How We Fall Read online

  HOW

  WE

  FALL

  Kate Brauning

  To my mother, Lori, for telling me I could be anything,

  and especially for all those talks in the kitchen.

  And to my husband, Jesse, for everything, every day.

  “I’m the last of the worst pretenders.”

  ~Matt Nathanson, “Mission Bells”

  Chapter One

  Last year, Ellie used to hang out at the vegetable stand with Marcus and me on Saturdays. This year, her face fluttered on a piece of paper tacked to the park’s bulletin board. Most weeks, I tried to ignore her eyes looking back at me. But today, Marcus had set the table up at a different angle, and she watched me the entire morning.

  The day that photo was taken, she’d worn her Beauty and the Beast earrings. The teapot and the teacup were too small to see well in the grainy, blown-up photo, but that’s what they were. She’d insisted sixteen wasn’t too old for Disney.

  The crunch of tires on gravel sounded, and a Buick slowed to a stop in front of the stand. I rearranged the bags of green beans to have something to do. Talking to people I didn’t know, making pointless small talk, wasn’t my thing. My breathing always sped up and I never knew what to do with my hands. It had been okay before, but now—surely people could see it on me. One look, and they’d know. Chills prickled up my arms in spite of the warm sun.

  Marcus lifted a new crate of cucumbers from the truck and set it down by the table, his biceps stretching the sleeves of his T-shirt. Barely paying attention to the girl who got out of the car, he watched me instead. And not the way most people watched someone; I had his full attention. All of him, tuned toward me. He winked, the tanned skin around his eyes crinkling when he smiled. I bit my cheek to keep from grinning.

  The girl walked over to the stand and I quit smiling.

  Marcus looked away from me, his gaze drifting toward the girl. Each step of her strappy heels made my stomach sink a little further. Marcus tilted his head.

  He didn’t tilt it much, but I knew what it meant. He did that when he saw my tan line or I wore a short skirt. I narrowed my eyes.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’d like a zucchini and four tomatoes.” Just like that. A zucchini and four tomatoes.

  Marcus placed the tomatoes into a brown paper bag. “Are you from around here?”

  Of course she wasn’t from around here. We’d know her if she were.

  “We just moved. I’m Sylvia Young.” The breeze toyed with her blonde hair, tossing short wisps around her high cheekbones. Her smile seemed genuine and friendly. Of course. Pretty, friendly, and new to town, because disasters come in threes.

  “Going to Manson High?” Marcus handed her the bags.

  She nodded. “My dad’s teaching science.”

  Finally, I said something. “Three bucks.”

  “Hmm?” Sylvia turned from Marcus. “Oh. Right.” She handed me the cash and looked over the radishes. “Are you here every day?” Her eyes strayed back to Marcus.

  “Three times a week,” he said.

  “I’ll see you in a day or two, then.” She waved.

  I was pretty damn sure she wouldn’t be coming back for the radishes.

  Sylvia Young walked herself and her vegetables back to the four-door parked at the edge of the road. The tires spit gravel.

  I glanced at Marcus, but he wasn’t watching her leave. He was rearranging the tomatoes. In true Marcus fashion, now that four of them were gone, he’d want to make the pile neat again.

  I exhaled. Maybe I was overreacting, but he hadn’t done that before.

  “You’re going to bruise those.” I grabbed a tomato that nearly tumbled off the mound. The globe-shaped Early Girls rolled too easily. “Don’t we have extra crates?” I looked to the shade of the bulletin board, where we stored the refill crates. No empties.

  “Nope. Too much corn.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead and popped the top on his water bottle.

  What amounted to a sweet corn fortress stood behind us. Stacks of milk crates—neatly stacked, because Marcus is Marcus—blocked the park and most of the town from view.

  He leaned against the table and smiled at me, his brown eyes finding mine and his body turning toward me again. I felt the shift, felt the pull in my body that made me stay with him. My shoulders loosened without me even trying. He hadn’t smiled at Sylvia Young that way.

  He tapped my nose with a finger. “Hey, what an expression. Jealous of something, Jackie?”

  “So jealous. I’d love to have my own car. What’s the point to being seventeen if I can’t have a car?”

  His eyebrows went up. He took a drink from the water bottle and set it down, his eyes flicking from me to the ground then back to me again.

  Being jealous would be silly, because Marcus and I weren’t dating. That was the deal. For an entire year, our deal had worked, and there was no reason it couldn’t work longer.

  Whatever expression that had been vanished and his grin came back. “Whatever. You use my truck all the time.” He was tall enough the edge of the table met his thigh instead of his hip.

  Anytime I used his truck, he came with. Down to the river. Everyone in the county knew what those tree-lined fencerows were good for.

  Marcus reached for my hand and threaded his long fingers between mine. The rough calluses on his palm made a warm, silly feeling trickle through me.

  My face flushed and I glanced around. He’d started doing this lately. Reaching for my hand. Touching my shoulder as he walked past. I pulled my hand away and rubbed my palms on my shorts.

  Acting like this was ridiculous. Sylvia was pretty and friendly, so of course he’d smile and say hi. And Marcus owed me nothing.

  It was a cheap move, but just because I was nervous, and okay, jealous, I played with the frayed edge of my jean shorts. My legs weren’t bad, and these shorts were my shortest pair.

  He glanced down like I knew he would and touched my hand again. “Well, don’t be too upset. She doesn’t have your legs.”

  Something tiny thrilled inside me. “That’s true. She does have her own.” That was the thing about Marcus. He knew I didn’t mean what I said; that when I claimed I wasn’t jealous, I absolutely was.

  He shouldn’t know those kinds of things. And he definitely shouldn’t be holding my hand to make me feel better.

  An engine guttered and cut out. The door of a white pickup right in front of us opened and then slammed.

  Marcus jerked his hand back like mine had stung him. I hadn’t heard the truck. I hadn’t noticed. How had I not noticed?

  A skinny man in jeans and sunglasses walked toward us. No one we knew. Relief churned into nausea in my stomach. I turned away to restack some of the sweet corn with my heartbeat reverberating in my ears.

  Nothing had happened, it was fine, but I still couldn’t stop my hands from trembling. I gripped the crate harder.

  The man in sunglasses talked to Marcus, but he kept glancing toward me, his head tilting just a bit when he looked my way.

  He wasn’t someone we knew, but he could have been. In a town this small, it was odd to have someone we didn’t know come to the stand. He left after a few minutes with spinach and green onions, and the white truck rumbled away.

  We’d let this go on too long. We were too comfortable. And Marcus knew it, too—he stayed away from me for the rest of the afternoon, our glances brief and casual, even when no one was around. He did not touch me again and I let the sick feeling in my stomach keep my mind where it needed to be.

  By dinner time, we’d sold only a third of the sweet corn fortress. Sweet corn wasn’t the smartest garden crop, because everyone around here had a patch in their yard. Two weeks from now, we’d be giving it away. A month from now, we’d be
throwing it away. But grow sweet corn we did, because my parents had read too much Little House on the Prairie.

  Of course, no one in that story smoked weed through their early twenties. My mother’s pothead college days were a secret to no one, and my parents’ room still sometimes smelled like weed.

  Once five o’clock came, I lifted crates and combined the leftover produce without hurrying more than necessary. But like usual, Marcus seemed hell-bent on beating some personal record, stacking, shoving, lifting at twice my speed.

  I picked up a crate from the shade of the bulletin board. The breeze fluttered the papers tacked to the cork—papers offering lawn-mowing services, piano lessons, babysitting. And the flyer with Ellie’s junior photo and a tip line number.

  The soft rasp of the paper edges scraping each other caught me like music.

  Four months.

  That weight in my chest—always there, now—seized up and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  I ducked my head and went back to loading the cucumbers. Ran away with some guy, everyone said. Not a chance. We’d played volleyball together, hung out at the pool on weekends, did homework together. She would have told me about a guy.

  I ran my finger along the silver bracelet that always hung on my wrist. Ellie had given it to me before she moved. I hadn’t taken it off since she’d gone missing, and now I never would.

  Late-afternoon sun baked the park and the vegetables and my skin. If I could get to the pool still today, I could chill my body in the water, lay out on my towel, and put myself, Ellie, and Marcus out of my mind.

  I rolled up the tarp and tossed it to Marcus. The pool wouldn’t happen, but maybe we could watch a movie instead.

  No way was I going to let the things that hurt ruin the things that didn’t. Worrying about Ellie wouldn’t help her, and Marcus and I were fine. A little too comfortable, maybe. But changing the topic was just as good as fixing the problem.

  I grabbed his water bottle from the tailgate as he jumped down from the truck bed. Just as he turned toward me, I popped the top up and squeezed. Water shot out and soaked his shirt.

  “Hey! What the—” His face colored pink, but he was half-grinning.

  Rattling him was too easy.

  But I was in for it. Determination settled in his eyes and he took a step toward me. I ran for the truck, jerked the door open, and scrambled inside, then hit the lock button.

  The tailgate slammed and he walked past the passenger door, tapping his finger along the window.

  He climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine, the muscles in his forearm tightening when he turned the key. He wouldn’t let me off the hook that easily, so he must have a plan for delayed revenge. I waited, but nothing. My eyebrows went up. He looked over at me and shook his head.

  This was lousy payback. His nice blue T-shirt was soaked. “That’s all you’ve got? You’re going to shake your head at me like you’re my mom?”

  He spun the steering wheel and braced his arm behind my seat, looking out the back window as he backed the truck down the asphalt path and out onto the street. “I’m definitely not your mother.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  His mouth twitched. I shifted in the seat, turning toward him. He couldn’t do much while driving, but being on my guard couldn’t hurt, and my curiosity was getting the better of me.

  “Hey, buckle your seatbelt.”

  I reached for the belt. “Now you really sound like Mom.”

  He ignored me and drove the few blocks to the edge of town. The welcome sign for Manson, Missouri, boasted a population of 212, but that was wishful thinking. The town was a collection of abandoned buildings and poorly insulated homes from the early 1900s. My sister, my only sibling and my extroverted, energetic opposite, bolted for the nearest city as soon as she graduated, but I didn’t mind Manson so much.

  Outside town, Marcus turned off the blacktop highway and onto a dirt road. Not even gravel. Dirt. Nothing was down this road except fields. “Uh—where are we going?”

  He parked the truck on the side of the road under the shade of the tree-lined fencerow. The shadows from the branches swam back and forth on the road. Marcus rolled down his window and the breeze swept through the cab, smelling like summer and creek water and grass.

  “You can unbuckle your seatbelt now.” He grinned, no trace of embarrassment left.

  My eyes narrowed. Maybe my attempts at getting him to loosen up were a little too successful. “What are you doing?”

  He reached over and unbuckled me. The belt slid back over my shoulder and I moved it aside.

  Marcus slid toward me on the bench. He hooked an arm around my waist and one under my knees, and pulled me toward him.

  Tan arms. Sandpaper skin, because he hadn’t shaved this morning. I touched the wet fabric of his shirt.

  We shouldn’t. Not now, not even to begin with. He knew it. I knew it. But he leaned closer, bent down, and I didn’t move away. His lips touched mine. Warm. Familiar. A little desperate.

  No one was here. The road was abandoned. I’d kept myself where I ought to be all afternoon. I relaxed, closed my eyes, and kissed him back. I should be watching out the window, should be glancing in the mirror, but his mouth pressed into my neck, and I exhaled, tipped my head back against the headrest, and let my mind stop spinning. When he pushed closer, our bodies touching everywhere they could, my stomach fluttered. His hands found my hair, his lips came back to my face, and I tasted the salty sheen on his skin. His eyelashes brushed my cheek. Any thoughts I’d had dissolved. Just him, yes. Us, connected.

  My hands found his shoulders, feeling the clench of his muscles. That was for me. Because of me. I traced down his arm to his hand that rested on my bare leg, touching the hem of my shorts. He kissed my neck and my jaw and then came back to my lips again. He was so much but so soft and slow that it seemed like he was trying to tell me something.

  I did not want him to.

  I moved my hands to his chest and tangled my fingers in his shirt. Then I pushed a little, the weight of his body on my hands.

  He moved back, sighing. The breeze rushed between us. “Later?” I asked.

  Everyone knew his truck, and everyone knew us. He cleared his throat and nodded.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded again.

  I bumped him with my shoe. “As far as payback goes, that wasn’t exactly fair.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You started it.”

  Sitting with him in the truck like this was tempting. Just to talk. To tease him and watch him grin like that. Here we were the most ourselves, and us together like this was where act three of a happily-ever-after would end. And much as I would love a fade to black and the end credits to roll, letting this be the point we hung on forever, we wouldn’t get a fade-out, and the other half of our lives was waiting.

  Chapter Two

  Marcus turned left onto the blacktop. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t, either. By now we’d learned there just wasn’t anything to say, and trying to find something that would help never did.

  We pulled up the long driveway to the house. It had a two-story brick front, but the rest was built into a hill. “Earth-sheltered,” Aunt Shelly said, but my friends called it hobbit-style. I loved the stained wood and the dozen small places for hiding to read. Useful, since my parents and I shared the house with my aunt and uncle and their six kids.

  I climbed out of the truck. Marcus fiddled around with something in the truck bed, so I went on ahead of him, glancing back in spite of telling myself not to. After managing to find time to ourselves, it always jarred me a bit to come home. Readjusting my personal space to not include Marcus took me a minute.

  He jogged up the driveway. Like always, he caught the screen door before it banged behind me.

  “Sixty bucks, Mom.” I dropped the cash on the counter. People said we looked alike, but I didn’t have her smile or the hair. I’d seen her college pictures—frayed jean cutoffs, a bikini top,
a guy-stopping smile. The same gorgeous, blonde waist-length braid she had now.

  I refused to do the braids. Braids make redheads look like Pippi Longstocking.

  Her giant chef’s knife snicked on the cutting board. She was slicing zucchini while Simon & Garfunkel played from the kitchen sound system. “Oh, thank you. Can you whip the egg for these? I’m in a hurry.”

  “Give me a second to wash my hands.” I headed for the main-floor bathroom at the end of the hall.

  “I should do that, too.” Marcus followed me.

  I turned the taps to the cool side of warm and pared the dirt from under my fingernails. Marcus hovered behind me. An inch over six feet tall, and not done growing. Aware he was watching me, I leaned back half a step to brush his chest with my shoulder. Teasing him wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Hey.” He hooked a finger in one of the belt loops on my jean shorts and pulled me back another step. His hands settled on my waist, his body close to mine.

  I pulled his hands off me. “Not here,” I whispered. Dad’s office and my bedroom were the only rooms back here, but still. If we bent one rule, we’d break them all.

  “No one’s around,” he said, his brown eyes meeting mine in the mirror.

  His expression stopped me. His shoulders were too straight, his smile forced, his stance too casual.

  I almost never did this because it fell into the category of handholding and pet names, but because I didn’t want him to look like that, I stood up on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

  For a moment, he looked stunned, then a slow grin split his face.

  “What’s that look for?” I asked. If it weren’t so dangerous, I’d do that more often just to see him look like that.

  “I mean, it’s not what I was hoping for, but I guess it’ll do.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, still grinning.

  That meant we were fine. I pulled away and continued scrubbing the dirt out of my nails, but his expression in the mirror caught me. “Later.” I smiled. Marcus didn’t mind me teasing him. He knew there would be later.