All the Bright Places(44)

Just like that, he lets him go, straightens, picks Roamer up, and drops him onto the bank, where he lies coughing up water. Finch goes stalking up the hill, past Ryan and Joe and me. His face is bloody, and he doesn’t wait or look back.


I don’t bother going back to school, because the damage is done. Because Mom won’t expect me home yet, I sneak over to the parking lot, unlock Leroy, and ride to the east side of town. I cruise up and down the streets until I find the two-story brick colonial. FINCH, it says on the mailbox.

I knock on the door, and a girl with long black hair answers. “Hey,” she says to me, like she’s not surprised I’m there. “So you must be Violet. I’m Kate.”

I’m always fascinated by how the same genes rearrange themselves across brothers and sisters. People thought Eleanor and I were twins, even though her cheeks were narrower and her hair was lighter. Kate looks like Finch, but not. Same coloring, different features, except for the eyes. It’s strange seeing his eyes in someone else’s face.

“Is he here?”

“I’m sure he’s up there somewhere. I’m guessing you know where his room is.” She smirks a little, but in a nice way, and I wonder what he’s told her about me.

Upstairs, I knock on his door. “Finch?” I knock again. “It’s Violet.” There’s no answer. I try the door, which is locked. I knock again.

I tell myself he must be sleeping or have his headphones on. I knock again and again. I reach into my pocket for the bobby pin I carry with me, just in case, and bend down to examine the lock. The first one I ever picked was to the closet in my mom’s office. Eleanor put me up to it because that’s where our parents hid the Christmas presents. I discovered lock picking was a skill that comes in handy when you want to disappear during gym class or when you just need some peace and quiet.

I give the knob a shake and then put the bobby pin away. I could probably pick this lock, but I won’t. If Finch wanted to let me in, he would.

When I get back downstairs, Kate is standing at the sink smoking a cigarette out the kitchen window, her hand dangling over the sill. “Was he in there?” When I say no, she throws her cigarette down the garbage disposal. “Huh. Well, maybe he’s asleep. Or he could have gone running.”

“He runs?”

“About fifteen times a day.”

It’s my turn to say, “Huh.”

“You never can tell what that boy’s going to do.”





FINCH


Day 27 (I am still here)


I stand at the window and watch her climb onto her bike. Afterward, I sit on the shower floor, the water beating down on my head, for a good twenty minutes. I can’t even look at myself in the mirror.

I turn on the computer because it’s a connection to the world, and maybe that’s what I need right now. The brightness of the screen hurts my eyes, and so I dim it way down until the shapes and letters are near shadows. This is better. I sign onto Facebook, which belongs only to Violet and me. I start at the beginning of our message chain and read every word, but the words don’t make sense unless I hold my head and repeat them out loud.

I try to read my downloaded version of The Waves, and when that isn’t any better, I think, It’s the computer. It’s not me. And I find a regular book and thumb through it, but the lines dance across the page like they’re trying to get away from me.

I will stay awake.

I will not sleep.

I think of ringing up ol’ Embryo. I go so far as to fish his number out from the bottom of my backpack and punch it into my phone. I don’t press Call.

I can go downstairs right now and let my mom know how I’m feeling—if she’s even home—but she’ll tell me to help myself to the Advil in her purse and that I need to relax and stop getting myself worked up, because in this house there’s no such thing as being sick unless you can measure it with a thermometer under the tongue. Things fall into categories of black and white—bad mood, bad temper, loses control, feels sad, feels blue.

You’re always so sensitive, Theodore. Ever since you were a little boy. Do you remember the cardinal? The one that kept flying into the glass doors off the living room? Over and over, he knocked himself out, and you said, “Bring him in to live with us so he won’t do that anymore.” Remember? And then one day we came home and he was lying on the patio, and he’d flown into the door one too many times, and you called his grave a mud nest and said, “None of this would have happened if you’d let him come in.”

I don’t want to hear about the cardinal again. Because the thing of it is, that cardinal was dead either way, whether he came inside or not. Maybe he knew it, and maybe that’s why he decided to crash into the glass a little harder than normal that day. He would have died in here, only slower, because that’s what happens when you’re a Finch. The marriage dies. The love dies. The people fade away.

I put on my sneakers and bypass Kate in the kitchen. She says, “Your girlfriend was just here looking for you.”

“I must have had my headphones on.”

“What happened to your lip and your eye? Please tell me she didn’t do that.”

“I ran into a door.”

She stares hard at me. “Everything okay with you?”

“Yeah. Super. I’m just going for a run.”