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“So did you send in five bucks?” Alex asks.
“No. I asked Mom if we could and she said that it was a stock photo that charity had been using since, like, the eighties and she didn’t entirely trust where the money went, anyway.”
“That sucks,” Alex says.
“Yeah.”
The conversation dies, each of us drifting away. Alex’s breathing evens out and I know she’s asleep, but I can’t get there myself. Every time I close my eyes I see that girl’s cleft palate. I go ahead and pretend that I went to Africa and got her, that she came to live with me and we were like sisters, even though if Mom’s right, that girl is probably twenty years older than me, or even dead by now.
But that’s not going to help me sleep, so I pretend.
I pretend that I make the world a better place.
37. JACK
Newness wears off.
This is something I’ve learned about relationships. I’ve had more than a few run their course, the idiosyncrasies that were once endearing becoming annoying, the jump of my heart into my throat at the sight of her lessening to a skip, then a pause, then the bare recognition that at some point slips into dread, and you know it’s time to end it.
It’s different with Alex. The newness might have faded, which is inevitable, but it’s grown into something better. The panic of not being able to come up with something to say to her has settled into the comfort of companionable silence, my hand resting on her knee, or her head on my chest. The frantic need to be near her and know how she feels has morphed into an almost pleasant ache of missing her when she’s not with me, because I know we’ll be together again.
We’re happily entangled with each other in my basement, a basketball game on the TV that neither one of us is watching, an empty pizza box on the floor that I really need to grab before it’s obvious we have a mouse problem. But I don’t want to unravel my fingers from her hair, or shift her off my chest.
There are things I haven’t talked to her about yet, though. Things I keep wanting to mention, but am afraid to ruin whatever moment we’re in. I tug on her hair to make sure she’s awake, fully aware it would be my luck to say something important to a girl who’s fast asleep. She sits up, and I immediately miss the pressure and warmth of her against me.
“What?” she asks, pulling her hair off her shoulders and into a ponytail.
“Do you remember when we met?” I ask.
It’s an odd question to ask someone in a town this small. Chances are there was never a time we weren’t in each other’s lives, whether we knew it or not. We probably splashed each other in the kiddie area at the public pool, while our soaking-wet swim diapers sagged forever downward. We may have reached for each other from child seats in grocery carts as our mothers passed each other at the store.
But I want to know if she remembers the night Anna was discovered, if she thinks of the version of me who participated in that, the guy with a fog in his brain and his pants around his ankles, a half-naked Branley underneath him. I want her to not remember, but I also want to rectify it if she does, prove to her and to me that’s not who I am. Being with her has killed that guy.
“Do you mean in the guidance office?” she asks, and my heart lifts at least three feet out of my stomach.
I could say no and come clean, but she looks so happy right now, and bringing up Anna can’t possibly be the start to a good conversation.
“Yeah,” I say.
“What about it?”
My mind is still in the woods that night, back when I was still a jackass and she still had normal posture, not always tense.
“Jack?” She taps my leg. “What about it?”
“You said you weren’t going to college. Why not?” I blurt the first thing that comes to mind, my initial reaction to her statement months ago that I never got around to asking.
Her face closes immediately, the tiniest shift of muscles making it obvious even in the dim basement that the conversation is over before it even begins.
“I’m just not,” she says, the words even and measured.
I sit up and our legs unfold from each other, the heat we’d made evaporating quickly in the cool, dark basement air. “You’ve got the grades. You’re smart as hell. And it’s not like tuition would be a problem.”
Alex doesn’t say anything, her eyes shifting to the ground.
I nudge her leg with mine, trying to reclaim the easy communication we’ve shared before. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s not for you to understand.”
