Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (10 page)

I kneel down on the rug beside his chair and take one of his dangling hands in both of mine. It’s cold, and the flesh seems loose on the bones—far looser than it should. Has he grown so old already? “Dad, wait until after his curfew is past. He’ll be home, I swear.”

It occurs to me to wonder if something bad happened to Eric because I used the cards, because of my dabbling in sorcery. My dad can’t pray. A fear flickers at my lack of faith … maybe there is such a thing as demons, after all. Maybe we’re being punished. My insides twist up in doubt.

“Do they go to some girl’s house? Are they sneaking off to do drugs? I need to know, Cass. I have to go find them. I’ll take my phone, so you can call me the instant he arrives home safe and sound.”

“Plath’s Lookout,” I whisper, an involuntary shudder traveling across my shoulders as the horror of the idea hits me. People die on the lookout. I mean, people
choose
to die on the lookout. What if … what if this is all too much for Eric? What if he and Gavin devised some kind of stupid Romeo and Juliet suicide pact or something? There haven’t been any jumpers since my eighth grade year, not since this kid leaped and was found, still alive—horribly mangled but conscious and in pain—like ten hours later.

“Take me with you.”

My father stands, tosses his keys once in his hand. “Let’s go,” he says.

14. Your biggest fear …

Gavin’s car is dark against the snow. I don’t see any sign of Gavin, or of Eric. There’s a tiny sideways sliver of moon—what Dicey always calls a banana moon—and the thick clouds are scudding across the black sky, offering only a brief glimpse of starlight here and there. “They sometimes hike up to the top,” I say. My pajama bottoms are thin; they flap in the wind. I shiver.

The beam of Dad’s flashlight cuts across the line of trees planted by the mining company to keep the red dust in place. Tree trunks flash bright blond against the blackness, their uniform spacing drawing attention to anything out of place. I can’t see Eric and Gavin anywhere.

“I guess we’ll have to hike up,” says Dad. “Are you too cold?”

I try to hide the shivers by wrapping my arms around myself. “I’m fine.” A lie, of course, a small sin borne of terror. I can’t bear the thought of him leaving me here. The visions of what I could discover on my own chill me more than the January air.

What if they’re making out or something, or stretched out on the backseat? My feet unwillingly trudge along in the wheel ruts toward Gavin’s car. The windows aren’t steamy at all, and when we’re closer, we can see why.

“Whoa.” The windows are broken. Okay, so not
all
of the windows, but the passenger side window, the windshield, and the little triangular window in the backseat. Not like, cracked. Broken, like shattered. Little beads of safety glass fill the bucket of the passenger seat.

“Did they hit something, do you think?” It’s the only thing that makes sense to me—a deer, maybe. A moose? I search for blood or hair along the passenger door or dents in the fender.

“It happened here,” says Dad. He reaches out a gloved hand and runs it across the edge of the window, and I can hear the tinkle of tiny glass chunks raining down and clinking softly against the frozen snow. It’s so cold. Where is my brother?

“Footprints!” I point at the side of the road, where sure enough, two sets of boot tracks lead away from the car. I can’t help myself. “Errrrriiiiiiiic!” My voice echoes. I wonder if the whole town can hear.

I expect my dad to shush me because he’s an astoundingly quiet man, even in an emergency, but he adds his own voice and shouts too. Then we wait, in nervous silence, for some kind of answer.

Nothing. My shivering gets more pronounced, my teeth chatter audibly. There’s no way I can follow that trail up to the top, not dressed like this. Dad hands me the keys.

“Wait in the car, Cassandra.” His voice is grim. What does he expect to find? I fiddle with the keys in my cold fingers.

“But … what if there’s something out there?”

“I’ll be right back.” He squeezes my shoulder and shows me the tiny flashlight on the key ring. “You go get in the car and stay warm.”

“Be careful.”

Dad disappears into the shadows, and I circle around to the driver’s side of Gavin’s car and shine my tiny flashlight around, hoping to find something more, some clue to where Eric has gone.

What I find is disgusting on so many levels. At first I think someone sprayed the whole driver’s side of Gavin’s car with a squirt gun or something because it’s covered in big streaks of half-frozen wet splatters, but then I notice the color where it’s dripped down into the snow.

It’s pee. People have peed on my brother’s boyfriend’s car, and in the snowbank beside the edge of the road, someone has spelled out a word. Okay. So.
Almost
spelled.

The yellow snow reads,
FAGGETS
.

15. One thing
you’ve lied about …

Later, when it’s all over and we’re safe at home with hot cocoa and my mom fussing over Eric’s black eye (which he says happened when he ran into a tree branch in the dark), it occurs to me that covering up the word in the snow was probably not the smartest thing for me to do. What if those assholes had
killed
Eric and Gavin instead of throwing ice chunks and peeing on their car? Tampering with the evidence might have screwed up any kind of case against them, but all I could think of was that Dad could
not
see that word, that poorly spelled accusation in the snow. That’s not the way for him to find out.

Eric won’t tell us what really happened. He says they pulled the car up like they usually do, sat there talking and listening to something on the radio for a few minutes, and then got out to go for a hike. He says they were a little way up the trail when they heard bass thumping and tires squealing. They hid in the trees while a bunch of guys shouted and carried on. When they heard someone throwing ice chunks at their car, Eric says that Gavin wanted to go back and stop them, but he convinced Gavin it wasn’t safe to go messing around with a bunch of drunk rednecks.

“I told him he has insurance for a reason,” says Eric, holding an ice pack to the side of his face. “And besides, that’s when we heard them starting up the trail toward us.”

“And that’s when you fell?” prompts my mother, hovering. She reaches out to brush back several strands of dark hair from his forehead.

“Yeah, pretty much. We were off the trail, not using our flashlights, and I ran into the tree, and everything got all sparkly. I slid down this steep part of the hill a little bit, but Gavin grabbed my jacket and kept me from going all the way down. I couldn’t see. I think that’s where I lost my phone.”

“We’ll go back tomorrow in the light,” says my dad. He runs both palms of his hands up and down across his cheeks, scraping against the stubble. I’m not used to seeing him this disheveled.

Mom falls unsteadily into the chair across from me. “Yes,” she says, “you and your father should go tomorrow, right after school. Together.”

“No.” Eric says it too quickly, and both Mom and Dad frown. I think of the word in the snow, and I’m glad I kicked it away. Mom presses her lips and taps all of her fingertips together, the way she does right before things get difficult.

“I found a condom in your garbage can,” she says.

What? Seriously, Mom?
Now
? I want to disappear, but I’m sitting in my heavy wooden chair at the dining room table and if I move, even a little, the chair will scrape loudly against the wood floor, calling attention to myself. Anyway, I’m trapped back here against the wall like always. Someone would have to get up to let me squeeze past. I study my cuticles, but the silence is so thick and heavy that eventually I have to look up, to see why nobody is screaming or defending themselves or making shocked sounds.

Eric’s face is grim beneath the ice pack but unsurprised. He looks my mother in the eyes and nods slowly. Her eyes are brimming with tears that she refuses to blink away or let fall. I turn my face to Dad, who sits at my right, his hands still on his cheeks. He looks a little stunned, but there’s something else. Is it pride? Is he really
proud
, thinking of his son using a condom? Gross.

Finally, Eric sighs. “What would you like me to say?” He sounds tired.

“I think everyone has said enough for one night,” says my dad, standing up with a scrape of chair legs. “It’s late, and you two have school.”

“I want you to say that I’m wrong in what I’m thinking. That it’s some mistake.” Mom’s voice is small beneath the authority of Dad, but she isn’t finished. She’s obviously been wrestling with this all day, and now that Eric is talking, she doesn’t want him to stop.

“It really isn’t what you think, Mom,” says Eric. “Trust me.” He nods to my father and stands up, too. “Good night,” he says, and both Dad and Eric leave the room, heading toward their bedrooms.

Now that Dad’s gone, I have an escape route, but Mom’s still sitting there with those tears hanging on the edge of her lashes and I don’t know what to do. I stare at her shoulder, wondering if I should try to comfort her. She’ll try to pray with me, when what I really want to do is race down the hall after Eric and demand that he tell me what really happened out there, who it was.

“So do I trust him?” Mom says, and she turns to me. “Can I?”

“Eric’s okay,” I say. And it’s like I can make it true, even if it’s just for tonight. I feel my breath come back to me, and I didn’t realize I was holding it, rationing it out to a mere whisper of oxygen. I’m dizzy.

Mom nods, and though she never wipes away the tears, her face is flawless. “Thank you,” she says. “I’m sure you’re right.” There’s something else there, in her eyes, some kind of truth I’m not ready to see, not ready to talk about. I shove my chair back with a loud scraping sound.

“I’m going to bed,” I say, and I stumble down the hall to my room. I want to know everything, but I leave Eric alone with his thoughts. He’ll come to me when he’s ready to talk. Until then, I’ll trust him, like he asked.

16. Your best and
worst nicknames …

I have to track Kayla to her cave, downstairs in the art room, this morning. She doesn’t look up from her drawing, not even when I pick up a utility knife and scrape dried clay off the wood tabletop with an annoying grating sound.

“I’m pretty sure somebody punched Eric last night,” I say. She keeps drawing, no indication that she hears me.

“And they broke out the window on Gavin’s car.”

She frowns at the page in front of her. “Cretins,” she says.

“And they wrote hate mail in the snow with their piss.”

Finally she looks up. “Shut up. They did not.”

I shake my head. “Some asshole who can’t spell the word ‘faggot.’”

“They should die in a fire.”

“Right?” Scrape, scrape, scrape. Kayla goes back to her ink world. We’re quiet, the two of us, but I can’t tell if it’s our normal, best friend quiet—the comfortable, I-don’t-have-to-talk-to-you-because-you-know-me-so-well kind of quiet—or if she’s pissed at me for something. She gets like that.

Okay. “So, I’m starting an anonymous tarot card reading … thing,” I say. “Maybe in the newspaper, or somehow
through
the newspaper. Like, secretly. Anonymously.”

She puts down her pen for that. “Serious?”

“Serious.”

“You’re going to kill your mom,” she says. She smiles as she imagines it.

“Hence the anonymous part.” I pick at a string hanging from the edge of my sweater sleeve. I don’t really know why Kayla loves to hate my family. Okay, so there are some differences in the way our families operate, but my mom and dad have always been nice to her, even when we were little kids and Kayla spent most of the time she was over at my house asking my mother to read the labels of our food to make sure there wasn’t any high-fructose corn syrup or MSG, parroting her parents’ politics at our dinner table, and scowling through the evening prayers.

“What you need is a blog,” she says, picking up her pen again and opening to a page in our notebook, the one we pass back and forth with all our notes in it. “A pseudonym, a blog, and a new email address.” She divides the page up into rows and columns, labeling each one. She takes charge. My idea is slurped up into the Kayla machine, and I sit here nodding, smiling. Agreeing. Telling her she’s brilliant. My shoulders slump a little.

Well, I needed her help anyway. And I mean, it’s cool that she thinks it’s a good idea. “Are you sure?” I say. “I don’t really think anybody reads blogs.”

Kayla rolls her eyes. “Look, do you want to do this or not?”

I don’t know. I thought I did. “Okay, so I was thinking of names,” I say. “What do you think of using an anagram of my own name?”

“I think that’s an awesome idea. I mean, if you want everyone to figure out who you are in like five minutes.” She taps the pen against her teeth. “Look, Cass. This is a cool idea, but you’re going to have to do it right. People will read, if it’s interesting and if you get the word out, but you can’t let them guess that it’s you.”