Something Like Normal (7 page)

She pulls on my sweatshirt. “Like what?”

“Every single night in Afghanistan,” I say, but it’s not really true. We had some good times. I tell her about the time Charlie’s mom sent us pizza—canned sauce, premade crust, pepperoni, mushrooms. She even included a metal pizza pan and one of those rolling cutter tools.

“We dug a fire pit, put a grate over it, and barbecued it,” I say. “It was kind of burned on the bottom and the freeze-dried mozzarella wasn’t fully melted on top, but it tasted so good. Like home.”

“Charlie is one of your buddies?”

“He was.”

Her smile fades. “I’m sorry, Travis. I didn’t know.”

“I know.”

“I heard Ryan talking at school once,” she says. “He said he wasn’t sure about the details, but that you were a hero. That you saved some people’s lives or something.”

“Ryan doesn’t know anything.” I sit up and tug my T-shirt back on. I hate my brother right now for using my life as some sort of… bragging right. Especially when there really isn’t anything to brag about. “I really don’t mean to be rude, but I’d rather not talk about this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, Harper, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just—I’m not a hero,” I say. “If I were…” Charlie might still be alive. “I’m just not.”

She doesn’t say anything right away, then she shoulder-bumps me. “You
do
have superior digging skills.”

I laugh. “Yeah, well, this one time at boot camp they gave me a medal for shoveling. You need a hole dug, I’m your man.”

I sneak a look at her while she’s laughing. My sweatshirt is huge on her, but it looks so good. As if she belongs in that sweatshirt. And I don’t even want to think about what that means. Instead, I think about leaning toward her, kissing her. Except I think too long and she’s on her feet, her eyes wide as if she can read my mind.

“We should—” Harper swings her head toward the nest. “The turtles.”

I can’t figure her out at all. She doesn’t behave the way most girls I’ve met behave. An awkward vibe zigzags between us as I follow her to the nest. She shines the red-covered flashlight and makes an excited little squeak. In the muted red glow, a tiny head and a pair of flippers wiggle their way out of the sand. Harper reaches for my hand and squeezes my fingers, telegraphing her happiness through me. I don’t do anything.

A second head pops through the sand as the first baby turtle flips his way to the mouth of the trench. This is only the beginning. I have to admit—I want to pick up the little bastard and carry him.

“What happens when they reach the water?” I ask. “There’s a whole new set of predators there we can’t do anything about.”

Harper laughs. “It almost sounds like you care.”

“Do you think I’d be sitting out here on a beach in the middle of the night if I didn’t?”

She lets go of my hand, her expression impossible to read, and unzips her backpack. The sound is magnified by her silence. She takes out a clipboard. “I need to keep notes.”

The first little turtle is flipping his way down the trench and I can’t help but like the little dude. Or girl. I wonder how you tell. “Do you name them?”

Harper keeps her eyes trained on her notes. “That would be too many turtles to name.”

I nudge her with my elbow. “But you do, don’t you?”

“No.” The corner of her mouth twitches and I know she’s lying.

“Yes, you do. Admit it.”

“Travis?”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

I turn to protest, but she reaches up and touches her fingers to my lips. I’m not sure what’s happening, so I shut up. Harper’s hand moves to the back of my neck and pulls my head down until our faces are mere inches apart. “This is probably going to be a mistake,” she whispers, before she presses her mouth to mine.

Kissing Harper is different from kissing Paige. For one thing, Harper doesn’t taste like Marlboro Lights. I don’t have to bend down so far. She fits better against me. And, Jesus, she’s a good kisser. So good I want to beat the hell out of whoever taught her.

She’s probably right about this being a mistake, but right now? I don’t care.

“We, um—we should be watching the turtles.” She’s breathless and doesn’t sound at all convinced. I cast a glance over the edge of the tarp. The first two turtles have left the nest and a third—no, a third and fourth are pushing their way up through the sand.

“We should.” The apple scent of her hair tangles around my brain as my lips brush her neck. She shivers in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature, and it pleases me in a way I can’t even explain. This time,
I
kiss
her
.

“Travis.” The clipboard comes up between us, killing the moment. I don’t want to let go, but I do.

“I know.” I tap the end of her nose with my finger. “I’ll go check on Alpha.”

“Alpha?”

“The first turtle,” I say. “That’s his name.”

She beams at me and it’s almost enough to make up for the fact that I’m harder than trigonometry right now. Almost.

Chapter 6

It’s full-on morning when Harper drops me off at home. Well beyond the sneaking-in hours, past breakfast, and eighty-seven baby sea turtles later. We stopped naming them after Zulu.

“I hope the one we called Juliet is a girl,” I say. “Or he’s going to have to face the next hundred fifty years being ridiculed by all the other turtles.”

She smiles. “Shut up.”

I kiss her for the first time since the first time. It doesn’t seem strange to me that we spent most of the night not kissing. It’s also not jump-in-the-backseat making out. It’s just… good. Really, really good. “See you later, Charley Harper.”

I don’t tell her I’ll call her, because it would be a cliché. But I already know I will.

“Travis? Is that you?” My mom’s voice drifts down from upstairs as I come through the front door. I find her in my room, taking a dark blue thermal shirt from a paper shopping bag. My bed is so thick with bags I can’t even see the comforter.

“What’s all this stuff?”

“Well, we never went shopping, so I thought I’d pick up a few things for you to wear. I got the sizes from your uniforms.” She’s babbling, nervous I’m going to hate the things she bought. It’s not an unfounded fear. We have history like that. “If there’s anything you don’t want, I can take it back. And I bought you the shoes we never got around to buying.”

“Thanks.” I peer into a bag filled with plaid button shirts from one of those pretentious, prewrinkled stores in the mall. Shirts Ryan wears. I could put them on and they’d look fine, but this fake vintage stuff is not me. The last time she bought me clothes from that store, I complained about how it was manufactured in a sweatshop and refused to wear it. That was me back then, spouting statistics I read on the Internet and thinking I was making a difference in the world. “Did you buy the whole mall?”

Relief fills her face and she laughs. “I did go a little overboard, but—I don’t know. I just felt as if maybe you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” I say. “But if we take some of these clothes back, you could use the money for that school supplies thing you were talking about.”

I haven’t turned into some rabid do-gooder Boy Scout, but spending seven months living around people who live in mud huts and don’t have indoor plumbing has changed my perspective a little. I don’t need this much stuff. Especially when I’m going back to Lejeune in a few weeks and then back to Afghanistan next spring.

“That is a very good idea.” She holds up the blue thermal and makes a what-do-you-think-of-this-one? face. I nod and she starts removing the tags. “Have you been out all this time?”

“Yeah, I was at the beach with, um—with Harper Gray.”

“She’s such a sweet girl,” Mom says. “I refuse to believe the rumors I heard about her at school.”

“What rumors?”

“Mean, vulgar things I don’t even want to repeat.” She folds the shirt and puts it in a drawer. “I know she runs around with Lacey Ellison and Amber Reynolds, but—well, Harper Gray is not
an S
-
L
-
U
-
T
.” She spells it, as if she’s offended just saying the word. “What kind of person would even start those kinds of rumors?”

If she only knew.

“An idiot.”

“You were at the beach all night?”

“She volunteers with a sea turtle conservation group, so we were monitoring a hatching.”

Mom blinks. I’m pretty sure my high school career was more notorious in her mind than in real life. “Really?”

“Yep.” I reach into one of the bags and pull out a white T-shirt and a pair of normal-looking cargo shorts. “Do you mind if I borrow the car again? I need to run an errand.”

Mom rummages in her purse. “Will you be home for dinner? It’ll just be you, me, and Rye.”

I give her a grin. “As long as I don’t have to cook it.”

She laughs and throws me the keys.

After grabbing a quick shower, I head across town.

I had a good time last night with Harper, but the hallucinations and flashbacks are messing with my head. The nightmares suck, too, but at least they’ve happened when I’m asleep and not a danger to anyone. So far. What if I have a hallucination when I’m driving or something? What if I hurt myself—or worse, someone else?

My cell phone rings and it’s Eddie.

“Dude, I bought an AK-47,” he says. “Me, Michalski, and Rye are going shooting tomorrow. Wanna come?”

Used to be, every few weeks we’d pile into someone’s car and head up to the gun range on Tucker’s Grade to release a little 9 mm steam, playing Dirty Harry with Glocks and shotguns and a .38 Special that belonged to Eddie’s dad. For Eddie, an AK is a big deal, but everyone in Afghanistan has one. Taliban. The Afghan National Army. Even the farmers, who were mostly Taliban anyway. The novelty wears off after you’ve been shot at by one, so I’m not all that impressed. But, what the hell. I like shooting stuff. “Yeah, I’m in.”

“Where you at?” he asks.

“On my way to a doctor’s appointment.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I lie. “Routine checkup.”

“Come over later.”

“I might,” I say as I turn into the parking lot of the veterans’ clinic. I feel bad about it, but I don’t want to hang out with Eddie tonight.

I write my name on a sign-in form at the reception desk, but when the receptionist sees that I’m a walk-in patient she shakes one long glittery purple fingernail at me. “It’s better to have an appointment.” Her accent is Jamaican, or possibly Haitian. “But have a seat”—she looks at the sign-in sheet—“Travis Stephenson, and I will call you as soon as someone is available.”

I sit in a red molded plastic chair in a waiting room filled with people who aren’t anything like me. There are a couple of regular-looking guys, but they’re probably in their thirties or forties. One of them has a prosthetic leg. Straight across the aisle is a wrinkled old veteran in a red Wind-breaker with a USS
Saratoga
ball cap and a metal cane. He’s thumbing through an old copy of
Newsweek
. His mothball breath blasts across the aisle whenever he coughs. Two seats over from me is a skinny, sketchy-looking guy maybe five years older than me who can’t hold still. His knee keeps jittering, shaking the whole row of chairs, and he’s missing a couple of teeth.

“You Army?” he asks me, but doesn’t wait for my reply. “I was Special Forces. They picked me right out of basic because I already had a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu, so I didn’t need much training.”

“Hey, good for you, bro,” I say, and pick up a back copy of a news magazine that promises an article about the war in Afghanistan, hoping he’ll get the hint that I don’t want to chat.

“Yeah,” he continues. “I led my guys on a whole bunch of covert missions in Africa, and you know when they captured Saddam Hussein? That was us.”

“Sure, dude, whatever.”

“I’d still be in, but I broke my back on a helo jump,” he says. “They weren’t sure if I’d ever walk again, but I fought it, you know? The doctors are having trouble getting my meds right, though, because I have to take, like, six pills at once for the pain to even go away.”

“Uh-huh.” I’m not calling him a liar, but nobody gets picked for Special Forces right out of basic training and he doesn’t look old enough to have done everything he claims.

I turn a page in the magazine and discover a series of photos of my own company, taken by a photographer who’d embedded with us for a few weeks. They’re from the beginning of our mission, when we were first deployed and still fairly clean. From when the other guys called Charlie and Kevlar and me FNG—fucking new guy—and Boot. It seems like it was years ago, instead of months.

There’s a picture of Kevlar and Charlie waist-deep in a poppy field. The caption only says
US Marines under fire in Helmand Province
and it looks like it could be a picture of any Marines, but I would recognize them anywhere. I turn to the next page and the full-page photo there is of a Marine squatting down on a dusty road, talking to a little Afghan girl who has a tear trickling down her cheek.

It’s me.

That day, we were out on patrol and we got mobbed with kids. Little boys mostly, but there was this tiny girl who was knocked down in the stampede. Their grubby, greedy hands waving at me, I pushed my way through the boys to the girl. She was crying—and I hate to see little girls cry. Women, too, but little girls just kill me. When I squatted down, her eyes went huge and afraid, like I was going to hurt her. I guess I can see how she might have thought so, considering I was holding an M16, but instead I gave her a beanbag giraffe. She cradled it in her arms as if I had given her a real live baby, and when she smiled at me, she had a missing front tooth.

The caption turns me into the poster boy for winning the hearts and minds of the local population, but it doesn’t talk about how the Taliban would spread flyers in the night threatening to kill the people if they helped us. Or that a lot of the local population
was
Taliban. The caption makes it look like we made a difference, when I’m not sure that we did.

I’m staring at the picture of myself when the nurse at the check-in desk says my name. “Stephenson? Travis Stephenson.”

That Marine right there in the magazine doesn’t belong here—at a veterans’ clinic with old guys and liars addicted to prescription painkillers. That Marine is hard. That Marine is tough. That Marine is not crazy.

I don’t want to sit in some counselor’s office every week and talk about how I
feel
, and if Staff Sergeant Leonard, my platoon sergeant, were here right now, he’d tell me to
unfuck
myself and get over it. Guys coming home from France and Germany after World War II, guys coming home from Vietnam… they didn’t talk about their wars. They didn’t see therapists. They filed it away in some tiny, dark corner of their brains and moved on with their lives.

I don’t need this.

I roll up the magazine, tuck it into my back pocket, and walk out of the building. Behind me, I hear the receptionist calling my name.

“So, Trav.” Eddie takes the AK-47 from its case and a feeling of cold dread crawls up my spine, freezing me where I stand. I know with every rational bone in my body that my friend is not going to shoot me with that rifle, but my palms are damp and my pulse is racing. My fingers curl into fists, in case I need to punch him, and I wish I had my M16. “I hear you’ve been hooking up with Harper Gray.”

The dread drains away, leaving me nothing but aggravated—at myself for panicking and at Eddie for saying such a stupid thing. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Paige told me you tried to pick up Harper at the Shamrock,” Ryan says. “And I saw her come pick you up the other night.”

I shrug. “We’re friends.”

Michalski laughs his big dumb laugh and sticks his face over my shoulder. “Well, she
is
a very friendly girl.” He pumps his fist in front of his mouth, simulating a blow job, and I jab my elbow back into his gut. He doubles over, coughing. “Jesus, man, what was that for?”

“Your mouth,” I say as Eddie clips a loaded magazine into the rifle and flips the catch. “Keep it shut.”

“What is your problem?” Ryan complains. “Everyone knows Harper is a—”

“A
what
?” My tone is knife sharp, and there is no good answer.

“You ladies mind if I go first?” Eddie interrupts, leaving my brother and me glaring at each other. Ryan’s fists bunch as if he wants to hit me. As if I’d let him. “I haven’t had a chance to fire it yet.”

“It’s all you,” I say.

With Michalski as a buffer between my brother and me, we give Eddie room at the shooting table. I watch through a pair of binoculars as he fires half a magazine at a man-shaped paper target set on a stand about a hundred yards away.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The sound—sharp and distinctive—is one I heard day after day in Afghanistan and I have to remind myself again that no one is shooting at me.

No one is shooting at me.

Out of fifteen shots, maybe six hit the paper, mostly at the edges. Nothing that would do any permanent damage.

“Damn.” Eddie hands the gun to Michalski. “I’ve heard these things aren’t very accurate, but that’s just crazy.”

I don’t point out that it’s probably operator error. The insurgent who put a bullet in my best friend didn’t seem to have trouble with the accuracy of an AK-47.

Michalski steps up for a turn and empties the remaining fifteen rounds in the magazine, hitting the target only a handful of times. Wounding shots at best. Definitely no fatalities.

“It gets easier,” I offer, taking the AK from him. I unclip the empty magazine and replace it with a new one. Ryan flashes me a dirty look, like I’m showing off or something. Like shooting people isn’t my job.

“So what’s it like?” Eddie asks. “In Afghanistan, I mean.”

“Hot and dirty in the summer, cold and dirty in the winter.” I can’t tell them the things they really want to know. How it feels to kill someone. It’s different for everyone, but I felt a rush of adrenaline. A fleeting triumph. And later, in the night when it was quiet, the guilt hit like a sucker punch. Because, even though he was trying to kill me, I’d taken someone’s life. These are things I’ve tried to leave in Afghanistan. Otherwise, how am I ever going to live with myself? “It’s a never-ending camping trip from hell.”

“Do the chicks really go around completely covered up?” Michalski asks.

We didn’t see many women out on the streets, but when we did, they were usually covered in those blue
chadris
that made them look like ghosts. “Pretty much.”

Eddie giggles. “You think they leave them on during sex?”

Everyone laughs, easing the tension. I’m smiling as I lean against the shooting table. The AK at my shoulder, I line up the target in my sight. I close my eyes to center myself, then open them.

There’s a black-robed Taliban fighter at the other end of the range, standing next to the target. His head is wrapped in a turban with a black scarf hiding the lower portion of his face so only his eyes show. The Muslim version of a Wild West outlaw.