How We Fall (29 page)

Kate Brauning

gotten wet from slipping balloons or the nozzle leaking, but we weren’t trying to be particularly careful. Ninety degrees with high humidity was like being in a sauna.

Marcus did not seem okay. He stacked shallow crates and tied off balloons while Claire, Sylvia, and I filled them. He was pale, and only talked to Sylvia. Her shirt was wet, too, and being pale purple, was more than a little see-through, but somehow he didn’t seem to notice.

Will drove by and honked, then parked and jogged over.

“Hey, ladies. Marcus. What can I do?”

“Hey. Um, you can help Marcus carry those crates over to the space for the water balloon game?” I said as Claire elbowed me in the ribs. I turned. “What?”

“Nothing.” She went back to tying off her balloon.

Will lifted a crate and followed Marcus and Claire smacked my arm. “Way to be obvious.”

“About what?”

“Will! I’m so jealous. You guys are really dating now?”

Sylvia chimed in. “Yep, they are, so hands off,” she said brightly.

I scowled. Sylvia was just being friendly, but that didn’t matter. I still hated everything she did. And suspecting she knew something about Ellie’s disappearance didn’t make me want to be any nicer.

“Is he as awesome as he seems?” Claire asked.

I nodded. “He’s pretty great, actually.”

“Good kisser, I bet.” She still watched him.

I turned off the water before her balloon burst. “What makes you say that?”

She sighed. “I mean, he’s just tall enough he’d only have to bend a little. No facial hair. He’s got big hands and a strong jaw. It’s all there.”

“Wow. You’re going to jump right on him if we break up, aren’t you?” I didn’t care, but I had to act like I did.

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She managed to shut the water off herself this time. “Of course not. I wouldn’t date your ex. Sister power, right? But,”

she sighed. “Too bad I didn’t get there first.”

If Will and I had really been dating, I would have been irritated, but I just spritzed her with the hose.

Kids were already arriving, lining up at the table by the bandstand to cash in their reading points for carnival tickets.

For the third year in a row, I was in charge of the face painting booth. Claire and Sylvia left to run the water balloon game while Marcus and Chris kept the soap slide going. The librarians and their own hapless teenagers were running everything else.I handed Will a paintbrush. “Paint what they tell you. Don’t get it in their eyes. If they don’t know what they want, do a cat.”“Don’t worry, I got this.” Will flagged down a girl and she gave him a ticket. “What do you want?”

“A lion,” she said.

A third grader ran up and announced he wanted a rat. I dipped my brush and mixed some paint to make a plausible rat color.

Will glanced at me. “Claire’s in college, right?”

“Yep. She’s a sophomore.” I dabbed color patches on the boy’s cheeks and painted a black nose and whiskers. Tiny white fangs were about the best I could do towards a rat. He and the girl ran off—hers didn’t look much like a lion—and we turned to the next pair of kids. They wanted to be kittens.

“So she’s what, twenty?”

“Yep.” I curled the tips of the whiskers upward. I couldn’t imagine not having siblings. Even before we’d moved to Missouri, I’d had Claire.

Halfway through the afternoon, Marcus came over to our stand. “You don’t have my keys, do you?”

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I shook my head. “No, why?”

“I can’t find them.” He was talking to me, but wouldn’t make eye contact. “Must have dropped them in the grass somewhere.”

“We can help look when we’re done here,” Will offered.

“Yeah. Thanks. I’ve got a spare in the glove box, but still.”

He turned away and headed for Claire and the water balloons.

Claire shook her head, and Marcus went back to the soap slide. He sprayed the flat plastic runner with soap solution, soaked it with the hose, then sent kid after kid running through the spray and belly-flopping onto the slide. Some of them got going fast enough they slid past the end of the slide and into the soggy grass.

Claire came over to switch with me. Glad for a change of pace, I took her place at the water balloon game, much closer to Marcus.

The water balloon game was for the older kids. Teams of two had a towel stretched between them, trying to launch a water balloon from their towel to another team’s towel without burst-ing the balloon. Sylvia was tallying points. I placed a balloon in each towel and scurried out of the way before they started launching the balloons.

“How’s it going?” Sylvia asked.

“Good.” The carnival was fun, but it was always exhaust-ing. I glanced over to the face painting booth, where Claire was painting Will’s face and laughing. I shook my head. My sister should have come with a warning label.

A truck rumbled by. I turned and Sylvia looked up from her points tally. A red Dodge. I blew out a breath and went back to keeping an eye on the game, but Sylvia had frozen. I looked up again. The red truck kept going, but she was staring at a white one, parked at the end of the block. The white truck that had run Marcus and me off the road. From here, I could see the empty cab.

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Sylvia paled. She looked at me, then at the kids playing the balloon game. A cheer went up; one of the teams had broken their balloon. She jotted down points for the wrong team on her clipboard. I ran over to replace the water balloon and the game picked up again.

After the third round, I stopped where I stood. Beyond the band shell stood the driver of the white truck. Short. Skinny.

He stood motionlessly, watching the carnival.

Sylvia looked up. She dropped her pen, then dropped her clipboard when she bent to pick up the pen. “I—can you take these—Sorry—I can’t—” She thrust the clipboard at me and ran to Marcus. She grabbed his arm and he stared at her in confusion, then he handed the hose to Chris. He said something to the kids in line, then went with Sylvia to his truck.

The man walked to the bouncy castle and watched. I glanced at the clipboard and declared a winning team while trying to keep an eye on Marcus and Sylvia.

He was talking to her, but didn’t seem to be getting much of an answer. She just kept shaking her head. After a minute, Marcus climbed into his truck and they left.

When I looked back to the bouncy castle, the man was gone.

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Marcus didn’t come home until late that night, way past his curfew. The parents waited up for him in the kitchen, Mom and Dad sorting and unpacking things from the carnival at the table. Chris was still up on his computer, but everyone else had gone to bed. I sat in the dark living room, pretending to be texting whenever one of the parents looked in on me.

Aunt Shelly’s voice rose when he came in. Marcus tried to explain why he was late, and his voice filtered into the living room, sounding exhausted.

A few months ago, if he had sounded like that, I would have made him sit down next to me. I would have run my fingers through his hair, and not moved until he’d told me what was wrong.

Maybe I’d let him go, but I was never going to love anyone else like that.

Marcus appeared in the doorway, his shoulders sagging and his eyes tired. The parents talked in hushed voices in the kitchen behind him, Aunt Shelly still sounding angry.

I looked up. “Everything okay?”

For once, he talked to me. “Sylvia won’t tell me what’s wrong. She wanted me to stay until her dad got home.”

I stood up and moved closer. “I saw her run off.”

He leaned against the wall. “I have no idea what happened, and she’s pretty shaken up. She won’t say anything about it except she saw someone she knew.”

My brain was spinning. “The guy she saw was the driver of 227

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the white truck. He drove by right before she ran over to you.

He actually got out and was walking around the park.”

He pushed off the wall. “The guy who wrecked Dad’s truck?

Are you serious?”

“Yeah. She got really pale and kept dropping stuff, then ran off. Maybe it’s not about Ellie, but she’s hiding something.”

He shook his head and exhaled. “Don’t. Just stop accusing my girlfriend of being involved with a murder. It’s petty and ridiculous. I’m going to bed.” He walked up the stairs, lifting each foot like it weighed a ton.

This time, I kept myself from saying something mean in response. My shoulders slumped and I leaned against the wall for a moment.

I wasn’t accusing her. For once, this had nothing to do with jealousy. Warning Marcus was only backfiring, but I couldn’t not tell him when something was obviously wrong there.

He knew me better than that. He should know being jealous wouldn’t make me go that far.

Sylvia must have had a major freak-out for Marcus to be this worried. I walked back to my room, the house quiet and the carpet soft on my bare feet. Claire was asleep in her bed, home for the rest of the weekend. Not liking the stillness, I turned on my television and slid in
The King and I.
My movies never woke her up, but I turned the volume down a little anyway.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the scene where Tuptim was being dragged off, swearing and crying over Lun Tha’s death. When Anna dropped her Bible, I turned off the TV. I could never make it through Tuptim’s execution scene without crying. I’d never forget those blood-splattered flowers.

• • •

Kate Brauning

I woke up to more screaming, but this time it was the twins.

The wailing of two-year-olds penetrated my bedroom door and my sanity. I crawled out of bed, pulled on a hoodie and my jean shorts, and stumbled into the living room.

Nate and Gage bawled on the living room floor. Candace and Angie were offering them toys and looking frustrated, but the twins just cried louder. Aunt Shelly came running down the stairs and hovered over them. “What’s going on down here?”

Marcus shrugged. “They’ve been crabby since they woke up.”

He was in the kitchen making hot chocolate. He glanced at me and then went back to the stove.

Whether or not we could be together, this was not the way things were going to go for the rest of our lives.

Aunt Shelly picked up the twins and carried them upstairs, both still crying, and I shut the door to the stairs. The quiet was a relief. I went over to Marcus. “You’ve never shown me how to do that,” I said. He might not want to talk to me, but he didn’t have a choice.

“You never paid attention,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

He looked at me like he wasn’t sure what I was doing while he poured milk into the pan. “It’s not hard.”

“I’m not accusing Sylvia of anything, okay? But it’s weird, and someone cut your tires and wrecked Uncle Ward’s truck. I don’t want you to get hurt. That’s all.”

He didn’t reply, so I tried again. “You heat the milk first, right?”

“Yeah.” He hesitated, and then doubled the milk in the sauce pan.

“Then what?”

“Cocoa. Two spoons, once it’s hot.” He handed me the cocoa powder and my fingers brushed his. “Want to do it?”

“Sure.” I whisked the milk so it wouldn’t scorch.

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“Hey, did you ever find your keys?” Chris asked from the table. He was eating a monstrous sandwich. For breakfast.

Marcus shook his head. “I have my spare truck key, but that’s it. They’ll turn up somewhere dumb. They probably got packed into one of the game boxes. Okay, add the cocoa.”

I sifted the dark silky powder into the steaming milk. Color spread through the white. I turned down the burner and kept stirring. The bittersweet smell of warming chocolate always made me wish for fall.

Partially because it was a relief from the humidity of summer, and partially because the leaves of the hardwoods turned red and orange, fall was my favorite season. Marcus and I always made giant leaf piles for Candace and Angie and went to haunted corn mazes with Chris.

“Don’t overcook it. Just add the sugar and it’s done.” Marcus poured in a tablespoon of sugar.

“That’s all?” Maybe didn’t like my coffee super sweet, but this was hot chocolate.

He almost smiled. “That’s all.” He took the whisk from me and stirred, then poured the dark liquid into two mugs. He sipped from one, then stirred in an extra spoon of sugar into the other and handed it to me.

His fingers touched mine again when I took the mug. Hoping adding extra sugar just for me meant he wasn’t so upset anymore, I leaned against the counter, holding the mug. He took his hot chocolate into the living room and paused by the stairs.

“When did we say for going to the movie?”

“Two,” I said, and rounded the corner so Chris wouldn’t hear. “Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

My voice was barely a whisper. “Just remember it’s still me.”He nodded and started up the stairs, and I stood by myself 230

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in the kitchen.

Out the window, sunlight flooded the yard. Sparrows hopped through the lawn, picking bugs out of the ridges of mowed grass already dried from the late summer heat.

Dressing up a little for this date might be a good idea. If I shaved, I could wear that skirt Marcus liked. No one was in the bathroom, so the shower was mine for once.

Thirty minutes later and I had showered, shaved, and tamed my red fly-aways with a little mousse. I had even gotten some curl into my hair. I stood in my room wrapped in a towel, sorting through my closet. Half the stuff was Claire’s. I decided on a soft black V-neck and my green plaid skirt.

When Will showed up, I put on the necklace he’d given me, added tiny pearl earrings, and figured that was the best I could do. He smiled. “Hey, look at you.”

I shrugged. “Marcus said he’d meet us there. You ready?”

Will opened the car door for me. “I hope you’re ready.”

That didn’t sound good. “Ready for what?”

He just winked.

I sighed. “I don’t want to keep hurting him, Will. He’s not getting jealous, he’s getting more distant. I don’t think he even likes me anymore.”