Chapter Nineteen #2
Marcus sighs and makes a big show of checking the clock in the garage, but fifteen minutes later, we are sitting crisscross applesauce on a blanket Marcus pulled out of the back of one of the cars.
It covers the dusty, oil-stained floor of The Fix, since Marcus claims to be too filthy to go inside.
With our outstretched hands connected and eyes closed tight, we try to think the same thought.
I find myself hyperaware of absolutely everything, from how sweaty my palms are to how taut my skin is against my knuckles to how long his fingers are.
“Zadie,” Marcus whispers. “You’re stroking my hands.”
“Oh my God!” I jump. “Sorry, I was just trying to…It’s part of the mind-melding process.”
“No, I know,” Marcus says, with faux seriousness even as my face heats up. “It’s one of your methods. You want the digits to really connect, right?” He is trying not to laugh and also clearly doesn’t buy my “mind-melding process.”
“Just close your eyes,” I order as Marcus chuckles and we rejoin hands. I breathe in deep because it’s taking all my concentration not to trace the lines across his hands again. It feels comfortable, easy. I can’t even begin to understand why.
After more than five minutes of silence and attempting to meld, something tells me to peek with my right eye. I’m horrified to see Marcus staring straight at me. “Marcus! Do you not understand the concept of closing your eyes?”
“I was,” he insists. “I just needed to scratch my eye.”
I shut my own eyes again, trying to set a good precedent, but I can hear the smile in his breath.
I feel my cheeks warming at the realization that he’s just been staring at me.
How long has he been staring at me, and what was he thinking?
A month ago, it wouldn’t have mattered one bit to me.
Or, at least, I would have denied that it mattered even an iota.
But now, in this upside-down world where he has seen into some of the most special and sacred memories of the past year, it turns out I do care what he thinks.
I wonder if he cares what I think.
We are quiet a grand total of about a minute before Marcus speaks again. “Things I did not have on today’s bingo card: holding hands with the Zadie Cartwright and trying to teleport.”
“Shhh.”
I swear I hear it again, the smile in his breaths, as I try very, very hard to force us into a dream.
But nothing happens. My hope was that, given the synchronicity of our brain waves or whatever, all we had to do was really concentrate and focus on transporting ourselves to the correct time and space.
But alas, we remain in Tommy Riddick’s garage.
* * *
Fifteen minutes and a Marcus bathroom break (and a Marcus snack break) later, we are inside Marcus’s house, the one attached to the garage.
It is smaller than I expect, smaller than it looks from the outside, but cozy.
With many pictures of Marcus and his sister in various stages of growth and toothlessness, the walls are a warm light blue color.
Mom would not say their house looked like a museum.
In fact, she’d probably say they had achieved peak attainability.
I plop down on the couch of the well-lit living room as Marcus eats a bowl of cereal and checks soccer scores on his phone.
He offered me my own bowl and I turned him down.
A few minutes later, while he’s upstairs cleaning up, I catch up on socials. Check again if the Instagram bully/Ring Bandit has done or said anything new. They haven’t.
“Ready to try again?” I say when Marcus comes back.
I offer my hands out to him, and he takes them, both of us facing each other on the couch.
At exactly that moment, a girlish voice that definitely does not belong to Marcus gasps from across the room.
“What the frig!”
My eyes snap open and land on a girl dressed in pink from head to toe. She has her blond hair pulled up in a perky ponytail and is wearing high-tops. She looks a prime total of nine.
Marcus groans. “Kangaroo. I thought you were at a playdate this afternoon.”
“Three things. Stella…” she says, each word slow and deliberate, “hasn’t picked me up yet.” She counts off on her fingers. “I answer only to Joey. And I don’t have playdates. I’m ten. We’re going to afternoon tea.”
Ten it is, then.
As the girl’s staring continues, I realize I’m still holding hands with Marcus and quickly take my hands back. I give her a little wave, but she just continues to look wide-eyed in my direction.
“Marcus,” she says. “What is she doing here?”
Joey’s expression is a cross between scandalized and awed, which seems a little strange.
I’m not sure she recognizes me, so I say, “I’m Zadie. Marcus and I go to school together.”
“And kiss?” Joey asks, completely shameless.
“Sorry?” I almost choke on my saliva.
“Do you go to school together and kiss? Because you kind of look like you’d be kissing if I wasn’t here.”
I think I’m overheating, but Marcus gets up, goes to put his sister in a headlock. “No, we don’t kiss, you rascal.”
She grins as he tugs on her ponytail, then remembers herself and bats his hand away.
“I…” have a boyfriend, I start to say but catch myself. I don’t know what I have. “I, um, like your shoes.”
In a normal type of family, I would probably know Joey better since she is also Jason’s cousin and our town is that small. But it’s almost like the Brothers Riddick only remembered they were related when Jason’s accident happened.
Joey beams. “Thrifted,” she says. “It’s the only way to do it.”
“The only way to do what?” Marcus looks incredulous. “Joe, I think I hear Stella’s mom’s car. Maybe you should go check?”