Breakable (15 page)

She thought she was stuck somewhere she wasn’t meant to be in consequence of that decision.

I wasn’t a believer in fate or higher powers, as much as I wanted to be. I had faith in taking responsibility, and clearly, so did this girl. But I couldn’t fault her for following someone she’d loved for three years – it pointed to a loyalty she wasn’t giving herself credit for. If she believed in
responsibility, then the best thing for her to do would be to take control again. To own the decision she’d made, however she’d made it. To make the best of it.

So that’s what I told her.

Wednesday, she arrived in class early, and I made an impulsive decision – all I seemed to be capable of where Jacqueline Wallace was concerned. I slid into the seat next to her and said her name. She startled a little when she looked up, expecting the guy who usually sat there, probably. But she didn’t lean away from me.

‘I guess you didn’t notice the phone number on your coffee cup,’ I said.

‘I noticed.’ Her voice was soft for such a smart-ass retort, candid curiosity in her steady gaze.

I asked for her number in return, and she asked if I needed help in economics. I almost choked, strung out between a now-familiar guilt trip and amusement at the absurd corner I’d backed myself into.
Do you need help in economics?
I asked why she’d think that, wondering, for two heartbeats, if she knew and was screwing with me.

If so, I completely deserved it.

‘I guess it’s not my business,’ she said, miffed.

I needed to move the conversation away from this line of thought. I leaned closer and told her the honest truth – that my wanting her number had nothing to do with economics.

She picked up her phone and sent me a text:
Hi.

Her classmate walked up, wanting his seat. (Benjamin Teague, according to the role sheet. I’d checked his campus
address, schedule, grades and any possible disciplinary notes – there were none. He seemed harmless, his fondness for
bro
T-shirts aside, and he made her laugh – both a point in his favour and a reason I sort of wanted to clock him cold.)

I surrendered the seat, holding back a jackass-level grin. She hadn’t called me … but she had programmed my number into her phone.

And now she’d given me hers.

Towards the end of class, I glanced up to find her watching me – a first. I hadn’t paid enough attention to the lecture, because I’d been immersed in devising and sketching alternative tissue-engineering designs for Dr Aziz’s research project next semester. Nothing but thoughts of Jacqueline could break through my excitement after getting his email yesterday, telling me I’d been accepted. I would be working with two of the university’s top engineering faculty members, and my final semester of tuition would be paid by the project’s grant. I would still tutor for Heller and work the occasional parking-enforcement shift, but I could quit the coffee shop, which currently sucked up fifteen hours of my week.

For the seconds Jacqueline and I stared at each other, Heller’s voice receded and everyone else in the room disappeared. I couldn’t return to Aziz’s project, or recall the mass of ideas swirling through my brain one minute ago. My past evaporated. My future plans blurred. Every cell in my body was aware of her, and her only.

I knew I could be careful with her. Her trust would be
hard-won, because she was afraid of being hurt again, but I could win it. I knew, from these few seconds of staring and from the one time I’d held her that she would respond to me, under me. That I could coax her body to levels of pleasure she couldn’t possibly have received from her narcissistic ex, regardless how long they’d been together.

And then I couldn’t offer her anything more. At the end of this year – mere months away – I intended to take a job somewhere far away. To escape this state, and my father. To build a career and a life for myself, with no emotional entanglements. Not for a long time, if ever.

I wanted this girl, but I wasn’t going to fall in love with her.

She deserved someone’s whole heart. She deserved someone honest and loyal.

And I was not that man, no matter how much I wanted to be.

Landon,

We’re making steak fajitas tomorrow night – come if you’re free. Also, I’m giving a quiz over CPI first thing Friday morning, in case you want to work that into your Thursday worksheet. The quiz should take fifteen or twenty minutes of class, so feel free to grab a cup of coffee first and come in late.

CH

Jacqueline and I hadn’t gone over CPI, so as soon as I created the worksheet, I emailed it to her. I also questioned
her interpretation of meant-to-be as it related to her decision to follow Kennedy Moore to college:
Can you prove you’d be better off somewhere else?

I asked her major, wondering if she’d given up music altogether, hoping she hadn’t.

Her answer, music education, was a relief, but she lamented the thought of teaching, as if that would prevent her from performing. I couldn’t see the correlation. Woe to anyone who tried to tell Heller he wasn’t
doing
economics because he was teaching it. They’d get an earful about how he conducted research for respected peer journals, stayed current on global economic events, and participated in influential economic conferences.

I added a stern postscript
ordering
her to do the worksheet before Friday.

She emailed me back and called me a slave driver.

I closed my laptop and went for a run, but it didn’t lessen the uncontrollable effect of her impertinent little replies. I paced the apartment for half an hour before grabbing my phone and pulling up her number. Shoving all misgivings aside, I sent her a text:
Hi. :)

She answered in kind. I asked what she was doing, and commented on her quick disappearance at the end of class. I told her to come by the Starbucks Friday afternoon, when it was usually dead, adding,
Americano, on the house?

She agreed to come, and I had a moment of exhilaration followed by the desire to beat myself into a bloody pulp.

‘Why did you just sit there and let me do that?’ I asked Francis.

He supplied a steady feline stare.

‘You could have at least
attempted
to stop me.’

He licked a paw, ran it over his face, and stared again.

‘Is this how schizophrenia begins? First, talking to a girl as two different guys, and then talking to my cat. This is a new low.’

‘Meee-ow,’ he answered, tucking himself into a circle.

Whenever Charles and Cindy were barbecuing or making fajitas, I didn’t have to ask what time dinner was – I just waited for the smell of grilled meat to permeate my apartment.

I grabbed the pan of brownies I’d made and headed over.

Dinner conversation concerned Cole, who would arrive in a couple of weeks for his first visit home from Duke, only to be stuffed into a car with the rest of us and driven to the coast. If Raymond Maxfield wouldn’t come to Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving would go to him.

‘Cole will be a cranky, stinky a-hole – three hours on a flight and then four hours in the car? Ugh!’ Carlie protested.

‘He’s eighteen,’ Charles said. ‘He’ll sleep.’

‘Good idea. Drug him,’ Carlie said, scooping a corn chip an inch high with guacamole. ‘
Please
.’ Her appetite had returned and then some after she got over her breakup. During dessert, her parents exchanged a smile when she took a brownie square. ‘Mmmm. These are like sex on a cloud,’ she commented, licking a finger, and her father’s face turned to granite.

‘
Carlie Heller
,’ Cindy said. ‘You’re going to kill your father with statements like that.’

‘What? Dad, I’m
barrelling
towards adulthood.’ She spoke while chewing. ‘You’re around college students all day. That’s less than two years away for me! Get real. I can’t be a kid forever.’

Caleb’s eyes swung back and forth between his sister and parents. He hadn’t been the centre of conversation once during the meal. As the baby of the family, that was tantamount to invisibility. ‘Stephen Stafford kissed a snake,’ he said.

‘I hope that’s not a euphemism, because
eww
,’ Carlie said.

‘What’s a euph–’

‘The snake in your science classroom?’ Cindy asked, focusing on her youngest kid. Caleb nodded. ‘And how did this happen?’

‘Dale Gallagher dared him.’

‘Ah.’ She looked at Charles across the table. ‘Well, I feel very sorry for Stephen Stafford’s parents.’

Caleb frowned. ‘Why? He probably didn’t tell them he kissed a snake.’

‘Still getting mental pictures and trying to eat,
thank you very much
,’ Carlie mumbled, wrinkling her nose.

‘Also Dale Gallagher had to pay him five bucks to do it.’

‘Then I suppose we can feel sorry for Dale Gallagher’s parents as well,’ Charles said, arching a worried brow at Carlie. ‘If he’s dumb enough to
pay
someone to kiss a reptile.’

When I’d first moved into the apartment above the Hellers’ garage, I hadn’t known what to expect – from how much interaction I would have with them to what the apartment would look like. No one had lived there since they moved in. They’d only used the space for additional storage. But I figured that whatever it looked like, it would beat sleeping in a pantry.

Carlie ran up to the SUV when Charles and I drove up. She’d been a preemie baby, so she had been small for her age all her life. Next to my eighteen-year-old body, she’d never seemed tinier. Still, she nearly knocked me over when she launched herself at me, as wide-eyed as a little kid on Christmas morning.

‘Landon, you
have
to come see!’ She grabbed my hand and pulled me along the driveway. After the four-hour drive, I was ready for a bathroom, a meal and a nap, plus I had a carful of shit to unload, but there was no stopping a fully energized Carlie.

Her brothers and parents followed us up the steps, where Carlie presented a key ring with a single key attached. The ring’s logo was that of the university where I would, unbelievably, be an official student in a week’s time. As she bounced on her toes, I unlocked the door and found a sparsely furnished apartment. I hadn’t expected furniture. Or newly painted walls, newly installed blinds, dishes in the cabinets, towels in the bathroom. An entire wall of the bedroom was covered in cork, ready for the drawings I might want to pin to it. Sheets were stacked at the foot of a platform bed.

With effort, I struggled to swallow. I couldn’t turn and look at any of them. I couldn’t speak. It was too much.

I walked to the window and twisted the rod, opening the blinds and flooding the room with light. My bedroom view was treetops – thickly leaved live oaks, and sky. The view from the living room would be the Hellers’ backyard, pool and house. They would be feet away. Steps away.

Charles and all three kids disappeared without my notice, and Cindy moved to stand beside me as I stared sightlessly out the window. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Landon,’ she said, her hand coming to rest on my back. ‘Charles and I are proud of what you’ve done to make this happen for yourself.’

The Hellers were like family to me. They always had been. They always would be. But they were just that –
like
family. They weren’t really mine.

‘The frog is dead. It can’t hurt you.’

Melody batted her lashes from behind a huge pair of goggles. ‘That thing is disgusting. I’m not touching it.’ The one-size-fits-all lab apron fell to her knees and wrapped all the way round, and she held her forearms up, elbows bent, to keep the gloves from falling off her small hands. She looked like a child playing operating-room nurse.

Don’t think about her hands right now
.

I crooked an eyebrow at her – the one with the barbell she was staring at last week when Pearl snapped her fingers in front of Melody’s face to get her attention. ‘Would you have said that to Pearl?’ I asked.

She shrugged one shoulder, her eyes on my eyebrow. Her dark green sweater looked as soft as her hair. The colour darkened the edge of her irises and contrasted starkly with the pale strands forked over that shoulder. ‘Yes,’ she said.

Don’t think about her eyes
.
Or her hair
.

I sighed. ‘Okay. I’ll dissect. You pin and label.’

She thrust her plump lower lip out in a pout that should have looked ridiculous on a sixteen-year-old girl.
God
.
Damn
.

I was grateful for the heavy canvas apron I was wearing. And the high table between us. ‘Fine. I’ll
dissect
and
pin
… and you label?’

She picked up a pen and smiled – awarding me positive reinforcement for caving so easily. ‘What’s first?’

Like a lab rat, I itched to discover where she hid that lever. I’d push it over and over to have that smile directed at me.

‘Uh … well, let’s see …’ I checked the instruction page. ‘Um. First we’re supposed to determine the sex.’

Melody caught her glossy lower lip with her flawlessly white, straight teeth, and I felt that bite – as though I was made of a single nerve ending – in one concentrated place. My dick twitched like a flag caught in a sudden gust of wind.
Jesus
,
what am I – eleven?

Damn Boyce and his stupid mononucleosis. Damn Pearl and hers, too. They’d both been out for a week. Without Pearl’s dampening presence or Boyce here to irritate Melody every five seconds, we’d begun to talk every day like we hadn’t done in over a year. Since the doomed geography project. Since her boyfriend paid Boyce to kick my ass.

Melody leaned over the dissection pan and stared at the poor dead frog, which looked like it had died dancing – nose in the air and jazz hands. ‘I don’t see a thingy. So it’s a girl?’

I laughed. ‘Frogs don’t have external
thingys
.’

She scowled, the back of her gloved hand covering her nose to block the embalming fluid’s eye-watering odour. ‘Then how the hell are we supposed to tell?’

I looked at the sheet again. ‘Says here the male has an enlarged thumb pad.’

Heads together, we both stared at the frog for one long moment.

‘C’mon now, he’s not doin’ it with his thumb!’ she said.

Oh. My.
God
. I stared at her. She blushed and giggled, and then we were both laughing and Mr Quinn was scowling in our direction. Apparently, dissection was not supposed to be fun.

‘Let’s skip that part for now,’ I said.

Don’t think about your own goddamned thumb, either, for fuck’s sake
.

Melody dutifully inscribed tiny labels and stuck the pins through them while I sliced the frog stem to stern and pointed out internal organs. We grew accustomed to the formaldehyde and she made fewer and fewer gross-out protests. She began sticking the pins through the parts I removed, though she refused to even pick up her scalpel or tongs unless Mr Quinn was making rounds to confirm that everyone was participating.

‘Aww, everything is so tiny,’ Melody said in complete seriousness. As though the parts inside a six-inch-long amphibian could be anything else. She looked at the diagram and back at the frog. ‘Ooh, are those his little nut things?’ She picked up the pin with the
testes
label.

I chuckled. ‘Yeah. That’s his nut things. Congratulations, we have a boy.’

She frowned. ‘So he doesn’t have a …’ She trailed off while my brain filled in the blank:
dick
,
penis
,
cock
,
boner
,
phallus
,
beast
. That last was Boyce’s designation.

‘Er. No.’ Caught between regret and intense relief that Boyce wasn’t here, I read the sheet, paraphrasing. ‘The male fertilizes the eggs by …’
Son of a bitch
. ‘Uh … climbing on to the female, wrapping his front legs around her, and squirting sperm over the eggs, after the female lays them.’

We looked at each other from behind two sets of goggles. I was surprised mine hadn’t steamed up yet.

‘Kinda sucks for him, huh?’ she said.

Don’t think about putting your arms round Melody Dover
.
From behind
.

Jesus H. Christ.

With Boyce out sick, I was back to walking to and from school. His rebuilt Trans Am might have been a loud, ugly, potential deathtrap – but it was wheels. I was four months and a few driving hours away from my licence. Grandpa and I located empty dirt and minimally paved roads inland every Sunday afternoon or evening so I could practise, taking the ferry to get there. He was close to determining that I was ready to drive on an actual road.

I’d hidden my face to roll my eyes, and I definitely didn’t tell him Boyce had been letting me drive the Trans Am whenever he’d had one too many beers or taken too many
hits of a pipe or joint and I was relatively sober. He’d have probably ripped up my permit right then and there, and I’d never get behind the wheel of that old Ford alone.

There was only one reason I wanted that truck.

As if Melody would want to ride in that rusted POS instead of Clark Richards’s snowy white Jeep – the one he got for his sixteenth birthday, a year ago. I’d heard him bragging about what Melody had done with him in the backseat of that Jeep, and his words made me furious and harder than hell. Furious because he shouldn’t share that shit with a bunch of dumbasses around a fire on the beach. Hard because I wanted her to do those things with me.

Kicking the arm off a cactus as I stepped from the road into the yard earned me a sharp spine right through the toe of my black Vans. ‘Ow! Fuck!’

That was when I noticed Grandpa’s truck parked next to the house. Along with Dad’s SUV.

The front door was unlocked, although that could just be Grandpa forgetting to lock it. Dad and he had gone round and round about security and leaving the house unlocked – Grandpa insisting that he’d never locked the
damn house
in all his
damn years
of living there, and Dad insisting that it was no longer 1950.

When some out-of-towners broke into Wynn’s Garage and stole an assload of tools, Grandpa conceded, sullenly. Sometimes he forgot to lock up, though.

‘Grandpa?’ I called, shutting the door behind me.

The interior of the house was dim after the bright, cloudless afternoon outside, even when I pulled off my
sunglasses. At first, I didn’t register that Dad was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hands grasped between his knees. He was staring at the threadbare rug under his feet.

He was hardly ever home this early in the afternoon, and if he was, he was working at the table, not sitting on the sofa. I frowned. ‘Dad?’

He didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t look at me. ‘Come sit down, Landon.’

My heart thudded, the pace escalating slowly like an engine warming up. ‘Where’s Grandpa?’ I dropped my backpack to the floor, but didn’t sit. ‘Dad?’

He looked up at me, then. His eyes were dry, but red. ‘Your grandfather had a heart attack on the boat this morning –’

‘What? Where is he? Is he in the hospital? Is he okay?’

Dad shook his head. ‘No, son.’ His voice was gentle and quiet. I felt like he’d struck me with the unyielding words, sharp and irrevocable. ‘It was a massive attack. He went quickly –’

‘No.’ I backed away from him, swallowing thick tears. ‘Goddammit,
NO
.’ Retreating to my room, I slammed the door and didn’t come out until after Dad went to bed.

Barefoot, I padded into Grandpa’s room – lit with the moonlight streaming through the half-open curtains. My fingers trailed over the items resting on his night table: reading glasses folded on top of a leather-bound Bible and a copy of
Leaves of Grass
, a half-full glass of water, a Timex watch with a scratched face, laid flat. On his dresser was a stack of folded shirts and a faded photo of my
grandmother, holding a baby – my dad. The frame was old, tarnished and bent on one corner.

In the kitchen, I took a lidded container of cold macaroni and cheese from the fridge and ate it without heating it first.

The funeral was short and sparsely attended – Dad, me, a group of old-timers and a few other fishermen Grandpa knew, who’d been friends and neighbours. Dad wore the one suit he’d kept – still sharp and perfectly tailored, though it hung a little looser on him than it had the last time he’d worn it, at Mom’s funeral. He’d lost weight. He was more muscular, but also gaunter. I didn’t have a suit and didn’t have time to get one, so I wore a black henley and black jeans for the service.

He was buried next to the wife who died thirty years before him.
Ramona Delilah Maxfield – Beloved Wife and Mother
, her headstone read. I wondered what Dad had ordered carved into my grandfather’s marker, but I didn’t ask.

The next day, Dad gave me two things from my grandfather: a heavy brass pendant with a Celtic symbol that supposedly represented the Maxfield name prior to the twelfth century, and the key to the old Ford truck.

I transferred the symbol, enlarged, to a sketch. I would have Arianna ink it on my side, at the edge of my rib cage. I slid the Ford key on to the ring holding my house key and a compass.

I had the truck I’d wanted, a thousand-year-old symbol of my heritage, a secret recipe for brownies, a pocketknife
and memories of my grandfather I’d have never had without the loss of my mother.

I couldn’t make sense of these things or their value to me, when every one of them was linked to the loss of something I didn’t want to lose.

I arrived as Heller was collecting the quizzes. As I slid into my seat, he asked to see me after class.

‘Yes, sir,’ I answered, working to keep my gaze from sliding to Jacqueline, who was eavesdropping none too subtly, head angled, chin at her shoulder. My breath went shallow, knowing he could say one sentence – hell, one word –
Landon
– that would tell her who I was.

I wanted her to know.

And I didn’t.

She didn’t look my way again until the end of class, when I’d moved down front. As Heller answered a student’s question, I took the opportunity to find Jacqueline in the mass of exiting students, but she was still in her seat. Looking at me.

Her eyes were dark, due to the distance between us and shadows cast by overhead lights. I couldn’t make out the perfect blue I knew they were. I couldn’t smell her sweet scent. She wasn’t laughing or even smiling. She was just a pretty girl.

But I couldn’t see anyone else.

‘Ready?’ Heller asked, stuffing lecture notes into his portfolio.

I wrenched my attention from Jacqueline. ‘Yeah. Sure. Ready.’

He arched a brow at me, and I followed him from the room. ‘Sure you aren’t working too hard, son? You seem a little preoccupied lately.’

He didn’t know the half of it.

This was not my day.

First, Gwen arrived in the first bad mood I’d ever witnessed her have. She was like a completely different person. She was like Eve.

Who was also working the afternoon shift.

I had no idea when Jacqueline would show up, if she would show at all, but I knew – as Landon – that late Friday afternoons were when she scheduled her high-school music lessons. She’d either be here any minute or not at all. When Heller showed up, ordered a venti latte, and parked it in a chair in the corner, I selfishly prayed he would slam his drink and go home.

He pulled out the
Wall Street Journal
and started at page one.

Not five minutes later, I heard Eve’s familiar, barely civil greeting: ‘Can I help you?’ with a double shot of attitude. I glanced up to see Jacqueline, chewing her lip as though she was reconsidering her decision to stop by.

‘I’ve got it, Eve,’ I said, stepping up to the counter.

As I got her coffee and refused to let her pay, my
coworkers continued to scowl at her, though I couldn’t imagine a single reason
why
. Choosing one of the bistro tables on the opposite side of the café from Heller, she pulled out her laptop.

‘What the hell?’ I finally asked Gwen, stepping into her viewing path. ‘Why are you staring at her like you’re trying to reduce her to ashes?’

She crossed her arms and stared up at me. ‘Please tell me you don’t actually
like
that girl, Lucas.’

I flicked a glance at Heller, who’d not moved except to turn the page of his paper. ‘What do you mean? Where’d you get that?’

She pinned her lips together, grimacing. ‘You’re more transparent than you think. And also, we think she’s playing you.’

‘
What?
’ Thank God no customers were at the register and Jacqueline was too far away to hear this cracked conversation.

‘It’s true,’ Eve hissed, appearing next to Gwen. ‘Her friends came in here again the other day – you know the two I mean? The sorority chicks?’ Her words said
sorority chicks
. Her tone said
disease-infested hookers
. Good God. I was giving her five seconds to get to an argument I could squash.

I nodded once.

‘Well, I couldn’t hear everything they said over the damned steamer, but I heard your name and her name and the fact that she’s using you to be her … ugh …’ She made air quotes. ‘
Bad-boy phase
. I’ve never heard anything so fucking
lame
.’

My brows rose. Bad-boy phase. Right. ‘You are both insane.’

Eve crossed her arms. ‘Um, no. We’re not. They’re plotting the whole thing out and she’s just following along. You’re supposed to be like – a rebound stud to help her get over some other guy. So – for a million dollars and a chance to advance to the next round: do you
like
her or do you just want to screw her?’