9. Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
Then
“Theo!” I sang out. “I have more for you!”
Theo looked up from the shelf he was arranging as I barreled toward him, pushing the old brown utility cart that we used to run stock. It was piled so high with shoes that I had to lean to the side to see where I was going. There were shoeboxes scattered all over the floor, waiting to be added to the clearance rack.
“All that?” he asked me. “Seriously?”
“That’s what Randi said.” I parked the cart in front of Theo and took my bag of Red Vines off the top. I pulled one out of the bag and took a big bite. Wordlessly, Theo reached out his hand, and I placed one in his palm as well.My constant consumption of sugar and red dye infuriated my mother, which only made it more attractive to me.
“Are they all going to fit?” I asked, eyeing the clearance display where we were standing. It used to be just an endcap at the end of the aisle, but over the past couple of years, it had grown steadily. Now half the aisle was marked with yellow and red signs labeled CLEARANCE! and LAST CHANCE!
Theo looked over at me. I could read his expression, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. We were young, but not that young; he had just graduated high school a couple of weeks before, and I was about to be a senior. We knew that everything in the store could be purchased cheaper and more conveniently elsewhere. We knew that the ever-growing clearance section wasn’t a good sign for a small business. We knew that our parents had been working longer hours and spending more time in the backroom with the door closed, speaking in hushed tones.
Theo ran his hand over his freshly buzzed head. He habitually cut his hair once per year, on Memorial Day weekend. I preferred his April hair, which was long enough to flop over his forehead and curl at the nape of his neck. “I’ll make them fit,” he said, going back to my question. “I’ll have to do some rearranging.”
“There’s no more coming after these,” I assured him.
He nodded, and I watched as he started shuffling boxes around. “Go get me another rack,” he said. He was always direct, even a little bossy, but not in a way that bothered me. I had no problem refusing his orders. If I followed one of them, it was because I chose to. “The gray one with the—”
“Got it,” I said, knowing exactly what he was talking about. It had been in the backroom collecting dust for ages. “Be right back.”
I strolled down the aisle toward the back of the store, bypassing the bathroom and entering the single swinging door that marked the backroom. There used to be two doors, but one of them had fallen off its hinges a couple years before, and nobody ever fixed it.
The backroom was small, but strategically organized to maximize storage space. The two walls perpendicular to the door had built-in shelving for backstock. At the end of the aisle, a right turn brought you to an alcove where bigger items, like the rack I needed, were kept. The office was back there, too, behind a door that had once been painted white but was now chipped enough to resemble chocolate chip ice cream.
I turned the corner and saw that the office light was on. Figuring it was Randi, I started talking as I stepped inside the small space. “Hey, I took all that stuff out to clearance and—” I stopped when I saw that it was not Randi, but my brother Brock, sitting at the computer desk. “What are you doing in here?”
Brock had his hands poised over the keyboard. From the doorway, I couldn’t see what was on the screen. He didn’t stop what he was doing; he kept tapping, not looking at me. “Just checking some things.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Although the three of us—Brock, Theo, and I—did some clerical work for the store and often closed out registers at the end of the night, we rarely had an occasion to be in the office alone. Especially on the computer. The only time I had ever used that computer was the previous summer, when I bought concert tickets while Theo distracted our parents up front.
“What things?” I asked him, crossing my arms.
Brock lifted his eyes to meet my identical ones. We had very little in common, but we did look like siblings. “Don’t worry about it.”
I walked further into the office and stood behind his desk chair. Brock promptly closed out whatever he had been looking at. “What are you hiding?” I pressed, leaning over to grab the mouse with him. I pulled the page back up and promptly deflated. It was just a spreadsheet, covered in numbers pertaining to sales and inventory. “Oh. Boring.”
“I told you not to worry about it,” he grumbled, batting my hand away and taking the mouse back.
I rolled my eyes and started walking away. Brock and I had never been close. I wasn’t sure if it was the age gap, our diametrically opposed personalities, or the fact that Theo and I naturally became attached at the hip while he was a bit of a third wheel. The distance between us had only widened once Brock cut back on his shifts at the store. At twenty-two, he was mostly working construction to pay for his one-bedroom apartment down by the train tracks.
“You ever coming over for dinner again?” I hollered at him, using my foot to unlock the wheels on the gray rack.
“Yeah, I will soon,” he said, not very convincingly.
“I think it’s only fair that you suffer with me sometimes.”
“I suffered for eighteen years. I’ve earned my freedom.”
I still remembered how jealous I was when Brock moved out. I was thirteen then. Things between Mom and I had started going south about a year before, and cracks were starting to show between her and Dad, too. I sat on the porch steps all morning, watching Brock load up his car and wishing we had a better relationship. I thought that if we did, he might have invited me to go with him.
I started to wheel the rack back to the floor, but a thought stopped me. I poked my head back into the office. “Why do you think they haven’t gotten divorced?”
Brock looked up from the computer again and exhaled hard, nostrils flaring. “Because they own a business together, Nina.” He said this like I was a complete moron for even asking. “You can’t just walk away from something like that with no backup plan.”
I thought of Cecil and Randi, Theo’s parents, whose own livelihood was wrapped up with my parents’. “I wonder—”
I heard the one swinging door whip against the wall, and then heard Theo’s voice. “Hey, Sass. Where’s my rack? I don’t want to be here all night.”
Abandoning Brock and our dead-end conversation, I walked out of the office just in time to see Theo turning the corner into the alcove. He came to a stop right in front of where our bin of toys used to sit. “Dude,” he said, noticing Brock. He craned his head to look into the office. “What are you doing in there?”
“I’m leaving,” came Brock’s snapping voice, “because you two can’t mind your own fuckin’ business.” A moment later, he emerged, slamming the door to the office shut behind him.
“Hey, man,” said Theo, holding his hands up in surrender. “No judgment here. That’s what incognito mode is for, you know?”
Brock glared at Theo. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that this whole dynamic—me and Theo, not related at all, ganging up on Brock, my only sibling—was kind of messed up. “Sometime, Hoyt,” Brock said, “you’re going to grow up a little bit and realize that shit isn’t all fun and games.”
“Brock,” I warned.
Theo’s eyes flashed. He wasn’t a hothead, but he also wasn’t anybody’s doormat. “I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on things, thanks.”
Brock opened his mouth, but seemed to stop himself before any words came out. He shook his head and stepped through the narrow space between Theo and I, brushing against us both. Nobody said anything else as his footsteps retreated. Then we heard the back exit open and close, and we were left alone.
“I don’t know what his problem is,” I said.
Theo nodded to the office. “He was snooping.”
“No, he was just looking at sales numbers or something. Something on a spreadsheet.”
He leaned on the gray rack, propping his elbows on the top shelf. “So, snooping.”
“I guess so,” I said. “But I don’t know why he’d be looking at that stuff.”
Theo ran his hand over his head. He fixed his heavy gaze on mine. “I don’t think things are going very well."
“I know,” I admitted.
His eyes roved my face in that way they often did, as if he was trying to figure me out. It always made me feel like I was under a microscope. “You can’t repeat this, okay?”
“Okay.”
He glanced behind him, double-checking that we were alone. “My parents told me not to tell you, but…” He raised and dropped his shoulders in a shrug.
I nodded in understanding. Most people who had occasion to talk about me and Theo referred to us as best friends or practically brother and sister , and I could see why they would think that. Neither of us referred to each other that way, though. Our relationship was nothing like mine and Brock’s, and my best friend was Sage Perry while Theo’s was Quinton Damask. We were just...Nina and Theo. I found it exceedingly difficult to describe our relationship; all I knew was that it was the most important one in my life.
That’s why I understood what Theo meant without him actually explaining it. Between him and I, the only secret was my occasional pining.
Theo cleared his throat. “Mom and Dad are starting to look into other options. Dad’s been talking about trying to find work somewhere else."
A lump immediately formed in my throat. "Really?"
“Yeah.”
In the same way that Theo had been my constant companion, the store had been the constant backdrop of my life. I didn’t always like it—my mother and I had many arguments over how often I was expected to work—but I did depend on it. The idea of us not running the store with the Hoyts was unfathomable to me.
“What would you do?” I asked Theo. Now that high school was over for him, our parents had put him on a full-time schedule at the store. He had been salutatorian of his class, though, and I wasn’t completely clear as to why he was sticking around here. “Would you go to college after all?”
“Nah.” For a moment, he looked torn. Then he gave his head a little shake, as if to clear it. “I’d find something. I could go work with Brock.”
I laughed out loud and pushed at the rack, nudging him out of the way. “You two would murder each other.”
Theo laughed too, and the mood was instantly lighter. He followed me back out to the floor. I could hear Randi’s voice from somewhere in the store, telling a customer that we would have a new shipment of flip-flops in on Wednesday. We couldn’t continue our conversation out here, but that was okay. I knew from experience that later, one of us would bring it back up, and we would continue as if we’d never paused the discussion.
“You and Sage going out to the farm tonight?”he asked.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
The bell over the door sounded, indicating that a customer had entered the store. I was going to let Randi take care of it, but then she bustled by. “Get that, please,” she tossed out in the general direction of Theo and I before disappearing into the back. Since Theo was doing clearance, I started heading that way.
“Hey,” Theo hissed, and I turned back. In his best imitation of my mother, he drew his eyebrows together and sternly told me, “No food in front of the customers.”
I made a big show of reaching into the bag, pulling out another piece of licorice, and chomping down on it like a cartoon rabbit. “Yum.”
“Sass,” he warned, visibly fighting a laugh.
I grinned at him. “Love you so much.”
Theo shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he didn’t miss a beat. “Love you so much," he responded, and disappeared around the corner with his rack.