by Rachel Vail
“Who the hell do you think you are?” I demanded.
His eyebrows crunched together as he squinted at me.
“You’ve just been playing with me? Is this some kind of sick—”
Samantha skidded into the kitchen in her socks. Her hair was all mussed up, her face blotchy and swollen from crying. “I mean it! Where is he?” Samantha demanded of Kevin.
He looked between me and Sam, uncrossed his arms, and shrugged his surrender. “You’re both crazy. All you people are crazy.”
“You people?” I asked. “You people as in girls?”
“What did you do with him?” Sam screamed as I was saying, “That is rude! And I am not crazy! Tess told me what happened Friday night, and—”
“He was NOT DEAD!” Sam screamed.
“Sam,” Kevin said softly.
“Murderer!” She was pointing at Kevin, her eyes bugging out, her face reddening even more. “Killer! Where did you put his body?”
“Stop it, Sam,” Kevin said, trying to collect her into a hug, but she was not having any of it; she was rabid, flailing, screaming, and crying.
“Murderer! Killer!”
“Sam, come on,” Kevin was cooing in between shooting me nasty looks. “He died. It’s okay. It happens.”
“You killed somebody?” I asked him.
“Shut up, Charlie.”
“Stop telling her to shut up!” Sam screamed. “You always tell her to shut up, and she does not have to shut up, you murderer! Where is the body, you criminal?”
“Sam,” Kevin said, blocking his face from her barrage of fists and flails.
“Yeah,” I said. “Why do you always tell me to shut up?”
“Because you won’t ever frigging shut up!” Kevin yelled. “I flushed him, Sam.”
“You FLUSHED HIM?!”
“He’s gone.”
“DOWN THE TOILET?”
“I—yes. He died. It’s like, down the pipes. That’s …”
“We could have buried him, if he died, which he didn’t!”
“A fish should not be buried, Sam. He’s a water animal.”
“Your fish died?” I asked her. Oh, her fish. Poor thing.
“No!” she screamed.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, he did,” Kevin said, impatience sneaking into his quiet voice. “He died. He had some sort of mold starting to grow out of his side, Sam.”
“That wasn’t mold! It was—he was—sometimes a fish—”
“And he was starting to smell bad,” Kevin said. “You can’t leave a dead fish decomposing for so long.”
“He was sleeping!” Sam wailed, and then, as if all her bones liquefied at once, she melted down onto the floor, weeping.
“Oh, Sam,” I tried. “I’m sorry. I know you really cared about that fish.”
“Alpha,” she sobbed.
Kevin wrapped his arms around shaking Sam on my kitchen floor and started singing the word okay, over and over again to her, into her tangled hair.
Not knowing what else to do, and seeing that my own argument with Kevin was going to have to wait in line, I went and got a Diet Pepsi out of the fridge. I popped it open and sat at the counter, trying to be inconspicuous. Also trying to maintain my rage at what a jerk Kevin was, despite the fact that he was singing a soothing song, the only lyrics of which were okay, into his distraught little sister’s hair.
My phone was there, beside the sink. Hmm.
“It’s my fault,” Samantha was sobbing. “My fault my fault my fault.”
“No,” Kevin said. “No.”
“I shouldn’t have …”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “You didn’t. Fish die. Betta fish die fast.”
“The last one lasted a YEAR!” she sobbed.
“Well, see?” He wiped her tears off her blotchy cheeks. Day-ummm. “You’re really amazingly good with fish. Maybe this guy was a very old fish when you got him. Or had some kind of medical condition it was born with. You can’t know. It was NOT your fault.”
Samantha sniffled hard, then flicked her eyes up to me and said, “My fish died.”
“I heard,” I said.
“And Kevin flushed him down the toilet.”
Ah, just like he did with my life, I thought, but instead I said, “I’m so sorry, Sam.”
“I loved him,” Sam said, and started sobbing again. “I loved Alpha!”
“Everything that lives, dies,” Kevin said.
Sam stiffened, suddenly still, not breathing. Then, fast as a prizefighter, she cocked back her tiny right arm and clocked Kevin hard across the jaw with her tight fist.
He was still toppling backward when she sprinted from the room. I watched him rubbing the bottom of his face as her fast footsteps tapped up the stairs out of sight. When the house had descended into its old silence, Kevin turned to me and said, “Good thing I lied about flushing him.”
“You … lied?”
“I put him down the garbage disposal.”
“You—but—that’s awful!”
“Shhh.” He stood up, still rubbing his jaw. “I got your phone for you, from the shed.”
“Holy crap! Down the … really?”
“There was so much water, I thought it might swamp the toilet. I kept texting you for advice, but …”
“I was at work. And my phone was …”
“Yeah, I know. I found it for you after. But nobody else was around,” Kevin whispered fiercely. “My dad and your mom have been out for hours, making up about the damn hammock. Sam got all stressed out when they were fighting and then her tooth falling out, so she went down to throw rocks in the lake, and I saw the fish, floating …”
“Her tooth fell out?”
“Yeah, big day around here. You missed a lot of fun. So on top of everything, I didn’t want to flood the toilet and then there’d be a dead fish and who knows what else flooding the house. And then your mom would get mad at me, too, and …”
“My mom doesn’t really get mad.”
“No? Okay.”
“Maybe your mom gets mad. I don’t know. Not mine.”
“Shut the hell up, Charlie.”
“Fine,” I said. “I don’t care.” I pushed the image of him all sweet and gentle huddled over his sobbing sister from my mind, letting the other one replace it—the image I had been unable to shake all day, of him laughing with Felicity in the dark, grabbing her by her waist in the dark, thinking they were unseen just because they were making out behind that big hemlock in her backyard.... “I don’t care about any of it. Including anything you do.”
“Chuck,” he said. “I don’t—I’m sorry. Okay? I just don’t like to talk about my—”
“About what? About how many girls you’re hooking up with at a time?”
“What?” He gave me his oh-so-innocent face, all perplexed and cutely confused.
“I know,” I said, and stood up. The Diet Pepsi was too sweet, too bubbly, and I was feeling neither sweet nor bubbly myself. “I know all about Friday night.”
“Friday night.”
“Yeah. You and Brad, at Felicity’s? Look, spare me the innocent routine you use on your father, okay? I’m not even asking what you did or if you did it, because I already know!”
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you know, but, okay.”
“It’s not okay!” I yelled. “What did you, like, tell Brad, ‘Hey, check it out, I can hook up all night with Charlie because, what the hell, she’s so convenient, and then I can get with Felicity, too’?”
“You. Are. Nuts,” he said, his hands up in front of his chest.
“I’m not nuts!” I screamed. Non-nuttily. Maybe. “May as well flush ME down the toilet, too. Or toss me in the garbage disposal, why don’t you?”
He stepped so close to me we were nose-to-nose, like we’d been so often recently, but now with a way different emotion charging the inch between us. “Samantha has really good hearing, so shut the hell up.”
> “Stop telling me to shut up!” I yelled.
“Charlie,” he growled, indicating upstairs with the slightest incline of his head.
“Oh, now you’re embarrassed?” I asked in a slightly quieter voice. I could feel myself right at the edge of completely losing it, holding myself back by the weakest thread. “That your little sister might know what a jerk you are to girls?”
His jaw clenched and reclenched.
“That she might think it’s okay to let boys treat her the way you treat me?”
“Stop,” Kevin growled.
“Bet Brad thinks you’re such the stud, huh? What did you tell him about me?”
“Nothing,” Kevin said. “And why would you even care? Brad? What the hell—is this all from Tess? Why do you even listen to her? She has never been a decent friend to you and you know it, but you still chase after her, believing everything she says, doing anything she wants.”
“You know what, Kevin? This isn’t about me and Tess.”
“No?”
“No! You want to hook up with Felicity? That’s fine. I don’t care. Just don’t lie to me.”
“I never lied to—”
“Yeah, you did,” I snapped. “We weren’t officially—anything. True. ‘Undefined,’ you wanted. Yeah. I get it. I didn’t then, obviously, but now I do. My fault, I’m so gullible—I thought that ‘cool space’ you talked about was, well, cool! Or hot! Or some other excellent temperature thing. And by the way, it wasn’t Gandhi who said, ‘The time to make up your mind about people is never.’ It’s from an old movie called The Philadelphia Story. Katharine Hepburn, not Gandhi.”
“Okay.”
“I get it now,” I said, on a roll. “Why you wanted it like that—all the fun, none of the limits. No strings. Great. I guess I signed up for that, fine, my bad. But be honest at least to yourself, Kevin. You were lying to me every time you looked at me, or touched me, or kissed me. Every time you made me feel like I was—something—to you.”
He shook his head. “Whatever.”
“Whatever?” I was shaking.
He started walking away.
“I trusted you,” I said to his back.
“Yeah,” he said. “Right back at you.”
And then he was gone.
twenty-six
“YOU OKAY?” MOM asked, poking her head into my room.
“Yeah,” I said. “You?”
She nodded, then shrugged. “Overreacted. Apologized.”
“I mean, a hammock. Why do people think that’s nice?”
She sat down on the edge of my bed. “They just make me seasick.”
“No, but I mean, what is a hammock supposed to symbolize, or not symbolize, but …”
We heard Joe knocking on Kevin’s door, a sound I knew too well from the other side of it. “Kev?”
“Go away!” Kevin yelled.
“I should go,” Mom whispered. “Work was good today?”
“Yeah.”
Kevin’s door squeaked open, then clicked closed.
Mom went to my door. “Everything else is good?”
“Dandy,” I said, and she left.
All I could hear after that was the low murmur of Joe’s voice, and the occasional “NO” from Kevin.
One time when I was little, during a playdate at Tess’s house, we got in big trouble. We’d taken her mom’s jewelry box into Tess’s closet and were playing with all the tinkly, sparkling things. The moment Tess’s closet door was opened, I almost peed in my pants. We’d been Russian royalty on the run, in the dark Siberian wilderness of her closet floor, but with Tess’s mom staring down at us, we were just two naughty little girls. I’d never been in trouble with somebody else’s mom before. After the necklaces, bracelets, and rings that Tess had put on me were removed by her mother, I was sent down to the living room while Tess and her mom had a “private talk.” I remember sitting there, my feet dangling off the chintz couch, listening to her mother’s angry voice. I felt small, terrified, embarrassed, and guilty; I remember wishing I could magically teleport away from that scratchy couch to home, where everything would be okay.
Same thing, overhearing Kevin and his father now—except that I was already home. Where could I teleport to?
I heard pencils skittering across his floor and then a shattering thud. I froze, thinking, Did he just punch a hole in the wall?
In my old life, there was just Mom and me. Sometimes when we got really crabby with each other (not very often), one of us would stomp away and flop down poutily in a chair to read. Within an hour, we’d get over it and eat some ice cream on the deck together.
Nobody ever took it out on a canister of pencils, and definitely nobody’s fist went through anything. Until, possibly, this.
I was trapped in my room, pressed against the wall with my heart pounding like a sprinter’s. Because what if I decided to leave my room at the same moment either Kevin or his dad stormed out of Kevin’s room? There would be a horribly awkward traffic jam, rounding the corner toward the stairs, and maybe flying writing implements, which could be—
“Get out,” Kevin growled.
Murmur, murmur from Joe.
“I hate her!”
He hates her? Who’s her? My mother? Samantha? Me? He has no right to hate me, I thought. Her better not be me.
His door opened and closed again. Footsteps on the stairs. Whose? I couldn’t tell the difference yet between Kevin’s stomping and his father’s.
I wish Tess were here, I thought, and then dashed across my room to grab my phone and text her.
Kevin just I think punched a hole in the wall of his room.
Which is his room? Tess texted back in one second.
Guest room/not rly the point!
Becuz you told him not to be a jerk to Felicity?
NO. Maybe. IDK. Something with his dad? Then I thought again. Or maybe his mom? He threw his sister’s fish down the garbage disposal.
Why wd he do THAT?
It was dead, I added quickly. But still.
That is bizarre. He’s worse than I thought!
I am trapped in my room! What if I have to go to the bathroom sometime in the next few years while he is still living here?
I guess you’ll have to try to hold it in, Tess texted back. Only three years to go.
Thanks tons, I texted back, though in fact it did kind of help. So I added, I am not sure my mom thought this whole thing through, when she decided we could handle having External Americans living in the same house as us.
Tess texted: <3 <3 <3.
So at least there was that.
twenty-seven
I SET MY alarm for 5:55, my luckiest time, and when I woke up to it I didn’t even hit snooze but instead went down to the blessedly empty kitchen to have a bowl of cereal all by myself while I finished up my homework. Then I went up, took a quick shower, and saw nothing revealed in the foggy mirror.
Just fog.
I remembered that Sam had lost her tooth.
After I dried off most of the way and got damply dressed, I tiptoed into her room and slipped a dollar under her pillow. She was sleeping flat on her back, like a pretend kid—or a corpse—one hand on her stomach and one on her heart, a small, pretty smile on her pink lips. I just stood there looking at her for a minute. The dollar I’d put under there was from the first money I’d ever earned outright on my own, not a gift from a relative or a bribe from my father. It was from my share of the tip jar from the day before, shoved into my pocket with my numb hand before I’d hurled myself toward home to the Kevin disaster show.
I hadn’t even gotten to enjoy the fact of having made my own money yet. But I did enjoy it, standing there watching Sam sleep. There was obviously a lot going on, but a kid should get a buck from the tooth fairy anyway. It felt grown-up to be the one slipping it under the pillow.
When I turned around, Kevin was standing in her doorway in his jeans with no shirt or socks on. He stepped aside as I passed, his mouth a straight, tight line.
I slipped out of the house just as people were starting to clomp around upstairs, leaving a note saying I had an early meeting at school, so I was riding my bike there.
I got my own bike out of the shed and rode as fast as possible, outracing my thoughts. The tires were a little flat, so it was more of a workout than I’d intended. Should’ve borrowed Kevin’s … Damn, every thought led inevitably back to Kevin. No, stop it. I pumped the pedals faster. My bike, my own, my freedom. At school I locked up next to Tess’s bike and texted her on my way in.
Where r u? Am here (@school) early.
Come to my locker! she immediately texted back, as I knew she would. Her house is such a hot mess in the mornings—she always rides to school and gets there before the doors open.
She was sitting with her excellent posture straight up against her locker when I got there, her legs splayed wide in front of her. She gave me her awesome full-face smile, and I just slumped down next to her.
She put her arm around me. “Wanna run away from home?”
“Yes,” I said, my head lolling onto her shoulder. “Will you come with me?”
“Of course! We’ll have adventures. Live off the land. Suck the marrow out of life.”
“Ew.”
“True. Suck the goo out of the chocolates.”
“And leave all the bad ones in the box.”
“Absolutely,” she said.
People were stepping over us, so we stood up. “I hate Kevin,” I said.
“We should make it a club,” she responded. “We could get jackets. Maybe a theme song.”
“I hate Kevin,” I sang. “I truly hate his guts.”
“I hate Kevin,” she sang, same tune. “Such a frigging slut.”
I grinned at her and she grinned back, my almost twin, my double, my best friend. “We might have to work on the theme song a bit.”
“I hate Kevin,” she sang as we started off toward homeroom. “He grinds fishes in the disposal.”
“I hate Kevin,” I sang, thinking fast. “He blinds girls-es with his—mind-control-sal.”
Tess squealed. “You are sooo random.”
We giggled and blew each other kisses good-bye.
