Текст книги "On the Fence"
Автор книги: Kasie West
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Kasie West
On the Fence
Dedication
To Michelle Wolfson, who in the process of helping me fulfill my dreams has become a true friend
Chapter 1
The engine whined against my attempt to go faster. The yellow lines of the road went by on my left in a blur. The ocean on my right didn’t seem affected at all. It created the illusion that I wasn’t going fast enough. The gentle curves on this road begged to be taken at high speeds. I pushed down another inch on the gas pedal and the car lurched forward. My heart picked up speed and I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. Wind whipped through the cabin, sending my hair flying and drying the sweat on my forehead from my last practice of the school year.
Red and blue lights flashed in the rearview mirror. I pointlessly lifted my foot off the gas pedal, as if that would help. I looked for a place to pull off the road, already coming up with my story. By the time the cop reached my window, pad in hand, I’d thought of two great possibilities.
When I saw his face, all my excuses were gone. I sighed and rolled down the window.
“Charlotte Reynolds, we meet again,” he said.
“Hi, officer.”
“What is this, the third time?”
“Is it?” Crap. What were the odds the same cop had to pull me over three times? “My dad says hi.”
He laughed. “Your dad is a good cop, but his name isn’t going to get you out of it this time. Not when you were going fifteen miles over the speed limit.”
“Really? It couldn’t have been fifteen.”
“It was. I need your license.”
“Can I look at your radar, make sure you read it right?”
He raised his eyebrows at me and I grudgingly handed over my license. My dad was going to kill me.
I walked in the front door and threw my bag under the entryway table, still angry about the stupid ticket. “Where is everyone?” I yelled out. I followed the sounds of laughter into the kitchen. A blender sat in the middle of the island, surrounded by a bottle of Tabasco sauce, ketchup, and eggshells. Gage looked up and caught my eye.
“Charlie! Just in time.”
I could smell from the doorway whatever awful smoothie they had just created—it smelled like rotten tomatoes. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes.” Nathan snaked his arm around my shoulder and pulled me up to the counter. “Grab another glass.”
A glass was added to the others on the counter. “On three we down it,” Gage said, pouring some of the soupy concoction from the blender into five glasses.
“Why are we doing this?” I asked, looking at the four guys around the kitchen island. Three of them were my brothers—Jerom, Nathan, and Gage—and the other might as well have been—Braden. He’d been our neighbor for twelve of the sixteen years of my life and was always around.
“One, to prove we can. Two, to toughen our stomachs for the pounding they’re going to get in football tomorrow.”
“So, in other words, just to be idiots.”
“That too,” Gage said, holding up his glass. “Ready?”
“Losers have to wear it,” Braden said.
“Yeah, yeah, come on already. I want to run before dark.” I took a closer whiff. I shouldn’t have. It smelled worse than Gage’s closet.
“She’s not going to do it. Charlie’s chickening out,” Nathan said, pointing at me.
“No, you’re stalling.” He was right. I wasn’t going to drink it. But neither were they. That was the whole game here. We had done this before. Well, not this particular one, but various versions over the years. On the count of three, everyone jump in the pool. On the count of three, everyone yell, “I’m a loser,” in the middle of the mall. On the count of three, everyone lick the person to your right. It was a game of bluff. If one person did it, the rest had to do something stupid as a punishment. If nobody did it, everyone was safe.
The only person I was wary of in that moment was Braden. My brothers were so easy to read. Tonight, I knew they weren’t going to drink it the minute I’d walked into the kitchen—it was written all over their faces, twisted in disgust. But Braden, even after all these years, was still the wild card. I eyed him and he smiled at me.
Scared? he mouthed.
I shook my head and studied his eyes. They were hazel, sometimes more green and sometimes more brown. They seemed more green at that moment, and I tried to figure out what that meant about his intention. Was he going to drink it?
“Okay, close your eyes,” Jerom said. “Glasses ready.”
I closed my eyes. I did not want to wear this and have to take two showers tonight—before and after the run.
“One . . .”
Braden cleared his throat next to me. That was a bluff move, wasn’t it? So that meant he wasn’t going to drink it.
“Two . . .”
He bumped his elbow into mine. Crap, he was trying to trick me. So that meant he was going to drink it.
“Three.”
Better to drink it than to wear it. I downed the glass in three big gulps, gagging only slightly.
“Charlie!” Nathan whined. “Seriously?”
They all held a full glass in front of them. “Ha! Wear it. All of you.” I looked at Braden, who had a smug look on his face even though technically he’d lost. I had to learn his tell so in the future I could avoid the horrid taste that coated my tongue. My stomach wasn’t very happy either. “Mmm, tastes like V8.”
“Ew, Charlie, never date a guy who likes V8,” Gage said.
I rolled my eyes. Ever since I turned sixteen—the age my father’s dating ban officially lifted—my brothers constantly spouted off qualities they thought made a guy undateable. I was convinced that if I compiled all the things they had rattled off in the last six months, there would be no one in the world left for me to date. “Why not?” I asked.
“Because you can’t trust a guy who drinks his vegetables. Plus tomato-juice breath is raunchy.”
My entire mouth slowly heated up from the Tabasco sauce. Then I got a punch of pepper that made me gag. “Ugh. What did you guys put in that?” I turned around and gave my tongue a high-pressure wash under the kitchen tap. “There is no pouring going on,” I said, spitting water everywhere. I listened as they dumped the horrible concoction on their heads to groans and complaints. Not worth the taste in my mouth. I gurgled and spit out one more mouthful of water. “Okay, that was fun. Football tomorrow. You are all going down.” I shoved Braden on my way out of the kitchen and he laughed, obviously knowing he was the only reason I ended up downing the drink.
“Wait,” Jerom called. “I want to run with you.”
“I’m not waiting for you to shower.” I crouched down and tightened my laces.
He slicked his hair back, the Tabasco sauce tingeing his black hair red. “Who said anything about showering? Let me grab my shoes.”
The smell lingering around Jerom as we ran made me sick to my stomach. Probably because the smell reminded me of what sat in my stomach. It didn’t help that it was a muggy summer night. Heat combined with moisture was not my favorite running condition.
I distracted myself by trying to identify the trees in the park. I knew the big ones were eucalyptus. They grew all up and down the coast. They must’ve liked the salty air. Even where we lived, ten miles from the ocean, they thrived.
“Eight weeks of summer,” Jerom said, interrupting my failed attempt to name any more trees. “Then we’ll be shackled by the oppressive chains again.”
“Don’t remind me. At least you have some freedom.”
“You think college equals freedom?”
“Uh . . . yes!”
He laughed. “Okay, yeah, it kind of does. But I still have classes and soccer, so it’s not as free as it could be.”
“Have you warned Nathan? I think he’s been looking forward to some freedom.”
“Yeah, right. If there weren’t rules to stay within the strict confines of, Nathan wouldn’t know what to do with himself.”
“True.”
He glanced over at me, slightly out of breath. It was good to know I could still outrun my big brother. I wasn’t even winded. “What about you?” he asked. “Any preconceived notions about being an upperclassman I need to crush?”
“Oh, please, I’ve been an upperclassman for two years already, considering I’ve hung out with Nathan, Gage, and Braden my whole high school career.”
“True. Maybe they did you a disservice with that. Maybe they should’ve let you suffer in the trenches for a while before calling you up.”
“Maybe I should race you up the hill.” I pointed ahead of us. The hill marked the beginning of mile three. My stomach gurgled, not agreeing with my suggestion, but as soon as Jerom said “You’re on,” I couldn’t back down.
As we powered up the hill, I noticed for the first time that it wasn’t just muggy; dark clouds hung overhead. Rain clouds. He led for the first fifty yards or so, but it was a big hill. I saved my speed for when he lost his energy, and I raced past him. At the top, I bent over, now winded, and tried to catch my breath.
“Being a forward has spoiled you,” I said. “I hear midfielders all over the world collectively laughing at you.”
“Whatever.”
“It looks like it’s going to rain,” I said, glancing at the sky again. “We better still be able to play tomorrow.”
“Oh, we’ll play. It just might turn into mud football.” He looked at his sleeve and then flicked a chunk of red goo off it.
The visual made my stomach flip, and acid crept up the back of my throat. “Hold on a minute.” I walked to the side of the road and proceeded to puke in some bushes. The smell made me want to repeat the action, but I quickly walked away.
“Gross,” Jerom said.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yeah, those raw eggs mixed with Tabasco don’t sit very well. But I feel much better now.” And I did. “Let’s go.” I ran again, heading toward the path that led around the park and then back down into our neighborhood.
“Do you ever think you push yourself too hard?” Jerom asked, once he was beside me.
“This, coming from Mr. I Go to UNLV on a Soccer Scholarship?” I remembered when he was first awarded that scholarship. Even though Nevada was his dream school, I had secretly hoped for a closer college. It was hard to let go of any of my brothers. I wanted to keep them close. Safe. I was happy when he decided to come home during the summers. “No, I don’t think I push myself too hard. You gotta do your best to be the best, right?”
“I guess.”
“You guess? You’re the one who always says that. The quote was taped to your bedroom door for years. Don’t give me this ‘I guess.’ Besides”—I pointed back toward the bushes—“that had nothing to do with pushing myself, and you know it. I’m not even tired. That had to do with a drink I shouldn’t have partaken of, the remnants of which you still have all over your shirt.”
“True.” We jogged a few more yards. “Why did you?”
“Why did I what?”
“Why did you drink it? You knew we weren’t going to.”
But I didn’t know Braden wouldn’t. “Like that time I knew you weren’t going to kiss a random stranger? You did. All of you did, even Nathan, and I was stuck telling the next four people I saw that I thought I was in love with my dog and asking if they knew where I could find help for it.”
He laughed so hard he had to stop running for a minute. “The punishment was funny, but the challenge was easy. That’s why we all did it. What was your deal? You didn’t like the random stranger we picked for you to kiss?”
“Something like that.” Actually, the random stranger was pretty cute. My issue was that I didn’t think he’d welcome my advances. My brothers were cool. Attractive. Most girls even described them as hot, with their tall, athletic builds and stormy gray eyes. I’m sure the girls they’d kissed that day still talked about it.
I was . . . a tomboy. That day at the mall, the kiss-a-random-stranger day, I was wearing warm-ups from basketball practice, my hair was greasy and pulled up into a ponytail, and my lips were chapped. I wasn’t kissing some random cute guy who probably would’ve gagged. “He wouldn’t have been able to handle my awesomeness,” I said out loud when I could tell Jerom was waiting for a better answer.
“Not many can put up with your awesomeness.”
Ever since his laughing fit, we had slowed to a walk, and now I picked up the pace. “I think that was meant as an insult, but I will take it as you agreeing with me. Now let’s move. No more slacking.”
“Yes, coach.”
When we got home I felt sticky and rubber-legged, but my lungs were open and adrenaline coursed through my body. It was one of the reasons I ran—this high I felt.
That night after collapsing into bed, I fell asleep immediately and slept like the dead—not a single dream.
And that was the other reason I ran.
Chapter 2
Apparently, it rained all night—not that I heard it—leaving the park a soggy mess. But, like Jerom said, perfect for mud football. My team huddled and Jerom looked at me. “Get open, it’s coming to you. And, Charlie, it might help if you turn out instead of in this time.”
“You worry about your technique, I’ll worry about mine,” I said.
“Just a suggestion.”
“I know how to play.”
“Yeah, Jerom. Charlie knows how to play,” Gage teased, bumping his shoulder into mine. “Don’t tell her what to do.”
“Gage.” Out of all my brothers, he was the closest to me, the only one I’d let get away with saying that. Mostly because he flashed me that cheesy smile of his and I couldn’t stay mad at him.
“Good, then let’s do this.” Jerom clapped his hands and we lined up. The score was tied at seven with five minutes left. My socks were soggy with mud and my hands slipped off my knees as I crouched down, but I was going to catch this ball. I took off after the snap and Jerom threw a perfect pass. I caught it and ran. Someone grabbed hold of the back of my shirt and I shook him free, nearly sliding across the slick grass.
When there were no defenders between me and the orange cones, I started calling out my own plays. “She hurdles a puddle and spins into the end zone. Touchdown!” I turned around and held the ball in the air like a trophy. “Oh yeah! We are the best!”
“Stop gloating,” Braden mumbled, picking himself up off the ground. “It’s annoying.”
“Sore loser,” I coughed under my breath. He was just like my brothers—he hated to lose.
He put me in a headlock and rubbed his knuckles across my scalp.
A whiff of wet grass, sweat, and dirt filled my nose. “Ugh. You smell. Get off me.”
“That’s the stench of victory.”
“More like the stink of failure.”
He let me go right above a mud puddle, making sure to throw me off balance. I landed on my hands, splattering mud all over my face.
“You are dead.” I jumped on him from behind, digging my knee in his lower back.
He let out a yell-laugh. When I slid off, I went to the sidelines, found his sweatshirt, then wiped my face clean with it. I headed back toward the field, where some guys were huddled together, including two of my brothers—Nathan and Jerom. “What are we all standing around for? Let’s finish this thing.”
Jerom and Nathan both shot me a warning look of silence. It wasn’t until I got closer that I realized one of the guys, Dave, was on the phone.
“No girlfriend emergencies right now. We’re in the middle of the game,” I said, and Dave looked up but his eyes didn’t focus on me.
“Charlie, shush,” Nathan said. “Something’s going on.”
Several more guys crowded in. “What’s up?” Braden asked from right behind me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know, I’ve been shushed.” Over Braden’s shoulder I could see Gage by the starting line tossing the ball in the air over and over. He caught my eye and put his arms out in the “What’s taking so long?” gesture. I just shook my head.
Finally, Dave hung up the phone and said, “I have to go. It’s my grandma.”
“Did you explain to your grandma that we’re in the middle of a game?” I asked.
“She died.”
“Oh.”
A round of groans and apologies went around the group. Dave looked like he was in shock, his eyes glassed over.
“How old was she?” I asked.
He absently ran his hand along his shoulder. “Seventy-something. I’m not sure.”
“What happened?”
“She’s had cancer for about a year. We knew this was coming. We just weren’t sure when.”
“That sucks.” I rubbed my hands together and looked around. Everyone just stood there, not sure what to say. “Should we finish the game, then?”
Braden elbowed me in the side.
“What? It will get his mind off it. And we only have five minutes left. We can’t quit now.”
“Charlie,” Jerom said in his official big-brother scold, at the same time Nathan took one of my arms and Braden took the other, dragging me away from the group.
“What’s the big de—” I couldn’t finish my sentence because Braden clamped his hand over my mouth.
“We, of all people, should understand this,” Nathan said under his breath. “Show a little empathy.”
I bit down on Braden’s finger and he let go. Then I yanked free of their hold. “What should I understand about some lady dying of a disease she’d been fighting?”
Braden reached out, probably trying to cover my mouth again. I stepped out of his reach.
“Shhh!” Nathan hissed, looking over his shoulder. “You should understand that—”
“Fine. Whatever. Tell Dave I’m sorry.” With that, I turned and ran, taking the path around the park, then farther. Why should I understand what Dave was going through? Because someone in his life had died, like someone in my life had? Our situations were nothing alike. My mom had been thirty-one when she died. I hardly got to know her at all. I got a measly six years with her. Six years I didn’t even remember.
The tightness in my chest made it hard to breathe, which made it hard to run. And that made me angry. Running was never hard for me. I forced myself to run until I could breathe normally again. It took a while.
By the time I got home, the sun was high in the sky and I was covered in sweat. Braden stood in my front yard. His wet-from-a-shower auburn hair looked black. He was a little taller than my brothers, which made him lankier, yet his broad shoulders made it obvious he was an athlete. “Hey, feel better?” he asked.
“Smell better?” I said with a smile.
“So that’s a yes?”
“I’m fine. Apparently, I’m just a jerk, but we all knew that.”
Braden cringed. He hated the word jerk. It’s what we all called his dad—well, what Braden called him, and we all agreed. It was as if he felt that word belonged to his dad and was too big of an insult to assign to anyone else.
“So is Dave okay?”
“Jerom drove him home, so I’m sure he’s fine.”
“What’s up with Jerom? Two years in college and suddenly he’s all fatherly?”
“Your brother has always been a good listener.”
He has? And why would Braden know that? I pointed to his driveway and the white work truck parked there. “Your dad got off early today?”
He waved his hand through the air, swatting away the question that apparently didn’t merit a verbal response, then turned back to me. “What are you doing right now?”
“Showering.” I reached my front door then turned around. “See ya.”
He stopped me by saying, “We’re going out for my mom’s birthday tonight. I figured I better go to the mall and find her a present.”
“Probably a good idea.”
My hand was on the doorknob when he asked, “Any ideas for what to get her?”
“You’re asking me?” I laughed. “Funny.”
“I could use a girl’s opinion.”
“Then you better go find one.”
“Well, opinion or not, you want to come?”
“To the mall?” I turned around. He had a look in his eye. Braden may have been a wild card, but I could still read him most of the time, and right now he felt sorry for me. Pity made me angry. “Look, Braden, I’m fine, okay?” And apparently if I needed to talk, Jerom’s ear was available.
He held up his hands in surrender. “Fine.” His eyes seemed to say, Perhaps you do have a cold, cold heart, Charlie. I couldn’t have agreed more.
Chapter 3
Nathan was in charge of dinner that night and had just pulled some sort of pasta-and-meat dish out of the oven, timing it perfectly with my dad’s arrival. Kiss-up. As my dad walked into the kitchen from the garage, he found where I sat at the table and narrowed his eyes at me. I wondered which one of my brothers had tattled and why my dad was so upset about it. For heaven’s sake, what was everyone’s problem? If I had started crying over Dave’s grandma my life would’ve been a whole lot easier right then. Maybe I needed to practice some fake waterworks.
My dad was a nice guy and most of the time a pushover, but when he was in his full police garb and had that look on his face, he terrified me. He hung his keys on a hook by the door, then unbuckled and hung his utility belt as well, the heavy flashlight banging the wall as he did. “Charlie . . . ,” he said in a tired voice.
“I’m sorry.” Then I made sure to give all my brothers a death glare. Gage played all big-eyed and innocent.
“You should be, but that’s not going to be good enough this time.”
“This time?” Had I been insensitive to the relatives of a different dead grandma before?
My dad approached the table and plopped a pink copy of my speeding ticket in front of me. Oh. This was worse than being insensitive. This was about breaking the law.
I tried to talk my way out of it. “I didn’t know the speed limit and I didn’t see him. He was hiding down a side street. Isn’t that illegal, like entrapment or something? Nathan? Isn’t that illegal?”
Nathan hid a smile and brought a pitcher of ice water to the table. Nathan was starting his first year of college next year. His ultimate goal—lawyerhood.
My dad leveled a hard stare at me. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I’m sorry.” I should’ve been honest. It was always worse when he found out about things from an outside source.
“This is the second ticket in as many months. And that’s not counting the ones you got out of by using my name.”
I ducked my head to hide the heat I could feel on my cheeks at having been caught. I didn’t need my brothers making fun of me for blushing. My dad was right. I had been pulled over multiple times. I used his name every time.
“Do you know how embarrassing it is when my kids get speeding tickets? When I have to find out about those speeding tickets from a coworker?”
“I’m sorry.”
“But worse than the embarrassment you caused me is the blow to my bank account.” His finger came down hard on the pink slip, landing on a number written in his own handwriting that read $264.00. My eyes widened. “Yeah, that’s a lot of money.”
I nodded.
“You’re paying for it.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I don’t think you learned your lesson last time because I paid for your ticket. So, you are paying not only for this ticket, but also the last one, and the extra hundred dollars a month you are going to cost me in insurance.”
“But I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Then find a job.”
“How? Basketball camp starts in about seven weeks, and then there’s school and soccer after that.”
“Dad,” Gage piped in, using his winning smile in my defense this time. “Charlie’s just a little girl. Don’t make her work. She’ll never survive.”
Okay, so that wasn’t exactly the defense I was looking for.
“Gage. Stay out of this,” my dad said.
He saluted. “Yes, officer.”
My dad turned his hard stare on Gage, but just like the rest of us, he couldn’t stay mad at Gage either. So he turned back to me. “Figure it out, because it’s my final decision.” With that, he left the kitchen and went to his room to change. My brothers all stared at me and then, as if they’d counted to three, started laughing at exactly the same time.
“Yeah, it’s so funny,” I said. “As if you’ve never been pulled over before.”
Nathan raised his hand. “Never.” Of course not.
“Twice,” Jerom said.
I looked at Gage. Of all my brothers, he and I were not only the closest but the most alike. “A few times,” he said, “but I always got out of tickets. You gotta act a little more innocent, Charlie. You can’t be belligerent with the cops. They don’t like it.”
“How do you know I was?”
They all laughed again. This round of laughter was cut off by the ringing of a cell phone, from where it sat being charged on the counter. Gage jumped up and slid across the island to answer it before it went to voice mail.
My dad came back, and the change in his clothes seemed to change his demeanor as well. He kissed the top of my head. Maybe this meant he was rethinking the whole job thing. “You should probably start looking first thing tomorrow,” he said. Then he looked at Gage and snapped, “Off the phone.”
I sank down farther in my chair and spooned myself some of Nathan’s pasta creation. My dad said a prayer (being a cop for the last twenty years had put the fear of God in him). Then we all dug in. Dinner in our house was like a race. If you didn’t eat fast, you missed out on seconds. I didn’t feel much like seconds anyway.
I lay on my bed, feet up on the headboard, and threw a tennis ball against the wall over and over. There was a single knock on my door, and then someone I assumed was Gage let himself in. He was the only one who never waited for an answer. I tilted my head back and saw an upside-down version of Gage right before he took a flying leap and landed on my head.
I grunted my disapproval and he rolled off.
“So, a job, huh?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“I think this day should go down in history as the day Dad decreed one of his offspring must seek employment.”
“Seriously. Whatever happened to ‘School is your job’ or ‘Sports can pay for college so I consider that your job’?”
“Apparently, someone by the name of Speed Racer changed that.” He paused and—just like Gage to always see the positive in something (which was one of the only ways we weren’t alike)—said, “Finding a job is way better than getting grounded. If you were grounded, all the indoor air your body isn’t used to breathing would dry out your pores and cause you to wither up and die.”
Okay, maybe not positive, per se, but close to it.
He pushed his bangs off his forehead. “Well, for what it’s worth, I offer you my job-hunting prowess.”
“Which consists of?”
“Accompanying you and pointing to the stores you should pick up applications from, helping you write your name in little boxes. You know, invaluable stuff like that.”
“What would I do without you?”
“It’s too painful to even consider, but it might involve drying pores and withering.”
