How We Fall (18 page)

Sylvia, of all people, was the one who looked up. “Hey, Jackie. Want to play a game?”

“I’m watching the BBC
Pride and Prejudice.
Sorry.”

“Isn’t that thing like ten hours long?” Chris lowered his graphic novel. If he was around on a weekend, it meant Will and his other friends weren’t.

“Six hours of witty social commentary,” I said. “If you plan on dating someday, you should watch it.” Chris made a face and went back to his reading.

Sylvia laughed. “I’ve never seen it. We should all watch it sometime.”

Nice try, blondie. “We could play basketball at the park once it cools down.”

Marcus finally made eye contact, but his face gave nothing away. Sylvia smiled. “Hey, that would be fun.”

I decided to ask. “Did you play anything at Edison? Did you play basketball?”

“Um, yeah. But not basketball.”

I knew it. She didn’t want to tell me. I shoved my hands in my back pockets. “Marcus played for two years, but I was never any good. What did you play?”

She glanced at Marcus then fiddled with her phone. “Oh, 128

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just volleyball.”

Okay, she’d admitted it, but she was reluctant to tell me. She picked at her fingernails. “Are you going to play this year?” I asked.

She pulled her legs up onto the couch and tucked her feet to the side. “No. I think I’m done.”

She didn’t say anything else, and Marcus was still giving me a weird look, so I quit trying to make conversation and walked into the kitchen.

I loaded a bag with a jar of nuts, a banana, string cheese, and peanut butter. After grabbing a glass of grapefruit juice from the fridge, I sealed myself in my room.

Playing on the Edison volleyball team was a big reason Ellie had wanted to move. I opened up my laptop and waited for it to wake up. Sylvia said she barely knew Ellie. But she had to have known her pretty well if they were on the same team. All those hours at practice. Competing together. Trips to games.

The sleepovers Ellie mentioned in her email. Sylvia couldn’t have barely known her.

I logged into Facebook. Sylvia might not be on social media, but Ellie had been.

Her profile hadn’t been taken down. She smiled back at me, holding her cat and looking super excited about something. It took me a minute to remember that she was no longer smiling, no longer fluffing her cat’s fur. Her hands and her face and her whole body were buried in the ground.

Or maybe she hadn’t been buried. I had no idea how the investigation was going; maybe she hadn’t even been put in a coffin and lowered into the ground yet.

I scrolled down her wall; it had turned into some kind of strange memorial.

I’ll always remember those sleepovers in 7th grade. Nail polish
everywhere! Miss you.
L

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We miss your smile down here- Mrs. Shepherd

We love you, sweetheart. I just wanted to tell you that one more
time. -Aunt Kathy

Awful. The one from her aunt was dated two days after they found her body. Most of the other posts were cheesy sentiments that sounded like they’d been taken straight from a badly written greeting card, like most of the posters barely knew her.

The blank box stared back at me.
Write something!
it demanded.

What would I even write?
I’m sorry the world is screwed up.

I’m sorry someone killed you. I’m sorry we didn’t stay close.

Ultimately, me writing something on her wall wouldn’t help anyone. She’d never know.

I clicked on her photos and scrolled through the most recent ones. She’d been tagged at someone’s party, in her mom’s photos of the new house in Saint Joseph, and driving the second-hand car that was her sixteenth birthday present. Her last birthday present.

There. Fuzzy photos from some mother’s cell phone. Several girls I didn’t know were tagged. Teammates. Ellie was jumping in the air, and right behind her stood a blonde girl. The photo was taken from a long enough distance, I couldn’t tell for sure who it was.

I flipped to the next photo. Fuzzier. Why did people bother posting ones like that?

I stopped on the third. A clear, in-focus picture of Ellie high-fiving Sylvia. Unmistakably Sylvia. The date on the photo was in the middle of the fall semester. Sylvia hadn’t quit the team, so she must have gone to the sleepovers and team activities.

I leaned back against the headboard and stared at the photo.

Sylvia had lied. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. People lied for lots of reasons.

An email popped into my inbox, so I switched tabs. Another 130

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one from Travis—I’d forgotten to reply to his last one. I clicked it open and replied.

Hey,

No, sorry, I’m fine. My life just kind of exploded this week and
I can barely remember what day it is. Glad you enjoyed the last
post—have you studied anything about adaptations or spinoffs in
your classes? I’m thinking my next post will be discussing
Bates Motel
, that modern prequel to
Psycho
, or else maybe the BBC’s
Sherlock
, and compare it to some of the earlier adaptations.

~J

I wanted to make some comment about Benedict Cumber-batch being the ideal man, but that was the kind of joke I’d make to Ellie, not to some internet guy. Besides, it was a toss-up between him and Johnny Depp.

Adaptations fascinated me. Just a few twists, and the story would turn out so differently. Minor changes meant Henry Higgins and Eliza stayed together or couldn’t overcome their pride.

Right then I wasn’t fascinated so much as seeing depressing parallels.

Sylvia giggled in the living room until dinner, at which point she went home and I emerged from my room.

During dinner Aunt Shelly and Uncle Ward pretended they weren’t overly interested in why Sylvia had been coming around and tried to come up with casual-sounding questions. Marcus deflected most of them, staring at his plate and not reacting to their baiting.

Chris waved his fork. “You know, this is late notice, but the real reason Sylvia’s been hanging out here is for me. We’re getting married this weekend. You guys should totally come.”

Candace and Angie giggled and Aunt Shelly told him not to be mouthy.

Halfway through dinner, Marcus tried to get my attention 131

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by bumping my foot, and I ignored him the first two times, but when he huffed and mashed his peas with his fork, I looked up. He simply watched me, his brown eyes worried, and I shrugged. What could I say? ‘Don’t worry, leaving me after two years probably won’t hurt that much’?

Secret messages and covert whispering simply weren’t part of the twelve-step program to getting over one’s cousin. If I didn’t treat him like Chris, I was never going to get over him, and I didn’t want to feel like this for one minute longer than I had to.

I passed the butter to Angie and asked Mom about the library. Her eyes brightened. “The summer reading program’s in full swing. I’m doing a lot of planning for the carnival. The soap slides are always a hit, and we’re doing face painting and water balloons again. We’re going to try to rent a bouncy castle for the big attraction.”

The reading carnival was usually pretty fun. Kids earned points for each book they read over the summer, and they spent them at the end of the summer at a mini-carnival put on by the library. All of us cousins usually got roped into helping. If Claire came home for it, I could attach myself to her and not get paired up with Marcus for all the games.

After dinner Mom and Dad made decaf coffee and Aunt Shelly and Uncle Ward brewed green tea in their tiny pot. I was heading back to my room when Mom stopped me. “Come talk with us, hon. You’ve been in your room since I got home.”

Marcus had gone upstairs to play his computer game, so I came back.

Mom was a big fan of conversation. I didn’t mind, but I didn’t really have anything to say, and the one thing I could have used some help with was the one thing I couldn’t talk about.

“So, senior year,” Aunt Shelly said. “ACTs, senior prom, all that. Are you excited?”

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“I took the ACT and the SAT last year, but yeah, it should be cool.” I read once that prom was short for promenade, which was a ridiculous word, and when paired with “senior” it just sounded like a geriatric parade.

Around here, proms were pretty lame, since the junior and senior class combined would be about forty students max, and everyone would leave about nine at night for a field party and some idiot would have a gun and everyone would use beer cans for target practice. Bonfires, kegs, tequila, and much making of prom babies would go on until four am, and everyone would be violently ill for the rest of the day.

Maybe I’d enjoy it more if I had people I wanted to share it with.

“What are you thinking about college?” Uncle Ward asked.

“You want to study English, right?”

“Maybe film, actually. Film criticism or cinematography or something.” I wasn’t entirely sure yet.

“Really?” Mom said. “You’d be great at that.”

Aunt Shelly pursed her lips. “I’m not sure I’d encourage one of my children to spend so much time with television, though,”

she said.

This conversation wasn’t one for in front of Aunt Shelly.

Mom set down her mug. “Well, that’s your decision, but we don’t have a problem with it, and even if we did, it’s Jackie’s choice.”

“But medical reports show the long-term damage to the brain is-”

Uncle Ward broke in. “So then you might go back to California? L.A. and all that?” He refilled his green tea.

Maybe if Aunt Shelly had smoked pot in college, she’d be more like Uncle Ward. “If I wasn’t going to teach film at a college or something.” I’d barely thought about what career I wanted, beyond something in film. Being in love with my 133

How we Fall

cousin was taking priority at the moment.

“That sounds great, honey. We’ll have to look at some of the good programs.” Mom was making a point to be supportive, and I appreciated that, but if I stayed here much longer, the conversation would turn into an argument about the effect of screen time on the adolescent brain, so I excused myself, saying I was tired.

“Be up early, please,” Dad called after me. “That garden needs a serious day’s work.”

I didn’t see Marcus for the rest of the evening. He stayed upstairs and I stayed in my room. Day one: successful.

Success felt an awful lot like loss.

• • •

The day would get hot fast, so I wore my raggiest pair of jean shorts and a sports bra under a t-shirt. I’d cut the sleeves off and slit the sides last summer. My arms might get scratched up, but there was a humidity point where personal injury ceased to matter.

Marcus held the hose, filling five-gallon buckets every few rows down the length of the garden for plunging our arms into to cool down. Aunt Shelly had turned on the soaker hoses, and they steadily dripped water onto the bases of the plants.

Mom stood up from over by the tomatoes. “Jackie, would you and Marcus start on the green beans?”

Beans couldn’t be watered until we were done handling the plants. If the plants were damp, our hands could spread bean blight bacteria from the leaves to the rest of the plant, so they had to be weeded first.

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I grabbed a bucket and we went over to the six rows of beans, two each of pole beans, snap beans, and yellow beans.

Beans were my least favorite garden chore. Not only were there a million of the things to pick every time I came out here, but it was like they deliberately hid from me behind the wide leaves.

Marcus knelt in the dirt and clipped a bean from the plant.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” It had only been a day, and already I missed talking to him. I picked up the garden scissors and snipped off a handful of ripe beans. The scissors meant we didn’t have to pull on the bean and damage the plant.

“You okay?”

“I hate picking beans.”

“I know that’s not all you’re thinking.” He tossed a bean past its prime to the edge of the garden.

“It’s not, but normal cousins don’t tell each other everything they’re thinking.” I walked back to the bucket pile and picked up another; several of the beans I’d seen so far were either with-ered or overripe. We’d need a bucket for the bad ones. Between only doing basics on the weekend and then Monday and Tues-day being too hot to work, the beans, and probably the rest of the produce, were not happy.

We worked in silence for almost twenty minutes. Candace came over to help, working in the pole beans row and talking about how Angie was being annoying and could do the tomatoes herself.

Dad drove by in the Gator, the bed loaded with flats of Roma tomatoes and buckets of spinach. Chris and Uncle Ward were on wash duty over by the garage. Dad waved, and I was glad he was out of the office for at least a little while.

Mom stretched an extension cord from the garage. She upended a bucket and plugged in an old radio, then turned the 135

How we Fall

dial to the local classic hits station. Mom and her music.

When Candace left to drop off her bucket, Marcus said quietly, “There’s no reason we can’t talk anymore. Why are you ignoring me?”

“We can still hang out. I just need some space for a while.”

I searched through one of the bushy plants and snipped off a bean. Across the rows, Aunt Shelly was staring at me, her eyes narrowed. I kept my eyes on the plants.

His shoulders were hunched as he worked. “Okay.” He wouldn’t look at me, which meant I’d hurt his feelings, which made me crabby. I didn’t want to hurt him, but we couldn’t jump from more than friends to only friends and expect that to work without changing how we treated each other.

The cloud cover broke up into patches, letting the sun through for a few minutes at a time. As the morning wore on and the temperature rose, Candace and Angie argued about who had to weed the tomatoes and spent half the time playing in the water buckets to cool off, Chris turned on his iPod and ignored us, and Mom and Aunt Shelly discussed how much of what to bring to the farmers’ market this weekend.