CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(2)

I’m still your brother. I’ll be your brother forever. It’s the only thing that matters to me at this point. I’d do anything to make things right with us. I hope in the distant day when we see each other again it will be possible.

Please look after yourself out there in the meantime.

Strength in brothers,

Stone





FIVE MONTHS EARLIER…..





CHAPTER ONE


ERIN



People don’t wake up the morning of their last day and know that it’s the last day.

Well, most people don’t.

Maybe the idea occurs to the ones who know they are terminally ill. Or those who have a shred of something extra sensory. Or those who plan end it all themselves.

There was no reason that such morbid ideas should have been on my mind as I watched the sunrise make shadows on the wall. I didn’t have any intention of dying on this day or the next one or any time soon. But my fingers betrayed some small guilt and snuck beneath the cap of my right sleeve to trace the scab flanking my ribs. I hated knowing how it got there.

The house was too quiet. Vaguely I remembered being disturbed by a monsoon storm that had blown through here last night. The winds must have knocked out the power.

I could hear my little sister Katie snoring in the next room and usually the air conditioner drowned her out. A glance at the empty face of my bedside clock told me I was right. It was still early but the house would heat up fast if the power wasn’t fixed by mid morning.

I pressed the half-healed wound and winced over the raw feel of the skin, but I was relieved not to see blood when I pulled my fingers away. I didn’t like blood. Blood was a necessary byproduct but it still bothered me. My mind strayed back to those gloomy ideas of death and I sat up, shaking out my hair.

I didn’t have a death wish. That was never the point. My best friend Roe was the only one who knew about that secret shame but she would never say anything to anyone. She didn’t even live around here.

Without even thinking I reached for my phone. The time was even earlier than I’d thought. Only six hours had elapsed since I’d stumbled through the front door half drunk on passion. Even though it was long after curfew and my dad was sternly waiting on the living room couch he didn’t do a thing except sigh and wave me off to my room where I happily curled up into a ball and slept soundly.

It was way too early to expect a message from Conway but there it was anyway. He must have sent it right after he left me and retreated next door to his own house.

Sweet dreams, butterfly.

It was a nickname that went way back, before we kissed, before we were us. Back to a time when I had bony knees and a gap-toothed smile, when I used to trail after the neighboring Gentry brothers in a desperate bid to be included in their games. Stone would scowl at the sight of me scrambling to keep up with them. I was a small, nervous girl and he was the neighborhood king. I did not interest him at all. But Con, younger than Stone by a mere ten months, would smile and wait for me.

Once I caught up to them by the foot of the butte, pretending like I just happened to be in that place at the same time. Stone, never a fool, threw me an annoyed look and started hiking up the side like I wasn’t even there. But Conway paused thoughtfully.

“That’s like you,” he said, pointing to a small, fluttering object.

I’d felt my face scrunching up. I was ready to cross my arms and be offended. “How am I like a butterfly?”

He broke into a grin. “They surprise you when you’re least expecting it.”

The Gentry boys grew up faster than I did. They were messing around with all kinds of girls by middle school and getting into the sort of trouble that was worthy of their last name. As long as there had been a town of Emblem there had been Gentrys in it; a tribe of tall, muscular mischief-makers.

Around that time my own father started grumbling over the antics of our next door neighbors. Elijah Gentry had finally died of some slow, wasting disease the same month our small family was turned inside out from the loss of my mother. While I became cook, babysitter, and housebound dutiful daughter as my father tried to paste together the pieces of his heart, the Gentry boys dealt with their father’s death by running wild. They came and went all hours of the night in all kinds of bad company. Aside from their mother’s occasional screech of ‘No good little shits!’ echoing over the neighborhood, no one did a thing.

“They won’t end up fit for decent company,” my father sighed one night, glaring out the open kitchen window as the boys whooped and howled while riding up and down the street on a pair of dirt bikes that they’d probably stolen.

“You don’t know that,” I snapped as I cleared the dinner dishes away, wondering why I should feel defensive of two rowdy boys who weren’t even my friends.

My father had looked at me with some surprise since I didn’t usually argue. But then again, he wasn’t usually so pessimistic. He probably hadn’t really meant to speak the words aloud in the first place.

“You’re right,” he finally said softly and then helped me clear the table. After that, the subject of the Gentry brothers didn’t come up again, not for a long time.

I had stopped trying to chase them, staring moodily down at my own skinny body and figuring I’d never catch up anyway.

I did catch up though. Without even trying.