The Falling Between Us by Ash Parsons

Author:Ash Parsons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

• • •

Time continues to stumble by.

“You need to get out,” Grandma says. “Get out of the house. Go for a walk. Anything.”

“You too, then,” I say.

She hardly ever leaves the house. It’s a whole big scary sky out there, and she has to pull her oxygen tank everywhere.

Grandma frowns at me. “I’ll get my coat,” she says.

I suppose that’s love.

I yank on black tac pants and peg them over my Docs. Pull on a ripped T-shirt and knot it at my waist.

We walk to the end of the driveway and back. It doesn’t change anything.

Back inside the house, Grandma falls back into her chair.

“Good work,” I say. “We did a lot today.”

“Smart alec,” she snaps. “Get out of my house and don’t come back until you’ve broken a sweat.”

I walk back outside.

The setting sun casts a golden glow across the dead grass. It feels a little warm but mostly ineffectual, like words on a condolence card.

But it feels good, being outside. For some stupidly pointless reason. I sit on the dead grass, feeling the cool of the earth through the stiff black pants. I lie back, stretching my arms out, the prickling of the grass along my bare arms like the scratching of a memory, tugging at your attention.

The ground is cold. The earth is dark and deep. Or something like that. A line from another poem.

What the hell with all the poems? Every poem Ms. Kearney tried to teach us. Why are they all coming back to me now?

I swipe at my cheeks and get up. Start walking. Fast, up the driveway, down the cul-de-sac, down the road. When I’m not looking at the computer, at the BlueBirdie blogs, the world is too present—I’m too alone—and—

Everything’s too real.

My phone vibrates.

Tyler. His daily attempt to reach me. He’ll be expecting my voice mail—my daily refusal to be reached.

“Hey,” I answer. Surprise.

“Hey! Roxy!” he says back. And he doesn’t sound mad that I haven’t been answering the phone these past months. He just sounds—like someone happy to hear my voice.

“Hey, Ty,” I say.

He sighs, and then we don’t say anything.

“So,” he finally says, “Artie sent me a rough cut of the tribute album. And a disc that goes with it—like a featurette. And. I want to watch it. I want to hear it. But—I don’t want to. You know?”

I laugh, a dark, sniffling loss-cough. “Yeah. I get it.”

I hear the shivery breath he takes. Can picture him, how he does, hunching skinny-wide shoulders, slouching his head low. Trying to stop it. Not being able to.

Trying to need less. Take up less space, be a shadow.

Ty always wanted to be his big brother’s shadow. Now there’s no one for him . . . certainly not Livie, who was barely there in the best of times.

I glare back up the street at Grandma’s house.

“If I start walking now, I should be there in forty minutes,” I say, with no real idea how long it will take, but just striking out anyway.

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