Sunshine (12 page)

Chapter 12
Questions
“The boy with the thorn in his side”-The Smiths

Boo and Trei spend the weekend with their dad and Stevie goes to visit his mom for her birthday, which leaves Jade and I alone to figure out something to do. We’re set to sit around the house all day and complain about how bored we are when out of nowhere, Adam calls.
I sit on top of the counter with the phone glued to my ear. “So, what are you up to tonight?” he asks. “Any plans with Trei and Boo, Myles?”
“No.”
“Well how’d you guys like to meet us for dinner at six?”
“Yeah!” I can’t keep my voice at a normal level. I’ve missed him so much.
“Okay. Leena, Laura and I will see you at the diner, then.”
“I’ll tell Jade.”
“See you then, Sunshine.”
I hang up the phone and carefully climb off the counter. My leg is a lot better. I’m not real worried about ripping stitches, but I don’t want to take any chances.
“Adam wants to hang out tonight,” I inform Jade as he walks into the kitchen.
“Awesome.” But he’s staring past me out the window into the driveway. And he’s got a ridiculous smile plastered to his face.
“What are you looking at?” I ask.
“Someone’s here to see you,” he says as I’m spinning around.
I peer through the blinds, shielding my eyes even though it’s cloudy. There’s a black Jeep Cherokee in the driveway, a familiar form climbing out. Convinced I’m dreaming and any second it will all fade into a cloud of nothing, I take my time putting on my coat and glasses, even if I don’t need them. I find him leaning against the driver’s side of his car.
“Hey,” I really want to punch him in the face for not calling me and scaring me half to death by making me worry about where he was.
Myles gives the biggest smile. “Hey.”
He looks different. More pale than usual, he has dark circles under his eyes.
“‘Hey?’” I fight to not yell.
He doesn’t say anything.
“‘Hey,’ is that all?”
He moves closer to me, but not so much that I jump or anything. “What do you want me to say?” he asks softly.
“Oh, I don’t know. How about, ‘Hey Sophie, I’m sorry I never called you and made you think I was dead!’”
His arms cross over his black jacket. “Alex told me you were worried.”
“And still, you could not pick up a phone.” I dodge the fact that he calls me out. “Where
were
you?”
“I was at Adrienne and Alex’s house,” he replies like he wasn’t missing for weeks.
Being mean to him right now won’t get me any answers, so I try to calm myself enough to
sound
nice. “What happened?”
“I needed a break.” He shrugs.
“A break from what?” I ask.
That little carved out curve twitches at his lip briefly. “A lot of things, I think.”
I get more serious, my memory flashing back to the sight of his mangled arms. “Did…that person come back?” I ask quietly.
He shakes his head.
“Well, you look like shit,” I try to joke.
He sees right through it, smiling weakly. “For someone who tries to make it look like they don’t like me, you were pretty concerned,” he says it like he’s caught me with my hand in the cookie jar.
Damn it.
I sigh. “What did you expect, that I wouldn’t notice at all?”
He looks at the ground, shrugs. “Kind of.” He tries to make it sound like a joke.
“Why?”
He smiles to himself, kicking a pebble. “Because you don’t want people to think you like me.”
I pretend to take it as an insult to throw him off. I can’t just let him know that he’s on to me. “Contrary to popular belief, I’m not heartless.”
Now he smiles even wider, his straight white teeth peeking out from his thin lips.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
But he doesn’t stop. I turn away and start walking back to my house. “Are you coming or not?” I call back. He catches up to me, still smiling all stupid. “That’s not cute, Myles,” I try to kid with him.
“You were worried,” he teases.
“I’ll remember this for the next time you disappear.”
He laughs before becoming a little more serious. “I’m glad you were worried. If you weren’t, I would have just stayed there.” Then his tone is back to cheerful, “But I won’t be disappearing for a while.”
“A while? Does that mean you‘ll be leaving
again
?” I ask in a mock-hopeful tone.
“No. I’ll be here for a
long
time,” he mocks my tone back.
We walk into the kitchen where I get a soda, and I can tell by the sound of running water from upstairs that Jade is in the shower. That’s convenient. Now that Myles is here, I’m not really sure what to do with him.
Listening to music seems reasonable. We sit at my kitchen counter where Myles asks me how An Anachronism’s music is going. Boo, Trei, and I haven’t had the chance to use the practice space or the recording software, but I end up playing him some old songs on my lap top.
Myles is okay. He’ll never let me live it down that I was
concerned
about him while he was gone, but he’s okay. I glance at the clock, convinced that time is moving too fast.
“Do you have somewhere to be?” Myles asks softly.
“I get to see Adam tonight,” I explain.
“I knew there was a reason you were in such a good mood.”
Yeah, and that you’re not a dream and actually here. “Yup.”
“When do you leave?”
“Jade and I are meeting him at six.”
“Oh.”
“I know, you’re disappointed that you can’t hang out with someone as charming as me all day,” I say sarcastically.
He laughs a little. “Trust me, you’re not the worst of company to have right now.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Let’s just say I don’t want to go home to face my mom,” he sounds like he doesn’t want to push the subject any further. If I was worried about him missing, I can just imagine how Phyllis is going to react.
“You probably scared the crap out of her,” I offer. He nods but doesn’t say anything. I push the pause button on my computer.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen him in so long, or maybe it’s because I’d been
slightly
concerned about him since he left without any warning, but I feel like if I let him go now I won’t see him again. “You should come.” I hope I succeed in sounding casual.
“You don’t want me there,” he says like he knows.
“No, maybe not, but Adam and Jade would probably like to see you.”
The smile he gives me now makes me laugh. “I said
Adam
and
Jade
, not me.”
His smile doesn’t fade as he turns my music back on.
I glance at my clock again, it’s almost five. “I’m going to get dressed,” I announce. “Don’t go anywhere.”
He nods and I walk out of the kitchen and into my room, grab some clothes and then I go into the bathroom,
lock the door,
and start to get changed. I do something that I haven’t done since I’d gotten the stitches.
I look down at my leg. I see the older ones that I’d grown up with, and then I see the newest addition to the family of marks. It’s about three inches long, a crooked horizontal line with blue thread poking out from it. I think what I always think when I’ve done things like this.
How could I be so stupid?
I throw a pair of jeans on and I pull on a black Yeah Yeah Yeahs t-shirt. I don’t think about it again.
It’s only because I’m in such a good mood (and possibly low on gas) that I let Myles drive.
We meet Adam outside of the restaurant. As soon as I see him in all of his Adam-goodness with his orange hair combed perfectly as usual, and his happy brown eyes smiling at me, I hug him as tightly as I can. I try to burn his smell into my memory. Mint tic tacs and aftershave. The same Adam smell that I’d missed for so long. “I missed you too,” he says into my ear.
Laura is sitting across from Leena toward the back of the diner when we go inside. I hug Leena first. She then runs up to Jade and hugs him too. Laura seems different. I realize that I haven’t seen her in a long time. Her hair is almost a strawberry color and makes her blue eyes pop out. She smiles at me and then Myles. I can’t believe she’s being so nice to us.
“Hey, Laura,” I say in the nicest tone possible as we’re sitting down.
“Hey.” I’m amazed that she actually sounds nice too.
Everyone goes off into their own conversations as we order. “How have you been?” Laura asks me. Whoa, is she actually talking to me without insulting me?
“Okay. Stevie and Jade finally fixed up the basement into an apartment, so I live there now.”
Her eyes widen. Like me, she probably never thought Jade and Stevie would ever clear out downstairs.
“I know, right?” I laugh at her expression.
Laura laughs too. We’re actually getting along, and I don’t hate it.
For a while, it feels almost normal. It helps if I pretend that Adam and my mother aren’t fighting. I pretend that my mother is busy and that’s why she didn’t come to dinner.
After we eat, Leena begins to get cranky. We all reluctantly decide to part ways so that Adam can take her back to gram’s to get to bed. Jade hugs Adam and Myles shakes Adam’s hand. Laura holds Leena’s squirming, cranky, little body. Myles and Jade go back to their cars and wait for me to say goodbye to everyone. I hug Adam as tightly as I can, wrapping my arms around him and pathetically clinging to the back of his sweater.
“I’ll see you again real soon, Sunshine,” he promises.
Like a little kid, I instinctively swipe at my eyes like I’m crying. I don’t understand at times like this when I feel like I desperately need to, nothing comes out. “I promise,” he repeats and then starts walking toward his car.
Leena squirms out of Laura’s grasp and hugs me almost as tightly as I had hugged Adam. “I love you,” she says in her tiny voice.
I take her little hands in mine and she looks at me with her deep blue eyes “Be good for Daddy.” I hug her as tight as I can.
“I will,” she says in a tired voice.
Then she chases after Adam, which leaves Laura and I. We don’t say anything for a few minutes. So much for being nice.
Laura sighs and looks indecisive. Then she does something I would never expect her to do and didn’t think she was capable of since we were little kids.
She hugs me. She hugs me so abruptly that it knocks the wind out of me and my muscles stiffen as soon as she does it.
My mind wanders to a place and time when we were kids at the park just as the sun was going down. We were sitting in a pile of wood chips near the swing set. Laura had fallen off the slide and scraped her knee. Mom was busy talking to some other parents and didn’t notice Laura wailing.
“Don’t cry,” I remember saying to her.
“Mommy doesn’t love me anymore,” she sniffed.
At that time in my life, I was appalled to think that our mother didn’t love each and every one of us. I dropped my rainbow ponies right there on the ground and hugged her until she stopped crying.
“Mom still loves you,” I said.
Only it isn’t my tiny five year old voice in a flashback that says it. It’s Laura’s seventeen year old voice right in my ear as she hugs me.
We let go and without so much as a wave, she joins Adam and Leena. I get into Myles’ car, almost frozen shock. My sister Laura, spawn of motherzilla hugged me, and it seemed like she meant it.
I shut the door behind me and blow out a big breath of air. Myles is listening to some classic rock station, but turns it down. “Is everything okay?” He throws the car in reverse and we back out of the parking lot. I can only nod. Jade’s truck passes us and turns the corner to get onto the highway, and we follow behind.
Myles slowly shakes his head. “No, you’re too quiet.”
His face has more color in it now, I guess because he ate something. Maybe it’s because I’ve never paid close enough attention, but he has these sharp cheekbones underneath his skin. I look out into the night at the road that lies ahead.
“That was the first time my sister has hugged me since I was five years old,” I say quietly. “I didn’t even think she cared about me.”
I can see Myles nod from the corner of my eye. “They all love you. Even Laura.”
When I look at him he’s staring at the dark road ahead of us and smiling.
“I never got the chance to tell you how much I like the sound of your voice,” he says after a while.
He flashes a smile in my direction as he makes a turn. “It’s very unusual.”
“Wow, thanks.”
I guess I sound a little sarcastic because Myles says, “No, I’m serious. I’ve never really heard anything like it before.”
He probably notices that I’m getting a little weirded out. “Today when you were getting dressed and I was listening to your songs, I didn’t just hear it. I
felt
it.”
I can’t help but burst out laughing. It’s not really too much of a compliment coming from a person who can feel what people are feeling in the first place.
“I’ll show you when we get back to your apartment,” he says.
Soon enough, we’re there and Myles is practically running down the basement stairs so he can prove his little point. He sits down at the kitchen counter where I left my laptop and starts clicking around until he finds the song he’s talking about.
I’m horrified when I hear it.
This was the one and only song I wrote about the Jack situation. I meant to delete it, but it got on my laptop somehow.
A long portion of the song is slow piano, but the end has lyrics. I don’t remember what they were, and I don’t think I want to.
I can feel my smile crack and begin to slip.
“What’s wrong?” Myles asks.
“I...” I blink, trying to breathe normally and make my tongue start working. “I didn’t know this song was on here.”
“You don’t like it?” he asks. “I think it’s amazing, especially when you start singing.”
I force every emotion I have into trying to act normal. I casually take the mouse, right click, and delete the song from my computer.
“I never finished that one. It sucks,” I say simply.
He really doesn’t look like he believes me, but he nods anyway.
Sitting down on the couch, I push everything that isn’t happy out of my brain’s field of vision and flick through the channels. Myles gets up and sits on the other end. I don’t want to talk anymore for a while, but it seems like Myles has other plans because he’s staring at me, no doubt trying to get me to look at him. “What?” I say.
“I have a question.”
Uh oh.

“It’s nothing bad,” he says, almost laughing. “It’s just something Jade said to me when you were saying bye to Adam and Leena.”
“Oh?” I try to sound calm.
“He kept saying that I was something good for you. That you’re happier around me. Do you know what he was talking about?” he asks.
Like he wouldn’t know. Like he couldn’t just go in and scoop out whatever he wanted out of Jade’s head if he chose to. “Can’t you just find out?”
He smiles crookedly, like whatever he’s thinking about isn’t exactly funny. “I was getting pictures of certain things, but then when he said that to me, I couldn’t see anything. It was like he was forcing himself not to think about something.” He’s silent for a while but then starts again, turning slightly towards me. “I just wish you knew how frustrating this is for me,” he says quietly. “I told you something about me that no one knows.”
Now I’m pissed that he’s bringing up the birthday incident yet again. And just because we're friends doesn't mean he gets the right to know everything. “Look,” I cut him off. “You also
saw
something that you weren’t supposed to see.”
He doesn’t say anything.
I calm down, trying to understand that it must be a pain in the ass to be my friend in the first place without the whole I-know-you’re-hiding-something-but-I-don’t-know-what-it-is-and-it’s-driving-me-insane element. “I don’t like talking about some things. Just like there are questions I ask you that you don’t like to talk about.”
“That’s fair,” Myles says. “But it’s…different.”
No. It’s not. I’m tired of arguing about stuff that neither of us is going to budge on. Myles leans back and stares up at the ceiling like he’s thinking about something. “How about this,” he’s suddenly looking at me again. “I ask you a question, and you ask me a question. If we don’t want to answer, we don’t have to. No one gets mad, no one gets hurt.”
I can feel my eyebrows rising. “That sounds too simple.”
He shrugs. “It doesn’t have to be hard.”
“Fine.”
“Okay, what’s your favorite band?”
“That’s all you’ve got?” I figured he was just going to continue badgering me.
“It’s only the first question,” he says in defense.
I shrug. We don’t have enough time to go through that list. “Mostly punk. But I like non-punk stuff too. I can’t name all the bands.”
He nods. “Your turn.”
“Why did you
really
leave and not tell anyone where you were going?” I’m not wasting any time.
Almost immediately his smile fades. “I’m not going to answer.”
“I guess it’s your turn, then.” It’s really hard not to get angry, but I want to continue, so I keep my cool.
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
A wave of nausea washes over me. “Why?”
He shrugs. “Just curious.”
I stare at my hands. “I don’t need or want one. I just don’t want anything to do with the whole thing.”
How am I supposed to tell him that the real reason is because no matter how much you really think you know and love a person, you can never, ever, really know what’s going on in their head? That they can hurt you worse than anything in the world because of the fact that you love them?
No way.
“So why won’t you tell me why you left?” I want to get the subject off of me and my lack of boyfriends.
“That’s a repeat question.” Even though he’s smiling a little bit, I can tell that he’s kind of annoyed.
“Oh, c’mon, it can’t be that bad.” I smile back.
“I can’t tell you some things. I want to, but I just can’t.” Well that’s a load of crap if I ever smelled it.
“Why not?”
“Can’t you just trust me?”
I almost laugh at that. He has met me, hasn’t he?
“Okay. You broke the lock on my door. How did you do that?” I figure not immediately calling him out for lying will get me a straight answer.
“With my hand.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Did you use something like a screwdriver, or a lock-picking thing?” Because my doorknob’s fine.”
He looks unsure for a few minutes, and for a second I think about just giving up. Then he starts to get up and motions to me to do the same. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”
We walk to my bathroom door and he opens it so I can see both the inside and outside. He locks the inside and then grabs the outside knob.
He takes the doorknob and turns it like he’s going to open it. I hear the screws that held it in place fall onto the carpet, and the chunk of metal comes off in his hand like it’s made out of sugar.
I have to blink a few times to believe that he really just did what I saw. I stare at his face, but he’s still concentrating on his hand, which he opens a few seconds later.
It looks like a crumpled up piece of paper, only made out of the gold material they happen to make doorknobs out of.
“How do you make it, uhm, you know…” I can’t finish.
He glances at me for half a second, and then turns his attention back to his hand. He turns the knob over in his palm so that I can see the hollow part, or what’s left of it. Myles sticks his finger inside and pushes it back into its original shape, like it’s made out of nothing more than tinfoil.
“What the hell,” I whisper. Picking up the screws from the floor, Myles replaces the knob back onto the door, good as new. “How did you do that?” It’s the only thing I can ask without completely freaking out.
“I want to tell you,” he says as he turns away from the door to finally look at me. “But I can’t.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” Even if I wanted to, I doubt they would believe me.
He’s quiet, thinking to himself. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’m not scared,” I blurt out. “I just don’t like not knowing what’s going on. That's what’s scary.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” I answer without even having to think about it.
Myles turns and walks back into the living room and I follow. He pulls his arms through his coat. He smiles slightly. “Will I see you tomorrow?”
“Well that depends, are you planning on going on another vacation or not?”
I don’t realize how insensitive that sounds until it’s out of my mouth. But Myles sees it as a joke. He laughs. “No, so I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Shutting the door behind him alone is enough to make me think about what I just witnessed being done to my bathroom door, but I try to shake it off.
I take a shower and lie awake in my bed trying to make my mind blank, waiting for sleep. But different types of doorknobs keep getting crumpled up and then un-crumpled behind my lids.