Fadeaway by E. Vickers (ebook smartphone TXT) 📗

worry and preparation weren’t enough.

Jake extends his hand one last time.

I nod and hand him the stack.

Our fingers do not touch.

Then I walk away so he won’t see me cry—and so he can have a moment with the person who missed him most.

While Kolt tries violence

and Daphne tries diplomacy,

all I can do is hide

behind the car door

like it’s a force field,

keeping me from this shapeshifter.

I mean, I know it’s Jake,

but I want it to not be Jake

because he is smaller, sunken,

and this place is dim, dirty,

and if this is Jake,

then my hero

left me,

hurt me,

made mistakes,

and all of it was

his choice.

Jake looks at me.

Tries again.

“Happy birthday,” he says.

“It isn’t,” I say, because

I

am

angry.

“Where have you been this whole time?”

“Here.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought I did.”

“I felt like you were frozen in carbonite.”

“I felt like that too.”

“You said it’s not my fault.”

“I meant it.”

I swallow my sob,

step out from behind the door.

I don’t know if I want to hug Jake

or hurt him back.

He steps toward me.

I let him.

“You said ‘when this is all over.’ ”

“That was stupid.

I didn’t think.

I didn’t realize.”

“What do I tell Mom?”

“Tell her I’m okay.

Or that I’m getting there.”

He can’t look at me for the next part.

“Tell her I’m sorry.”

“What about me? Are you sorry to me?”

My force field must be down because

Jake pulls me in,

holds me tight.

I am surprised how much he feels

like my big brother.

“I’m sorry to you most of all,” he says.

It takes a long time

before either of us lets go.

As Daphne and Luke say their goodbyes, I’m watching Jake and Kmart. Their steady movements, the way they stand their ground. Finally I believe it.

“You’re clean,” I say, and it’s not a question. “Both of you.”

Jake looks away, like he’s still so superstitious he thinks saying it out loud will make it all disappear.

Kmart, on the other hand, looks me straight in the eye. After all these years, the anger inside me isn’t going to burn out anytime soon, but I’m not going to let it keep me from getting answers. “Is that why you came out here? Because it’s easier to stay clean outside of Ashland?”

He half shrugs. “It’ll never be easy. But yeah.”

“So now what?” I ask. “You drive away and never come back?” I try to keep my voice level. Try not to sound like I care.

“Nah,” Kmart answers, sliding his hands into his pockets. “It’ll take two years for his dopamine receptors to start working naturally, but it’ll get better after that.”

I can barely believe this is my brother. “Thanks, Professor.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but even I can hear the sharp edge on it.

Good.

Then I play the odds. “It’s been longer than two years for you, though, hasn’t it? You could come home. Mom and Dad would want that. We could, you know, be a family again. Don’t you think you owe them that?”

Kmart kicks at the gravel. “I owe all of you a lot more than that. But I need to see this through for him,” he says. “Somebody did the same for me a while back.”

“Who?” I ask. My brother is even more of a mystery than I thought.

“That’s a story for another day,” Kmart says, fishing for his keys.

Another day. He said it like this won’t be the last time we see each other. But I don’t want to care whether that happens, so I remind myself he came back for Jake, not for me. And he’s choosing Jake again right now.

“Where will you go?” I ask.

Kmart leans against the truck. “I’ll let you know when we know. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I mean, it was always going to be rough on Jake and me, but it wasn’t supposed to be so bad on your end. I didn’t know about the search until it was too late to smooth it over with the authorities, so we had to dig ourselves in deeper and wait it out.”

I look to the house, which is pretty sketchy, even by my standards. “So you’ve been here the whole time? Running some kind of vigilante rehab?”

Kmart laughs. “You could call it that, I guess. The only kind guys like me and Jake can afford.”

“And you didn’t break the law?”

Kmart hedges. “Well, I’m not sure the cops would see it that way. There were…struggles, let’s say. Times when Jake didn’t want to be here.”

Jake shudders, and I can see it’s still raw. I try to come up with the perfect joke—something about the creepy setting and the horror-movie house—but nothing quite clicks. Then I realize I don’t want to make a joke right now, anyway.

But he still owes me answers. I nod at the soda-can tab on his key chain. “You still collecting those?”

“You remember that?” he asks. “It was just for fun at first. But now I keep one for every day I’ve been clean. Almost a thousand now.”

“I found one on the sidewalk outside Jake’s house the day after he disappeared. I almost showed it to the police, but even I couldn’t believe it was anything but trash.”

“Might have been,” Kmart says. “Or maybe I dropped it. Maybe they would have believed you, maybe they wouldn’t.”

We stand there, probably both of us thinking about the millions of ways this might have gone down differently. And even if I’m still pissed, I can’t stop myself from picturing how much worse this could have turned out. I feel something building inside me, and then, dammit, I’m crying, even though everybody knows Wookiees don’t cry.

“We gotta go,” I say, swiping at my eyes with the back of my arm.

I’m halfway to the car when Kmart’s arms wrap around me from behind.

“I’m sorry, Kolt.”

His words are dulled against my shirt. His hold tightens, and panic sears inside me. In a flash, a thousand painful thoughts surface: Kmart picking me up from practice high, Kmart missing his own hearing, me holding Mom one night while