Just Like Home(63)

He lifts his collar again, scrubs angrily at his face. Vera’s heart catches in her chest at the way he rubs the soiled fabric across his cheeks and eyes. Beside her left ear, her father’s voice whispers they’re filled with a foulness.

The fabric is dark gray now, the tears creating a slow-spreading splotch in the white cotton of the fabric. A thought is starting to dig long, narrow fingers into the meat of Vera’s brain. She tries to ignore it, but it’s loud. It sounds like your little friend Brandon is becoming a man.

“Do you think he ran off?” she asks, and Brandon’s face twists with some combination of pain and fury. The curve of his cheek shifts as quickly as a caught fish jerking on a line. “Sorry,” she adds. “It’s just … him and your mom were always fighting, I thought maybe—”

“Shut up,” he growls, tears still spilling down his cheeks, his lower lip wet with spit. “You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about. He didn’t leave us, he wouldn’t ever leave us. He’s not like your dad. Something must have happened to him.”

The thought is humming all through Vera’s mind now, electrified by her fury at Brandon accusing her father again. It’s a thought that catches and clings.

The foulness.

The grease.

It has to be in him, and she wants to see it. Brandon has stained his shirt with tears, but the tears aren’t filth—they’re just saltwater. Clear. How can she find out if Brandon has the rot in him? How can she know if her father is right?

Is she going to get to see it today?

She feels something she’s never felt before, something that could be revulsion and could be hunger. She knows that the grease will disgust her and at the same time, she’s desperate to find out, firsthand, the thing her father knows.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She puts her hand on his arm because maybe the grease will start to seep out of his skin, maybe she’ll be able to feel it like how she can feel the sponginess of the mulch under her feet. But he jerks his arm away, and when she sneaks a peek at her palm, it’s still clean.

“Whatever,” he says, sullen. “I shouldn’t have told you.” He’s inspecting his shoes and his hands are in fists. His tears are slowing.

Vera is gripped by the frantic feeling of an opportunity passing her by. “Don’t be like that,” she whispers. “Brandon. It’s okay. You can show me.”

He looks up at her, bewilderment naked on his face. Vera’s never seen him this moody, this raw, this volatile. Is this how her father could tell that Brandon was turning into a man? Is that what he meant?

“What?”

“You can tell me,” she tries. “What do you think happened to him? Where do you think he is?”

He shakes his head. Confusion is reigning now; his eyes dart around like the answers are floating in a nimbus around Vera’s head. White salt trails are forming on his cheeks, under his nose. “I don’t … I don’t know. How would I know? Should I try to figure it out?”

“I guess,” Vera answers automatically. She’s barely listening to him. She’s studying that white on his cheeks. How could that exist if he’s all rotted inside?

“Mom doesn’t want to call the cops,” he says. “Maybe … maybe I should tell her to call them?”

Vera examines his lips, pink and full and shining with the heat of crying. Maybe they look the same as they always have, but she can’t be sure about that, because she’s never looked at them this closely before. She’s never paid this much attention to what parts of Brandon seem clean and what parts don’t. “I guess,” she murmurs again.

He wipes his face on his shirt one last time, even though it’s mostly dry by now. “Thanks, Vee,” he says. “I’m sorry I called you a dumbass. You’re right. I’m going to tell her to call the cops. If she doesn’t listen to me, I’ll do it myself.”

He grabs his bike by the handlebars and starts to walk up the slope. As he steps around Vera, the thought she can’t shake snaps into focus, and the maybe of his foulness yanks on her like a puppetmaster pulling strings.

She turns to grab Brandon by one shoulder to keep him from leaving, from getting on his bike and riding away home before she can see the truth of him. Before she can see if he’s gone bad or not. She pulls too hard. He wheels around, gets his feet and his arms and his bike all tangled up.

He knocks into her, drops the bike, grabs her arms to steady himself. He’s so close to her and he’s leaning on her so hard, and his face is raw with bewilderment and hurt and vulnerability, and Vera can’t stand it, she can’t stand looking at him like that, all soft and scared and weak and easy to destroy—that weakness that could keep her from seeing the filth that surely must be growing inside him. She can’t stand it, so she does the only thing she can think of to keep him from running away.

She kisses him.

It’s different from when they kissed before. That kiss was tentative and soft, almost formal in its uncertainty.

This kiss isn’t like that at all. The instant Vera’s chin bumps up against Brandon’s, she’s seized by a feverish need to know, to know for sure, now, before he can leave.

She digs her fingers hard into his skinny arms and crushes her face into his. He opens his mouth to let out a startled sound. She catches his lip between her front teeth, wanting to know, wanting to find out if his blood will taste rotten as the half-decayed leaves under her feet, wanting to bite—