by Holly Green
And it was fun, really. We worked on a new LEGO kit he had, and then built with some other LEGOs and acted out a whole thing where the Star Wars characters had a hotel for aliens. The movie was good. Everything was going really well, until Johnny Hink got home for dinner.
I’d been slow coming around to the idea of foods mixing. If the green bean juice got in the mashed potatoes, the potatoes were contaminated. It’s not that unusual. But it was a big freaking problem when Leslie Hink set a steaming dish of goulash in the middle of the table.
I leaned forward and studied the bowl. It was a messy mix of ground beef, peas, carrots, corn, smothered in juicy stewed tomatoes. And the name—it was like the sound of the slop falling into the pig trough when my class visited that farm in kindergarten.
There was only one way out of this. “I’m a vegetarian,” I announced.
“Oh,” Leslie Hink said. Her serving spoon hovered over my plate for a moment before she returned it to the bowl. “I guess I can make a sandwich for you.”
“I’ll make it.” I pushed my chair out from the table, because I didn’t want to cause any more trouble for Cully’s mom.
“No.” Johnny Hink’s hand slammed down beside his plate, rattling the empty glass in front of him. “I watched that girl put away three hot dogs last weekend. She can eat what we eat.”
You couldn’t be best friends with Cully and not know that his dad had a bad temper. Tanner knew, too. But as long as I could remember, the grown-ups had looked around it, like it was a tree that grew out of the center of the dining room table and there was just nothing to be done.
I sat quietly through dinner, sipping my glass of milk while Cully wolfed down his food. At the end, when Cully asked to be excused, Johnny Hink’s eyes met mine. “You’re going to eat it for breakfast.”
Cully’s face fell. His eyes grew shiny with tears. “We were supposed to have waffles.”
* * *
We stayed up later than we were supposed to. Well after the grown-ups had gone to bed. And Cully was still heartbroken over the waffles.
“Truth or dare,” he said.
“Dare,” I answered, but as soon as the word was out of my mouth, I knew what was coming.
“Eat the goulash.”
Just the thought of eating something called goulash made me want to gag. But I nodded. Cully grabbed his mom’s phone and filmed me as I forced down every bite. We needed proof for his dad that we hadn’t put it down the garbage disposal.
That’s when the word goulash became a way to throw down the gauntlet. To say, Are you tough enough for this?
“I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t back down from a dare,” Cully said when I chased the last bite with half a cup of chocolate milk.
But he was wrong. I didn’t eat the goulash because he dared me.
I ate the goulash because I wanted Cully to have those damn waffles.
4:49 A.M. SUNDAY
There’s a light in the distance. A boat up ahead. I sit straighter in my seat and correct my form. Cully’s pace has me slacking. Not cool.
“Can we pick it up? Let’s catch them.” I cannot believe I’m asking Cully’s permission to go faster.
He does it, and in a few minutes our light is shining on a four up ahead. Only two of the four are paddling. The sternwoman holds her water tube in one hand and something else, maybe a sandwich, in the other.
I swear my mouth gets two degrees hotter, and my tongue starts to stick to the back of my throat.
After we say a quick hey and pass by them, I hit the button on my watch. 4:58. My next scheduled sip is in two minutes. Close enough. I reach for my water tube. I’m so thirsty it’s almost dirty.
A shot of cold lime-flavored water hits my tongue. And then air bubbles.
When I reach for my bottle it almost flies out of its holder.
Too light.
I shake it.
Empty.
No.
This is bad.
I didn’t pace this right at all.
At least four more hours to Hochheim. If Cully realizes I’m out of water he’ll freak. He’ll call for help, no question.
“You okay back there?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Fine.”
5:28 A.M. SUNDAY
“Hey, Sadie.” Cully’s voice drifts through the darkness.
“Mmmhmmm.” I don’t even let my lips part.
“I’m falling asleep up here. I need you to talk to me.”
Crap.
My leg brushes against something in the boat. And that’s when I remember. I have a bottled energy shot left. I stop paddling for a moment and try to open the bottle. My hands are permanently wet. Permanently wrinkled. They don’t work right. It’s like I’m wearing oven mitts. I fumble with the lid forever, but it finally twists, and I pour this strawberry watermelon whatever down my throat and swallow. The sweetness lingers in my mouth, artificial and wrong. I need something to wash it down, but obviously that’s not an option. Still, at least my mouth is kind of wet.
“Start anytime,” Cully says.
“What?” I ask.
“The talking …”
“Right …” What are we supposed to talk about? “How are you doing?”
“You’ve gotta give me better than how are you doing?”
I’m about to snap that he can start the conversation himself if he wants to talk, but my mouth is too dry for fighting. I need to get him to do the talking.
God, I can’t wait for the next water stop. For Erica and Gonzo.
And there’s the thing I’ve been wondering since yesterday morning.
“How did you and Gonzo end up being friends? I don’t remember you being friends before …” I trail off. We don’t need to talk about the fight.
“Do you remember Steve Ellwood?” Cully asks. “Does he still go to school with you?”
“I don’t like that guy.” The words fly out of my mouth before I can check them. Not that I have a good reason for not liking Steve Ellwood. I just don’t, but it probably sounds too harsh. “But yeah, I remember. He just graduated,” I say, going for a softer approach.
Up ahead a low branch stretches halfway across the river. Across the current. I steer us toward an empty spot below it so we can go under instead of going around it in the slow water.
“Yeah, well, the summer between sixth and seventh, after … you know.”
After the fight.
“Well,” he continues. “Steve invited Gonzo and me to this pizza dinner at his church. He said there’d be girls there. That he’d held Rachel Tillman’s hand at one the week before.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, lips closed, to keep him talking. Rachel stole my piñata candy at a birthday party in second grade. She and Steve deserve each other.
“Anyway, everything kind of sucked that day and my mom dropped me off late and I missed the beginning, but I got there right in time for the—”
We’re almost to the branch. Cully should be preparing.
“Lie back!”
“Oh, right.”
He lies back in the boat, I do the same, and we glide under the branch.
“When we got there, the pizza was cold, and then they called us all into the chapel. I didn’t know there was going to be a sermon. The preacher started talking about witches and the devil and kids killing their parents and how his mom was possessed by demons and the police called him because she was naked at the airport.” He goes quiet for a couple of strokes. “Scared the bejesus out of me. You know my mom’s pretty religious, but not that kind of religious. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it because …”
Because his parents suck. Because he wasn’t friends with me anymore.
“Anyway, Gonzo was weirded out, too. He told his mom about it, and she took us out for ice cream the next day and talked us down. I needed a new best friend, so …”
Gonzo, with his suspenders and wingtip shoes. The opposite of everything Johnny wanted Cully to be. “Your dad must have loved that.”
“Thrilled
,” Cully says flatly. “Almost as happy as he was about me having a girl for a best friend.”
“I never knew it bothered him that we wer—”
“How did you miss it?” he asks.
How did I?
“What about you and Erica?” Cully asks.
“We work together at the bakery,” I say, like it’s that simple.
But getting to know Erica wasn’t simple. Coming from Houston, she was skeptical of anything small town, especially the people. Which made it weird that she wanted to work at the bakery. We hardly talked for the first month, which didn’t bother me much. But one day she came in with red eyes and raw fingertips, and fell asleep with her head on one of the prep tables.
At the end of the shift, I woke her up.
“Hey, are you okay?”
She lifted her head and wiped drool off the side of her mouth. “Effing Lacy Siddens.”
“Did she Instagram you?”
Lacy Siddens was a senior with my brother, famous at school for posting bad candids of people she didn’t like on social media. Like she’d catch someone mid-yawn with their face all messed up and make some horror-show caption about it.
“Worse. She hired my grandma to make her prom dress.”
Erica pulled out her phone and showed me a picture of this ridiculous dress covered in tiny flowers. Like the whole dress was flowers. Not an inch of plain fabric. Even the straps.
“We’ve been making those stupid flowers for weeks, and two days ago she told us none of them were good enough. Said they needed more petals. Threatened to smear us on social media. Prom is in two days, and we’re still not done.”
My mom didn’t mind when I told her I was going to sleep at Erica’s.
I’ve always been good with my hands. Making daisy chains. Decorating cookies. Working on boats. So Erica taught me how to make the flowers, her grandmother fed us chicken stew, and we worked until Erica couldn’t see straight. I sent her to bed, but I kept going.
“You’re fucking invincible,” she said the next morning when I was cutting fabric and my laundry basket was full of flowers. “We have school today. Why didn’t you sleep?”
“Because it’s hard,” I answered. Which was part of it. I liked the challenge. But also, being Erica’s friend felt like something I had to earn. And I liked that about her. I wanted to earn it. I liked her better than all the girls I was friends with from the cross-country team.
But I’m not about to tell Cully that. He doesn’t need to know how long it took to fill the hole he left in my life.
The conversation is dead now, which is too bad. It makes the boat move faster. Makes the time pass and distracts me from how the dry spot in my throat has grown. And also, his voice makes me feel warm inside.
We paddle through straightaways and turns. Cully pees, so I pee, too, and I don’t drink it. It’s a pathetic little trickle I pour into the river. We paddle. We dodge stumps and an owl swoops down low in our flashlight beam and we paddle. Everything hurts and we keep paddling.
“I think I need a break.” Cully’s words come out soft and scratchy.
“Have a snack,” I say reflexively, just holding back the constant forward motion that Dad would tack on if he were here. Keeping your blood sugar up is his number one fatigue solution.
He puts down his paddle, and I guess he eats something, because it’s quiet up there for a minute before he starts paddling again. “If I’m not going to lie down, we’ve gotta keep talking.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “I just can’t think of anything.”
What if I just gargled the river water and spat it out? Just to wet my throat. Would that make me sick? Would I get some sort of brain-eating parasite?
There’s a long pause, and then Cully speaks. “Last movie you saw in the theater.”
It’s been so long I barely remember. “Hell or High Water,” I finally answer.
“That came out years ago,” Cully says.
“Drive-in,” I say. But for some reason I don’t tell him it was a date. It was a lousy date, but the movie was awesome.
For a while it’s kind of fun, talking to Cully about movies, what books we like—school and non-school—and how he’s totally come around on cilantro, even though when we were kids he swore it tasted like soap. It’s familiar. Comforting. Easy.
“Who was your first kiss?” Cully asks.
“What?” The thought of talking to Cully about kissing makes me squirm. Maybe because when we were friends, kissing wasn’t even on my radar. His face flashes in my mind. Not his kid face. His face now.
“Who’s the first person you kissed?” he asks again.
I guess we’re doing this, because there’s no way in hell I’m letting him know it bothers me.
“Do you mean like a peck? Or are we talking tongue?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Wes Dearington in the seventh grade. Just a peck. And then with tongue … I think that was Casey Ledbetter. Either him or Jake Summers.”
“You can’t even remember?” he asks. “Wow.”
“What?” There was a lot of spin the bottle the second half of middle school. It was fun. Then I remember. “No, first tongue kiss was Luke Blackmon. Eighth grade. Final answer.”
“Luke? That guy used to spit his gum on the lunchroom bench. I spent a whole afternoon with a sticky butt because of him.”
“I didn’t know that.” Luke was in Cully’s grade, not mine. He was older and I thought he was cute.
“Well, it might have been a selling point for you.”
“Hut.”
We switch sides and I steer us around a tree branch hanging down into the water.
I really didn’t know about the gum. But Cully’s right, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me. Not then, anyway.
“Why? Who was your first kiss?” I ask.
“Let’s talk about something else.” There’s something more subdued in his voice.
“Was it Allie?”
“No. You wouldn’t know her. Sarah Simms in ninth grade. And then this girl Madison when I was visiting my cousins. After that it’s just Allie. And a girl named Krista, one night at a party. It was awkward after that. I don’t drink at parties anymore.”
“Oh,” I say, because it turns out I don’t like the mental image of Cully kissing all these girls. I wish I hadn’t asked. Also, we went to the same school for seventh grade, and that’s when all the kissing started. At least in my grade it was. And Cully—well, even back then, he wasn’t bad to look at.
As if he’s reading my mind, he says, “It’s hard to get any play when everyone knows you cry at Disney movies.”
Something inside me sinks, remembering all the times I saw him secretly dab at his eyes. During The Lion King. During Finding Nemo. It’s not like it was something we ever talked about. It was just this thing I knew about him. Something that was only mine to know.
Then, in sixth grade, when I was still raw and angry from the tree house, Caitlin Sisal asked if my mom’s cookies were really made with crickets.
“Of course they’re not. Where’d you hear that?” I’d asked.
Caitlin shrugged. “That’s what Cully is telling people.”
“I wouldn’t listen to someone who cries during Disney movies,” I snapped.
It was something I’d loved about him, and then I turned it into a weapon. Just like I used his full name like a weapon. It’s like there’s something heavy in my chest.
“How long did you date Allie?” I ask, grasping at things to say.
“Still picking at the scabs,” he says, but it’s more resigned than annoyed. I didn’t realize it was a scab. I just needed something else, anything else to say. But then he answers. “Two years.”
“Did you see her at Palmetto?” I ask. “I wasn’t really watching.”
“I’ve been doing my best not to see her since Cottonseed.”
Right. She’s the reason we flipped. “Do you think she’s finished trying to mess with your head?”
“No. I think your brother got far enough ahead that she had to choose between seeing him and seeing us.”
“WHAT?” I ask. “Why would she want to see Tanner?”
“Is this a joke?” He sounds confused.
“I’m missing something.”
“Don’t you know they’re together?” Cully asks.
Tanner and Allie? How did I not know this? I’ve seen a few girls leave the garage early in the morning when I set out for a run or a paddle. I guess that hasn’t happened for a while. A long while. But I’ve never even seen him talk to Allie.
“Didn’t he tell you why we fought?” Cully asks.
“He said you were talking trash about Dad.”
“What do I care about the garbage between our dads?” Which doesn’t even make sense. He tore the tree house down over the garbage between our dads.
“It was in the afternoon on Allie’s birthday,” Cully says. “She was supposed to be out with friends, so I brought flowers to put in her room. It was supposed to be a surprise. I walked in on them together.”
“Together?”
“Yeah.”
I shudder.
“So that’s why you fought?” I ask, trying not to think about my brother sneaking through Allie’s window. Or Cully doing the same.
“Yep.”
“Like you fought in her bedroom?”
“No. I didn’t hang around to watch. Seeing your brother’s bare ass still haunts me. But I stood on the sidewalk for a minute thinking Allie might come out and, I don’t know, have some sort of legit explanation.” He shakes his head a little. “I wasn’t thinking straight. Anyway, Tanner came out instead, and his shirt was inside out, and I don’t know, I just kind of lost it.”
Holy hell. Tanner had made it sound like he was just walking down the street and Cully ambushed him.
“Did you swing first?” I ask, because I know now that Dad was wrong about Cully. He’s not volatile.
His arms droop a little. “Yeah. It was right after Scout died. I was a mess.”
My heart plummets. “Scout died?” God, the way she and Mazer would roll around together when they were both little, it was just one big ball of fluffy puppy.
Mazer. He’s not allowed to die.
