“I’ll be right in,” he said. “I just need a minute.”
I could just see his outline in the dark, his arm rising and falling with each swig from his drink. Music was playing inside, so it was impossible to hear if the flag was flapping the way it did, but I wondered if he was listening for it. That slap flap, slap flap. I watched him through the door. I didn’t take my eyes off him because I was afraid if I did, he’d disappear. I was running out of time.
CHAPTER 2
LOST
DAD LIFTED HIS glass to make a toast. “When Sef first told us he joined the marines, I said to myself, Of course he did. He’s doing it for our country, just like I did and my father did and his father did. He’s going over there to get the job done. It’s in our blood. But my son—he’s worth a million—”
“No Christmas presents!” Jack shouted.
Some people laughed.
Dad looked around the room. “That’s right, no Christmas presents. I couldn’t have said it better myself. They don’t know how lucky they are, getting my boy to fight for their country. To Sef. God bless him.”
The room exploded into cheers and hollers, and people threw their glasses back. Sef just smiled like he was embarrassed and didn’t quite know what he was doing in the middle of all of this.
Mrs. Vasaturo from across the street came up to Sef. “You be careful over there, Sef, honey. And come back to us real soon.”
Other neighbors and friends lined up to put their arms around Sef, shake his hand, and give their last good wishes. Some of the women held on too long. In the summer when he took his shirt off to mow the lawn, Mrs. Fischer next door would come out to garden and Mrs. Henderson would walk her pug up and down our street.
Mom marched out, holding the cake high. It was a sheet cake of the flag with the words “OD BLESS YOU, SEF! We love you!” written in blue cursive. The G had gotten scraped or eaten off by Jack. Mom started cutting pieces and passing them around. She kept her party smile on, and everyone smiled back at her and told her how strong she was.
There were so many people around Sef that I couldn’t even see him. I followed Van to the kitchen, where she turned and went out through the open mudroom door that led to the garage.
Finn was sitting on the stool at Dad’s workspace, playing guitar. Our next-door neighbor Kristen Adams was standing too close to him, nodding her head, letting her hair swish side to side. Her tiny T-shirt showed off the gold loop through her belly button. She was in eighth grade, between Van and me.
“What are you guys doing?” Van asked.
Finn turned, paused for a second, and then kept right on singing, “Try to live again, the first cut—”
Kristen looked from Finn to Van to me as the song ended. “That was, like, so cool, Finn. Thanks. I guess I’ll go back to the party.”
Van looked like she was going to cry.
Finn bent over his guitar and said, “What? I didn’t do anything. I’m just playing music.”
“The life of a rock star,” Van said sarcastically.
“Yeah,” Finn said. “Come here.”
She did.
I got out of there fast. The night air was getting cold. The bird feeder Sef made for Mom years ago swung from the lowest branch of the sycamore. One of its sides hung askew, and it banged against the tree over and over. I yanked at the rope, pulling hard until it finally loosened and fell to the ground. I stood there for a long time, not knowing if I should leave the bird feeder there or try to fix it. Then I heard someone laughing and went back inside.
Sef and his friends were getting ready to leave.
“Thanks for everything, Dad,” Sef said. He hugged Dad and then turned to Mom.
Her shoulders shuddered, and her whole body seemed to become smaller, just for a second. Then she snapped back to her party self.
“I won’t be out long. Thanks, Mom.”
“This good-bye is easy compared to tomorrow’s,” Mom said. Just as she stepped forward to kiss him, Jack jumped on Sef’s back and wrapped his arms around Sef’s neck.
Sef grabbed Jack’s hands. “See you in the morning, champ.”
Jack wouldn’t let go. Dad had to wedge him off.
“Hey, where’s Van?” Sef asked.
“Van!” Dad yelled. “Get over here and say good night to your brother.”
“I think she got in a fight with Finn,” I told them.
“Better her than me.” Greg slammed his fist into his palm.
“I’ll show him a peace train,” Dad said.
“Peaze,” Jack said.
Everyone laughed until Van came in. Her eyes were red.
“Bye, Sef.”
“See you tomorrow, Van.” He pushed up her chin with his fingers. “Do me a favor?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t let anyone get you down.”
She nodded.
“You know I’m not leaving until you smile, right?”
She did. A little. When Van and Finn first started dating, she was so happy. She let me help pick outfits for her to wear, and we listened to CDs of Solar Train that Finn had made. Tonight it seemed like she was playing a game that she couldn’t win.
Sef turned to me. “Are you going to be ready tomorrow morning?”
“Sure. Are you?”
He laughed and looked at all of us standing there, waiting for him to leave. “You guys know you’re the best, right?”
“Yeah,” Jack answered. “I know.”
“All right. I’m glad someone around here knows.”
He followed his friends out into the dark, and I was sure then that nothing would ever be the same again.
We listened to their car drive away. Dad said, “That went by fast. It was a good party, Gracie.”
Mom sank onto the couch. “Now it’s over.”
“He’ll be all right, Grace. He will.”
“I never wanted him to go. It was your idea.”
“Jack, Cass, go upstairs. Party’s over. Get ready for bed,” Dad told us.
We stepped over someone’s broken wineglass and started upstairs. When we were almost at the top, we heard Mom say, “If he comes home without arms and legs, I’ll never forgive you.”
Jack sat down on the last stair and turned to me. “No arms and legs.”
“No,” I said. “No way. He has arms and legs. Don’t listen to them. Mom’s crazy. Come on, let’s go.”
Jack’s eyes were wide. He grabbed my hand. “I want to sleep in Sef’s room. Please, please, please.”
I didn’t think Sef would mind. “Go get your sleeping bag.”
He pulled my hand harder.
“Did you pee in it?”
He shrugged.
“I’ll get mine.”
Van was sitting at her computer with her iPod on. Her side of the room was so neat, it was sickening. Sometimes I’d move a photo or some makeup or something out of place just to see how long it’d take her to put it back where it belonged.
“Van,” I said, “why weren’t Ally and Nora here tonight?”
She shrugged. “I just wanted Finn to be here, if that’s all right with you.”
“I just thought it was a little weird, since they’ve been your friends for years and you’ve known Finn for a couple of weeks or something.”
She turned the volume up on her iPod.
I spun the globe on the floor next to my bed, closed my eyes, and landed my finger on the place I was going to end up living. The Pacific Ocean. I’d need a houseboat. I couldn’t exactly build a school for Jack on a houseboat. That was Sef’s idea. He said that I’d be good at teaching kids like Jack. Right now I didn’t think I could do anything right, never mind build a whole school. I carried my sleeping bag to Jack, who was waiting outside Sef’s door w
ith White Kitty, who was really grayish brown with dirt.
“Shut the door. Don’t let anyone in,” he said. “Just Sef.”
“No one’s trying to knock the door down, don’t worry,” I said.
I unrolled my sleeping bag beside Sef’s bed. In his camouflage clothes, Jack shimmied inside it and shut his eyes.
Sef had spent his whole life in this room. It had the same wallpaper with tiny silver airplanes. On his desk, there were pictures of girls from his class. They were all pretty with different lengths of dark, feathery hair. And there was the picture of him from a road race. Jason had lost a bet and had to run wearing a Speedo and a girl’s tank top. Sef was beside him, laughing. He didn’t look like a marine. He looked like my brother.
There was a picture of our family from a barbecue last summer. Everyone was smiling except for me. I always looked like a phony when I smiled for pictures, like someone had come along and taped a stupid look on my face, so I didn’t smile. Mom, in a white pleated skirt and sleeveless blouse, wore a big smile, showing her teeth. Her hand rested on Sef’s shoulder. Sef was holding up the football he and Dad had been passing back and forth. Kneeling in front of Sef, Jack had to turn his head up to look at Sef.
All our heads were tilted toward Sef, I saw then. I wished I could remember now what it was he had said that made us all look at him. I set the photo back down on his desk. I felt lost.
CHAPTER 3
I DIED
I DIDN’T EVEN realize how much Sef held us together until he was gone. He was the only one who could make Van smile. He was Jack’s hero and Dad’s best buddy. He was the only one Mom listened to when she’d had too much to drink. And me, I was myself with Sef. I laughed the most with him. Sometimes I thought if people at school saw me at home, they’d ask, “Who is that girl?”
Sef was always watching over us. I remember a fall day years ago when Mom took us to the beach. It was windy and warm as we started over the sand toward the water.
Mom realized she’d left her purse in the car. She yelled for Van and Sef, but they were too far ahead. “Watch Jack,” she said to me and turned back toward the parking lot.
I stretched out my arms and let the wind whip around me, breathed in the salty, seaweedy smell. The sand was warm between my toes. I picked up an upside-down horseshoe crab shell by its tail and let the sand pour out. When I held it up to show Jack, he was gone. I dropped the crab and ran toward the sea, the waves like thunder in my ears.
“Jack! Jack!” By the water the sand dropped, forming a bank beneath where the waves crashed. I knew Jack had gone over the embankment. In my mind I saw him in the water, trying to lift his head as the sea pulled him away, and I knew it was my fault.
I saw Sef ahead of me, running to the same edge of sandbank. When I got there, Sef was kneeling on the sand where the waves crashed. He laid Jack down and pounded him hard on the back. Jack choked and coughed, spitting up, his arms flapping like he was trying to fly away. It happened to Jack, but it felt like I was drowning. I touched Jack’s face. His eyes were white and watery like they were floating far away. My heart was pounding, and I couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t do that again!” Sef yelled. “Never!”
I didn’t know if he was talking to Jack or me.
Van stood back, her pants wet to the tops of her legs. “He could have died,” she said.
“I died,” Jack said.
“No, Jack, you didn’t,” Sef said.
“There’s Mom,” Van said.
Her black purse banged against her side, and her long sweater flew out behind her. She cried when she saw us. She fell into the sand on her knees and took Jack and rocked him back and forth for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, and then I took off running down the beach until I collapsed in the sand. Until I could breathe again. After a while, Sef came for me. His clothes were still wet. He handed me a smooth gray-blue skipping stone that fit in the palm of my hand. I never threw it. I kept it in my pocket.
“Come on, Cass,” he said. “It’s okay. Jack’s okay. He found a horseshoe crab. Come on. I’ll race you.” And we ran as fast as we could through the sand. It felt so good to breathe hard, to suck air in and to sweat out the fear. I knew what would have happened if Sef hadn’t been there. Every morning since then, Sef and I had gone running.
When we got home, Jack held the horseshoe crab up by the tail for Dad. “I died,” he said. A tiny trickle of sand fell to the ground.
“Yeah?” Dad popped a napoleon into his mouth. “And then you rose again?”
“And walked across the water,” Mom said triumphantly.
Dad poured them drinks. We never talked about it again.
That’s how we were—we didn’t talk about things.
CHAPTER 4
BRING ’EM ON
I WAS MAD at Sonia for not coming to Sef’s party, but the weekend before hadn’t gone so well. Her parents had come over to watch the Patriots game. Even though they lived only two blocks away, they drove because of the freak storm that blew snowflakes the size of my hands. Mom watched out the window as the LeClaires backed their Volvo down our driveway. “They’re here!” she sang.
Sonia came in first, carrying a tray of beads and shaking the snow from her long blond hair. She looked so pretty and so together.
“Hey,” she said to me.
“Hey.”
“It’s crazy out there.”
“I know,” I said. “Jack’s been howling because Mom wouldn’t let him outside.”
“Only Jack.” She laughed and started to spread her beads out on the table. I’d told her I’d help her string some necklaces for her new jewelry business.
Sonia’s father, Eric, draped his arm over Sef’s shoulders. A lawyer, he was slim and had clean-cut boyish looks and sandy slicked-back hair. “One more week, Sef. Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“You’re going to kick some ass over there.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Bring ’em on!”
Susan shook her head at her husband as she set a platter of nachos on the coffee table. Like Sonia, Susan was Barbie-doll pretty. “You’ve got to think of something new to say,” she said.
“What’s he saying now?” Mom asked.
“Nothing,” Dad said. “You don’t want to know.”
Sonia rolled her eyes at me.
“Nice!” Eric shouted. “Killer catch.”
Everyone turned to the TV. Dad stayed in his leather chair. Mom sat on the couch between Eric and Susan on one half of the L couch, and on the other was Jack in his Tom Brady shirt and Sef.
“Kick some ass! Bring ’em on!” Jack shouted.
“Jack,” Mom asked, “where’d you hear that?”
Jack chanted louder and louder, “Kick some ass! Bring ’em on!” Then he jumped up and pulled down his underwear and sweatpants.
“For God’s sake, Jack,” Mom said.
Mom pulled Jack’s pants up while Eric roared laughing. “Well, that gets the afternoon off with a bang! It’s going to be hard for Tom Brady to top this.”
“Let’s go to your room,” Sonia said. She looked disgusted.
Upstairs, Sonia held out the oblong glass beads strung in a two-brown, one-pink pattern. “That was really gross,” she said.
“Jack?” I asked. “Jack’s not gross. Jack is Jack. You know that.”
“You realize your family is pretty weird sometimes, don’t you?” she said.
“It’s not like your family is perfect,” I answered.
“I know,” she admitted. “When we were getting ready, Dad told my mom she had to lose weight. For like the billionth time. She freaked out, of course.”
“Your mom’s not even fat.”
“Tell her th
at,” Sonia said. “I don’t get how it’s okay for men to be fat and not women. My mom was crying.”
“Well, I guess it’s not okay for men to be fat either, because my mom hides my dad’s pastries. But he usually finds them and eats them anyway.”
Sonia laughed. Her blue eye shadow sparkled in the light, and her highlighted blond hair fell over her face. “Thanks for helping me. I want to make my own money so Mom can’t tell me what I can get when we go shopping. She doesn’t like buying me makeup.” She glanced up at me. “You’d look amazing in my silver eye shadow. Can I try some on you? Just for fun?”
“No way. I hate makeup.”
I could hear Jack outside, yelling at Sef to throw him the ball. I said, “Let’s go out and catch snowflakes. We always do that the first time it snows. Remember last year?” We fell over, we were laughing so hard trying to catch the swirling snow in our mouths.
“No, thanks.” Sonia’s eyes got smaller, and her lip curled up.
I shrugged.
Jack called out, “Touchdown!”
I said, “I can’t stop thinking about Sef leaving.”
“Everything’s always about Sef,” she said quietly.
I ignored her. “It’s not just that he’s the best with Jack, but he always makes everything better.”
She knotted her string and cut the ends. “What about Van? She helps, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, but she’s always with Finn now.”
“That’s good, right?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She doesn’t even talk to her old friends anymore. She just doesn’t seem like herself.”
“Who does she seem like?”
“Someone else. Have you seen her lately? She’s obsessed with her clothes and hair and stuff.”
“Well, you’re not exactly a fashion judge. I mean, I’d die for your hair, and you don’t even care what it looks like.”
“I do so. A little.”
Sonia smiled.
“Anyway, it’s weird how she changed so fast.” I said it about Van, but I realized I was afraid that Sonia was changing too fast too. I’d seen her list of friends “to get to know better”—as if the friends she had weren’t enough anymore. Most of the girls were cheerleaders, like Lisa and Meg, and I didn’t really have anything to say to them.
Dear Blue Sky Page 2
