Chapter 11
WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING?
Maverick
Iclimb into my truck and shake my head as I turn the engine over and pull out of the spot, waiting for Clover to do the same before I leave the parking lot. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Or why I’m trying to get my professor to go on a coffee date.
All I know is that writing that freaking story for her class seems to have unearthed a bunch of memories I can’t shove back into a box.
I can’t talk to my family about this, and I sure as hell can’t talk to Kody.
Clover already knows the basics, so telling her the whole story makes the most sense, and then maybe once it’s all out, I can stop having the weird dreams, and the invasive memories will chill.
The coffee shop is quiet this time of night, so there are lots of empty spots in the lot next door and only a few occupied tables inside—a couple in the back, a man reading a paper, and two women who look to be in their thirties having a serious discussion.
We approach the counter, and I order a sugary latte and a piece of cake. “What can I get for you?”
“I can get my own. Thanks, though.”
Her smile is a little stiff, so I don’t push it.
She orders a tea, and we take a seat at one of the empty booths.
It’s strange to be sitting across from Clover and not in a classroom.
I’ve gotten used to the invisible wall that went up as soon as I became her student, but it seems to have developed a few cracks recently. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be here.
I’m close enough to see the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. They’ve faded since the summer. Without her glasses, she looks closer to my age—mid-twenties maybe. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Seriously? That’s your first question?” She quirks a brow.
“You know how old I am.”
“My age isn’t relevant under these circumstances. You need to keep in mind that I’m still your professor.”
“For a handful of weeks. I want to say you’re twenty-six or twenty-seven, but that would make you a child prodigy. Were you?” I curl my hands around my mug, feeling the heat seep into my fingertips.
“No. And I’m older than twenty-seven.”
“By how much?”
She rolls her eyes and purses her lips. “I’m almost thirty.”
“Almost? So you’re still in your twenties, like me.”
“For a few more months, yes.” I can tell I’m making her uncomfortable.
I don’t want her to get up and walk out, so I shift gears. “By the time my dad was in his mid-thirties, he was retired from playing hockey.”
“That’s very young.” She tucks her hair behind her ear.
She has three earrings in the right one. Two up near the top of the shell, as though maybe she had an industrial at one point and didn’t quite want to give up the rebellion. It’s a bit at odds with the bunny socks and cardigans and thick-rimmed glasses.
“He played for more than a decade. Professional hockey careers are short compared to the way most people will stick with the same thing for decades. Some players only get a season or two on the ice before their career is over.” I rest my elbows on the table.
“How old were you when you finished your PhD?”
“Twenty-six.”
“That’s faster than most.” For reasons I’m unsure of, I want to know how she got where she is. “Why were you in such a rush to get through university? It’s kinda the last hurrah before you have to start taking life seriously.”
“Are you saying you don’t take life seriously?”
“It’s not that I don’t take it seriously. It’s that I know it’s full of slap shots and chippy plays, so you gotta enjoy the good stuff when it happens.”
“Is that why you half-ass your assignments in my class?” She arches a challenging brow.
“I half-ass a lot of things. I don’t think I realized how intense your class was going to be.”
“Did you think it would be an easy A?”
“More like a moderately effortless C. I probably should have paid closer attention to my advisor when I was signing up for classes. My first professor seemed to like me well enough, but that obviously changed. I tried to switch out after you took over, but I’d passed the deadline, so you were stuck with me. ”
She laughs, and her smile does something to me, makes my chest all warm.
It’s stupid. She’s a professor. Educated.
Established. She’s done everything she can to put distance between us this semester, but for whatever reason, the universe seems pretty determined to keep pushing her back into my orbit.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” She said there’s no live-in boyfriend the other night, but that doesn’t mean there’s no boyfriend at all. Plus, there was a gift basket in her foyer when I checked in on her on Friday.
She focuses on her tea. “I thought we were going to talk about your creative writing assignment, not my personal life.”
“We are. I’m just curious. You’re beautiful. Smart. Funny. Kind. Strong. Independent. Someone has to have noticed that besides me.”
She leans back in her seat and crosses her arms. “You can’t flirt with me, Maverick.”
I bite my thumbnail and give her a half grin. “It’s a compulsion. I can’t help myself.”
“Does that mean you flirt with everyone?”
“Not everyone. Just women I find attractive, and I’m a single Pringle, in case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.” She shakes her head and picks up her mug. She’s still smiling, but it’s stiff now. “Keep it up and I’m leaving.”
“I’m sorry.” I hold up a hand. “I’m nervous and deflecting.”
“It’s fine.” She sips her tea and sets it down on the table. “And why are you deflecting?”
I focus on my mug for a moment. “For all these years, we’ve never really talked about what happened to my sister. A creative writing piece isn’t the same as a conversation, but putting it on paper . . . I don’t know. I didn’t expect it to sit with me the way it has.”
“We as in you and your sister?”
“We as in my family. We talk around it most of the time. I mean, it happened more than a decade ago—almost a decade and a half—so it makes sense that it’s not a huge topic of conversation.
And Lavender doesn’t want to be defined by something that happened when she was too young to really remember.
” I take a sip of my latte, wishing I’d gotten water, or that they served beer here instead.
“You were both quite young, weren’t you?”
I nod. Part of me wants to reject going back to that day, but the other part wonders whether purging this information will make things better.
“But old enough to remember,” she says softly.
I set my mug down. “I guess. Lavender says she remembers it mostly in smells and sensations, not what actually happened.”
Clover nods thoughtfully. “Do you think that’s because she was so young?”
“Maybe.” I pull a napkin from the dispenser.
It’s thin and easy to tear, but it’ll keep my hands occupied.
I start folding it into a square, following the pattern that’s engrained in my brain from doing it so often.
“That’s the part I probably have the hardest time with—the never really knowing what happened.
And it’s not like she hasn’t had loads of therapy.
She’s gone not just because of what happened, but because she has pretty bad social anxiety.
Even before the abduction, she was quiet whenever we were with people she didn’t know, or in large crowds.
After, though, there were times we’d have to leave someplace because it was too much for her. ”
“What would happen? What made it too much?”
“I don’t know really.” I run my tongue over my eye tooth for a few beats. “But she’d shut down. Like her body was there, but she was trapped in her head. It always freaked me out. I was scared she was going to stay like that. But she always came back. Eventually.”
“You said in the parking lot that you were supposed to wait. What did you mean by that?”
“We ran ahead of Lavender and River, and we shouldn’t have.”
“We?”
“Me and Kody. My best friend. He’s Lavender’s boyfriend now.
” I set the finished crane on the table and pull another napkin free.
I feel restless, like there’s an itch under my skin that I can’t get to.
I want to get up and run—hit the ice and do skate suicides until my legs and lungs are burning.
Until I puke. I do that sometimes, push my body so hard that I make myself throw up. Those nights I sleep almost peacefully.
“That sounds complicated. And you said your sister lives with you? What about Kody? Does he go to school here too?”
“Yeah.” I fold another crane, the piece of cake I ordered sitting untouched in front of me. “He and I play hockey together. He lives two doors down, with my cousin, but he’s obviously at our place a lot now too. He’s the reason I didn’t wait for my sister that night at the carnival.”
“I don’t understand. He didn’t want to wait?” Clover’s expression is pensive, like she’s trying to reconcile the story I wrote with what I’m telling her.
“No. He did. That’s why I didn’t.” I wish I could shut the hell up.
There’s a reason I don’t talk about this.
I don’t want everyone to know how fucking awful I really am.
“Kody’s been in love with my sister since he could say her name.
Even as kids, they had this untouchable bond.
Lavender’s like that. She radiates goodness. ”
“And you don’t think you do?”
I huff a laugh. “I’m not a good person.”
“From what I’ve witnessed, you’re pretty selfless.”
“I’m not, though.” I shake my head and lean forward, resting my chin on my fingers. “Sometimes I’m really fucking selfish.”
“How do you mean?”
I scrub a hand over my face as long-buried memories surface.
“All I wanted to do was run through the funhouse one more time with Kody and then ride the roller coaster and get a funnel cake. But we spent what felt like a freaking hour—and was probably more like five minutes—convincing Lavender it would be fun if she came with us. I knew ninety percent of the reason she wanted to come was because Kody was going, and she idolized him.”
“And Kody is her boyfriend now?” I can see her trying to piece it all together.
“Yeah. They started dating this year.”
“Is that hard for you?”
“It was inevitable. Those two have been destined to be together their entire lives. Kody just needed to have his shit together first.” I poke the slice of cake with my fork.
“Anyway, that night I was trying to be patient, but everything with Lavender was kind of an ordeal back then. She needed a lot of coaxing and coaching, even to do normal things. Anyway, she started to shiver, but she’d left her coat in the car on purpose.
Our mom had made it for her, and it had this ruffle thing around the neck that made her itchy.
Our mom was going to go back to the car to get it, but I didn’t want to wait, so I told Kody to give her his hoodie. ”
“I’m guessing he did?”
“Yeah. I knew he would because he had a real soft spot for Lavender. Has, present tense, obviously. So finally we get to go into the funhouse, and River, Lavender’s twin, is holding her hand.
Our older brother went on ahead of us, because he was in the middle of a book he wanted to finish and he didn’t give a shit about the funhouse.
He wanted the funnel cake.” I swallow down bile as I remember what happened next.
“Kody wanted to wait for Lavender and River. He even stopped me from running on ahead at one point. But I figured they’d be okay.
I mean . . . I didn’t think she’d get lost or anything bad would happen to her.
So I made him come with me instead of waiting for them. ”
I feel like there’s a weight on my chest that won’t lift, but I keep talking, unable to stop now that I’ve started.
“Robbie, my older brother, was already waiting for us when we came out, but when River and Lavender didn’t appear right behind us, I checked around at the entrance to see if maybe Lavender got scared and decided she didn’t want to go through, but she wasn’t there.
And when I came back to the exit, River was there, but Lavender wasn’t.
” My stomach churns as I remember the way he looked, his panic.
“He was crying so hard he didn’t even make sense.
And then when we realized she was missing .
. . Kody went with my dad to look for her, but I was convinced she was going to come out of the funhouse.
They even sent people in to look for her.
Turned on all the lights and everything.
” I press the heels of my palms against my eyes.
“But when they found her. . . fuck. I’ll never forget it.
Her hands were all bloody because she’d screamed into her skin. ”
“Screamed into her skin?” Clover’s fingers flutter around her throat.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I overheard my mom and dad talking about it after. I guess the guy who took her told her if she screamed, she would never see her parents again. So she dug her nails into her palms until she broke the skin.”
“You told me about that before, when you helped me with my hands.”
“That’s right.” I nod. “She dug her nails in so hard, it broke the skin. It happened once in a while after that, when she was really upset or scared.”
Thankfully she grew out of that. And Mom kept her nails short to prevent it from happening after the first couple of times, but man, it sucked when she came to my room in tears, asking me to help fix it so Mom wouldn’t see and get upset.
“You see now, though, what I mean when I say I’m not a good person. I forced Kody to come with me, and we left Lavender behind. If I’d waited, she wouldn’t have gone missing. I’ll never know what happened to her. I’ll never know how bad it was.”