Just Like Home(72)
She looked, and she looked. But no matter how hard her heart rattled in her chest, no matter how hard she yearned to know, Vera could not see.
Not yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Vera is thirteen years old. She is angry all the time and her legs are too long and she has an idea that she can’t put down.
The idea won’t shake. It’s become a stain on the underside of her skin, one that’s been setting for the past few days. It’s been there ever since Brandon’s father disappeared from the basement below her bedroom. The basement is quiet now, but Vera’s mind twitches like a damp spider all day long. She lies awake at night, on top of her bed instead of beneath it, trying to figure out what to do with the thought that won’t leave her be.
The thought about Brandon.
She hasn’t spoken to him since he pushed her by the creek, since she got mud beneath her fingernails and it was his fault. She’s seen him at school but they’re not in the same class and they aren’t talking, and he doesn’t come to her house after school anymore to ride bikes or throw rocks at the creek or try to find cool stuff in the woods.
She’s not sure that he’s avoiding her but she’s not sure he isn’t, either. Vera’s been eating lunch with her second-best friend, who isn’t really her friend at all, who has a very boring crush on the vice principal and won’t shut up about it. She’s been riding her bike by herself in the afternoon to the creek and back, feeling the wind on her face, unable to shake the thought of what’s to be done about Brandon.
The uncertainty is the thing that infuriates her. It’s cruel for him to make her feel this way. If Brandon told her that he didn’t want to be friends anymore, she could deal with it. And if he still wanted to be friends but he at least told her that he was mad at her, she could yell at him and he would yell back, and then they’d be okay.
But he hasn’t talked to her in a long time, in weeks and weeks, and she doesn’t know if he’s ever going to talk to her again, and it’s putting a twist in her belly and a lump in her throat and an idea under her skin.
She would think that he, of all the people in all the world, would know how brutal uncertainty can be. His father’s body still hasn’t been found—it won’t be, she knows it won’t, they never are—and there are posters up everywhere, have you seen this man, and it’s on the news every night. All anyone wants to talk about, except for Vera’s second-best friend with the crush on the vice principal, is how nobody knows what happened to Brandon’s father. How he must’ve run off with some woman or gotten murdered by a drifter or gotten kidnapped by mobsters.
It can’t feel good, knowing that people are saying your father ran off with some woman. If Brandon thought about it for just one second he’d realize Vera is the best person for him to talk to about it.
All day long, from across the cafeteria and during recess, Vera sees how drawn and tired Brandon is. How his eyes dart around as if his father will turn out to have been hiding behind a tetherball pole this whole time. It’s pathetic how miserable the uncertainty has made him. How fragile. He’s being broken by it, slowly torn into exhausted little pieces of himself, ground down into a fine paste.
It’s killing him.
So how could he inflict that same killing uncertainty on Vera? How could he leave her guessing about whether or not they’re still friends? How could he keep not learning his lesson?
It’s all Vera can think about, the uncertainty and the cruelty of it, the way it doesn’t make any sense for Brandon to be acting the way that he is. And then, one day, she’s going into the girls’ bathroom and he’s coming out of the boys’ bathroom, and he doesn’t say anything to her at all. He looks at her, looks right at her, sees her for sure. No faking like he didn’t notice her or like he’s distracted by his lunch. He sees Vera and his eyes flash dark and furious.
And then, without a word, he walks away.
That’s when the uncertainty vanishes and the idea crystallizes, and she knows without a doubt. The grease has him now. It’s the only explanation for why he would treat her like this—as if they were never friends, as if they’ve never even met before. It’s the only explanation for why he hasn’t learned his lesson.
You can’t learn a lesson, Vera reasons, when there’s filth inside you.
She chews on the end of her pencil while her teacher talks about Egypt, carefully keeping her tongue away from the eraser. The yellow paint on the pencil crackles between her teeth. Now that she knows what the problem is she has a lot of thinking to do. The uncertainty is gone. There’s a problem to be solved.
Fortunately, Vera is good at solving problems.
Vera can’t imagine that the grease takes over a person all at once. It must happen sort of gradually, like a scab forming or puberty starting. One day you’re clean inside and the next day, you’re just a little bad.
Brandon is only a few months older than she is—he had a movie party for his birthday last year, with popcorn and movie-candy—and he’s only started acting different within those last few months. Even a month after that, he was still Vera’s friend, and he’d never brought up kissing or said fuck. That means that this change in him is new. It’s not all done yet. He hasn’t been taken over and ruined. Not yet. Maybe, Vera thinks, frowning around her pencil, that means there’s still hope for Brandon after all.