It's a good enough plan: they drop off Aunt Esther at the old family home to go through family records, let Tiff wrap Andy's present in the car, and go drop it off before she has to walk all the way out to the chapel (unless Drew wants to drive her, and he probably doesn't). She'll probably say the present is from Drew, on the label, so her mom doesn't throw it out. It's a good plan.
She turns down the radio when Drew pulls up outside the townhouse the Sheridans have rented for years on a semi-sleepy, semi-suburban street in East Orlando. He parks at the curb instead of in the driveway, even though there isn't a car there.
No car in the driveway. That means her parents aren't home.She can take it up to the door without the risk of running into them.
She stuffs the near-empty tape dispenser into the glove compartment and looks over at Drew. "Come up to the door with me— Will you come up to the door with me?"
"I thought you wanted to do this yourself."
"Come on!" she pleads. "Come play moral support!"
"I'm not Denny, forehead." He unbuckles himself anyway, and turns off the car. He swings himself out to stand on the street; in tandem, she joins him.
She stares down the house and the front door. She lived here for about two years. She went to ninth and tenth grades at the high school a fair ways away and rode there on her bike all the time (and, briefly, her motorcycle, to the portables for Girl Scouts meetings, after Uncle Mike gave it to her as a sixteenth birthday present); she spent time in those windows, looking out at the world around her and wishing she could be in it. That was the kitchen where she truly learned to fear the stove; that window facing the front was Andy's room, and probably still is. She knows this place.
She crosses the pits and gouges in the driveway expertly. Her parents must not have annoyed the landlord enough about it over the past few years. (He wouldn't listen anyway. Their neighbors and that frat from down the street had to help dispose of that fallen tree when the landlord wouldn't.)
She knocks on the door, then considers stepping away. By the time she decides it might be a good idea, it's far too late. The door is already open and caught on the chain.
Andy stands there, looks out at her, eyes wide with surprise. "Hi, Tiff!"
"Hey, bud." Oh, she's being so normal about this. She's getting a good grade in sibling interaction. "I just wanted to drop off a present for you. From me and Drew. It says Drew, but it's mostly me."
She doesn't need to say that she didn't want their mother to throw it out as soon as it entered the house. He already knows that.
He looks around, from one side of the street to the other. "Do you want to come in?"
There's such hope in his voice, and she hates to let him down, but she has to say, "I don't know if that's such a good idea, bud—"
"They're not home."
"I don't know—"
"Please?"
How can she say no to him? This is her little brother. She has missed him like her own soul for two years. Of course she sees that glimmer in her little brother's eye, and she says yes, sure, she'll come inside, and of course Drew will come in with her. Is there a way to say anything else?
The house is the way it was when she left, but it also isn't. The upright piano against one wall has a festive runner and a different vase on top of it; the couch and TV have been moved. The bookshelves are more packed, though exactly none of Tiff's old music theory books remain on the bottom shelf.
It's the same, then. It's different. She holds out the poorly-wrapped, bulbous gift to Andy. "Here, bud. For you."
He shakes his head. "You should take it to Meemaw and Peepaw's."
Tiff narrows her eyes. "How come?"
"I got in trouble at school a few weeks ago, so Mom decided we're not doing a tree or presents this year. And then she said I talked back, so no stockings or casserole either." He shrugs; he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
Something in her heart breaks, though she should have known to expect that. "I'll take it to Meemaw's, then. I don't mind. I can stop by later, drop it off."
That's not true. She's going to forget. Drew is going to have to remind her, like he does with the laundry.
"I'm sorry," Drew interrupts, "but that's pretty messed up. And I'm sorry, Andy."
The kid shrugs, like he's used to it. "It's alright."
"It's kinda not."
Tiff nods in agreement, but doesn't say anything. She knows how it goes. She knows how this place is.
"Well," she decides, out loud, "if we're going in, then we should go in."
She tucks the present under one arm and takes off her boots by the door. There's no point in dragging all sorts of mud across the carpet. One of the shoelaces catches on her foot; she accidentally kicks it into the room. Like the fool she is, she deigns to carry it with her instead of leaving it by the door. She may look like an idiot, but she has always looked like an idiot in this house.
Drew looks around, changing the subject as expertly as he normally does. "So... Tiff, you grew up here?"
"Not really." She puts the present in her boot so she has one more free hand. "I only lived here for two years."
"I don't know why I thought you grew up in Orlando."
"I mean— I was born here, at Arnold Palmer, and I lived here— but I grew up in Fort Reverence. It's just easier to say Orlando because it's more recent and nobody has ever heard of Fort Reverence."
"I have," Drew points out.
"Your mom is from Fort Reverence! You're an exception to the already-spurious rule!" She giggles a little in the faux-outrage. "But, yes— I did live here. For a while. for the last two years of being in Florida. Yeah."
"Give us the tour, then!" Drew laughs. "Andy, give us the tour."
"Do you want to see my room?" Andy asks, eyes bright, voice on the verge of chuckling. "You too, Tiff?"
"Yeah, I'd love to." She doesn't say it in the way she does when Darren from next door tries to show her a cartwheel and then smacks his leg on the fence. She really does mean it. "I'm sure it's changed since I moved."
"Not a lot," Andy admits.
He leads the way past the couch to the small hallway where their rooms were— or are, in Andy's case. She knows the way, but she lets him take her hand like he's a little kid again, she's the dutiful older sister, and everything is okay.
She has missed so much, she realizes, as the door opens to a scene of early-teenage interest. His bookshelves are neat; his bed is made; there are portraits of Biblical figures on the walls alongside literary ones; and, across the top of the dresser, there is a string of cheap, pink string lights plugged into the wall. They're shaped like flamingos.
Her heart twists in her chest and falls into her stomach. They used to be hers. She got them for her birthday when she was eleven and added them to her room immediately, between neatly-arranged porcelain figurines and collected bits of rocks and wood. Like everything else that used to be hers, she left it behind.
On a whim of a hunch, she reaches for the other door at the end of the hall and wrenches it open. This used to be her room, she knows, as she opens up into it.
It isn't anymore. This used to be a bedroom, with a bed against the wall and the window, a nightstand that used to hold a diary and a blue glitter gel pen, a dresser topped by a rock collection, and a collection of books and Bibles on shelves around the room. Now it's a study and a craft room: a desk against one wall, a table in the center, pipe cleaners and hot glue sticks in organizers on bookshelves between books on teaching literature to children and theology in the twentieth century.
She tries not to let her heart break when she sees it. She should have expected this. Coming back was a pipe dream, wasn't it?
She doesn't cry. She kind of wants to. She just frowns, with her hand still on the doorknob, and thinks exactly nothing about it.
"Hey, Tiff," Drew asks, a thousand miles behind her. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," she decides, voice foreign to herself. She isn't sure if she's lying or not. "I think I'm alright."
"Okay." Skepticism bleeds through in his tone. She tries her hardest to ignore it. Drew turns to Andy, instead. "Well, Andy. What were you getting up to before we got here? I'm sure we interrupted."
"I wasn't doing much." Andy's face goes red, the way it does when he's lying and trying to seem like he isn't. "I was just— just reading."
"Uh-huh." Drew grins. "I'm sure you were, kid. I'm sure you were."
"So what were you really doing?" Tiff asks, trying to be normal despite the odd little blow. (She knows she'll feel the whole impact of it later.)
"I was reading a book."
"What kind of book?"
"The Aetherium," he admits, voice quiet, head bowed a little in shame.
Drew laughs. "Tiff hates those things. She read one book back in June—"
"And I hated it. I had a bad time." She shrugs, mind whirling around the reveal and what it would mean if he were caught. "I think Andy is probably the right age to get into it, though. For that kind of literature."
Even if it is a horrible idea. Dad might not be so strict about what Andy reads (and Tiff read, when she lived here), but their mother will go ballistic if she finds out. If she finds the books. She used to go through Tiff's stuff all the time. That's how she read all those theories and thoughts about Bigfoot in Tiff's diary; that's how she found the diary in the first place. There was never any privacy here. Who's to say the rules aren't the same for Andy?
"Do you want us to take them with us for a bit?" she blurts. "Because we could do that."
Drew gives her a look. "Why would you take his books?"
"She's right," Andy squeaks, shaking his head. "Will you, Tiff? And then give them back before you leave? So she doesn't find them? I thought you guys were here, I thought..."
"Yeah, of course. Always."
It sucks more than anything that this is something that's even remotely necessary. She takes the books all the same. She tucks them under her arm. "You know, if you were to come by the motel, then maybe we could..."
"Could we read them together?"
"Sure." She ruffles his hair, gives him a genuine smile. "You can come over to the motel and we'll read them together."
"How kind of you," Drew deadpans.
"I'm nothing if not benevolent."
A sound comes from the front of the house, outside the window, in the front of the house. A car pulls up in the driveway, and that can only mean one thing.
She locks eyes with Andy. "Are you allowed to close your door?"
He shakes his head, but he seems to get what she's getting at. Even after two years, they still understand each other on a fundamental and unspoken level. He drags Drew by one hand out to the living room, whispering, "Tiff was never here. You came to drop off— Oh, shoot!"
"This." Tiff reaches into her pocket, pulls out the small ziplock bag of glow-in-the-dark stars, and tosses it to Drew. "I'm going out the window, I'll head down the street past the frats— not down the sororities, the other direction— and I was never here—"
"What the hell do you mean?" Confusion pours out of Drew like watered-down juice. (She wishes she had some. Cran-apple. Delicious.)
"I'm not supposed to be here," she hisses, trying to think quickly. "I wasn't supposed to come home."
There's only one way to avoid the consequences of her transgression. While Andy drags Drew into the living room, Tiff heads into the study and closes the door behind her.
She has never been more grateful for her seeming inability in her back pocket, because she gets the feeling that it's going to come in handy, that she has a screwdriver in there.
She opens up the window— the one that faces the side yard where that tree fell all those years ago. She pops out the screen and climbs through. While she does, she can hear the front door open and the snippets of conversation after.
And her mother sounds so happy. She sounds so pleased when she opens the front door and says, "Oh, Drew, I didn't expect to see you here."
"Oh, I just got here. I came by to drop off these glow-in-the-dark stars."
"And I let him in to use the bathroom," Andy adds.
There's a quick moment of quiet. Tiff doesn't need to be in the room or even in the house to know the look that her mother is giving Andy, or that the kid is going to get in trouble later. That's how it goes. That's how all of this goes.
She climbs out over the desk, careful not to leave footprints behind, careful not to land in the mud beneath the exterior sill.
Voices still come from inside, but she can't hear them as well from here, as she puts the screen back into place.
Then she realizes her big mistake. She left her left boot by the front door. There's no no way she can get it. That would be to admit she came back when she was told not to— disobedience of their final order, a sin, a crime. She's eighteen. This is trespassing, and not in the fun way.
Closing the window gently from the outside before she puts the screen back on, she taps out a text to Drew with her other hand, asking him to discreetly take it. It would be obvious to anyone looking, she knows, that it isn't Andy's and it isn't Drew's. Neither of them wear black boots with green laces, just as neither of them actually intended on all of this—
There's no time to spiral about this. In her stocking feet, she starts her walk down the street.
These are Denny's socks, she realizes. She doesn't know why she has them; she doesn't know why that is the easiest thing to concentrate on here. Little sharks in a band around her ankle, pushed down in the franticness of leaving.
It's going to be fine. Her heart is still beating in her ears and she has a small pile of Aetherium books and one boot to carry with her. But there's stuff to move on to and think about, and there's plenty of time to do those things in.
Later, though. She can do that later. After youth group.