Gone, Gone, Gone(56)

“Relax. I’m not doing any more skateboard crashes.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Enough with the skateboard. We’ve got to be more creative next time, or your video’s gonna get boring.”

She makes that wicked smile. “You okay to stand?” She takes my good hand and pulls me up. My right wrist dangles off to the side like the limb of a broken marionette. I want to hold it up, but Naomi’s got me in a death grip so I won’t fall.

My stomach clenches. I gasp, and it kills. “Shit, Nom.”

“You’re okay.”

“I’m gonna puke.”

“Push through this. Come on. You’re a big boy.”


Any other time, I would tease her mercilessly for this comment. And she knows it. Damn this girl.

I’m upright, but that’s about as far as I’m going to go. I lean against the grody wall of the Laundromat. “Just bring the car around. I can’t walk that far.”

She makes her hard-ass face. “There’s nothing wrong with your legs. I’m not going to baby you.”

My mouth tastes like cat litter. “Nom.”

She shakes her hair and shoves down the brim of her cap. “You really do look like crap.”

She always expects me to enjoy this part. She thinks a boy who likes breaking bones has to like the pain.

Yeah. Just like Indiana Jones loves those damn snakes. I do begging eyes.

“All right,” she says. “I’ll get the car. Keep your ribs on.” This is Naomi’s idea of funny.

She slouches off. I watch her blur into a lump of sweatshirt, baseball cap, and oversize jeans.

Shit. Feeling number four is worry. Problems carpet bomb my brain.

What am I going to tell my parents? How is this setting a good example for Jesse? What the hell am I doing in the grossest parking lot in the city on a Tuesday night?

The feeling that never comes is regret.

There’s no room. Because you know you’re three bones closer.





From

INVINCIBLE SUMMER

She’s eleven!” Noah and I protest the entire time Melinda’s patting our sister’s face with powder and dabbing lip gloss on her baby mouth. “Too young for makeup,” I whine, and Noah drops his head onto Bella’s pillow so he can’t watch. But I can’t look away. Bella and I are riveted— Bella by how old Claudia looks, me by the length of Melinda’s fingers.

“I’m only giving her a little, Chasey.” Melinda traces powder over the tops of Claudia’s eyes. “Making her feel just as beautiful as she is.”

Claudia’s positively beaming.

“She’s going to be swarmed,” Noah says, his voice muffled. “Do you want her swarmed by men?”

Claudia laughs, all grown-up in the back of her throat. Ha ha ha.

“Maybe someone will fall in love with her,” Bella says, and bites her lip and looks at me.

Noah looks at me, telling me it’s my turn to object. “Too young to be someone’s lust object,” I say, then turn to Bella and mouth Eleven, to clarify. Bella had her makeup done before we got here, and now she’s studying herself in the mirror, pinching her cheekbones and pressing the skin between her eyebrows.

“You’re all too young to be talking about this love and lust shit,” Noah says.

Melinda is calm, blowing extra eye shadow off her fingers. “The point is not to be loved. The point is to love.” She puts on some kind of accent. "’For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.’”

Noah picks up his head. “What’s that?”

“Camus, darling.” Melinda takes a book from the foot of her bunk and tosses it down to Noah. “Only the most summer-oriented philosopher in the book.”

“What book?” says Bella.

Melinda examines her eyeliner pencil. “The book of life, my dear.”

“Man,” Claudia says. “That’s one big book.”

“Small font, too.” Noah sits up and cracks open the paperback. “He’s French?”

“Oui, but that’s supposed to be the best translation.” Melinda gathers her curly hair back in one hand and leans forward, examining Claudia’s eyebrows. “You guys would like him.”

Noah reads, “’Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening’s slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.’”

We’re quiet.

“Well.” Claudia flinches at the mascara wand. “That was happy.”

“Shut up,” Noah says. “I’d almost believe he grew up here.”

I look at him, and I know by the way he’s smiling that I’m making the same face I always make when we agree. The one that looks really shocked.

“I think it’s beautiful,” Bella says, quietly.

“‘No love without a little innocence,’” Melinda recites, putting on that silly accent again.