I leave my uncle to his things and run down to the car, grabbing his small toolbox from the backseat floor. My uncle brought a few special projects with him to stay busy and keep up with his business while we’re here in Indiana. Just a few antiques he’s been trying to get working again—one a wrist watch, one a pocket. He didn’t need to come, but I didn’t fight him very hard when he insisted. He’s the only family I have left, which means I’m also it for him. We’re a healthy kind of codependent, I think, because we definitely need each other. He’s also the only person who saw me at my worst, and I feel a little less like I’ll fall with him around.
When I come back inside, I lock the front door and flip out the lights. The sun is setting, and for the first time in days, I feel like maybe, just maybe, I’ll close my eyes and find a few minutes of actual sleep. I tuck my uncle’s tools under one arm and take the steps two at a time, but I halt when I see the opened door opposite my temporary home. It isn’t fully opened, and there isn’t a light on, but I know for certain that it was closed when I ran outside.
“Uncle Duncan?” I say, pushing the door lightly. I hear papers spill onto the floor a second before my palm finds the light switch on the wall. She’s nothing but wild hair buried under her hands as she crouches down in front of the desk. She lets go of head, and soon her hands are rushing to gather spilled papers around her feet. I set my uncle’s tools down and hurry to help her.
“I got it,” she bites out.
I stand with the few pages I managed to pick up before she stopped me.
“I thought you were my uncle,” I say, my free hand moving to the bridge of my nose. My brow pulls in tight and I hold my mouth open, unsure of what to say next. I decide nothing is probably the best for both of us.
The more Maddy rushes, the more the papers slide free from her hold, but I let her work through it, eventually laying a mish-mash of ledgers and receipts into a disorganized pile on the desk.
“My mom will sort it out. Just,” she says, her eyes coming up enough to see the papers in my hands. She grabs them and adds them to the stack. “Just leave them here for her.”
My lips are still parted, my words caught somewhere in my throat. Of everything, I knew this would be the hardest. This place, the drills, her dad, the water—it’s all going to be hard. But seeing Maddy…
I can’t move my gaze up no matter how many times my mind screams at me to be civil, to pretend that none of this is strange or hurtful. I’m stuck on her hands, the way she’s balling her fingers into fists, the way her nails are filed down low—for speed. Every piece of a second counts. Maddy swore she was the fastest girl in the pool when she was in junior high because she was the only one without giant nails dragging through the water. My lips betray me and quirk a smile at that memory. She must be looking at my face, because the second my mouth curves, she tenses and grabs a phone and set of keys from the desktop near the papers.
“I only came in here because I forgot my phone. I have somewhere I need to be,” she says, rushing past me. She has nowhere to go. I could always tell when she was lying.
“Yeah, me too,” I say, surprised at my own voice. My eyes widen a little and my pulse picks up. Maddy stops at the doorway and turns her chin just enough that I catch a glimpse of more of her profile. “I have to be…over there,” I say, gesturing to my new home on the other side of the hall.
Her fingers drum once along the wood of the doorframe, and she grunts out a tiny laugh before she flees down the hallway and steps, slipping out the back door just like she used to when we were kids. I hear her car motor start up soon after and watch the shadow of the lights move along the windows that line the alleyway. When I hear her car hit the gravel, I let my head fall back and I bring my arms up over my eyes. I breathe in long and deep, holding my lungs full. She’s even more beautiful than she was the day before I ruined her life.
This is going to be hard. I want to quit already. But I can’t, because—whether she remembers it or not—I promised her I wouldn’t.
Never.
Chapter Two
Maddy
I saw this thing on the Internet. It’s a series of videos of these junior-high boys flipping half-filled water bottles on things, landing them just right, then running around with their arms in the air as if they’ve accomplished something amazing. My best friend Holly sent it to me, sort of as a joke.
What you’re doing can’t be half as hard as this.
That’s what her text said. It made me smile, because how stupid is a water-bottle stunt. Then I spent the next hour trying to get my damned water bottle to land upright on the floor. I just stuck it, and I refuse to pick it up now because that was really, really hard. I even threw my hands up when I did and let out a whoop—all alone, in my room, at sunrise. I whispered the whoop. And then I mimicked the sound of a roaring crowd.
Hats off to the water-bottle flippers of YouTube.