January 26th, 2013
“So, Winter, how is your ankle feeling?”
My mother had bombarded yet another one of our book club sessions on a chilly Saturday afternoon, promptly from returning from her errands. We sat on my bed, papers scattered around us, a small throw pillow propping Winter’s injured ankle up. She said that they were doctor’s orders, and I’d never known Winter to take anybody’s orders, so it seemed like a rather significant request.
“It’s feeling a little bit better, thank you, Mrs. Carson,” Winter told her, smiling in that way that was to expected of your child’s best friend.
“I’m glad,” She told her, leaning against the doorframe intrusively. “That seemed like a pretty nasty fall.”
“I don’t remember much of it,” Winter said quietly, her voice having trailed off. Even the unwise person could sense that Winter was uncomfortable, but my mother didn’t have that keen, intrinsic ability of distinguishing an appropriate topic from an inappropriate one.
“Did you hit your head at all? Your head looks fine. At least, I think, I mean, I’m no doctor. But if you’re hurting, maybe you’d like some ice—?”
“No thanks, mom, she’s fine. For the hundredth time,” I interrupted, frustrated beyond belief.
My mom frowned at me, sighing, as what seemed to be sense crawled back into her head. She nodded, leaving the security of the doorway, taking only one step out just to put one in after she saw Winter’s copy of The Decampment lying on my bed, a sizeable chunk of it already highlighted and annotated. She beamed, walking over to pick it up, “Oh, my goodness, is this was your little book clubs are for?”
“Yes, mother,” I said firmly. I only ever said mother when something was wrong, but it didn’t seem that it mattered to her.
She ignored me, pointing to the hardcover of the book, glancing at Winter, “This is a great story. Chapter twenty-five’ll kill you, though—”
“—Alright, mom, enough,” I snapped, full of ire as I got up to usher her forcibly out of my room, taking her far enough until she could walk the rest of the way on her own accord.
“All right, all right,” she muttered, grumpy, setting the book down on my shelf. At the doorway, she stopped and looked back at us. “If you need anything, though, Winter, just call—”
“—Just call you, trust me, we know,” I sighed, hurrying to the door to shut it tightly closed. The door shut, I set my back against it, as if she might try to slam it open again. I took in a deep breath, exhaling long and hard as Winter eyed me with tacit amusement.
“She’s sweet,” Winter said, grinning as she leaned against my headboard, setting her book down on my comforter. I backed away from the door, grabbing the book, and sitting down at the foot of the bed as I glanced to her.
“She’s my mother, of course she’s sweet,” I muttered. "But it doesn't mean I want her parading around my room every time I have someone over." I reopened the book to the page we’d been at before my mother interrupted us, my eyes darting about the page as I could feel Winter’s eyes on me.
I could see her frown from the corner of my eye, and I tilted my head up to meet her gaze. “What?” I asked pensively.
Still frowning, she slumped her shoulders, as if she’d lost a battle. She adjusted herself, her ankle looking uncomfortable, “I just…” she sighed, shaking her head, “…well, are you okay?"
I blinked at her, confused. I narrowed my eyes, “…What do you mean?"
“Well, I mean, about what happened. About me, and how I…” she paused, like she’d lost her words and couldn’t find them for the life of her. “…And how I left.”
I averted eye contact with her, staring down at the words. I tried to make it look like I was reading, but it was more of a distraction than anything. I didn’t want to seem averse, but I felt like I’d been slighted; like I’d been pushed away onto the sidelines, just like so many other times before. I had to admit, I was hurt, but I didn’t want to talk about it just yet. I was happy to see her again, and I didn’t want to ruin it, because this time, I wasn’t sure how long it would last.
“It’s fine, Winter. It’s in the past.
Winter pursed her lips, irate. Narrowing her eyes at me, she nudged me with her brace. “Come on, look. I know you must be annoyed,” she said. “Bronwyn told me that the doctors wouldn’t let you in because you’re not family. She told me that you waited for me.”
My nerves tightened, my muscles straining. I bit down on my tongue to stop from saying something stupid, but I worked out a small word for measure. “It was nothing, really. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Ugh, you’re so modest. It’s nauseating.”
“What?” I said, “Would you have me be arrogant?"
She shook her head hopelessly, her eyes tired and glassy, like they were here but somewhere else entirely, ignoring me. “They said…they said you were really shook up,” she paused, clenching her fists. “And I’m sorry.”
I looked up from the book, long enough to see contrition written on her face in bold. I frowned, the curious question that’d been burning in my head all week wanting to burst from my head. “Winter,” I mustered, my throat sore and weak. “Why’d you just get up and leave?”
She frowned. “I told you this before. I don’t want to talk about—”
“—No, not that. That’s not what I’m asking you about,” I said nervously, shaking my head. “I mean why did you leave me. Up there. In the tree house.”
Her face fell suddenly, all of a sudden and all at once, her eyes, nose, mouth, freckles and all just fallen, as if they were all shooting stars, streaky across the skies. “Henry,” she said tentatively, and I knew suddenly, by the way she said my name so carefully, that something was amiss. “I’m not good with goodbyes.”
I felt my throat tighten like a noose, “Was that supposed to be goodbye?”
Her face hardened like stone, “It was supposed to be ‘so long.’”
“You were going to leave.”
“Yeah,” she said, sullenly. Hearing her say it suddenly felt so much more definite; so much more concrete. “I was going to leave.”
I was groping for any answer I could find at this point. “But why?” I begged.
“Because,” she whispered softly, under her breath, but just loud enough to hear, “I can’t do this anymore.”
My face hardened, and my fingers clenched around each other, like vines of ivy around a post. “So you decided to just get up and leave,” I said, the prospect of such a thing still tasting foreign on my tongue.
“I suppose so,” she said with a frown. A moment of silence settled between us, and she nudged me with her injured foot, “Look, Henry, I’m sorry. But I’m not gone now, okay? I’m here”—she gestured up and down herself, like she was proud of her own presence—“satisfied?”
I wasn’t really, but it wasn’t the sort of thing to vocalize.
“Hey—stop looking so mopey. I swear, I’ll jump out another tree house if you make that face one second longer.”
I got up from the edge of the bed, scratching my neck nervously. I shifted my eyes to her and tried my hardest to feign joy. And while I was sure it was less than convincing, it was suffice for her to go on.
“Now pick up the damn book, Henry, and read to me,” she said, settling in on my bed, adjusting herself to make herself comfortable. She smiled at me, a glint in her eye that beckoned me to retrieve the book and recite the entire thing to her until my throat went completely dry.
With trepidation, I approached my own bed once more, picking up her copy of The Decampment. I sighed, flipping to where I last left off, watching as Winter smiled to herself at the sound of turning pages. She closed her eyes the moment I began to recite the chapter, fading off into her own world comprised of nothing more than sun kissed days and snowy nights.
❄
January 28th, 2013
“You’re a fucking dick, Jake Benjamin Gavin.”
Annoyed, I rapped on Hattie’s door for what must’ve been the fifth or sixth time that morning. In the morning, I was trying to relax before school, but it was abruptly interrupted by the noise of Hattie’s shrieking argument in the room over. She yelled into her phone as music as proportionately whiney as her played in the background in a weak attempt to drown out her own shouts. It wasn’t too efficacious, however, and only disrupted the otherwise peaceful morning.
“Hattie, can you quiet down?” I asked as politely as my temper would allow, after my third or fourth knock on her door. "It's seven AM."
“No—I don’t care—yeah, well you and Maggie can go take your invitation and shove it up your asses.”
I was about to knock again, yell even harder this time, or even kick the door to really catch her attention, but I stopped; just long enough to catch the last bit of her conversation before she cut the line short.
“—Yeah, I don’t think so. I’ve heard enough Jake, alright?—Yeah. I guess so. Maybe Lizzie was right, after all.”
After that, I heard a loud thump. And after knowing Hattie for so many years, accompanied by her temper, she’d probably thrown it at the wall in frustration and had her head buried under a pillow. Hesitantly, I knocked on the door—softly, this time.
“Hey, Hattie?—What’s wrong?”
There was silence for a minute, up until I called her name again, more loudly. The door opened immediately, and standing in its way was my tiny sister, looking more vulnerable than I’d seen her in years. I hardly ever saw her without makeup, but there she was—red, puffy eyes, chapped lips, and her hair, messy and disheveled like she’d not slept a wink but instead spent the whole night rolling in a mess of sheets.
“What do you want, Henry?” She finally asked, her voice tiny and weak, like a little girl’s.
I frowned, reaching my hand across the threshold to touch her shoulder—slowly, as if I was afraid she might vanish before my fingertips touched real flesh—and pulled her closer to me. “What happened? Why are you so upset with Jake and Maggie?”
She frowned, water pooling in her puffy dark eyes. She shook her head, staring down at her feet, “I really don’t want to talk about this with you—”
“—Hattie, I’m your brother. Just tell me, okay? I won’t judge you, or anything—”
She pulled away, her shoulder jerking out of my grip, “No. Just stop. Stop trying to be understanding.”
I frowned, my arm falling to my side, “I just—”
“—I know you’re trying to help, but you can’t. You don’t know anything about me.”
I looked at her, confused. I crossed my arms, standing before her in awe. “Of course I do.”
Her lower lip trembled like a scale, and she shook her head, wiping the premature tears that hadn’t yet fallen with the back of her hand. “You don’t, though. When was the last time we actually had a conversation, Henry?”
I narrowed my eyes, wondering if this was some sort of practical joke. “Yesterday, we did. We talked about—”
“—We talked about Mom’s shitty lasagna. Big deal,” she deadpanned. “No, I mean a real conversation. Like a one-on-one conversation that you seem to always have with your precious Winter.”
I grimaced, taken aback. “What are you trying to say—”
“—You think you have license to be my therapist when you don’t!” She shouted finally, reaching the point where her tears were no longer contained, spilling down her face like rivulets. “Did you even notice how down I was last week?”
I shook my head slowly, trying to remember the events of last week, but they were all blurred by the pandemonium of Winter’s accident. “I…”
She face fell, and whatever part of her that held hope inside of her seemed to die. She looked like she was shaking, and she wrapped herself in her own arms. She took in a deep breath, “Last week,” she said, her voice cracking by the end of the sentence, “Maggie slept with Jake.”
I frowned, taking a minute to let herself adjust to the sound of her saying such a thing out loud. I paused, licking my dried lips, “…But…you and Jake…you weren’t…”
She whimpered like a puppy, and she finally buried herself in her hands. She drew in a sharp breath, her words choppy like waves on a riptide, “We were...we did.”
Slowly, I felt my heart break. My shoulders went limp, my arms falling again to my sides, “Oh, Hattie…” I muttered softly against the sound of her whimpers.
She looked up, her eyes redder than before, “And now he’s calling me every second trying to tell me about how drunk he was, and how it was Maggie’s fault. Tell me, how can it be your fault if you fuck someone else?” She asked the ground, distraught. “And Lizzie told me not to let him in like that. She told me: ‘Hattie, he’s not loyal, he’ll only use you when he wants.’ And even though I’ve known her for years, I didn’t seem to care. I just…bought right into his game. It’s so stupid, I can’t believe how stupid I was. I’m so stupid. I’m so, so stupid,” she mumbled, repeating the same three terrible words over and over again until she finally believed them.
I let out a long, lingering sigh, before I allowed myself to go anywhere near her. I tried to touch her shoulder again, like a mother might, but I was no mother. I was just this boy, who happened to live in the same house as her and share two parents, but who also happened to not know anything about this girl at all.
But at the same time, I might’ve been only a boy she knew from birth who lived down the hall from her, but I was also the closest pair of arms in sight. And as quickly as my fingers brushed her skin, she dove into my arms like it was the only source of solace for miles. She cried, and she cried, for what must’ve been ten minutes, soaking my t-shirt and digging into my back with her nails. And as she cried, I stroked her hair and whispered, “it’s okay, it’s okay,” into her ear over and over, even though I had no clue. I had no clue if it’d be sunny or cloudy tomorrow, and I had no clue if I’d be on time for school; I had no clue if Winter would run off again just like I had no idea if I’d be able handle it if she did.
But though I could not tell the future, I could still hold my baby sister. I could still brush her hair with my fingertips and hold her away from whatever evil came her way. I could still whisper her votes of confidence, whether they were furtive lies or brazen truths. And even though I was just this strange boy who did not know a thing about her, who broke bread with her at dinner and sipped sparkling apple cider with her on New Year’s and bought her birthday presents wrapped in pink paper and argued with her when nothing else seemed right, I could still pretend as if, for a moment, I was the only one in the world who so much as knew her name.
❄
“I can’t believe that.”
“I know. It’s bullshit.”
“Well, we have to do something about it, don’t we?”
“I don’t know. What would we do?”
“I don’t know,” Winter mumbled, chewing at her stubby fingernails. The cold awaited us outside as I helped her across the parking lot to her car. Though she was contained in a brace, she kept up with me at a near steady pace, all while keeping her rage intact.
I’d waited until the last moment of the day to tell her about the incident that morning with Hattie so that she wouldn’t be fuming about it all day. I could tell, deep inside of her, that she had a certain soft spot for my baby sister, and that she’d be just as aggravated by the news as I was.
“We’ve got to hit him where it hurts most,” she said, turning her head up to the sky. “Don’t you think so?”
“If only we knew where that was,” I muttered, looking around the parking lot to find the man himself, headed to his car. It was an impressive looking vintage model, though I wasn’t sure of the type or the year. I nudged Winter’s side, pointing to him, “Speak of the devil.”
“…And he shall appear,” she finished with a smirk.
I nodded in silent agreement, and when we finally approached her car, I opened the door for her, helping her in. The whole time, though, her eyes remained glued to Jake, in the distance. “You know,” she said, chewing pensively at her lip. “That’s a pretty nice car.”
“Yeah,” I agreed with a shrug. “S’pose so.”
She looked up at me with a mischievous grin, “I bet you he likes it a lot.”
Slowly, I caught on, and my eyes widened once I realized exactly what it was that Winter wanted to do. My mouth fell slightly ajar, and I wondered aloud, “You don’t mean…”
She smirked, right before closing her door. “We’re gonna need a phone book.”
❄
By the time Winter finally called me, it was verging on eleven o’clock at night.
“You do realize the time, don’t you?” I whispered into my phone, throwing my legs off my bed. I hadn’t changed into pajamas in anticipation of this moment, and I hovered at my door, peering out both ways with the fear that my parents might still be up.
“Well, we can’t do something like this in broad daylight, can we?” She rebutted with a laugh.
“No, I suppose not,” I said softly, making a break for the hallway, heading down the stairs as quietly as possible. I tiptoed to the first floor, where I quietly opened the door, only to see Winter’s Volkswagen Bug, loitering at the curb. I could see her face through the foggy window and she waved to me, a grin plastered to her face.
I grinned back at her, hanging up the call as I quietly locked the door behind her, joining her at the curb. I hopped into the passenger seat, meeting her gaze with a mix of enthusiasm and fright. It seemed that Winter, however was entirely filled with excitement for the night and whatever she’d planned.
“Are you ready?” She asked me, starting up the car.
I nodded at her, “As I’ll ever be.”
With another mischievous grin, she nodded, putting her foot to the pedal. With that, we sped off, slowly, and then as quickly as it would take to match the beating of our pumping hearts.
---
a/n: WOW AN UPDATE I GUESS MIRACLES DO HAPPEN
i missed you guys so yeah comment if you'd like i'd love to hear if any of you are still keeping up with this story
and dedicated to flippantdevilmaycare for their lovely comment last chapter :)