The Moon Sisters (12 page)

A stranger, holding one of those huge backpacks I’d seen earlier, stepped out of the gloom alongside the tracks. Most of his face dyed in a labyrinth of tattoos. Free-flowing brown hair. Angular jaw. Tall. An expression that said, definitively,
Bite me
. He gripped my sister’s shoulder, steered her toward the woods beside the train.

No way.

I dropped my bag, rushed at them. Struck the stranger’s left shoulder with one hand, swivel-turning him to face me. Waited for our eyes to connect. Punched him in the face. His jaw didn’t just look hard; it was rock solid. My knuckles screamed. So did Olivia.

“What the fuck?” he said, eyes blazing.

Olivia sounded frantic. “Hobbs, wait! That’s my sister!”

He touched the corner of his mouth. Looked at the blood on his fingers, then back at me. Fierce eyes, lighter than the markings on his face. My age, probably.

“Sister? Well, sister, if you weren’t a woman—”

I squared up with my still tingling arm, ready to hit this Hobbs again, but an echoing shout stilled me.

“Bull!”

A duo materialized out of nowhere and took off with a dog. Hobbs followed.

“Hurry,” Olivia said. “Jazz, let’s go!”

In the distance, a white pickup approached. I guessed from the way the others had run that the truck held an official of some sort. I walked to where I’d left my backpack in the grass, picked it up, and made my way out of the yard like a civilized human being who’d just punched a guy in the face. Olivia stayed by my side.

A voice crystallized behind me—“See you here again, I’ll have you fined!”—and I ignored it.

As soon as our feet hit a forest trail outside the yard, Olivia said, “I’m glad you’re here, but also”—she pinched the inside of my arm—“I’m really mad at you.”

“Stop it!” I said, nudging her away.

“How?” she said. “How did you even get here?”

“How do you think? I sucked fumes and dust for six hours, clinging to a train ladder. You should try it sometime,” I said, as we stepped into a large clearing where the rest of the group stood at a distance. I put my hand out to stop my sister’s advancement, shushed her.

A woman—a twentysomething with a disastrous tangle of red hair and several face piercings—stood on tiptoe inspecting Hobbs’s mouth, her hands on either side of his jaw, tilting his head one way and then the other.

“Where’s Red? Was he caught?” said a rail-thin boy who seemed overwhelmed by a mass of blond dreadlocks and his own colossal backpack. A familiar dog panted at his feet.

“No idea,” said the woman. “I’m more worried for—”

A series of staccato barks pierced the air.

“Kramer!” said the boy, and the dog aborted his run to greet or eat us, and returned to his side.

Hobbs’s eyes turned dark and slitlike when he saw me, and I had to admit he looked ominous in the shadowed woods. Pissed off. Almost as pissed off as I felt.

“Maybe we should start over,” the woman said when Hobbs threw down his pack—a good indication that he was ready to forget I was a female. “Olivia, maybe you can introduce us to—”

“Touch my sister again and die,” I said, pointing right at him with one hand and wrapping the other around Olivia’s arm.

She yanked it back. “What is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with
me?
What’s wrong with
you
, Olivia Moon? It’s like you’re hell-bent on setting yourself on a path of destruction! How can I take care of you if—”

“You don’t have to take care of me,” she said. “I’m not your job.”

“How typical of you to be delusional.”

For the first time, I took a hard look around and realized there wasn’t any sign of a town, just woods, woods and more woods. A finger of fear returned to trace my spine. We were in the middle
of nowhere. Lost. Outnumbered by the sort of strangers you’d see decorating a police lineup on the evening news. A knife hung from the boy’s belt.

I averted my eyes, worked to control my voice. “Which way is town?”

No one responded. I looked at the woman in need of a brush.

She shrugged. “Not my state,” she said. “Hobbs?”

With reluctance, I regarded the ink-dyed freak. “Which way is town?” I repeated.

He tried to stare me into dust, but I refused to blink. Finally, he said, “That way,” and pointed back in the direction of the tracks. “About half mile north of the yard, not that there’s much to it.”

There’d be a phone. That’s all I needed.

“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s go.” I made to grab Olivia’s arm, but this time she evaded me.

“Which way to Cranberry Glades?” she asked.

“In the opposite direction,” said Hobbs. “You coming?”

“I am,” she said, and took a step toward him.

“You’re not.” This time I did grab her, pulled her back with my cold hand. “This game ends now.”

“Game?” Her shoulders squared, and her wide blue eyes narrowed. “I know what I’m doing, Jazz, and I’m a legal adult. I can and will do what I want.”

“I don’t care how old you are on paper, you’re reckless!” I said. “You’re irresponsible! You’re—you’re like a two-year-old out here, devoid of any sense of logic or reason, and this—” She squeezed my shoulder until I let go of her arm. “This proves it! Riding a train? Running around in the wild with strangers? Are you trying to kill yourself?” I hadn’t meant it literally, but now the words hung in the air between us, dangling like a noose. Made me even more afraid, even angrier. “How can you just blindly trust him?”

“Trust
me?
You see me going around punching strangers?” said Hobbs. “But at least now it all makes sense. Why she’d rather stay with the likes of me than go back home. Why she’d choose anything
else over having to return. No one would want to have to deal with the likes of you.”

“I’m her sister,” I said with a snarl.

“You’re a bitch,” he said.

“Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Olivia said quietly, as a crow cawed high above us. “Listen, Jazz, you never wanted to do this in the first place. I get that—how you think this is a waste of time, stupid, how you have a job to get ready for, all of it. That’s your point of view, but I have a point of view, too, and it’s just as valid, even if it’s different. I need to keep on and finish what I set out to do. It’s what
I
need. Hobbs has said he can take me closer to the glades, and I’m going to let him. I’m going to trust him, and I’m going to trust
me
. I have to trust
me
.”

A breeze blew up when she dropped her hand, and my panic spiked. This was a change. Not a jabberfest. There was something different about my sister, as if she wasn’t trying to bait me to follow. As if she’d grown an inch taller, her skin a millimeter thicker. As if her heart had become sufficiently calloused, and now she was not only ready but determined to walk on without me.

“I will take you once the bus is fixed, okay?” I found myself saying. “I’ll take you and Dad and Babka, and we’ll scatter Mom’s ashes together so she can see whatever wisps she wants whenever they decide to come around. Isn’t that a fair compromise? We’ll do it on a weekend, when I’m not working.”

“Working at
Rutherford and Son Funeral Home
, you mean?”

I felt the others’ eyes on me but kept mine on my sister, my voice even. “You know that’s what I mean.”

“Dreams like feet better than knees,” she said.

“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

“It means I need to do this now. And I’m going.”

This time I couldn’t hide the quaver in my voice. “Do you realize I left the bus—just left it—at Jim’s to chase after you? We need to find a phone and call home so they know where we are and—”

“I have an iPhone,” said the redhead.

I glared at her. She didn’t look like she could afford a plastic spoon.

“What?” she said, with a hint of defensiveness. “Just because I’m out here enjoying a hippie moment doesn’t mean I can live without my cell any more than the next American. I charged it in the last town, too, so as long as there’s service—”

“You’ll have to sleep in the woods, Jazz,” my sister said. “If you come. If you decide to go with me now. We won’t be able to get there today.”

The air felt like fire in my nostrils as my desperation rose. “Olivia.” I gripped her shoulders again, fighting the urge to shake her into submission, and played the last card I had to play. “I will hate you forever if you do this.”

But, as always, my sister held the ace.

“Oh, Jazz,” she said, and her eyes turned sad. “I think we both know that you will hate me forever anyway.”

I called Babka using a cell phone that looked more expensive than any I’d ever seen. The reception wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. I was able to say what I needed to say, even if I didn’t hear what I wanted to hear.

She was glad I’d called, glad we were still on the way to the glades. She would take care of the bus, as I would take care of my sister. I was a good girl.

I wasn’t a good girl, I told my grandmother. I was a stuck one.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Fortunate Thing

   OLIVIA   

T
he story of how my parents met is a tale of love at first bite. Papa was at Kennaton State, taking a trayful of Babka’s biscuits and rolls down a flight of stairs and to a campus grocery store. Mama, a junior there, lingered behind him with some of her friends, admiring his cute butt and strong shoulders—until she tripped, somehow, on her own heels. She couldn’t catch herself; her feet wouldn’t land right on the steps, her hands couldn’t snag the railing no matter how she tried. She said it was like being a bird flung out of a nest to learn that it had no wings, and that she was lucky someone was there to break her fall. She plowed into Papa’s back, which threw him off balance, too.

There were ten steps, maybe, to the bottom, which didn’t sound like much but was a lot when you were out of control. I picture them rolling, cartwheeling down the stairs, baked goods everywhere, biscuits raining over them like falling stars. When they reached the end of their tumble, my mother’s body landed over my father’s back in an ungainly sprawl, and her shrieking mouth pierced his shoulder.

When he turned himself over to face her, like a half-cooked griddle cake, Mama kissed him—despite her throbbing teeth and sprained ankle. Her friends thought maybe she should see a doctor
because she was acting so funny, but Mama said the only prescription she needed was the delivery guy’s phone number, which he gave her.

I asked her once what made her kiss him, and she said it was two things. The first was his eyes; they were big pools of blue, bright and happy to meet her. The second was the taste of him when she bit into his shoulder. He tasted, she said, like tomorrow.

If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

The train rattled on in my veins long after we were off it and on the ground, which might explain why my feet were slow to do as I asked—like they’d turned to clay and clay didn’t have to listen to me. The clearing we’d argued in, the one we’d said goodbye to Ruby, her brother, and his dog in, was the last we’d seen of a wide-open space in the forest. The brush became thick as we walked south, the air heavier,
greener
, the weeds tickling my ankles.

My stomach cramped with hunger as we moved in a single line, but I wasn’t about to ask for a break when we’d just gotten started. Still, everything I saw and heard seemed to remind me of food. The crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot drifted from the upper reaches like overturned potato chips, while the bag that bumped with regularity against my leg created a staccato of orange splats, like melted cheese dripping onto a counter.

I’m sure Jazz noticed from behind whenever I tripped over a root or rock, though she never said anything. Hobbs, who led the way, didn’t speak, either, unless I spoke first, like the time I realized I couldn’t see Jazz behind us when I stopped to look.

“Don’t go too fast, or we’ll lose Jazz,” I said.

“Right.” He shifted his backpack. “We wouldn’t want to lose Jazz.”

I should’ve been happy, because we were on our way; we’d get to the glades. But it was hard to be happy when the day smelled like a big pot of I-hate-your-guts.