Part 1 (2/2)

Now, though, I just look on as my mom prepares a frozen meal, micro waved for five and a half minutes on high, and, peering at her taut face, I try to think quickly of an answer to the question of what I've done today that won't make her cry. I've taken to lying. Sometimes I tell her that I played tennis or I went swimming -- never mind the fact that I never have a bathing suit hanging to dry over my bathtub or sweaty smelly shorts and T-s.h.i.+rts in the laundry. She doesn't notice those missing details.

We sit down at the kitchen counter to eat our micro waved

7.

peas and chicken, while my father takes his on a tray into the den, the only sound the clinking of ice cubes.

When my dad comes back into the kitchen to fix himself a second drink, I scrutinize my parents' faces, taking in their matching gray pallor, pinched foreheads, and deadened eyes, his hair gray and thinning, hers limp and greasy. They both look as though they have been broken into a thousand pieces and never properly mended. My mother's face is sewn too tight, while my father's face has become fuzzy in outline, like a cloud, with all of these little particles loosely holding on, floating, floating. But when he pours himself a tall gla.s.s of gin, those pieces come back together, just momentarily, again.

I wonder how my parents look at work, if they shed their brokenness outside the house. My own skin, the walls of this house, the clink of ice cubes, are all a prison. I must look broken, too.

Everything fell apart because of Nate. I try and try not to think about him, but as the start of school looms near, he keeps trespa.s.sing into my head. He always trespa.s.sed.

It happened six months and twenty-three days ago. Eight things went wrong on that eighth of February. Eight things that started out small. First, I slept straight through my alarm, so I was running late. Then, when I couldn't open the orange juice carton and punched a misshapen hole through the container, juice dribbled down the side, spilling all over the counter

8.

and floor and the front of my jeans. Next, I missed the bus as a direct result of the orange juice incident. The series of eight continued as I forgot my Spanish homework and flubbed a math quiz; my favorite pen broke and leaked all over the bottom of my backpack; I got into a screaming match with my older brother, Nate; and then he died. Yup. There it is. Number eight. It's a big one. My big brother got killed when he stormed out of the house that night, the night of February 8, drove his black Honda Civic in the dark without the headlights on, skidded around an icy curve in the county road, and wrapped this Honda Civic around a tree.

And the last words Nate said to me were, ”See ya, wouldn't want to be ya, loser!” to which I very maturely responded, ”Up yours, jerk!”

I had the last word.

But those words banged around and echoed in my head as the screen door banged shut. When the hospital or police, or whoever it was, called, those words thrashed around and rang in my head some more. In fact, they haven't stopped knocking and pounding in my head these last six months and twenty-three days. If there is one thing besides the certainty of all the houses and trees and creeks and streets that lie right outside the front door, I am certain of the fact that I cannot forget those angry, careless words.

In four days' time, I'm supposed to start at Lincoln Grove High, where my brother should have been entering his senior

9.

year. Nate Bradley made sure that every student, teacher, and administrator at LGH knew who he was. He was the Juvie D of LG, Always getting in trouble, getting detentions, getting arrested for stealing and tras.h.i.+ng and tagging and generally being where he shouldn't. Nate never did anything really terrible, but he sealed his seat in infamy by sneaking into the teachers' lounge and spray painting the walls with the postulates and theorems of geometry. He picked up all of the fallen street signs along a two-mile length of the county road that were knocked over during a storm, and kept them. He pried the placard off the princ.i.p.al's office door and rehung it on one of the stalls in the second-floor boys' restroom. He talked back to teachers, forgot homework, flunked quizzes, sped in his car, violated his probation, and then started all over again.

I had grown used to the constant fighting between Nate and our parents. But I couldn't get used to the terrible anger that seemed to have taken hold of him after his fourteenth birthday. From then on, he was a stranger to me, to all of us, I think. I never really figured out where the older brother whom I used to follow dutifully on bike trips across town to the Wyatt cornfields where we would play spies, or whom I would trail to the creek, watching in awe as Nate hopped from stepping-stone to stone, sweeping up minnows and toads in his mesh b.u.t.terfly net, went.

So I must start high school, where Nate's friends and teachers and ex-girlfriends will all be. If he had still been alive, I

10.

might have had a fighting chance at being able to distance myself from him, but now there is no escape -- I will be known as Nathaniel Bradley's little sister. It's bad enough being the daughter of parents whose son died, every single minute of every single day, trapped in the house with their overpowering sadness. Now I'll be the girl whose brother died.

11.

Chapter Two.

Should I wear my pink sundress or the lavender miniskirt with the white ruffly tuxedo s.h.i.+rt?” Rachel's voice pours through the phone. Her intonation seems to have acquired a tw.a.n.g, a sort of valley girl tw.a.n.g to it, and I have no idea where it's come from. Rachel spent the summer with her family in Michigan, as she always does. Do they talk like valley girls in northern Michigan? Wherever it comes from, I am beginning to find it grating. Very grating.

”Why are you talking like that?” I interrupt.

”What?”

”Why do you have this stupid accent all of a sudden?” I demand.

”I have no idea what you're talking about,” Rachel snaps defensively.

”Yeah,” I snarl. ”Whatever.”

”What's your problem, Cora?” Bolts of hurt shoot through her voice.

”Nothing, Rach. Look, I should go,” I say lamely.

<script>