Fracture Page 25

“No, it didn’t. She could’ve died.”

Quietly, Dad said, “We thought she did.”

Nobody spoke for a few moments. Then Mom said, “I already lost her once.”

“There are other ways you can lose her and you know it.

She’s seventeen. How old were you the last time you spoke to your parents?”

Mom only ever mentioned her parents in the negative. She inherited bad eyesight from her father and cavity-prone teeth from her mother. She never told me who gave her the hazel eyes or the dimple in her left cheek, both of which I inherited. They were long dead and I never knew them. I couldn’t believe Dad played that card.

They came back into the dining room and resumed eating. “You can go,” Dad said again. “This steak is delicious.”

I stared at them. “Why did you stop talking to your parents, Mom?”

Mom shot Dad a look and threw her napkin on the table. She excused herself and started scrubbing pots in the next room.

Dad shook his head at me. “Anyone can have kids,” he said. “Anyone.”

Ceramic and glass banged against one another as Mom loaded the dishwasher in record speed. “At least they’re dead,” I said.

Dad put down his fork and wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “They’re not dead, Delaney.”

“But she says—”

“She says they’re dead to her.”

A piece of steak went down the wrong way, and I coughed and gagged into my napkin, like I was choking on the information.

Dad stood up to bring his plate into the kitchen, but first he grabbed my wrist. “Don’t,” he said. “I can already see the wheels in your head spinning. Leave it alone.”

My brain scrambled to make room for the existence of these people. Grandparents I’d never known. They went from hypothetical, empty memories to blurry, unformed shapes in my head. Dead one second, alive the next.

Kind of like me.

Chapter 7

The next few days passed in the comfort of the expected. Studying and exams and Decker and no twitching hands or itching brain or excursions down the street in the middle of the night. Maybe I was healed. Maybe all I needed was time. Maybe I needed to immerse myself fully in my life and stop thinking about dying. Or resurrected grandparents.

So on Thursday when exams were done and Decker came over, I had plans to keep busy.

“I have a project for us,” I said.

Decker looked out the window at the falling snow. “Is this like the project where we had to categorize the different types of snow like the Eskimos?”

“Not at all. And it wasn’t like the Eskimos. It was my own original idea. I didn’t know someone else tried it first.”

He turned back to my bookshelf. “So, is it like when we had to alphabetize your books and then the kitchen pantry?”

“I think the food was your idea.”

“I was really, really bored.”

“Well anyway, I have a plan to finish all our required reading for next semester over the break.”

He rolled his eyes. “That’s a really lame plan.”

“It’s a great plan. We’ll save so much time in the spring.”

“You’re forgetting a major point. I don’t do required reading.”

When we were ten, he took pictures of every heap of snow and taped them into a loose-leaf notebook. He wrote descriptions under each image. I, on the other hand, collected samples in Mason jars and stored them in the freezer. By the next day, they all looked the same. When we were thirteen, we alphabetized the contents of my parents’ cabinets. I ordered by brand name: Campbell, Kellogg, Kraft. He categorized and subcategorized for content: soup, chicken noodle; soup, minestrone; soup, split pea.

He’d do it. I knew he’d do it. It was all a matter of what I’d have to give. “I’ll do your math homework for a month.”

He raised his eyebrows at me and smirked. “Sold.”

“You’re cheap,” I said as I scanned my bookshelf.

“Joke’s on you. I would’ve done it anyway.”

I handed him Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Decker’s eyes widened. “Never mind, joke’s on me. This is a joke right?”

I sat on my bed and leaned back on the pillow, watching the planets circle my head. “Better get started,” I said.

Decker fanned the pages. “This is, like, twelve hundred pages!”

“Like I said, better get started.”

Decker propped his legs on my bed and crossed his feet at my waist. I hung an arm over his ankles, and he started to read.

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