The Fall Read online

  Her heart pounded so hard that her vision throbbed.

  Even in her lap she could still feel the warmth of another hand within her own.

  “I said ‘warm in there?’” Mare said, chuckling.

  “Absolutely freezing,” she whispered.

  “I can imagine, it being nearly winter and all. It was sarcasm, Missy.”

  She smiled, the rose slowly blooming back into her cheeks.

  Mare plopped down beside her on the bank, tossing off his Vans and socks and thrusting his feet beneath the water beside her with a splash that dotted her legs with frigid water. He was already taller than she was, even though she had two solid years on him and was reasonably tall for a girl. He stood just over six feet with hair a shade lighter than hers, spiked into a ruffled mess atop his head. His face was smooth as a crystal ball, but he still shaved it once a week religiously. Apparently that was one of the passages into manhood. From the side, he looked remarkably like she imagined her father must have looked at that age, though Mare was thinner, his limbs taut and wiry. Quick reflexes and Gumby-like flexibility made him in high demand as goalie for both the soccer and hockey teams. Their father had always been disappointed that his only son never played football. And even though he wasn’t the star quarterback or the leading goal scorer, and his nose had been broken more than once by a stray puck, he still turned some heads walking down the hallway at school. Even Megan Tillman, who just graduated with Missy, had a thing for her little brother.

  “You sure you’re ready to do this?” Mare asked, his eyes fixed on the river. He didn’t want to see any indecision in her eyes.

  “Of course,” Missy said without hesitation. “You’re my brother for crying out loud.”

  He smiled and nodded, but still stared straight ahead.

  “What’s wrong?” Missy asked. “You starting to get nervous?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t want you screwing up your education trying to take care of me,” he said, finally turning to face her.

  “Jesus!” she gasped, immediately jerking her feet from the water and propping herself on her knees, cupping either side of his face with her hands. “What the hell happened to you?”

  He smiled, but couldn’t bring himself to look up to her face. His left eye was swollen into a purplish mass of pulpy tissue, the eye a slit of black amidst the knotting bruise. Two streaks of blood drew diagonals from the outer corner of his eye, dribbling thin rivulets of blood toward his cheek.

  “It’s not as bad as it must look,” he said, his forced smile never wavering.

  “Did he do this to you?” she nearly screamed, forcing his chin up so he had no choice but to meet her stare.

  “I had it coming.” His smile appeared to bear a twitch of mirth.

  “What did you do this time?”

  “You know we don’t have enough money to get us to Nashville—”

  “You didn’t.”

  “She keeps all that cash in their closet.”

  “Put it back.”

  “No way! They owe us at least the gas down there!”

  “We don’t need their money.”

  “I consider it a ‘bon voyage’ gift.”

  “We don’t need anything from them at all!” she huffed, lurching to her feet.

  “The hell we don’t!”

  “Lord only knows what she does to get that money.”

  “I don’t care if she’s thieving jewelry off of corpses—”

  “Was it worth the black eye? Hmm? You’ve got nothing but that shiner to show for it!”

  “Who says I don’t?” he said slyly, the left corner of his mouth curling upward.

  “You didn’t give the money back?”

  “What money?”

  “You’re really starting to piss me off!”

  “There’s no money missing from their closet.”

  She sighed and felt her teeth grinding. Planting her fists on her hips, she cocked her head, raised an eyebrow, and waited.

  “Like I said. All of the money’s still in their closet…just not exactly where they put it.”

  “What if they went looking for it and found our hidden money?”

  “They won’t.”

  “What if they did? Then what?”

  He shook his head.

  “They won’t, okay?” Mare said with a shrug. “Besides, I only pulled a twenty from Staci’s stash. She usually doesn’t even notice.”

  “You’ve done this before I take it?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t gotten into one of those rolls.”

  “Never,” she said. “So what did you do with the money?”

  “I put it with the rest.”

  “Mare…”

  “Okay, okay. You know that hole in the ceiling of their closet leading up to the attic?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, if you push the panel up and reach toward the back, you’ll find a manila envelope filled with cash. For us, Missy. For us.”

  “Look at you,” she sighed, gingerly reaching toward his mashed eye. “It’s not worth this.”

  He smiled.

  “Like I said, I can’t have you throwing away your future for your screw up of a brother.”

  She couldn’t stay mad at him. He was her baby brother after all.

  “You’re not a screw up,” she whispered, ruffling his gelled hair.

  He nodded, pulling a smooth stone from the bank and pressing the nearly frozen surface to his throbbing eye.

  “I want to go now,” he said softly.

  “We just have to wait a couple more months. I can’t start classes until after Christmas, and we can’t afford to get a place of our own this soon. We’d run out of money way too soon.”

  “There’s easily a couple grand up there.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been pulling a twenty from her wad once or twice a week for the last few years.”

  “Years?”

  “I didn’t want you to get upset.”

  A couple grand? That was first and last month’s rent on a decent apartment with money left over to stock the cupboards. Throw in the four grand she’d set aside from waiting tables, all of her tip money since she was sixteen, and the grant money she’d receive with her first student loan check, and they just might be all right after all.

  She looked up into the clear blue sky, shaking her head.

  She was scared.

  Missy leveled her eyes on her brother’s face, studying the deep black ring swelling around his eye like a decomposing donut. She hated her father for hurting him. How would he feel? she wondered. How would he feel if he walked down the stairs in the morning and I was waiting there with a baseball bat—?

  That wasn’t her. That wasn’t the Melissa Stringer who graduated first in her class and served as student body treasurer all four years. That wasn’t the Melissa Stringer who fancied herself growing into the woman that her mother would have wanted her to become.

  The frightening thing was that it easily could be. She could almost feel the grain of the wood against her palms as she clenched her fists around the bat, twisting and tightening, jaw muscles clenched, Louisville Slugger raised over her right shoulder…

  “Two weeks,” she whispered.

  “What?” Mare asked, his face dripping with bewilderment. He dropped the rock into the river and climbed to his feet, walking to where Missy stood with her back to him. He gently placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “I get my next paycheck in two weeks,” she said without turning around. He could feel her trembling. “We’ll go then.”

  Mare turned his sister slowly, both enraged and terrified by the sheen of tears glimmering over her eyes. He pulled her to his chest and wrapped both arms around her. She shuddered against him, a soundless sob releasing the flood of tears onto his shoulder.

  He wanted to say something to make everything all right with the world again, wanted to whisper something reassuring so that she would know that no ma
tter what happened, everything was going to work out for the best, but he knew if he even tried to open his mouth to vocalize his feelings, he’d be standing there by the river crying with her. So he lowered his chin and kissed the top of her head.

  Two weeks.

  He stole a hand back and winced before his fingertips even came into contact with his eye.

  Two weeks.

  VI

  Eugene, Oregon

  “OH, YEAH! STICK THAT UGLY HEAD OF YOURS AROUND THAT CORNER AGAIN and give me a clean shot at it!”

  A skeletal manifestation slunk onto the screen. It was immediately barraged with bright blue laser bursts to the thorax and face. Both arms shot out to its sides, the hands enveloped in glowing balls of power; electric blue lightning snapped from one side of the screen to the other before the monster exploded with a pixilated spray of gore.

  “Who’s your daddy?” Rick gloated, nodding and shifting the joystick from the right side of the keyboard to the left. His thumbs were beginning to ache and his elbows were bruising his thighs.

  “Dude,” Darren snapped from where he knelt on the couch, the curtains pinched in his fingers and parted just enough for him to see out into the sunlight while still wallowing in the anonymity of the shadows within. “You’ve got to check this out!”

  Rick Megget paused the game and arose from the computer for the first time in three hours. His knees popped loudly as he walked, his pale legs trying to readjust to his weight. His hazel eyes were bloodshot from staring at the monitor all afternoon, his face scruffy with a couple of days’ worth of growth. Were it not for the backwards Seahawks cap and the jean shorts that hung below his knees, he would have been a dead ringer to portray the live action version of Shaggy from “Scooby-Doo.”

  “Why don’t you just go across the street and see if any of them require the services of a future doctor?” he asked, nudging Darren aside so he could see through the slit.

  It appeared as though every Kappa Delta in the house was out on the lawn sunbathing. Granted, bikini season had long since come and gone, but the majority were out there on towels in their shorts and belly shirts or halter-tops. One had to take advantage of the sunny days in the Pacific Northwest, as it could cloud up at any moment, and Lord only knew how long it would be before the sun burnt off the rainstorms again. That was why they paid a thousand bucks a month for a three bedroom dump when they could have had a much nicer house a couple of blocks further from the university for nearly three hundred dollars less.

  “Oh, to be a bottle of Coppertone,” Darren mused, wiping his damp lips with the back of his hand. His wavy streaked hair was pulled back as flat as he could manage on his crown, though it was only a matter of time before it frizzed back again. He had a slender face with sharp features and a long thin neck. His shamrock green eyes betrayed his O’Neal roots every bit as much as his affinity for Guinness.

  “Seriously, Dare. Are you going to waste this whole year staring at them across the street or are you going to get up the nerve to cross it?”

  “What chance does someone like me have with someone like…?”

  “Gina Andrews,” they said in unison as a blonde with long tanned legs strode out of the open front door in heeled sandals. A loose sundress made of material as thin as air hovered about her form, the low cut of the front split in two by a swell of cleavage they could clearly see from all the way across the street. She had lips the color of maraschino cherries and eyes a blinding color of blue that nature had reserved just for her. There was just an aura about her, as though she was something so special that even the air around her had to take a step back admiringly.

  Three other girls flocked to her side from the lawn, their tanned bodies already glistening with a mixture of sweat and tanning oil. While a moment prior, each would have been considered gorgeous, by merely coming within her vicinity they were made plain by contrast.

  “What I wouldn’t give for just five minutes—”

  “What are you guys doing?” Ray Gorman shouted from immediately behind them.

  Darren and Rick nearly left the ground, loosing the curtains to flutter back into place. Neither had heard him descend the gray-carpeted stairs from the second floor.

  “You trying to give me a heart attack?” Darren gasped, while Rick merely took a step away from the couch and socked his roommate in the shoulder.

  Ray laughed. “Man you guys don’t even have a pair between you.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Darren said. “You’ve already got a girlfriend.”

  “I certainly didn’t get her by stalking her from across the street.”

  “Funny.”

  “Come on, guys. We’re pre-med. Don’t you know what that means?”

  “It doesn’t mean jack until we have that M.D. after our names,” Rick said. “You know…many dollars, mucho dinero.”

  “Microscopic di—”

  “Shut up, Gorman!” Rick barked, pounding Ray in the shoulder again.

  “Do it again,” Ray said, raising a fist.

  Rick socked him in the exact same spot again before Ray even saw Rick move.

  “Damn,” he groaned, turning and rubbing madly at his shoulder.

  “Who’s your daddy?”

  Ray’s face was bright red, and beneath his T-shirt, he was sure the forming knot was a miasma of blue, purple, and black.

  “Who’s your daddy?” Rick demanded again.

  “For God’s sake, Rick,” Ray huffed, his long bangs hanging in front of his eyes. Usually, he would have quickly dragged them back over his ear, but one arm was nearly paralyzed with alternating tingling sensations and outright bolts of pain, while the other kneaded at the swelling bruise.

  “Incoming,” Darren said, having resumed his position by the front window after tiring of the macho posturing. “Three bogeys, moving fast.”

  “That’s why you’re still single,” Ray said.

  Darren leaned farther back to ensure that he wouldn’t be seen, watching as the girls stepped out onto the street from the walk in front of the sloped lawn of the sorority house. Browned fern leaves littered the gutter, but they simply hopped over and looked quickly to either side before slipping out from between the cars parallel parked along the road.

  “It’s only Tina,” Rick said, looking over Darren’s shoulder. He took a quick whiff. “Are you wearing Axe?”

  Darren ignored him, watching the three sets of long, tanned legs striding confidently across the weathered asphalt.

  “Who’s with her?” Ray asked, heading through the doorway into the kitchen in anticipation of her arrival. Two Pepsi cans popped open, one after the other, and fizzled in either hand as Ray came back into the living room.

  “Looks like Jill and April,” Darren said.

  Rick rolled his head back on his shoulders and sighed up into the ceiling.

  “Jill’s a great girl,” Ray said. “And besides, no beggar ought to turn down a burger.”

  “It’ll take a whole sixer for me to want fast food, when there’s filet mignon right over there.”

  Both Ray and Darren knew exactly who he was referring to. What had begun as something of a crush for Gina had turned into a full-blown obsession. She was way out of Rick’s league, and everyone seemed to know it except him. Of course, the best he could manage to muster was a nervous “Hi” in passing, though once he had driven her home from class during a rainstorm. They still heard about that on a daily basis.

  Ray transferred both cans into his left hand, stacked one atop the other, and opened the door before the doorbell rang, looping his arm around Tina’s waist and drawing her into the front room.

  “S’bout time,” he said with a crooked smile.

  “We’ve got a test in microbiology tomorrow, and you know as well as I that we weren’t going to get any studying done here.”

  “Micro was cake,” Ray said.

  “Someday you’re going to actually have to work for something,” Tina said through a smirk.

  “Not tod
ay, I hope,” he said, mashing his lips against hers.

  “Get a room,” Rick said, shaking his head as he walked back across the room and plopped down in front of the computer. He un-paused the game and took hold of the joystick.

  “What crawled up his butt?” April asked, but Jill silenced her with a sharp elbow to the side.

  Electronic laser-fire echoed from the corner of the room where the computer was set up on a rectangular desk beneath a set of shelves displaying an array of empty beer bottles.

  Ray Gorman smoothed back his bangs with one practiced motion and lowered his eyes to find Tina’s azure stare. Their hair was nearly the same shade of brownish-blond, though hers was streaked with a blond so white it almost looked as though the locks had been ripped from someone else’s head entirely and sewn into her scalp. Her legs were well toned, but her exposed stomach showed a bit of paunch over the tight waist of her shorts, her cropped shirt held away from the stomach by the massive swell of her chest.

  Ray broke the lip lock and handed her a Pepsi before taking her by the hand and bounding up the staircase.

  “So,” Darren said, clapping his hands in front of himself and nodding self-consciously. “A microbiology test, huh?”

  “Yeah,” April said. They were still freshmen, having rushed and been accepted into Kappa Delta, but still living in the dorms across campus. It was somehow much more adult to be away from the campus, whether actually doing something or not. Still these guys were sophomores and had their own place, which made them a whole lot more attractive than the guys back in the dorms. “It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be after the first test.”

  “I did pretty well when I took it last year,” Darren said, trying his hardest to keep his southward drifting eyes focused on her brown eyes made blue by her contact lenses. She had chestnut hair pulled back into a ponytail and an otherwise nondescript face. She was a little heavy, but not so much that it really showed. Her shorts were a little snug over her hips and she tugged unconsciously at the bottom of her shirt to keep it from displaying her little gut. “I could, you know…help you…”