Just Like Home(62)

Vera frowns, because usually, when she imagines what her friend would say to her, she imagines her being reasonable. She imagines her being right. “But I do want to see it.”

You could tell him that it’s scary, her friend counters.

“It isn’t scary, though. It’s cool,” Vera replies.

Her friend doesn’t say anything else after that. Vera decides that this is for the best. She is too old for imaginary friends, too adult. It’s time to stop pretending that there’s someone beside her, someone who cares about her, someone who loves her.

That’s for little kids. It’s time to grow up.

She organizes her new school supplies in her backpack, taking extra care with the multicolored gel pens that she’s sure she’ll need all of. She brushes her teeth and spits white foam into the sink and wonders if men can taste the grease inside themselves, or if it’s all tucked away. If there are men who don’t even know they have it.

Her father doesn’t get back for a very, very long time. Vera knows because she wakes up when he comes home. She wakes up because someone is yelling outside her open bedroom window.

She gets out of bed and tiptoes to the curtain. When she looks outside, she can see her father. He’s hugging a man who is a little bigger than him, and in the gray light of predawn, it almost looks like they’re dancing.

But then her father spins the man around and hooks his elbow around the man’s throat. He holds his arms like that, visibly straining with the effort of it. After a few seconds, the man’s legs collapse out from under him.

And then Vera’s father has his hands under the man’s armpits, and he’s dragging the limp form toward the house, and Vera steps away from her window, her heart pounding hard.

She dives underneath her bed, pulls the loose floorboard away, presses her face to the wood. She doesn’t want to miss a moment of what happens next. Watching, she knows, is the only way to learn, and she wants to learn.

She wants to see the rancid oil spill out of whoever her father’s brought home.

She wants to see it all.



* * *



Brandon is at the door asking if she wants to ride bikes, and she doesn’t know how to answer.

Say no, her friend advises. She’s decided that the friend is her conscience, is the better part of her. If her friend says no, then the right answer is probably no. A good person would probably say no.

But school starts tomorrow. She doesn’t want it to be weird, seeing him there. She hasn’t seen him all summer, not since the day he pushed her. He already missed her birthday, and that was weird, and she doesn’t want more of that feeling. And besides, she doesn’t know how to say no to him without being mean, and then Brandon says, “Please? I really need to talk to you,” and that seals it.

So she walks out the front door and down the porch and she grabs her bike off the lawn and she follows him away from her house and down the street. He’s riding fast and angry today, standing up on the pedals of his bike, wobbling wildly from side to side, heading for the creek. Vera has to pump her legs hard to keep up with him. When they reach the gap in the trees beside the road, Vera takes the turn off the road too fast and nearly falls down the slope to the creek. She regains her balance with effort—but then she nearly crashes into Brandon.

He’s stopped halfway down the slope, the front wheel of his bike wrenched sideways. There are long tracks in the mulch where he’s dragged both feet to brake.

“What are you—” Vera starts to ask, angry, but she stops when she sees his face.

He’s crying.

Vera doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t touch him, doesn’t ask what’s wrong; she just gets off her bicycle, letting it fall to the ground beside her.

She feels the same way she did when she was pulling the worm out of the jar with her father to catch fish. Brandon is soft and small and much too easy to hurt, and she could hurt him right now, the way he hurt her. She could do it if she wanted to.

But she waits instead, and finally, after a long wet sniff, he gives voice to the thing that’s making him cry.

“My dad is missing,” he says, using the toe of one sneaker to lower the kickstand on his own bike before he climbs awkwardly off it. He stands on the slope just below her, his hands in his pockets, his gaze resting somewhere near Vera’s knees.

She doesn’t know how to sculpt her face to make it look like she’s surprised. “Oh,” she says. Then, because it seems like the appropriate addition, she adds, “What?”

“He’s been missing for three whole days.” Brandon lifts the collar of his T-shirt and uses it to wipe at his eyes and nose. Vera’s eyes linger on that collar after he drops it, on the dark spot left behind by his tears and his snot. “He went out on Saturday night and he never came home.”

“Where did he go?”

He shrugs. The dark spot on his shirt rubs against his skin when he does that. “I don’t know,” he says angrily. He loses his balance for a moment, skidding a little down the slope toward the muddy creekbed. “That’s what ‘missing’ means, dumbass.”

Vera rolls her eyes. “I meant where did he tell you he was going, when he left. Don’t call me a dumbass.”

“I don’t know. He just told Mom he was going out. He doesn’t … he doesn’t tell us where he goes, you know?”