Just Like Home(29)

Vera turns to grab her shoes from inside the closet. She doesn’t want to ride bikes with Brandon right now, but she doesn’t want to be within Daphne’s sight, either. She looks for the comforting gap between the floorboards as she bends to pick up the shoes, but she doesn’t see it.

She’ll think to look for it later, soon, and that’s when she’ll see the light below her bed.

The light that will let her understand the world in a way she never has before.

But that’s later.

For now, running down the porch steps, she forgets all about that gap in the floor, because Brandon Gregson is there.

He is her best friend and she accepts this the way she accepts the fact that dinner is at seven o’clock. They hang out together almost every day—they started calling it ‘hanging out’ instead of ‘playing’ earlier this year, before she’d caught up to him in age and in height, and before he’d caught up to her in speed and in stubbornness. Now Brandon puts gel in his hair to make it stick up in limp spikes and he got really tan over the summer because his family got an aboveground pool, one that Vera is never allowed to swim in. He is her best friend and she loves him, although most of the time she is not sure that she likes him very much.

“You have something on your hand,” he says, pointing. Vera looks and sees that he’s right—something thick and dark is smeared across her fingers. She wipes it on her pants; then, when it doesn’t come off, she bends to rub her fingers hard against the grass. It smears at first, spreading out gray like old grease, but then the grass breaks and the dampness of it loosens the filth from her skin, lifts it off and leaves her at least a little bit cleaner than before.

“Gross,” she says.

“What is it? Is it from the basement?”

Vera rolls her eyes because Brandon doesn’t really think it’s from the basement, he just wants an excuse to talk about what might be down there, behind the forbidden door.

“It’s just gunk,” Vera says, and then she takes off.

They ride their bikes fast, their helmets dangling from the handlebars. Vera stands up on the pedals and pumps her legs hard, then coasts for a while to let Brandon catch up. He is leaning forward over his handlebars—he has an idea, she recalls, that this makes him aerodynamic—and sweat soaks his shirt.

“You don’t have to go so fast,” he snaps.

“You don’t have to go so slow,” she says back. She says it in a slow, easy voice she’s been learning to use with the boys at school. It’s a cool voice, she hopes. Sometimes it works to defuse their strange sudden moods, and sometimes it doesn’t.

This time, it does.

“Race you to Maple Street,” he says, and he’s already gone, even though it’s not fair of him to give himself a head start like that.

She pedals hard to catch up, wanting to beat Brandon at this sudden race. Vera wants to win.

She doesn’t want to be angry, but she is anyway. It isn’t fair, what he’s done.

Brandon is ahead of her, his legs working hard to keep distance between them, but she’s closing in on him. The wind is in Vera’s hair and she feels fast as a diving bird. She clenches her fingers hard around her handlebars. She thinks of the photo the police showed her, the photo of her father’s missing coworker. Her legs are starting to burn, but not so much, and she’s almost on Brandon now. She thinks of how Brandon will look when he’s an adult, how a photo of him will probably be indistinguishable from that photo of Laurence. She thinks of how Brandon, one day, will be the same as every other adult man who isn’t her father, and how they’re all the same as each other, too, with their wet eyes and their bristly hair and their slow, deep voices that laugh at things she doesn’t find funny.

Vera wonders if she will still be angry at him, when they are grown up.

This is the last thought Vera has before she realizes, almost too late, that she’s directly behind Brandon’s back tire, and still going much too fast. She jerks her handlebars to avoid smashing her bike into his. There is a heart-stuttering moment when she knows that she could crash into the curb, but she lifts the handlebars and pops the front tire of her bike up onto the sidewalk and somehow, by what she is sure is magic, she keeps the bike upright.

“Hey!” Brandon yells, and he sounds impressed. Vera lets out a whoop, because she’s pretty sure that was a wheelie, and she’s never done one before. She won’t tell him that it was an instinct, an accident. She’ll let him think she knows how to do a wheelie on purpose.

They both coast across Maple Street without stopping to check for oncoming traffic. Brandon cheated a little at the start of the race, but Vera has definitely won. She brakes hard, letting her back tire skid a little, and turns to look at him. A broad grin splits his face, and seeing it, Vera’s anger evaporates.

“That was awesome,” he says.

Brandon’s eyes are bright and his grin is guileless and Vera cannot help but smile back at him. In that moment, she loves him, in part because he is not the type to get mad at losing a race to a girl and in part because she beat him and so she can afford to be magnanimous. In that moment, she feels that it is fate that they are best friends, that she will know him forever, maybe marry him, and their marriage will be one without icy stares and twisted-up towels and fights in the evening.

In that moment, Vera cannot think of a reason why she should ever have been angry at Brandon at all.