Sweetly

by Jackson Pearce

  “Uh, neither, actually. We broke down about a mile ahead on the road. I wanted to see if we can get a tow truck,” Ansel says.

  “Closest tow company is over in Lake City, ever since the Bakers left town. They can be out here in about an hour, though, if you want their number,” the waitress tells us with a pitying frown.

  “Can I use your phone to call?” Ansel asks. The waitress reaches down below the register and pulls up an ancient-looking phone, and she and Ansel begin flipping through a series of tattered business cards, looking for the tow company’s number. I ease myself onto one of the bar stools and look around the diner.

  Along with a few older blue-collar men sitting at the bar is a man—boy?—about Ansel’s age, though something about him feels old. It’s not his skin, not his hands, but something in the way he holds his shoulders, in the way his head droops down, something that makes me think he’s handsome and dangerous at once. Our eyes lock for a small moment through his layer of shaggy, almost-black hair. Bright eyes as green as mine are blue, eyes that don’t match the tired look of the rest of his body—the gaze shoots through the air and startles me. I glance down, and when I look back up, the boy is hunched over his coffee again.

  I’m jarred away from him by the sound of Ansel hanging up the phone harder than necessary.

  “Interested in that sweet tea now? How about a Cheerwine?” the waitress asks Ansel.

  “Why not? Two teas, I guess,” Ansel mutters in response. The waitress nods and jogs toward a silver urn of tea labeled SWEET with a permanent marker. I don’t totally get the need for the marker, because the identical one beside it is also labeled SWEET.

  Ansel slides onto the stool next to me. “The guy says it’ll cost a hundred and fifty dollars. Might as well be a hundred and fifty thousand. I told him never mind. I didn’t even ask how much it would be to fix the car.” Ansel sighs and rubs his forehead. “I could do it if I had the tools, but I didn’t have room to pack them.”

  The waitress slides two glasses of amber tea packed with ice onto the counter; I sip on mine tentatively. It’s tremendously sweet, so much so that I feel the sugar coating the inside of my mouth. Ansel and I sit in silence for a moment, until an old man a few seats down coughs loudly and wipes his mouth with a handkerchief.

  “Okay, okay, you got my pity. You good with your hands, by chance?” the old man asks.

  “Good enough,” Ansel answers carefully, rising. He walks over and shakes the man’s hand.

  “Ansel Kassel”—Ansel nods toward me—“and my sister, Gretchen.”

  “Jed Wilkes,” the man replies.

  Other people stare at Jed, as though he’s broken some sort of oath about talking to strangers. He doesn’t notice, though—he takes off his NRA ball cap and runs a hand over his mostly bald head. “Well, if you can do some basic repair sort of stuff, I might be able to point you in the right direction to make a little cash.”

  “I can do basic repairs—more than basic repairs. What do you need done?” Ansel says eagerly.

  “Not me—Sophia Kelly. She runs a candy shop way out in the near middle of nowhere. Had some stuff she needed fixed up, last I talked to her.”

  There’s a sharp movement next to me; I turn to see that the green-eyed boy has lifted his head. “Yeah, she needs help,” he mutters, slamming his coffee mug down so hard that liquid sloshes out the sides. The waitress cusses at him under her breath, lifts the mug, and runs a wet rag over the spill. Everyone else in the diner seems to share the waitress’s sentiment—annoyed eye rolls and irritated glances fly his way. No one offers any sort of explanation before Jed continues.

  “Anyway, interested?”

  “Yes,” Ansel answers immediately. “Absolutely. If I buy your meal for you, would you give us a ride back to my car first? I don’t want to leave our suitcases out there all day.”

  “Hell, don’t worry about it, kid. I feel bad for you—you remind me of my grandson, before my daughter up and moved to the city with him. I’ll give you a ride to your car. Just remember to tell Miss Kelly how gentlemanly I was,” Jed says with a loud chuckle. The green-eyed boy responds by dropping a ten-dollar bill onto the counter and jumping from his seat. He moves to leave the diner but suddenly stops in front of me, eyes piercing my own.

  “Stay away from her,” he tells me, loud enough that the rest of the diner can hear but so seriously, so desperately, that I feel as though he and I are the only ones in the room. “Stay as far away from her as you can.”

  Ansel makes it from Jed back to me in record time, but the boy is already gone—he storms out of the diner and slides onto an ancient-looking motorcycle, then squeals out of the parking lot. I’m left shaken, not by what he said, but by the way he looked at me, the way he spoke to me, the way he… everything. I try to swallow my reaction. Being afraid of a crazy kid in a diner is no way to start a new life, Gretchen.

  “I’m fine. Seriously,” I tell Ansel. I hate him and love him for being this way, ready to run to my side. It makes me feel safe, but I wish so badly that I didn’t need a rock to cling to.

  “Ah, so you do speak, Skittles!” Jed says. Ansel takes the green-eyed boy’s vacant seat, still warily watching the cloud of exhaust he left.

  “Skittles?” I ask.

  “Never seen so many colors since lookin’ in a bag of Skittles,” Jed says, nodding toward the tips of my hair. Pink, blue, purple, faded strands of orange. I thought that maybe if I made myself stand out, I wouldn’t feel so scared of slipping off the world and vanishing like my sister—if people noticed me, they could hold me here. Ansel didn’t understand, but I still think it makes sense—you forget the number of wrens and sparrows you see every day, but if a macaw flies by, you notice her. You wouldn’t stop using her name and try to forget she ever existed.

  It didn’t work, though, so I’m left with almost-healed piercings and a rainbow of faded dyes in the lower half of my hair.

  Jed continues through my silence. “He’s got a thing against Miss Kelly. Don’t you mind him, don’t you mind any of ’em. People think she’s either the patron saint of candy or the first sign of Live Oak’s end days. She’s the saint, I promise you that.”

  “Right,” my brother says, as if that makes complete sense. If he’s as taken aback by Jed’s description of Sophia Kelly as I am, he’s not letting it show.

  “Any reason I should bother trying to find out what you two kids are doing out here all alone?” Jed asks.

  “Our stepmother asked us to leave,” Ansel says shortly. “So we did.”

  “Right.” Jed shoves a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth. “We don’t get runaways too often,” he says with a laugh. “But then, we don’t get too many young people, period.”

  “We’re not runaways,” I correct Jed quietly. “We were thrown out.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jed says. His eyes sparkle. “But if your stepmother is the type to throw you out, you probably woulda run away sooner or later.”

  Without doubt, I think. I know I couldn’t have lived with her in the shell of our childhood home for too much longer. Ansel shakes his head and takes a drink of his yet-untouched tea; his eyes widen in surprise at how sweet it is.

  “Well, let’s head out, then,” Jed finally says, nodding at the waitress. She takes a ten-dollar bill from his hand. Ansel fumbles with his wallet to pay for our drinks.

  “Don’t worry about it, hon. On the house,” she says with a kind smile. Usually Ansel would be too proud to walk away without paying, but I suppose being this broke has challenged his pride. He gives her an appreciative look as I follow Jed outside; the diner begins buzzing again behind us, as if they’d been holding in their conversations while strangers were around. There’s a faded red truck that I already can tell belongs to Jed—it doesn’t surprise me at all when he opens the door and waves us over. I let Ansel have the front, since he’s huge and the back is crammed with tools and cigarette packages.

  With the windows open, hot wind whipping through th
e air, we cut down the interstate to Ansel’s Jeep. He grabs most of our things, tosses them into the back of Jed’s truck beside some rusty animal traps, and we’re on our way again.

  The first stoplight we see is simply flashing yellow, and Jed coasts through it. The town appears ahead—strings of brick buildings connected to one another, though each with a slightly different storefront. On the sides of the buildings are old signs from businesses long closed, painted on the brick in faded colors. It’d be idyllic, if it didn’t have a feel of abandonment about it—as though the buildings are stores merely because that’s what they’ve always been. I feel as if the empty windows are watching me.

  Finally, there’s a break in the buildings: a town square, with a traffic circle around its border. In the center is a statue of a Confederate soldier on a rearing horse. On the far side of the square, set just off the road, is a wooden building with an American flag out front and a bright red acorn logo above it. The windows are boarded up.

  “Is that a school?” Ansel asks over the clattering of the truck’s engine struggling down the road.

  “Was. Ten or so years ago we stopped havin’ enough students to fill it. All the kids are bused down to Lake City now—hour ride, but the government paid for a bus to come and get ’em. Though rumor has it that might stop, what with there not bein’ too many kids left in Live Oak.”

  “You won the county championship in sixty-nine, I saw,” Ansel adds with a hint of amusement in his voice.

  “Bet your sweet ass our boys did—against Lake City High, biggest showdown in the county. I was second-string, didn’t get to play in the game, but Sophia’s daddy was the big star of it. Touchdown, seventy-three yards. Proudest moment Live Oak’s ever had!” Jed exclaims. If that was their proudest moment, I can’t help but wonder what’s been going on in the decades since, but I keep my mouth shut.

  We emerge on the other side of town and delve back onto roads lined with pastures or trees. Jed begins taking strange turns onto roads that I’m certain can’t lead anywhere, since they’re all overgrown with branches and the paving is barely there at all, but no, eventually we come out on a decently paved street with forests looming on either side. They’re just starting to bear down on me when I spot a break in the trees, and when Jed slows down, I realize what it is—a front yard. We’re here.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It’s a cottage, tucked away into a nest of mountainous oak trees that are draped with Spanish moss. The exterior is a cinnamon shade of wood, with a stone chimney that’s being devoured by ivy. Flower boxes line the white-trimmed windows, filled with what looks like the peppermint plants our mom used to grow. The door is arced and licorice red and sits behind a covered front porch that holds several rocking chairs. A wooden sign with Coca-Cola advertisements on either end hangs from the porch’s mottled tin roof; pale violet lettering in its center reads KELLYS’ CHOCOLATIER. The entire thing looks imaginary, like a gingerbread house in a quiet corner of a hot paradise.

  Jed’s truck rumbles off the main road and onto the gravel drive as he breathes deeply. “It’s a spell, I’m tellin’ ya. A magic spell.”

  I’m not immediately sure what he’s talking about, but just as I’m about to ask for an explanation, I figure it out: the air is filled with sweet vanilla, a scent that makes me think of our mom’s cooking and morning sun and summertime. It overpowers the cigarette smell of Jed’s truck and thickens as we grow closer to the cottage, and I suddenly find that I don’t want to speak—I simply want to breathe it in, close my eyes, and rest. I look to Ansel; his expression matches the same blissful, blurry way that I feel.

  Jed pulls the truck into the tiny gravel lot in front of the cottage. Ansel gives me a hopeful look before opening the passenger side door and swinging his legs out of the car; I climb out after him. Outside, the humidity makes the vanilla scent almost drinkable. I pull my hair into a ponytail and try to ignore the forest on either side, and the trees and leaves and darkness behind the house. I prepare for the fear, the familiar twist in my stomach, but… it doesn’t come. I inhale, exhale, waiting for it to strike, but I can think only about the vanilla smell. For the first time in ages, the trees are simply trees, instead of places for witches to lurk. Jed’s right—it is like a magic spell. How else could a single scent erase years of fear from my mind?

  Jed inhales again, then shoves his hands into his overall pockets. He crunches across the gravel in heavy work boots, toward the porch. Before he can go more than a few steps, the door swings open.

  The first thing I see is the dog: a golden-colored shaggy creature whose pink tongue lolls out of his mouth. He barks in greeting.

  The second thing I see is the beautiful girl. I’m not sure how I missed her on first glance. She’s young and built like a dancer, with a heart-shaped face and long hair that spills like dark chocolate curls. She’s wearing a pink flowered apron and holds a lime-colored bowl on her hip, the way a mother might hold her baby. Everything about her is lovely—classic, the kind of pretty that can’t be created with mascara or lip gloss. The girl’s dark blue eyes find Jed first, and she grins.

  “Jed! You haven’t been here in ages!” she scolds him playfully. She turns to set the bowl down inside the cottage, dusts her hands on her apron, then starts across the front porch with the dog following.

  “I know, Miss Kelly. We’re repavin’ the road to the Clarks’ place. Takin’ way more time than we figured,” Jed says apologetically, sweeping the ball cap off his head.

  The girl crosses her arms and laughs, a bell-like sound. Her eyes find Ansel and me. My brother inhales and stands up straighter. He’s watching her intently, but melancholy edges around his eyes. He’s never really dated. Girls have never been able to understand his—our—baggage.

  “And you brought company?” the girl asks. At her words, the dog rushes toward us. Ansel steps in front of me protectively, but the dog simply sniffs around our sandaled feet before licking my toes.

  “Sorta,” Jed explains, motioning toward my brother and me. “They broke down on the highway and are lookin’ to make some cash to fix the car. I was thinkin’ if you still needed some work done, this guy might be able to help you out.”

  “Hmm, okay,” she says, nodding. The dog sits at my feet; I lean down to stroke his head. When I look back up, I discover the girl’s eyes on mine—and they’re no longer sparkly, no longer happy, but rather, yearning. Desperate, even, as if she’s searching for an answer within me but coming up empty. Her smile fades not into a frown but into a sad sort of expression, the kind you make before you start to cry. She’s looking for something, and though I don’t know what, I want to help her find it. I want to be her friend. I take a step forward.

  She looks away sharply, and her bright smile reappears. Her eyes sparkle again, whatever sadness that had lingered there instantly vanishing.

  “Well, if you’re interested—what was your name?” she asks my brother.

  “Ansel,” he says, his voice shaky and nervous. “And my sister, Gretchen.”

  “Sophia Kelly. I have a few things that’d probably only take the afternoon to knock out. Simple stuff—a few tree limbs that need to come down, a cabinet door that won’t stop sticking, that kind of thing. Interested?”

  “Yes, yes,” Ansel says breathlessly. Jed snickers, but there’s a look of understanding on his wrinkled face.

  “Great,” she says, grinning. She whistles, and the dog trots back toward her. “Are you going to help your brother, Gretchen?”

  “I can—” I begin, glancing toward Ansel.

  “No. No, I’ve got it,” Ansel answers quickly. I’m not sure if he actually doesn’t need my help or if he just wants to appear extra manly.

  Sophia nods. “Come on, I’ll get you both a Coke before your brother gets to work,” she says to me.

  Jed reaches into the back of his truck to haul my suitcase to the ground; Ansel hops onto the wheel and grabs his own in a much more grandiose display than is probably necessary. I pull th
e handle up on mine and roll it over the gravel toward Sophia.

  “Let me help,” she says when I arrive at the porch steps. She sweeps toward me gracefully and helps me lug the suitcase up the stairs. Even though we’re not that close, I can smell vanilla and strawberries rising from her skin. She gives me another kind smile, then waves me to follow her in. I glance back to see Ansel hurrying to catch up to us, as if he’s afraid to let Sophia out of his sight. Normally I’m the one he watches carefully. It’s a nice change.

  Inside the chocolatier I feel as though I’m somewhere magical, somewhere exciting. Gently sloping light pours in the front windows, illuminating shelves that line two walls of the main room. They’re filled to the front with crinkly cellophane bags packed with chocolates in every shape and size. Tiny ribbons are tied into perfect bows, their color reflected in the glass cases on the opposite side of the room. Behind the glass are bright, ripe pieces of fruit dipped into chocolate—white chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, dotted with nuts or dusted with cocoa powder. Other trays boast chocolate truffles, thick, enormous chocolate cakes and cupcakes, baskets full of cocoa beans, and jars of hot chocolate powder. There’s a fireplace and mantel with an antique-looking gun over it; the mantel is lined with stacks of chocolate bars in perfect rectangles with gold and silver foil wrappers.

  “I’ll put your things in the stairwell for now,” Sophia says. Before I can stop her, she heaves my suitcase toward a door at the back of the shop, tucking it just behind the door frame. “What’d you pack, bricks?” she teases me.

  “Books,” I say, and my cheeks flush. I started reading after my sister vanished because it made me feel as if I were her—as though she weren’t lost after all. But then it became something else; in someone else’s story, I could become a whole character instead of half a girl.

  Our mom used to sneak up, watch me read. She’d always start to cry, and I would close the book to make the tears stop. She wasn’t really watching me. She was watching my sister.