“Can you get out of your house? I’ll pick you up.” I only have my learner’s permit, but I know how to drive well enough to steal Dad’s car and get to Tommy.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m in my room. Blocked the door with my dresser.” Tommy’s “door” is a sliding accordion divider, barely thicker than a sheet of cardboard, and definitely not enough to keep his father out. “Just talk to me, all right?”
“What about?”
“Tell me where we’d go if we ran away.”
I whisper to avoid waking Renny or my parents. My dream of the stars is already fading, but their clear notes linger longest. “I think we’d run to Colorado. Somewhere in the mountains. Or maybe the desert. Either way, we steal a car and drive west. It takes hours to get out of Florida, but we shed our troubles at the border, and at night we sleep under the open sky.” I stop when I hear something crash on the other end of the phone. “Call the police, Tommy.”
“Ignore it. Do we stop anywhere on the way?”
“Sure.” It’s difficult to dream up a story about running away when I’m worried Mr. Ross is going to break through Tommy’s door and kill him. But I try anyway. “We don’t take the interstate because the cops are looking for us. We drive the back roads instead, and we pull over at every little stand that sells boiled peanuts.”
“I love boiled peanuts,” Tommy says. “Then what?”
“We reach Boulder and stop in this cute café for breakfast. There’s a woman working who keeps looking at us like she recognizes us. Before we leave, she asks if we know where we’re going. We tell her we don’t. She says the only way to figure it out is to stop searching.”
I don’t hear anything on the other end of the phone, so I say, “Tommy? You still there?”
Nothing for a moment. Then, “I’m here. Keep talking.”
“So we head into the mountains with no destination. We drive until we run out of gas. We abandon the car and keep walking. It’s winter, and we’re cold, but we keep walking. And then, when we’re too tired to take another step, we find a log cabin hidden in the trees. Smoke’s rising out of the chimney, and there’s a mat at the front door that says ‘Welcome Home,’ and we know we are home. We stay there and no one ever finds us.”
“Is it real?” Tommy asks.
“It’s real,” I tell him. “As real as you and me.”
Mr. Ross bellows in the background, and I hear something heavy break. “I gotta go, Ozzie.”
“Tommy, wait—”
“Ozzie, I can’t—”
“We’ll get out of here, Tommy. I love you.”
I wait for him to say it back, the way he always does, but the line goes dead.
337,902 KM
RENNY LOOKED LIKE SHIT. HIS image on the screen kept freezing, and his voice cut out because the Wi-Fi at Lua’s house sucked. But I could see him, which made me both feel better because he was alive, but worse because half his head was shaved completely to the skin revealing a squiggly line of staples, puckered and raw, and his face was a mass of cuts and bruises.
But his injuries couldn’t account for all the changes in my brother. Renny was leaner, his cheekbones more prominent, his eyes deep and hollow. He didn’t smile, didn’t call me names, didn’t joke around. He looked like someone who’d nearly died and wished he hadn’t survived.
“You look good, Renny.”
“So everyone keeps saying,” he says. “You’re all liars, of course.”
Warren had waited until Mom and Dad had gone to their hotel to catch some sleep before calling me. They’d refused to leave his side since they’d arrived and were getting on his nerves, so he’d yelled at them until they agreed to give him some space.
“What happened?” I asked. “All Mom and Dad would tell me is that you fell.” They’d also informed me the fall had partially severed Renny’s spinal cord at the T6 vertebra, and that he would probably never walk again, but I wasn’t sure how to bring that up.
Renny shut his eyes. I didn’t know what kind of drugs the doctors were pumping into him, so it was possible he’d fallen asleep. But then he said, “There was this guy—Lucas Prieto—everyone called him Fapper. Don’t ask why.”
“Gross. I won’t.”
“Yeah.” Renny frowned. “Me and Fapper didn’t get along. He thought I was a suck-up because I was good at being a soldier.” He looked directly at the camera. At me. “Ozzie, I was really good.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. Another lie.
“Anyway,” Warren said. “We were running the obstacle course, and Fapper hated me because he could never beat me.” A small smile crept onto Renny’s face. “So we’re running the course, and we get to the Skyscraper, which is this tall wood tower we had to scale one side of and rappel down the other, and I’m kicking ass, right? I’m probably going to beat my own best time. But Fapper’s right on my tail. I’m hauling myself over the top, Fapper’s beside me, and he kicks out, like he’s trying to use my face to boost himself over the ledge. Only, he kicks too hard, and I lose my grip.”
Renny touches the staples on the side of his head. “I don’t remember the actual fall, but Lindley said I cracked my skull on one of the beams on my way down and landed on a log at the bottom.” He blinked back tears. “I won’t ever walk again.”
I wished I hadn’t called him. It hurt to see Renny so broken. Not his body, but his spirit. “Mom and Dad said your doctors are waiting for the swelling to go down. That the damage might not be as severe—”
“Don’t,” Renny said. “Mom and Dad and the doctors keep trying to feed me that bullshit, but I can’t take it from you.”
Mom told me Dad spent every second he wasn’t with Warren in the hospital chapel praying. I doubted he’d do that if he had faith in the doctors’ abilities to fix my brother. And Mom hadn’t even tried to give me hope Renny would recover the use of his legs. I guess she’d spent so much time sugarcoating the situation for Renny she had nothing left for me.
“Fine,” I said. “So maybe you’re paralyzed, but I researched these stem cell treatments that are showing a lot of promise. And they have exoskeletons now that could help you walk. You could have bionic freaking legs.”
“Do they make bionic dicks, Ozzie? Because I don’t give a fuck about my legs.”
Renny was hurting, and I wanted to help him. I wanted to get in my car, drive to Georgia, and sleep on his floor. But none of that would fix him.
“That’s the worst part, you know?” Warren said.
“What is?”
“Knowing I won’t ever have sex.”
“You don’t know that. I read a bunch of articles about how paralyzed men can have sex.” My browser history would’ve looked so weird if anyone had snooped, but what I’d said was true. I just didn’t mention he’d probably have to use pills or inject this stuff into his dick to get an erection because the descriptions had sounded horrible.
Warren shook his head. “Why bother? Even if I could get it up, I wouldn’t feel it. And what girl’s going to want me now?”
“There are specialists. I bet Mom and Dad could find a doctor who—”