Something Like Normal (12 page)

Chapter 12

The sun has barely broken the horizon a few days later, when I pull the Jeep into the driveway at Harper’s house. She’s waiting on the front porch swing with a yellow duffel bag beside her.

“Hey, you,” she calls over the rumble of the engine as she throws the duffel in the back and swings up into the passenger’s seat. I catch a whiff of sunscreen as she leans over to drop a kiss on my cheek.

“Hey back,” I say. “Thanks for coming with me.”

“Sure.”

“I can’t promise it’s going to be a good time.”

“That’s okay.” I can’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses, but she’s smiling as she twists her hair up into a knot. She makes messy look so damn good. “I’ve never been to St. Augustine. Have you?”

“Nope.”

She’s happy and I don’t want to spoil it by telling her about Paige. She’s going to be pissed. Now would be the perfect time, so she still has a chance to get out of the Jeep and leave me. But I don’t want that to happen, so I throw it in reverse, spitting gravel as I back out into the street.

“I brought music.” Harper reaches back to her duffel and pulls out her iPod. “What do you want to hear?”

“You pick.”

She plugs her iPod into the stereo with one of those fake cassettes and dials up a reggae-sounding band I’ve never heard before. Harper sings along, her bare feet propped on the dashboard, and I wish I could run off somewhere with her, away from Paige and Charlie and the United States Marine Corps.

I pull in for gas at the Racetrac just before the interstate.

“I’m going in for a Coke,” Harper says as I’m punching the buttons on the self-serve pump. “You want one?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I’m leaning against the side of the Jeep, waiting for the tank to fill, when she comes out. “I’ve got something for you,” she says.

From behind her back, she dangles a bag of Skittles in front of my face, and it knocks me out that not only does she remember my favorite candy, but buys it for me. Paige never did anything like that. With one hand I snatch the bag. With the other, I wrap my arm around her waist and pull her against me—and kiss her.

The latch on the gas nozzle pops when the tank is full and the pump shuts off, but we don’t stop until a voice comes through the little speaker on the pump, asking if I’ve finished fueling my vehicle.

“Wow,” Harper breathes. Her hands are beneath my T-shirt, splayed out on my back, so I’m pretty confident she was as into it as I was. “I should buy you Skittles more often.”

“You don’t have to buy my love,” I say. “I’ll kiss you for free anytime you want.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth I wish I could spool them back in.
Buy my love?
Jesus, she probably thinks I’m an idiot. Because I
am
an idiot. But she doesn’t look freaked out that I dropped the L-word on her. She smiles.

“I already knew that about you, Travis.” She gets back in the Jeep. “I read it on the wall in the girls’ locker room.”

“That,” I say with a laugh, “doesn’t surprise me at all.”

It’s pretty much impossible to talk when you’re doing eighty with the top down on the interstate, so for the next few hours Harper keeps the music on shuffle and we sing along. I don’t claim to be a good singer, but back in high school, Eddie and I got it into our heads that we were going to start a band with him on bass, me on guitar/vocals, and whoever we could find on drums. It was a punk band, so we figured I wouldn’t have to sing well.

We drive into the middle of Florida, through towns I’ve never heard of—past farms and orange groves and trees that aren’t palms—until we reach the outskirts of Disney World. The crops there are restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions, and traffic picks up, because even in the summer there is no escaping the Mouse. Once we’re on the other side, the landscape changes again and the green highway signs tell us we’re getting close to the beaches. New Smyrna. Daytona. Ormond.

The miles close in on St. Augustine and I start thinking about Charlie. I asked him once, when we were picking through our MREs for the best parts, why he joined the Marines.

“It was the commercial that got me, man,” he said, shoveling a plastic forkful of sloppy joe into his face. “You know the one where the guy jumps into the pool and comes up out of the water in full gear?”

I had no idea what he was taking about. I never paid attention to the recruiting ads on TV and I hadn’t even considered enlisting until the day I walked into the recruiter’s office. I had no idea that most guys don’t sign up and ship to boot camp a few weeks later, the way I did.

“My mom’s a hippie type,” Charlie said. “She was always talking about how I should take a gap year between high school and college to
find myself
. I think she was expecting me to backpack my way across Europe or live in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. So I’m watching TV one day and that commercial comes on and I start thinking about how fucking cool it would be to be a Marine.”

Moss, who was sitting with us while we ate, just shook his head and muttered, “Boot.”

Charlie laughed, because insults never stuck to him. He was rubber that way. The only thing that would have ever gotten under his skin was if the other guys had made fun of his mom being a lesbian, but I was the only one who knew. “So I go to her and I’m like, ‘Mom, I’m going to join the Marines.’ She’s
completely
horrified on account of her being a tree-hugging peace freak, but she says, ‘Well, if that’s what you really want—but, Charlie, wouldn’t you rather go on a vision quest or something? I know a guy in New Mexico. He has peyote.’” He laughed again, his mouth full of food. “My mom—the only parent on the planet to try and talk her kid
into
doing drugs to keep him
out
of the Marines.”

It’s just past lunchtime when we roll into St. Augustine on Highway 1. My face feels tight from the wind and sun, and the end of Harper’s nose is a little bit pink. My insides are bunched up now that we’re here, even though the memorial service isn’t until later this evening, and I still haven’t figure out what—if anything—to tell Harper.

“You hungry?” I ask as she lowers the volume from highway to city.

“Definitely.”

“How do you feel about barbecue?” On the side of the street is a little soul food place. The smell of barbecued meat hangs in the air and my stomach growls out loud.

“I think your stomach already decided,” she says. “But that sounds good.”

We go inside and order ribs, greens, and macaroni and cheese off a menu board spelled out in mismatched letters.

“Do you want to sit in or out?” I ask.

“In,” Harper says as we sit down at a picnic table. “The air-conditioning feels good.”

She’s right, it is, but shit—I have to take off my sunglasses. Because it would be weird if I didn’t. And as soon as I do, she notices the black eye.

“What happened to your eye?”

“I got in a fight with Ryan.”

“Over Paige?”

“Why would you think that?”

She picks up a rib. “Because if you were going to get in a fight with your brother, chances are it would be over a family thing or Paige. I went with logic.”

“I, um—I kind of hooked up with her since I’ve been back.”

She puts down the rib and starts gathering all of her food onto the tray we brought from the counter. She does it really fast. Angry fast.

“Harper, I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t talk.” Her voice is low and controlled as she stands with the tray. Quiet, so she doesn’t draw attention. “Or I’ll dump my lunch on you and that would be a waste of good food. I’m going to the Jeep.”

I get up, but she cuts me with a look so sharp it drops me back down on the bench. My stomach growls again, reminding me I’m hungry, but to dig into my lunch would be a dick move. On top of all the others I’ve made since I’ve known her, I mean. From the window I can see her sitting in the passenger seat with the tray on her lap. She doesn’t look my direction at all. So I eat.

And try to think of a way to fix things. Again.

She’s still in the Jeep when I go outside, but the tray is gone, and she goes out of her way to not look at me. I check the computer-printed directions to the hotel and then start the engine.

“Why?” Harper says as I pull out into traffic. At first I think she’s asking me why I slept with Paige, but then she continues. “Why would you bring me all the way to St. Augustine and then tell me you hooked up with your ex-girlfriend?”

“If I told you at home, you wouldn’t come.”

“You’re a shithead, Travis,” she says. “And I’m stupid for thinking you could possibly feel the same way about me as I do about you.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t. Because I would never do that to you.”

Just like that I’m leveled. Ripped open. She could have shot me and it would be less painful. I know. I’ve been shot. Only I lived.

“Harper, I’m sorry,” I say.

She doesn’t reply, but I guess I’m not really expecting an answer. I’ve done a lot of apologizing and can see how that might call my sincerity into question—and piss her off.

We reach downtown and it sucks she’s not speaking to me, because St. Augustine is cool. The buildings are old and historic, some dating back to the 1700s, and the Spanish moss dripping from the oak trees in the park make it feel like we’re somewhere other than Florida. I wonder if Harper likes it as much as I do, but I don’t ask. Instead I ask her if she wants me to drive her back to Fort Myers.

“And prove to my dad that you’re as big an idiot as you were in seventh grade?” She snorts. “I don’t think so. Let’s just go to the hotel. Then you can do your thing and I can do mine until the service.”

Shit.

“I don’t want—”

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” she says. “What I want right now is for you to leave me alone.”

“But—” I want to explain. Tell her that what happened with Paige didn’t mean anything.

“Just don’t,” she says. “Because if you try to tell me that it didn’t
mean
anything or it
just happened
or that we weren’t
technically
together when you hooked up with Paige, I will punch you in the face again.”

And that’s the thing. There isn’t any good reason why I slept with Paige. I didn’t do it to get revenge on Ryan or because I wanted her back. I just did it because I could. And there’s really no excuse for that.

We don’t talk again until we reach the hotel, which is probably the fanciest place I’ve ever seen. The lobby is filled with overstuffed leather chairs, Spanish tapestries, golden chandeliers, and a tiled fountain. I feel like a peasant in the palace as I approach the black-vested man behind the marble-topped reception desk. He lifts his eyebrows when I tell him I have a reservation—as if he can’t believe it either—and for a moment I’m annoyed.

“Name?” he asks.

“Stephenson.”

His fingers click on his computer keyboard. “Two rooms,” he reads off the screen. “One night.”

“I want to pay for my own room,” Harper says.

“Harper…” All the while I was in Afghanistan, my pay was direct deposited into my bank account. Since I’ve spent very little money over the past year, I can afford these rooms. They’re expensive. Too much for what amounts to a couple of well-decorated bedrooms, but I wanted to impress her. Now I just want to make it up to her. “I’ve got it.”

She doesn’t say anything, but she walks as far away from me as she can as the bellman carries our luggage to the fourth floor. It’s strange letting someone else carry my seabag. Also, my dusty bag looks so alien in a hotel that looks like a Spanish castle. We stop first at Harper’s room. Although she doesn’t say anything as she goes inside, she glances back at me before closing the door.

My room is beside hers, with a big iron bed covered with soft-looking bedding and a wrought iron balcony overlooking downtown and Matanzas Bay. I tip the bellman for the bags, hang my uniform in the wardrobe, and then go out onto the balcony. On the street below, a horse-drawn carriage filled with tourists rolls past, the horses’ hooves clip-clopping on the pavement. Harper comes outside and awkwardness fills the small space between her balcony and mine. There’s no reason we can’t both be out here, but it feels weird. I want to ask her to go driving around St. Augustine with me. Or to the beach. Or even to go to that stupid wax museum down the street to look at fake Michael Jackson and fake Michael Jordan. Before I can do any of that, she goes back inside.

Chapter 13

It’s nearly five o’clock when I knock on the door to Harper’s room. I’ve never worn my blue dress uniform before, so it’s starch-stiff and new-smelling, and I’m not sure my medals and qualification badges are positioned according to regulation. Also, the heavy jacket is hot—even in the air-conditioning—and I’m sweating between my fingers in these gloves. This uniform might impress girls, but it’s uncomfortable. Especially compared to my cammies, which were sandblasted to a salty faded softness.

I’m tugging down on the hem of my jacket when Harper steps out into the hall, wearing a black dress that somehow manages to be memorial service respectable and sexy at the same time. She’s straightened her hair again and her black sandals make her nearly as tall as me.

“Wow, Harper, you look beautiful.” I offer her my arm as an older couple walks past and I hope she doesn’t blow me off. They glance at each other and smile as she slips her hand under my arm. Her fingers are shaking.

“Thank you.” Her voice is quiet, as if she doesn’t want to talk to me but also doesn’t want to be rude. Which is okay with me. I’ll take that. “You, too. I mean, you don’t look beautiful. You look really… good…”

I’m sure I look like an idiot—and this might be the only remotely nice thing she says to me for the rest of the night—but I can’t keep the smile off my face. “Thanks.”

The banquet room is only a couple blocks from the hotel, so we leave the Jeep in the parking lot and walk down King Avenue. We get a lot of looks. Kevlar is right about the effect the dress blues have on girls.

We’ve barely entered the banquet room when Charlie’s mom appears. Ellen Sweeney looks exactly like her son. If, you know, Charlie were a middle-aged woman with thick black dreadlocks wearing a too-tight, red Chinese-style dress with gold dragons all over it.

“Oh, Travis, you are much more handsome in person than in pictures.” She jingles as she reaches up to touch my face—her arm so full of bracelets it seems like she shouldn’t even be able to lift it—then pulls me into a hug. “I’m so glad to see you. It’s
good
to have you here.”

I reach my arms around her, feeling awkward as I hug her back. She smells like a hippie. Like incense or something. It tickles my nose and it’s not the most pleasant thing I’ve ever smelled, but I let her hold on to me as long as she needs. I’m getting used to the hugging. When she pulls away, her eyes are shiny with tears. “Thank you for coming.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” I say.

Charlie’s mom turns to Harper and squeezes both her hands. “Aren’t you adorable?” she says. “I’m Ellen.”

“I’m Harper.”

“Thank you, Harper, for keeping Travis company on his journey.”

Charlie told me once that his mom’s personal philosophy is kind of like a salad bar. She picks her favorite parts—a little dogma here, a little karma there—until she’s assembled a heaping plate of strange. I probably should have warned Harper, but with her being mad at me, it slipped my mind. But Harper doesn’t miss a beat as she smiles at Ellen. “I wish I could have met you under better circumstances,” she says. “I’m sorry about Charlie.”

Ellen pats her hand and touches her cheek. “If you’ll excuse me.” As Charlie’s mom steps away to greet someone new, she looks back at Harper. “Someone famous—I have forgotten right now just who—once said the heart has its reasons that reason does not know. Food for thought, that.”

Harper swings her head in my direction, giving me a narrow-eyed glare. As if I had something do with it.

“Don’t look at me.” I throw my hands up in surrender. “I just met the woman.”

I’m not sure she believes me, though.

Across the room I see Kevlar, Moss, Ski, and Starvin’ Marvin. We call him Starvin’ Marvin—or usually just Marv—because he’s tall and skinny, and with his head shaved he looks like the African kid the boys adopted on
South Park
. I wasn’t as tight with Ski and Marv as Charlie, Kevlar, and Moss, but we hung out together night after night in Afghanistan, circled around the fire pit, smoking, telling dirty jokes, and arguing over the hotness of female celebrities. Peralta is with them, too. “Charlie told me she thinks she has, as she puts it, a touch of the ESP,” I tell Harper.

“She’s… unusual,” she says. “But I like her.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Harper follows my sight line and spots nearly all of Kilo Company—a forest of dress blues. “I, um—need to use the ladies’ room,” she says, and leaves me to join my friends alone.

In the corner of the room a band plays a reggae-fied version of one of the sad Beatles songs, and the people dotting the room are dressed in everything from dark business suits to tie-dyed hippie skirts with those jingly ankle bracelets. There’s even one woman with bare feet. She’s got about half a dozen plastic grocery bags draped over her arm and she looks as if she hasn’t showered in a while, so she might be a homeless lady Charlie’s mom invited in for a free meal.

“Here’s the man.” Kevlar whacks me on the back as I walk up. He smells like whiskey. “How’s it going, Solo? Did you bring the whip?” He giggles. “Because you’re whipped. Get it?”

“That was weak, Kenneth,” I say as I shake hands all around. “Get back to me when you’ve got something original.”

“Whatever.” He works his tongue into the empty space where his dip would be, making his lower lip stick out. “Where’s your girl?”

“Ladies’ room,” I say. “But she’s kind of pissed at me right now.”

“What’d you do?” Moss asks.

“I hooked up with my ex.”

“The”—Kevlar air-mimes an enormous rack in front of his chest—“that ex?” I might not have carried around a picture of Paige, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t describe her.

“That’s the one,” I say.

“How’d she find out?” he asks.

My face goes hot as I admit I told her.

“Solo…” Kevlar shakes his head at me. “For a smart guy, you can be such a dumbass.”

I don’t tell him I didn’t have much of a choice.

“Don’t listen to him,” Moss says. “Messing with your ex when you’ve got a good thing going is a bonehead move, but telling her the truth is the honorable thing.”

“Honorable, my ass.” Marv leans forward and pokes me in the chest with his finger with each word. “It’s plain and simple stupid. What she don’t know don’t hurt her. Period.”

“So if your girl stepped out on you while we were in Cali last year for training, you wouldn’t want to know about it?” Ski is always the devil’s advocate in an argument, especially with Marv, who gets worked up easily.

Marv’s forehead wrinkles as his eyebrows pull together. “You know something I don’t?”

Ski laughs. “It’s a hypothetical.”

“A hypo-what?”

“A
what-if
, you retard.”

“Oh. Well, that’s different,” Marv says. “I’d want to know if she’s been playing me for a fool while I was gone. And I’d beat the crap out of the guy she’s been banging.”

“So why doesn’t Solo’s girl deserve to know?”

“Is that how you got the fresh black eye?” Kevlar asks. “Harper punch you again?”

“No, my brother hit me when he caught me with his girlfriend,” I admit, which cracks them all up. And it would be funny, if Harper didn’t hate me. Thinking about her makes me feel like my insides are nothing but a series of knots, and it makes me not want to be here right now.

“Stephenson, you got a second?” Peralta asks, like he’s reading my mind. His voice is quiet. Even when he was pissed at us he rarely raised it. We step away from the others. “You doing okay?”

“Just suffering from a raging case of stupidity.”

Even his laugh is quiet. We walk in silence for a few beats. “Are you… getting things squared away?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

If he knows I’m lying, Peralta doesn’t mention it.

“Listen,” he says. “I just wanted to let you know that Leonard volunteered you for bomb dog school.”

“Me?” I deflate a little. It’s not like my plan for doing the recon course was set in stone, but training to be a bomb dog handler isn’t something I’ve ever considered.

“He asked me to recommend someone,” Peralta says. “I chose you because I know you’ll do a good job… and I think it could help you.”

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

He smiles and pats me on the shoulder. “Consider yourself voluntold, but trust me on this, okay?”

Harper comes back into the banquet room as Charlie’s mom and a small blond woman I’m guessing is Jenny step up to a podium with a microphone. “Welcome, everyone. If you’ll all take a seat, we’ll begin in a moment.”

The undercurrent of conversation ebbs away as everyone finds a chair, the Marines a solid row in front. I leave a seat on the end for Harper. Her thigh touches against mine when she sits and even after she shifts away it feels warm, like it’s still there.

“Thank you,” Charlie’s mom says, reaching out to take the blond woman’s hand. “Jenny and I thank you all for coming today and sharing in the celebration of our son’s life.”

Kevlar turns and makes a did-you-know-about-this? face, but I shrug my shoulder a little in a silent
get over it
.

Ellen talks for a while, taking us back to when Charlie was a little kid and was horrified to find flamingo on the menu at a restaurant—it was really filet mignon. I didn’t know that kid, but I envy his life because even though his mom is a little strange, they were connected in a way I’ve never been with my parents. They did things together. Went places that didn’t involve football.

As Charlie’s mom talks, I catch a glance at Harper out of the corner of my eye. She’s wiping her nose with the back of her hand, so I pull off my gloves and hand her one. I’m probably breaking some stupid USMC uniform regulation, but she doesn’t have a tissue and the glove is absorbent enough. Her words hiccup in her throat when she whispers thank you.

Charlie’s mom doesn’t try to paint him as a patriot whose love of country came before anything else. He was like the rest of us—trying to figure out what he wanted from life and the best way to get it. She’s strong, though, standing up there in front of everyone with her eyes all shiny, but not breaking down as she talks about a son she doesn’t have anymore.

When she’s finished, she looks at me. “Before he died, Charlie would e-mail me as often as he could and his letters were always peppered with Solo this and Travis that. So I’d like to invite Travis Stephenson to say a few words.”

I stand up and look into the middle distance, trying to calm nerves that haven’t been this jangled since the last firefight before we left Afghanistan. No matter how many times we engaged the Taliban, it was always completely butt-clenching scary. I blow out a breath and though I don’t look at her, I think I feel Harper touch my palm. I curl my fingers around the spot, holding it there, then go to the podium. Ellen smiles at me and I wait for her and Jenny to sit down before I begin.

“Many nights in Afghanistan we played poker,” I say. “Since none of us carried much cash, we’d use make-believe money. At last tally, I owe Charlie eight million dollars—” Charlie’s mom gives a little chuckle from the front row, which sends a ripple of quiet laughter through the room and dissipates my fear that a joke would be in bad taste. I give Ellen a grin. “I
really
hope you’re not planning to collect.”

Her eyes are full and she puts her fingers over her mouth as she smiles. I stand there for a moment, looking out at the crowded room. It’s as if all of St. Augustine turned out for this. Family. High school friends. Ex-girlfriends, maybe. Someone here has to be more qualified to make this speech than I am.

“I, um—I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what I was going to say and now that I’m here, I still have no idea,” I say. “The things that keep coming to mind are not really appropriate, like his fondness for Miss November, or the time he put… Yeah, never mind about that.”

I clear my throat and look for a spot in the back of the room, so I don’t have to see tissues and tears. Instead, I see Charlie. He’s leaning against the wall like he’s waiting to hear what I’m going to say about him. Like he’s waiting for me to tell his truth.

“The thing is, Charlie was just… When I first met him, I thought he was a complete motard—ridiculously motivated to be a Marine, you know? Because he’d volunteer for anything, and who does that? But then I realized that’s who he was. He attacked life so he wouldn’t miss out on anything, and if I can tell you one thing about Charlie that you don’t already know it’s that he went out of this world as bravely as he made his way through it.”

My eyes search out Charlie, but he’s gone.

I look at his mom.

“He was the person all of us should be, but most of us aren’t. And if I could have taken his place to buy him a little more time in the world, I’d have done it. I’m sorry I couldn’t.”

Ellen shakes her head and I know she’s telling me I don’t have to be sorry, but how can I not be? How can it be okay that I’m here and Charlie isn’t? I step away from the podium and my empty seat is right there. But when Charlie’s mom comes up to introduce Peralta, I quietly excuse myself to her.

And I leave.