Reese Chapter #2
Outside, everyone eats but me. I hear them through the screens of the porch, where I lie in bed with my back to them, listening to them laugh and to their conversations.
The adults are drinking. Everything gets funnier the more they have to drink, though every now and then their voices go quiet, whisper-like, and I wonder what they’re talking about and if they’re talking about me.
And then I hear my name and I know. They are talking about me.
“What was wrong with Reese? Why didn’t she eat with us?”
“She said her stomach hurt,” Emily says.
“That’s too bad. She seemed fine when we were playing baseball,” Aunt Courtney says.
“I don’t know about fine. She was pretty moody.”
Nolan scoffs. “What else is new? She’s always moody.”
My throat tightens.
Aunt Courtney says, “I didn’t mean that. I just meant that I didn’t hear her say anything about her stomach bothering her
during the game.” She pauses, says then, “Can you imagine how hard it is to be a teenager these days, with social media and
all that? It’s not like when we were kids. We had it easy in comparison.”
“Do you think she’s on drugs?” Uncle Elliott asks from out of nowhere, and I know that’s what he wants them to think. That
I’m on drugs. “I just mean the moodiness. I’m not saying she is, but it’s a sign. Being sullen, depressed, hostile, withdrawn.”
People are quiet, imagining me as all these things, deciding in their minds that Uncle Elliott is right, that I probably am
on drugs.
Emily asks, “Like what? Like weed? Where would she even get that?”
Nolan’s voice is loud, patronizing. “Anywhere, Emily. Don’t be so naive. Half her school probably smokes weed.”
“Shhh,” Aunt Courtney says. “You don’t want her to know we’re talking about her.” She asks then, “Have you checked on her since we’ve been home? Have you made sure she’s okay?”
“No,” Emily says. She goes quiet and I think that’s all, just no. But then she says, “Maybe I will. Maybe I will go see how she is,” and for a minute, I flash back to when I was young, when
Emily would come into my room at night and lie down beside me when I had a bad dream or didn’t feel well or couldn’t sleep.
She would burrow beside me under the covers, nuzzle in close and run her fingers up and down my back until I fell asleep.
But then Mae came and everything changed. Because Mae almost died. Because, when she was born, there was a lack of oxygen
and blood flow to the brain due to something with her umbilical cord, because the cord came out before Mae did. Her skin was
blue when she was born and her breathing was weak, which I only knew because I stood there that night, hidden behind an open
door, when Nolan came home from the hospital, telling my grandparents about the color of her skin and how they weren’t sure
she was going to survive the night. The doctors had all sorts of scary prognoses should she actually survive, like cerebral
palsy, epilepsy, more. She stayed in the NICU for weeks, on a breathing machine. Emily stayed too (feeling guilty somehow,
as if it was all her fault) and when they came home, Mae almost never left Emily’s arms. Something had changed. I was seven
at the time, and though I knew Emily still loved me, I could tell she loved Mae more.
“I’ll be right back,” Emily says now, and I imagine her setting down her drink, pushing her chair back, standing up, and I
decide that when she gets here, I’ll tell her everything. About Daniel. About what happened. About how much my heart hurts.
But then, before she can leave to come to me, Uncle Elliott’s voice cuts in, and he says, “Are you sure you want to do that?”
Emily asks, “You don’t think I should?”
“Well,” he says, “I’m just thinking she’s probably asleep, right? If she was telling the truth and really doesn’t feel well. You should let her sleep.”
My anger grows. Uncle Elliott is only saying it to protect himself, to keep Emily from me so that I can’t say anything to
her about him.
“No,” she says, “I guess you’re right. I don’t want to wake her. She should sleep if she’s sick.”
And just like that, someone gets more for them to drink. The laughter starts up again. They move from the deck to the firepit,
where I can still hear them, though their voices are softer, dulled down by the distance.
I put a pillow over my head so I can’t hear them at all. I don’t actually know that I’m crying, but all of a sudden my face
is drenched with tears that seep into the pillowcase, making it wet.
Sometime later, I come to. I must have rolled over in my sleep, because my body faces the other way, across the porch, out
the window and toward the firepit, which has gone cold, taking any traces of light with it so that I can’t see the empty camping
chairs or the empty bottles of booze.
It’s not quiet outside. Bugs like crickets and cicadas make noise. Thunder rolls across the sky in the far-off distance, while,
closer by, embers sputter in some dying fire that’s been left to burn out all on its own.
I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep, or how much time has passed since everyone went in.
I slip my hand out from under the covers, reaching for my phone on the nightstand, seeing that it’s two thirty in the morning.
It’s black outside, though it’s not black inside the cottage because someone left the kitchen light on before they went to sleep, which they never do, which tells me they were too drunk when they went to bed to remember to turn off the light.
Images of Daniel and that girl come rushing back to me.
I roll over in bed. I turn the other way, toward the screen closest to the bed. I close my eyes again, wanting to fall back
to sleep and forget, to lose myself to unconsciousness, to never wake up.
A noise comes to me from outside. It’s close by, a heavy, deadened sound like when walnuts fall from trees.
I throw my eyes open and search.
It’s too dark outside to see anything. The kitchen light is a disadvantage. Because of it, I can’t see out, but if anyone
is standing outside, they can see right in.
I hold my breath, fixating on the world outside, trying to get my eyes to adjust, staring but not really seeing anything.
Lightning flashes in the sky, and in the blaze of light it gives off, I see him, a dark silhouette standing at the tree line,
facing our cottage.
I gasp, telling myself to be quiet, to hold still.
He comes forward. As he gets closer, the moon just barely illuminates his edges from behind, so that they’re woolly and unfocused.
I inhale, staring at him standing far enough away that I can’t make him fully out, but close enough to know he’s there. To
hear him breathe.
I lie perfectly still and he comes closer, stepping up to the window, his face coming into view. I watch his eyes, which reflect
the kitchen light, glowing outside.
“Where were you?” he asks, leaning out to touch the screen.
Slowly, I push myself up to a sitting position. I drag my body to the far side of the bed, furthest away from the screens.
I pull my knees into me, wrapping the covers over them. “What . . . what are you doing here, Daniel? It’s the middle of the—”
“I said, where were you?” he asks again, cutting me off this time, and I go silent because there’s a bite to his words, an edge to them I’ve never heard before, at least not directed at me.
He says, as if upset, “I waited for you for hours. You didn’t come.
If you weren’t going to come, you should have told me. ”
“I . . . I don’t feel good,” I say, hearing and feeling a vibration to my words that I know is fear, though I tell myself
not to be scared, that I don’t need to be scared because it’s just Daniel, and Daniel wouldn’t hurt me, except that he already
has. I think of him leaning into that girl tonight, stroking her face with the back of his finger, saying, Then we have to make the most of it.
“You sure about that?” he asks.
“Yes. I feel sick.”
“You’re not lying to me?”
“Why would I lie about being sick?” I ask.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
I hesitate and then I say, “I saw you with that girl.”
“What girl?” he asks, like I’m dumb. Like I didn’t actually see them together. When I say nothing, he sighs and says, “That
was a mistake. A lapse in judgment. She has a boyfriend, for one, and is stuck up as hell. I don’t like her.” He pauses, takes
a breath, says in some sickening, sycophantic way, “I like you, Reese like the candy,” as if trying to butter me up, to get
back on my good side, except that this time when he says it, it isn’t cute. This time, it gets under my skin. He asks, “Is
that why you’re mad? Is that why you didn’t meet me at the lake?” softer, crooning. He sets his hand on the screen again,
pressing so that the edges of it start to peel away from the frame. If he pressed any harder the screen would break and then
he’d be on the porch with me. “Come outside,” he says. “Let me make it up to you.”
I say, “No.” Because he doesn’t actually like me. I’m an idiot for thinking a guy like him ever would.
He pulls a face. “No?”
“No.”
It takes almost no time at all for him to ask, “Why, Reese, because you have so many guys waiting for you back home?” He laughs, but it’s not a funny laugh.
It’s cruel. Tears sting my eyes, and I think of all the things I said to him that I never said to anyone else.
“You said so yourself. They don’t like you.
No one thinks of you like that. No one thinks you’re pretty. ”
No one thinks you’re pretty.
My heart hurts. There’s a squeezing feeling in my chest, my ribs. My chin trembles.
“You’re not crying, Reese, are you?” he asks. When I say nothing, he says, “So you’re not sick then,” running his hands through
his hair, his cruelty turning to anger. “So you were lying.”
“Just leave me alone, Daniel. Go away.”
“You’re making a mistake, Reese. You’ll be sorry,” he says.
“I don’t care. Just go away.”
He stands there a long time. Saying nothing. Breathing hard while I don’t breathe. While I hold my breath, my heart pounding
inside of me until it hurts.
“You’ll regret this,” he says. “Do you hear me? You’ll fucking regret this.”
I won’t. The only thing I regret is ever liking him.
He backs slowly away. When I can’t see him anymore, I slide down in bed, lying on my side with the covers pulled up to my
neck.
I think he’s gone, that he’s left.
But then, from outside, I hear the flick of a lighter and see the glowing cherry at the end of a joint. I smell weed.
He’s not gone.
He’s still out there, watching me from the trees because I’m backlit by the kitchen light, on full display.
Lightning flashes in the sky again. Thunder rolls. It never rains.
I stare at the glowing red embers, at the movement of them as he inhales and then lowers his arm to his side, over and over again.
In time, he puts out the joint so I can’t see where he is anymore.
It doesn’t matter because even if I can’t see him, I know he hasn’t left. He’s still there.
He’s still watching me.