The A-Word (3 page)

WE WALKED BRISKLY toward the Merc, not because we were rushing, but I think because it made Casey feel like we were doing something normal people would do. He avoided my eyes. The glow was long gone. We lounged under the parking lot lights while people searched out their cars and the knots of traffic wound to the street. I wanted to think about Ryan Sloboda. But Casey had made that impossible.

“Why did you help him?” I asked. “Donny, I mean. You did, right?” Maybe I was wrong.

My brother heaved a sigh, like an old man. He looked tired, even though I knew he would never be either old or tired again.

“What am I supposed to do? Let Lanie be saddled with a loser? She’s top-of-the-class. Already accepted to UT. Then vet school, if she gets in, which I know she will. Did I tell you that? That she wants to be a vet? He’s Sneed. But he’s good to her. He’s
good
. Better him than most of the other numbnuts around here …” His voice faded. “She’ll see that when she’s in vet school.”

A million sharp-tongued comments froze on my tongue.

Casey nudged me with a smirk. “Least it’s funny for me, right? Knowing he would have fallen flat on his face?”

“Ha ha,” I said, not laughing.

He didn’t respond, just rubbed at his back where I knew his retracted wings sat. Something tightened inside me.

“Do you always know they’re there?” I whispered.

Casey’s gaze shot to mine.

We didn’t talk about it much. Or at all. Maybe since I knew he was grounded because he’d used his earthly flight to save me. Crazy angel rules.

“I guess,” he said after a bit. “Yeah. I do. I guess that’s part of it. Of being—”

“How did it feel?” I interrupted. “Flying?” So much had happened since last year that it had felt like just one more thing to talk about. But suddenly I needed to know.

“Amazing,” he said, and it surprised me. His voice was deep and sincere in the way he wasn’t always with me, even now. “I could feel them stretch out and become part of me. Like my body welcomed them or something. Does that make sense? And then there I was—in the air flying toward you. I’d
never … God, Jenna. It was the best thing ever. Like I was made for it.”

I knew then the other reason we didn’t talk about it. It was just another thing he loved and couldn’t have, another thing he now had to miss forever.

Across the parking lot, I spied Maggie hurrying toward us. I waved my arm and she waved back. Somewhere in those two short motions, my brother’s smile faded.

“I’m not ever gonna be good enough, am I?” he asked, looking everywhere but my face. “That’s the real reason I’m still here, isn’t it? They turned me into … this.” He gestured down his body with his hands. “And I saved you. What the hell was I supposed to do? Let you die? They sent me back and made me your guardian, and when you needed me I was there. And now what? I’m stuck here forever. That’s what I think. Me but not me. Able to look and not touch. Wings I can’t use. Screw this, Jenna. Screw it all.”

I started to reach for him and stopped, knowing that if I touched him I wouldn’t feel normal, here, present. “You’ll figure it out.”

We both knew I was lying, but what else could I say?

My brother tilted his face toward the top of the light pole at the end of the aisle. The fluorescent glow increased its brightness, flooding the parking lot with fake light, stronger and stronger.

“Stop it,” I said.

“Why? What difference will it make? What difference will I make? Isn’t that the whole point? For me to make a difference?”

“There’s a reason,” I said, lying again.

But by then Maggie had arrived, and he gave up and drove us all home.

M
om was in the kitchen, busy with speech therapist paperwork (she always seemed to be working these days) when we trooped in the door. Also, talking on her cell.

“Your father won’t be here for your birthday,” she said, glancing up. “He’s staying in Austin.” She waved the phone at me like a baton.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” my father singsonged in my ear.

“It’s tomorrow, Dad.”

“So I’m the first one to tell you.”

That was one way of looking at it.

“Lot going on here,” he said when I stayed quiet.

I almost laughed. A lot going on here, too, Dad. I wondered what he meant. Our father was a reporter who split his time between the
Houston Chronicle
and the
Austin American-Statesman
, sportswriting mostly, but he’d branched out to politics, among other things. He’d recently published a piece in the
Sunday Statesman
about this group of people
who wanted Texas to secede from the Union. Texas had been its own country once, so this was not as odd as it seemed.

“Crazies plotting to overthrow the government again?” I asked him.

My father grunted. “That’s not what it’s about, Jenna.”

“Then what’s keeping you from coming home?”

This stumped him enough that we said our goodbyes, and he promised—ha!—he would try for the following weekend.

Here is what neither of us said but understood completely: odds were, he would have left us years ago, anyway. Even if Mom’s boss, Dr. Renfroe, hadn’t given him a megadose of memory-losing drugs because Dad started investigating Renfroe’s nefarious activities. (Nefarious is not a favorite word of mine, but it is on the SAT list, and it means evil and conniving. Like a person who’d keep drugging ailing oldsters and justify it in the name of scientific research.) Because what father would admit to his children that their life together actually had never been enough? Sometimes your family is falling apart even before the cracks are evident.

“You sleeping over?” Mom asked Maggie while Dad was telling me he loved me.

“If that’s okay,” Maggie said, even though of course it was.

“It’s Jenna’s birthday in a few hours,” Mom told her. “She gets to have whatever she wants.”

This was more optimistic than even I could manage.

“How was the game?” Mom directed this to Casey. What she probably wanted to say but didn’t: Why don’t you go back to playing football now that you look so great and you’ve quit one of your jobs since I’m working again and not comatose? Followed by the part where she might ask why that nice Lanie Phelps wasn’t coming around anymore like she had been a few months back.

“We won,” my brother said.

“Jenna’s outfit was a hit,” Maggie observed.

Mom’s eyes narrowed. She scanned me up and down and up again. “Hmm,” she said, then cut her glance to Casey as his cell vibrated like a fire alarm in his pocket.

“It’s fine,” he hissed into the phone. “Don’t you worry.”

On the other end, loud enough that we could hear it, Amber Velasco was saying something in the annoyed, high-pitched, East Texas drawl she slips into when she’s peeved.

Lately, with my brother, it had been her normal tone.

Even Maggie recognized it. “What’s up with her and your brother?” she whispered. Mom went back to the mess of documents in front of her. “Is there something going on that you aren’t telling me?”

“You want to order pizza?” I asked her. Maggie still thought Amber was just the wacky EMT who pulled us out of our Prius wreck. And that was all she was ever allowed to think, for her own good. “ ’Cause if you’re waiting for my brother to make sense, you’ll be waiting till the Second Coming.”

This seemed to satisfy Mags, who started rattling off topping choices. As for me, I was sorry I’d put it that way. Our family had never been what you would call religious, but let’s face it: once your brother comes back from the dead as your guardian angel, you begin to wonder about things. Like what would happen if I brought my brother to Maggie’s Sunday school class for show and tell.

“I’m going out,” Casey said, shoving his phone in his pocket.

Mom looked up. “It’s almost midnight.”

Casey strode toward the back door. “Won’t be long. Bryce needs me to help close over at BJ’s. Someone went home sick.”

At the kitchen table, Mom steepled her fingers. “You work too many hours,” she said.

“You want Domino’s?” I asked Maggie. “Or Papa John’s?”

Casey slammed the door behind him.

“You want me to order for you, too?” I asked Mom. She shook her head.

“I’ll get one with pineapple and Canadian bacon,” I said. “Just in case.”

Mom was looking at her hands. “He wouldn’t have to work so many hours if your father were here.”

I stood there. On the one hand, I knew full well Casey wasn’t going to work. He was going to meet Amber somewhere or do something that Amber had told him needed doing. On the other hand, my father was being a douchebag even if he was providing income again. He was still renting an apartment in Austin. That wasn’t coming cheap.

It was Maggie who saved us. “So who invented pineapple pizza anyway?” she asked. “Not the Italians, right?”

“I’ll ask the delivery guy,” I said.

Mom smiled. Then her forehead wrinkled. “Did you leave this house with your blouse unbuttoned like that?”

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. “Gotta check this,” I said, and her wrinkle deepened.

It was Ryan texting.
Call u tomorrow?

My heart leapt.

K
I typed back.

He texted again with a smiley face. The winky-eyed one. This time my heart waved its jazz hands. It hadn’t done jazz hands in a long time.

BY THE TIME we crawled into bed—Maggie on one side and me on the other—I was ready to puke. We had consumed most of a pineapple pizza (the Domino’s guy did
not
know who invented it) and half a cheese. Also chocolate chip
cookie dough sundaes. My mother had taken one thin slice of pineapple to her room.

My brother was still not home.

“Jenna,” Maggie said as I turned off the light. “Something weird is going on with Casey, isn’t it?” She leaned up on an elbow and peered at me in the dark. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

I didn’t answer. What could I say?

Then: “Are you?”

“Everything’s fine,” I lied.

Maggie burped. Not long after that she passed out in a food coma.

This is the fortunate thing about having a best friend who, in her own words, “Treats her body like a temple.” Load the temple’s altar with Frito pie and Hawaiian pizza and ice cream, and you don’t have to tell her much of anything. The temple’s too busy digesting. But I had stretched my own personal limits getting her there.

I lay awake for a long time rubbing my overindulged belly and listening until finally, sometime after three, I heard my brother’s footsteps on the stairs.

I tiptoed into the hallway. “Where have you been?” I whispered.

“Go to sleep,” Casey said. He opened the door to his room and started to step inside.

“That’s not fair,” I said. I was no longer feeling sorry for him.

“That’s the way it is.”

He closed the door behind him.

Then he opened it again. “Hey. It’s Saturday. Happy birthday.” He winced. “And brush your damn teeth. If you’re gonna have a boyfriend, you can’t have pineapple pizza breath.”

“Don’t talk to me about personal habits. Listen, I can get my learner’s permit now.” If he wasn’t going to tell me the truth, then I needed to focus on something he
could
do. “You can take me Monday, right?”

“You? On the road?”

“Drive better than you.”

Casey shrugged. He’d been letting me circle the Merc around the mall parking lot on Sunday mornings when it was empty. I’d been overjoyed until that stupid niggling voice in my head asked if maybe he was rushing things so that if he got yanked away by Management, I’d be ahead of the game.

“Where were you?” I asked again. “Talking with Amber, right?”

Sometimes he went other places, I knew. Spring Creek was a rumor mill like that. I tried to ignore it, but still in the hallways I’d hear how crazy Casey Samuels was driving that POS Merc like it was a race car down the feeder road till it almost shimmied in half. Or that they had seen someone who looked like him standing on top of the water tower by the high school, and how the hell did he get up there?

“Yeah,” he said.

“And?”

“And I was with Amber.” He stepped back into his room, hand on the door. He did not often elaborate about what he and his angel boss/still-EMT-as-her-cover-job discussed when I wasn’t around. My birthday was no exception. It was three in the morning and the fifth slice of pineapple pizza was too big in my gut, but I was a tough girl. I waited.

Eventually he said, “That little pissant Sloboda better be nice to you.”

“Like you were nice to Donny?”

We gave each other a prolonged stink eye.

“I got you a birthday present,” Casey said then. “You want it now?”

“Hell yeah.”

He disappeared into his room again and returned with a pink gift bag. I could tell he’d done it up himself: the tissue was randomly stuffed inside and the ribbons tied on the handle were drooping straight, not curling. I dug in.

It was one of those makeup combination kits from Sephora. This one had like a zillion eye shadow colors and lip glosses and a bunch of brushes, including a pointy one that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with.