GetAwayFromHer.
GetAway.
I watch, enthralled, horrified as my sister smiles.
It’s like she knows him. Like she belongs there, smiling with him.
I’m alone and she’s there.
It’s wrong.
It’s wrong.
I grit my teeth again, because it’s not wrong. My sister is an adult and she can do what she wishes and obviously it’s normal for her to smile at a guy.
But not him, the voices protest, so many of them that I can’t tell them apart. There’s something about him, something wrong, something he’s hiding.
He’s hiding.
YouCan’tTellHerSheWon’tBelieveYou. For the first time, I agree with them. Calla would never believe me if I voiced this reservation, because I don’t have any proof.
All I have is a feeling.
And we all know I’m crazy.
11
UNDECIM
Calla
I sort through the million different kinds of pasta sauce, picking one, before I find Dare in the shampoo aisle.
I’m halfway to him when my eye falls on Dove, the kind of shampoo my mother used. I can almost smell her hair as she hugged me, and my throat clams up and I pointedly look away, because that’s what I have to do when something reminds me. I have to ignore it and put it away for later. Because I simply can’t deal with it now.
“Are you ready?” I ask Dare. He nods, then eyes my heaping cart.
“Good thing we brought your car and not my bike,” he observes. I have to laugh, but I don’t want to explain how my father is sliding, how we’re out of every imaginable thing in my house. So I don’t.
Instead, we check out and load our stuff into the trunk and get on our way.
But once we’re on the road, Dare turns to me.
“I could use a drink. Could you?”
I’m giddy that he thinks I’m old enough, but I shake my head. “I’m not twenty-one,” I tell him sheepishly, but honestly, why am I embarrassed? My age is not my fault.
Dare grins, unaffected. “I meant a soda, young one.”
“Oh. Well, I know a coffee house. And they have sodas.”
“Let it be so, then,” he announces theatrically, like he’s at the helm of the Starship Enterprise.
“You’re not a Trekkie, are you?” I ask, scared that I might finally be finding a fault in this seemingly perfect guy as I turn the car down a narrow city street. He glances sidelong at me.
“What’s that?”