“Language,” their father said, and Andy looked chastened.
“You burned yourself? Let me see.” Ignoring the old man, Gabe took his brother’s wrist. Carefully, he uncurled the fingers. A blister was rising on Andy’s palm, but it didn’t look bad enough to need a trip to the emergency room. They’d had their share of those visits over the past few years. “Be more careful.”
“I was being careful,” Andy said stonily. “It was my hand. My goddamned hand, it just doesn’t work right....”
This time, their dad said nothing about the cursing. Gabe found some bandages in the kitchen drawer and wrapped Andy’s hand after applying ointment. Then he cleaned out the burned pan, emptied the crumb drawer, pitched the burned toast and eggs, and made them all breakfast.
Andy ate in silence, carefully picking at his food. The old man shoveled down two helpings of everything, then pushed away from the table without so much as a thank-you, to disappear into the living room and watch television. Andy got up to put his plate in the sink, and nearly dropped it; Gabe bit out a command to just freaking leave it. Andy put the plate down but didn’t leave the kitchen.
“What?” Gabe barked.
“I was thinking about later, umm...I was going to see if maybe Janelle wanted to go see a movie with me. Think she would?”
“The hell if I know,” Gabe said. “Why are you asking me?”
“Did she...like me, before? Ever?”
“I’d be more worried about if she likes you now,” Gabe said, treading carefully, not sure what to say. The thought of Andy asking Janelle out was enough to stun him. “What difference does it make about before?”
Andy rubbed at the stripe in his hair, frowning. His gaze went a little blank, his mouth slack. It passed in seconds, with him blinking rapidly before focusing on Gabe again.
“Get out of here,” Gabe said quietly. “I’ll clean up.”
Andy did, without another word about Janelle. Gabe looked around the mess of the kitchen, still stinking of smoke. Forget about napping all day, forget about sleeping for a few hours. He wanted to run away. But this was his life, he thought as he got up from the table to start cleaning up. He’d made his choice, and he was stuck with it.
Stuck.
THIRTY-FOUR
Then
EIGHTEEN’S SUPPOSED TO feel different, but so far it’s only been more of the same. Nan’s making lasagna and homemade garlic bread for dinner, Janelle’s favorite. The aunts and uncles and cousins will all come over and sing to her, maybe slip her a five dollar bill in a card or something. Her mom already called this morning to sing the birthday song she’s sung to Janelle every year of her life that she can remember. This year it should feel different, if only because she’s living with Nan, because she’s almost an adult, because the last time she saw her mom it was through the back window of a car and her mom had turned away without waving. Because, because.
Eighteen doesn’t feel any different at all.
“Are you going to invite any of your friends?” Nan asks. “I have plenty of food, I just need to know.”
Janelle does invite some friends. Mandy, Dawn, Kendra, Barbie. Not Gabe. It would raise questions, maybe earn some good-natured teasing that might hit too close to home. She doesn’t want anyone getting even an inkling that there might be something more to her and Gabe than being neighbors.
Her friends and family sing “Happy Birthday” to her and there’s cake. Chocolate, Nan’s homemade. Ice cream, too. Her friends, who’ve lived in St. Marys their entire lives, know Janelle’s cousins better than she does. It’s not the first time she’s reminded that she doesn’t really fit in here. Not all the way. Not the way she would’ve if she’d lived here with her dad as a kid instead of visiting every once in a while.
Then again, Gabe has lived in St. Marys his entire life and he doesn’t exactly fit in, either. It’s because he doesn’t try. People would like him better if he just tried. That’s what Janelle tells him later that night when she opens her window to crawl into his.
“You’re going to kill yourself one of these days.” He ignores what else she said.
Janelle doesn’t. “It’s not that you weren’t invited because they don’t like you, Gabe. Or even because I don’t like you.”
She likes him too much, as a matter of fact, but she won’t say so.
He frowns and closes the window behind her. “Who says I even care?”
She holds up the note he taped to the outside of her window and starts to read aloud. “‘If your done,’ it’s spelled y-o-u, apostrophe r-e, by the way. ‘If your done with your fancy party and want to hang out—’”
Gabe tries to snatch the note from her, but Janelle dances out of reach. Laughing, she ducks his much-longer arms. She can’t escape him entirely, though, she discovers when he grabs her by the hip and spins her. He backs her up to his bed, and she falls down on it, looking up at him. Daring him to get on it with her.
Gabe takes the note away, crumples it up. Shoves it in the trash. “Fine. There.”
Janelle scoots back on the bed to prop herself up on his pillows. “I didn’t think you’d want to come over. It was all family. And Mandy and them. You don’t even like them.”
Gabe frowns. Then scowls. Shrugs. “I don’t care.”
All at once, Janelle wishes he did. “I thought we agreed, that’s all. About anyone knowing anything.”
“We did. It’s cool.”
It’s really not, but she’s not going to push it. She rolls over to reach for the tin box beneath his bed. Gabe watches without expression when she pulls out a joint he already rolled. She holds it up, then digs in her pocket for the Zippo lighter her dad left behind in the closet. He’s never come back for it, so finder’s keepers. She flicks it open, then closed. Open again. Gabe loves this lighter, and she knows it.
“Happy birthday?” she says.
“You already helped yourself, might as well go ahead.” After a minute or so, he sits beside her. He takes the joint from her and takes the first toke.
Janelle waits for her turn. She watches him. When he hands her the joint, she takes a drag from it without taking it from his hand. When she looks up at him, she smiles.
Gabe smiles back.
Some time later, flat on their backs on the bed with Janelle’s feet propped on the slanted ceiling, she says, “I should’ve brought you some cake.”
“I don’t like cake.”
She’d sit up if it didn’t feel so good to keep still. “What do you mean, you don’t like cake? That’s...that’s like saying you don’t like blow jobs.”
“No, I like blow jobs. I just don’t like cake.” Gabe sounds drowsy and warm.
She turns her head to look at him. “Why?”
“Because blow jobs are awesome.”
His grin makes her want to rub herself all over his face. “I’m sure they are. But why not cake?”
“I dunno. I just don’t like it. I like pie. I like cherry pie. I like apple pie. I like blow job pie.”
“You’re an idiot,” she tells him.
“That would be the best kind of pie, ever.”
“I think I’d rather have cake.”
“You wouldn’t think that if you’d ever had a blow job.”
Janelle can hear how slow and syrupy they both sound. How silly. She laughs, then some more. “Girls can’t get blow jobs.”
“Sure they can. It’s called something else. Something complicated. But it’s the same thing.”
“Well. Duh.” She knew that, of course she did. Oral sex. “Going down. It’s called going down. And I’ll take your word for it.”
“You never...did it?”
She’s blown him dozens of times by now, so she knows that’s not what he means. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Nobody ever offered,” Janelle says, for the first time realizing how annoyed she’d been by that.
“I’ll do it,” Gabe says.
They’ve never, no matter how high or d
runk they’ve been, ever talked about the things they do together that make them not just friends. They somehow just...do it.
Now everything inside her tightens and tenses. “No.”
“Why not? It’ll make you feel so good. And it’s your birthday. And soon you’re leaving. You’re going to go away.”
“You’re going away, too,” she says. “Aren’t you?”
Gabe snorts soft laughter. “Hell, yes. As far away as I can go. Never coming back.”
“We’ll never see each other again,” Janelle says.
“That’s why I’m going to do this for you now.”
“No,” she repeats, not sure why she’s so adamant about it.
Somehow, he’s moved her on the bed, he’s leaning over her. His mouth moves along her throat. Lower.
Lower.
It’s not her first orgasm—Janelle’s known that pleasure since she discovered the joys of the detachable shower head at age thirteen. It’s not her first with a boy, or even her first with Gabe. But this...this is...too much. His mouth on her, kissing her down there when he has yet to kiss her mouth. Everything spirals up and up and then down so hard she can’t breathe.
She can’t breathe.
She can’t look at him when it’s over. This is also different from the other times, when they finished what they’d been doing and she went home. Now she can’t move, can’t sit up. Something’s changed, and she doesn’t know exactly what.
Janelle manages to force herself upright. Off the bed. She finds her clothes. Gabe’s eyes are closed; he’s breathing low and slow. Sleeping? She hopes to sneak away, if her legs will even hold her, if she can get through the window and across the alley into her own room without falling.
She finds her clothes. She opens the window. His voice stops her.
“Hey, wait.”
The high’s worn off, leaving her wide-eyed but no longer hungry for cake. She turns to face him. Gabe’s sitting, hair tousled. He pulls something from beneath his pillow and stands.
“I got you something for your birthday. I mean...a real something.”
The box is the size of her palm, inexpertly wrapped in plain brown paper without a ribbon. She pulls the tape free, takes off the paper. She lifts the lid. Inside, on a bed of flat cotton, is a small Blessed Virgin charm on a silver chain.
It’s beautiful.
She lifts it from the package, the silver chain threading through her fingers. She looks at him. “It’s the one from the thrift store.”
“You liked it,” Gabe says.
He listened to her. More than that, he heard her. She hands him the necklace and turns, lifting her hair. “Put it on me.”
He does. For a guy with such big hands, he’s surprisingly delicate. He smooths the chain against the back of her neck, and Janelle tenses, eyes closing, waiting for him to kiss her there, too. But he doesn’t.
She doesn’t tell him she likes it, though she does. He doesn’t ask. When she turns to face him, he’s already backing away, his expression hard to read.
“Gabe,” she says, thinking of all the things she could say, but doesn’t or won’t or can’t. She settles for the simplest, though it’s also the most important. “I love it.”
THIRTY-FIVE
IT WASN’T THE first time the chain on this necklace had broken. This time, it snagged on a button as Janelle pulled her shirt over her head. The medallion slid over her skin and got stuck in her bra, but the chain slithered farther while she fumbled to grab it. She missed and let out a soft curse as the chain hit the floor in a long silver coil. The clasp was fine, she saw when she bent to pick it up, but a few links had broken.
It was senseless to cry over something she’d broken before, so easily fixed, but somehow the tears rose, anyway, and Janelle found herself on her hands and knees with her palm clapped over her mouth to press back the sobs. She’d worn this necklace for years, thinking every day of the boy who’d given it to her, but she’d worn it for more years not thinking of him at all. It had become habit.
She touched the place at the base of her throat where the medallion always rested. It felt naked. Her fingertips pressed, pressed against the hollow, then to the left along the curve of her collarbone, and to the right. Somehow she’d stopped crying and hadn’t noticed, though her face still felt hot and her eyes swollen.
Janelle took the chain and medallion and put them carefully in her jewelry box. She’d never been one for expensive jewelry. The Virgin Mary nestled between a set of silver bangle bracelets and a few pairs of novelty earrings Bennett had bought for her from the school’s Christmas bazaars over the years. Santa, Rudolph, Frosty. They made her ears sore, but she could never throw them away. She closed the lid of the box, letting her fingers rest there for a moment or two, thinking about the night Gabe had given her the necklace.
What it had meant then.
It should mean nothing now.
Janelle washed her face and finished changing her clothes—it was past seven, time for lounging pants and an oversize sweatshirt. Comfy clothes. She had nobody to impress.
Downstairs, she found Bennett at the dining table with Andy, both bent over math homework. Nan was in the recliner with her feet up, switching channels at random and pausing no more than a few seconds on each program. She looked up when Janelle came in.
“Ready?”
“Yep. Let me go grab a few boxes.”
Nan smiled and twisted a little in the chair. “Benny, are you finished with your homework?”
“Almost, Nan.”
“He’s doing really great.” Andy smiled at Janelle. “What are you doing?”
“Sorting more of Nan’s pictures. Hey, Andy, I could use a hand with some of the boxes. Could you—” He was up and out of his chair before she could finish the sentence.
“Sure, yeah. Finish that work, man. I’ll check it when I come back.” Andy rubbed his hands together, straightening the curled fingers of his right hand. To Janelle, he said, “Anything you need.”
The back room had a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves against one wall. A couple dozen shoe boxes without lids, each stuffed to bulging with packs of photos, lined a few of the shelves. Nan had albums, too, the kind with magnetic pages, each labeled with the year and with hand-scribbled notes of who, what, where and when in the margins. They were all shoved haphazardly into the cabinet in the living room. They’d be easier to sort, so Janelle had started with the years’ worth of snapshots that had been shoved away without any rhyme or reason, while Nan was still here to help her decipher the faces in each picture.
“Can you help me get those down?” She pointed to the top corner, the one she’d be able to reach only if she stood on something.
Andy was a good five or six inches taller and could easily reach the boxes, but could use only one hand to grab. “Sorry,” he said as he handed her one at a time.
“For what?” Janelle stacked the boxes in her arms as he passed them to her.
“For being slow.”
She laughed. “It’s fine. I appreciate the help.”
Andy gave her one of those brilliant grins, not paying close enough attention to what he was doing. The box he grabbed tore as he pulled it, the cardboard rotten with age. Half of it came away in his hand. An avalanche of paper envelopes filled with pictures cascaded off the shelf, onto Andy’s head, his shoulders, onto Janelle’s stacked boxes. Onto the floor.
“Look out!” he cried, too late.
Janelle managed not to juggle the boxes in her hands into another waterfall of photos. “Oops.”
“Sorry, sorry!” Andy shook his head and went to his knees. “God, I’m so stupid. What a freaking idiot. I’m sorry.”
Janelle set the three boxes in her arms carefully on the floor next to the pile that had fallen. “Hey.”
He didn’t appear to hear her. Andy scooped up the pictures on the floor, the ones in his good hand piling neatly while the ones in his bad hand fluttered and skittered out of his grasp. Janelle put her hand over
his to stop the frantic fumbling. Andy quieted.
“Hey,” she repeated. “Chill out, dude.”
He smiled tentatively. “I don’t want to ruin your grandma’s pictures.”
“They’re fine.” Janelle patted his hand. “The boxes are old. Don’t worry about it.”
She was holding his hand, she realized. The bad one. She didn’t let go, not right away—that would’ve been more awkward than this. She turned it over in hers and ran her thumb along his fingers, one by one, feeling the resistance that wanted to keep them curled against his palm.
“Does it hurt?” Gently, Janelle let go of his hand.
Andy pulled it close. “No. Not really. Nothing hurts except sometimes my head. I get headaches. Bad ones. They used to mean I was probably going to have a fit, but the pills I take helped that a lot.”
“A... Oh. A seizure? You had seizures.” Without thinking, Janelle pushed the hair away from his eyes. Dark hair, except for that white section.
Andy looked at her seriously. Too seriously. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.” Janelle bit the inside of her cheek, her old habit, to keep from saying more. There weren’t words for what had happened back then, or her part in it. Nothing could change it, especially not regret.
“Hey, look,” Andy said. “It’s you.”
There were sure to be a bunch of pictures of her in these boxes, but the one he showed her was from her senior year. “Oh. God. The hair.”
Every time she saw it, she wanted to cringe and laugh at the same time. The clothes, the hair, the makeup. Who had she been? Who had she been trying to be?
“I think you looked pretty.” Andy tapped the picture, taken in Nan’s backyard sometime in the fall. Janelle was posed under the apple tree, staring at the camera as if she meant to bite it, not smile for it. He pointed off to the side. “There’s me. And Mikey.”
They were a blur, running through their yard, caught by the camera. They weren’t identical twins, but Janelle couldn’t have told them apart in the photo. She didn’t have to, because Andy ran his finger along one of the figures.
“I wonder what we were doing.”