Rites of Passage (24 page)

God, if this guy standing in the door wasn't my
drill sergeant . . .

“Right. Come on in, Sam. We're having a party.” Tim looks relieved that someone told him what to do. He stumbles backward a few steps and disappears into the house. A few seconds later the music starts again.

I should definitely leave, go back to the DMA. After Thanksgiving, the last thing I need is to be alone with him. But I can't go without knowing. “Drill Sergeant, how does the drill sergeant know Tim, Drill Sergeant?”

“At ease, Mac.” He waves the words away. “Tim's my brother.” Now that he's said it and I've seen them this close together, I don't know how I could have missed it. The eyes, the wrinkles both their foreheads get when they're concerned. It's so obvious now. “This is my house, too.”

“Wow. I should go. Really.” When I turn, he reaches out and takes my arm. Just that small touch sends jolts of electricity through me.

His eyes lock on my arm where his hand is touching me. I don't understand the little tug at the corner of his mouth. “Tim said it's fine. Come on in. It's freezing out here.” He steps back, his hand on the door opening it wide for me to enter. He doesn't move aside, though, and I brush against him as I step into the house.

Boxes are stacked almost floor to ceiling in the small, cramped hallway. “Here, follow me,” Drill says. He shuffles sideways to move past, pausing for a second when we're face-to-face and making my heart stutter before sliding by. I follow him past the boxes and into the kitchen. “Want something to drink?” Moving quickly, he shuffles papers together that are spread out on the kitchen table. He adds them to a pile on a chair and then moves the entire stack. “You can sit here.”

Drill opens the fridge, then grabs a Coke and pops it open. Beer bottles clink as he lets the door fall shut. When he hands the can to me, our fingers touch. I wonder if it affects him the same way it does me.

“Thanks.”

“Mom and Dad are off visiting Megan, our sister. She's stationed in Colorado.”

Drill's sister is military and his brother was Amos's best friend? Now it makes sense why he was watching over me. Having a logical reason for why he cares about me doesn't make me feel so great, though.

He sits there, looking anywhere but at me, fidgeting with his fingers.

“Is he always like this? Tim?”

Drill shakes his head. “Normally he's pretty great.”

“He's drunk. How great can he be?” I wish I could pull the words back, but it's too late.

“He's not always drunk. This Christmas has been rough for him.”

It's bad for everyone, I want to say, but the words stick in my throat and I find something really interesting on my Coke can to study. It sounds like an excuse I used to give for Mom.
She's not always drugged up.

“Why are you here, Mac?”

I fiddle with the tab on the can, breaking it off and pushing it inside before I talk.
I think there's a secret society after me and I'm scared. I miss my brother.
“I just needed to get off campus. And I thought maybe Tim might have heard from my mom. They talk sometimes. About Amos or whatever.” It sounds so pathetic.
I miss my mommy
. I've survived a semester of Matthews. I should be able to survive two weeks alone.

“If she'd called I would have come right over.”

“I know.” I push the chair back. “I'm gonna go.” As I walk past him, he reaches out and wraps his hand around my arm. The heat from his hand makes me shiver and I stop as suddenly as I started.

He stands and turns me gently so I'm facing him. “Mac . . .” His voice is quiet, hesitant, like he's scared he might break me if he talks any louder. “Stay awhile. For the whole break if you want. We've got movies, video games . . . your mom will call if there's news. Just stay.”

The beginning of a “no” lodges in my throat because I'm sure staying here with my drill sergeant is so against the rules it's not even funny. I fight the urge to lean into him. More than anything, I wish the look on his face wasn't just one military brat caring about another military brat, but something
more.
Being a normal teen sounds so good right now. Spending Christmas break wasting time, not worrying about Dad being MIA or the possibility of secret societies . . .

“Okay. For a little while.” I don't promise how long. “I'm going to need some food, though.”

He laughs. “We've got Domino's on speed dial. Follow me.”

The living room isn't much cleaner than the kitchen. Beer bottles and soda cans cover every empty space there isn't a pizza box. Sitting on a futon, Tim holds a video game remote, staring at a screen on pause—presumably from when I knocked on the door earlier.

“Ready, Tim? I've got some serious ass to kick.” Drill sits down on the futon and grabs the other remote, unpausing the game and beginning to shoot a machine gun almost immediately. Tim doesn't say anything but he starts playing, too.

“There are some sweats upstairs in my bedroom if you want them,” Tim says. “That is, if you want to break DMA rules in front of your drill sergeant.” He laughs like it's the funniest thing in the world, his eyes never leaving the screen.

Drill grins when I look his way. “I won't rat you out if you don't rat me out later when I drink a beer.”

“Deal.”

He pauses the game again, stands up, and walks over to a duffel bag against the wall. When he turns to me, he's got PT sweats in his hand. “Here, wear these. They're clean, at least. Take a left at the top of the stairs, second door on the right,” Drill says. “We'll get your PT gear from campus tomorrow.”

I take them and try to ignore the fact that I'm about to be wearing Drill's clothes. They smell like fabric softener and some spicy body wash that is totally him. My face heats up and I take the stairs two at a time.

The bedroom is an extension of the downstairs. Boxes everywhere. Running my finger over his dresser, covered in a thin layer of dust, I stop and stare at what's in front of me: a framed photo of Tim and Amos—one I've never seen—in-country. They're wearing their desert BDU pants but no shirts. I can't help notice their smiles. Amos looks happy in the photo. This is not the same Amos who came home last Christmas. That Amos was . . . broken.

“It was the October before we came home on leave. Hot as hell, even then.” Tim stands in the doorway, leaning, just like Drill does.

I reach out to the frame to touch Amos's face. I'd forgotten the way the left side of his mouth crept up higher than the right when he had a secret. Brushing away a tear, I sit on the edge of the bed and hold the frame in my hand.

“It's my favorite picture of us.” Tim steps into the room, stumbles, and plops down onto the bed next to me. “Sorry I'm like this tonight. Tomorrow it'll be a year.”

I close my eyes and have to force the words out. “I know.” It's hard to imagine that a year ago today my brother was planning his suicide. “I found him, you know?”

“No. I didn't. I'm sorry.” And somehow from him, it's not pity. He
gets
it.

The sun is setting outside and he hasn't turned on any lights yet. But somehow it's easier in the coming darkness to tell my secret. “We were supposed to go shopping for Christmas presents. We had just moved to Fayetteville and he had just come home on leave. I walked up the stairs to his room. His door was closed and when I opened it there he was, dangling from the fan in the middle of the room. He'd pushed his bed up against the wall, knocked the chair over. I don't know how long he'd been there, but I tried to lift him up. I tried to help.”

Tears fall down Tim's cheek. I reach over to hold his hand but he scoots away.

I don't know if I should go on, but I can't stop. Even Dad doesn't know the details about how I found him. My teeth are chattering now and the room is suddenly way too cold. “I never got to ask him why. He didn't leave a note.”

Tim reaches out and takes the photo from my hands. “He loved you, you know that? He loved you more than anything. You and the colonel.” He spits Dad's rank out like it's poison. “He didn't want to let you guys down.”

“How could he ever let us down?”

He sighs, pain in his eyes. “I think it was my fault.”

“What? Him killing himself?”

“I told him he should tell. I
told
him that you guys would understand that he was gay. You're
family,
for Christ's sake.” His eyes are red and full of pain when he meets my gaze. “God, your old man flipped out.”

Some puzzle piece I'd had all along clicks into place and sadness overwhelms me. I should have known. It's obvious, now that Tim's said it out loud. The girlfriends who were never serious, the need to please Dad in the military. We'd been so close, but he'd held his secret even closer. “He could have trusted me. I would never hate him for that.”

“Your dad did,” Tim says. Someone in Platoon McKenna not following Dad's battle plan for our lives. Yes, Dad would have been furious. “Amos called me and put his phone in his pocket so I could hear the conversation. When he told your dad . . . I could hear your old man screaming over the phone. After that, he didn't want to even try to tell you.”

I remember the fight last Christmas. I heard them yelling in Dad's office and I just turned my iPod up. Maybe if I had gone down . . .

“All right, Tim. You've spent enough time strolling down memory lane for one night. Time to get you to bed,” Drill says, walking into the room and breaking the moment. I wonder how much he heard—what he must think of my screwed-up family that values appearance so much Amos couldn't even trust us with a huge part of himself—a part of him that was so obvious now that the truth is out in the open.

“Sleep sounds good.” Tim's lying down, tugging at the blanket even while I sit on the bed.

Before Drill can say anything to me, I walk to the bathroom, close the door, and lock it behind me.

 

Thirty minutes later, after the tears have finally stopped, I walk out of the bathroom, Drill's sweatpants rolled three times at the waist so they don't drag on the ground. Wrapping a rubber band around the end of my braid, I follow the sound of gunfire into the living room.

Drill doesn't look up when I walk in, but he scoots over and pats the futon next to him. I sit down, picking at my fingernails and trying to keep my eyes off the screen. Instead of stupid video game characters fighting a battle, I wonder if that's what Dad's going through, wherever he is. Maybe he's hurt, maybe someone's holding him captive. Maybe he's scared. Alone. Maybe he's somewhere thinking about what tomorrow is. Maybe he feels the same huge guilt about Amos that weighs my shoulders down right now.

Drill pauses the game when I sniffle. “Shit. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking.” Without waiting, he gets up and turns the game off. I shiver and he grabs the blanket behind my head, shaking it out for me.

He wraps it so gently around my shoulders that I have to laugh. “I'm not going to break.” I wrap my arms around my stomach, wishing he couldn't see how easy it would be for me to crumble. “At least I don't
think
I'm going to break.”

He reaches for the remote and turns on the satellite. “What do you want to watch? Comedy? Action? Romance?” He starts flipping channels when he sits down next to me again.

“It doesn't matter.”

He settles on a channel that shows reruns. There's a comedy on about nerds and he turns the volume low.

I feel his leg against mine, his arm a heavy weight on the blanket. He's watching me, probably to see if I'm going to lose it and be all
feminine
on him. I force myself to keep my eyes on the screen and laugh through the nerd show, then one about a group of friends at a coffee shop. Much later, when the screen turns to infomercials, I turn to him.

“Did you know about him?”

He sighs and turns to face me, leaning back on the armrest and pressing his leg against mine. “Tim told me last Christmas after it happened. I just figured you knew and didn't want to talk about it.”

I take a deep breath and close my eyes. This conversation is too emotional. It just makes me want to be closer to Drill, and getting any closer to him now . . .

Despite the warning sirens going off in my brain telling me to walk away, though, I settle farther into the futon. Right now, I need him more than I need the DMA. “I think I always knew, somehow, but he never told me. And I thought we told each other everything. . . .” I miss Amos so much right now it feels like I'm crumbling to pieces. The hole in my heart is so big tonight I don't know how it's ever going to get better. I put my hand on Drill's.

“I guess he just thought you had an image of him and he didn't want to disappoint you, or something. I don't know. I'm no good at this.” He rubs his free hand over his face, the frustration obvious when he looks down at me. “Mac . . .”

But I can't stop now. I need to know if this strange thing between us is more than a drill sergeant looking out for his recruit or a military brat looking out for one of his own. If he feels what I do right now. To hell with the rules. I need to be
close
to him.

I lean in toward him, my eyes on his lips now.

His arm muscles tense under my hand. “I can't . . . shit, do you know how hard it is to be your drill sergeant?”

That's not what I expect at all and I'm starting to pull my hand away. “I'm sorry,” I say, the humiliation of being demoted to remedial PT still a fresh wound in my mind. “I'm trying as hard as I can—”

He grabs my hand, though, and slides his fingers between mine, locking us together. “No. I don't mean like that. You're an amazing recruit. You're going to make a damn good cadet. But seeing you every day, being in charge of you, knowing that I can't touch you. Knowing what Matthews says to you and not being able to beat the shit out of him. Knowing that I can't kiss you whenever I want to . . .”