to us together. That’s what I want. You be the accountant person. Count the cash, make a list or whatever, like a chart, and figure out what we should be spending. You got that.”

  She nods and handles the wallet.

  “You can do that? Like, you know how?”

  “I can manage that. A chart, or whatever.” She’s smiling a little now. Good.

  “I don’t know what they’re called. Like, balancing your checkbook, right? ’Cept I never had checks or a bank account or nothing like that.”