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  CHAPTER 6

  Sage and Aaron hug me goodbye next to Grandpa. Sage pulls back, her hands on my shoulders, freckles framing her hazel eyes. “Sucks you’re going,” she says, and I look at the ground, guilty. “Glad we got you while we did, though,” she turns it around. Jeff reminds them like three times that he’ll be back soon. I guess he’s not thinking about how it might feel for me to hear him say that.

  We bump over the dirt road, past the tarps and the hand-painted signs, retracing our steps. Gradually the dirt turns to asphalt, county roads, and I watch out the window as trailers start to dot the forest, ramshackle houses with moss-spotted roofs. They’re ugly, but there are few enough that they blend in with the woods instead of taking over. As we drive, the buildings multiply, three in a row and then four, convenience store gas station diner. I try to skip over them, keep my gaze on the beautiful parts, branches curving black against sky, green patches silvered with rain; I try to hold on to it as long as I can.

  When we merge onto the highway, the woods slip away, giving way to McDonald’s and Walmart and malls, concrete monstrosities, and suddenly they look like monsters to me, Godzilla stomping out the screaming world beneath his feet. It all just looked like the normal world before, but all of a sudden the plastic and gloss and too-bright colors remind me of Naomi and her lipstick, the jock guys in their polyester jerseys. I remember the dirt in the forest, soft beneath my cheek; I realize that’s what’s under all these strip malls, smothered by fake brightness, and for some reason I almost start to cry.

  Jeff hears me clearing my throat and looks at me sideways. I try to look down so he won’t see, but he does. “What’s wrong?” he says, and I don’t know how to explain it, so I just say, “Nothing.”

  “Are you crying?” he says, his eyes on me, drifting too close to the car in the next lane.

  I don’t answer.

  “Are you?” he says again. I don’t cry in front of people; I don’t know what he’d do if I told him yes.

  “No,” I say. “Whatever.”

  He drifts again, his eyes on me; the car beside us honks. I have to give him something. “I’m just not psyched to go deal with my mom.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “That sucks.” He thinks a minute. “Least you’ve got a place to live, though, right?” Unlike me.

  “Yeah,” I say, staring out the window, wishing I could rip those fucking ugly strip malls off their foundations and expose the real world underneath.

  * * *

  • • •

  Once we’re back into the city, the buildings pile up on each other so quickly that it’s hard to remember there’s anything else, and ugly just turns back into normal. We stop at the diner and I get us dinner and then coffee and then a bunch of refills, trying to delay the inevitable as long as possible. Finally Jeff says, “So I can crash with you, right?” and I realize I hadn’t even thought of that. My chest fills up: I’m so relieved, thinking of spending the night with him. I don’t even care that I might get in trouble. I just don’t want him to go.

  “Sure,” I say. “I’ll sneak you in. Let’s just wait till she’s asleep.”

  I twist the doorknob slow so it doesn’t creak, and Jeff takes off his boots outside. I shut the door silent behind us and wait. Nothing. I was gone the entire weekend, and she’s just sleeping. She’s not up, waiting, wondering where I am. My heart sinks a little, but I don’t know what I thought would be different. She doesn’t need me.

  We slip into my room and into the bed, cocooned beneath the comforter. Jeff doesn’t try anything, and for once I’m relieved; I’m already feeling way too much. I’m feeling the dirt floor of the forest beneath my cheek, the rub and scrape of it, all those people saying thank you. My world’s been so small since Andy died: trying to keep my head down, get through, keep everyone but Jeff away. I’m not used to people seeing me. I want to hide, and bolt; to huddle up and run away. Jeff lies behind me, close, his arm slung over my waist, and I nestle backward into him, trying to pretend he’ll be here past tonight. If Jeff weren't here, the black hole of my house would swallow up this whole past weekend, suck it down and down till it turned into a tiny dot and disappeared. But Jeff was there with me, somewhere outside of this; that makes it real. I repeat it in my head—it was real, it was real, it was real—until I fall asleep.

  The beep of my alarm jolts me awake, and for a second I’m confused, until I look around and realize where I am. My heart sinks. Right. Here. My life. Jeff snores through the alarm; I decide to let him sleep a little longer. I switch off the alarm, click my door shut quietly, and go to take a shower.

  On the way to the bathroom I crack the door to Andy’s room. It’s like a museum, the old house of some dead president, gussied up for tourists: everything exactly in the place where it was when a person lived here. It’s the only part of our house my mom ever cleans. The living room, the kitchen, the den: they all get gross and messy, full of dust. But Andy’s room is spotless. I look at the Pearl Jam posters hanging next to Zeppelin, his T-shirts folded, camping gear stacked perfect in the corner. No one wants it this way but her. It doesn’t keep him alive; it just makes the memory of him hover here, circling around the remnants of what his life used to look like. I grab Andy’s tent and sleeping bag on the way out of his room, just to spite her. Maybe Jeff can use it.

  The shower feels amazing after three days in the woods; hot water blazes clean trails through the dirt on my skin. I’m a little sad to wash the campfire smell out of my hair; I say a silent goodbye as it swirls down the drain and the water runs clean.

  I’m walking back to my room when I hear a thunk above me.

  Shit.

  I clutch the towel around me with one hand, grip Andy’s tent with the other, and rush into my room. Jeff’s awake; he’s getting dressed. I’m naked, though. “She’s up,” I hiss-whisper, pulling underwear and jeans on, fast. Then I hear her on the stairs.

  “Alison?”

  “Hi,” I holler, fingers fumbling to hook my bra. Jeff is gesturing frantically at me, some weird kind of desperate sign language, asking what he should do. It feels like something from a movie, except I don’t have space beneath my bed or a window he can climb through.

  And then the door to my room opens, no knock, and she walks in and finds me in my bra and Jeff fully dressed and my bed unmade, and it’s obvious that he slept here. Her eyes go wide; rage rushes in to fill them like a flood. “Alison.” Her voice is thick with accusation.

  I steel myself, muscles turning to armor as I turn away to put a shirt on.

  Jeff keeps his head down like a beta dog, picks up his pack, and tries to leave my room, but my mom blocks his way. “I’m sorry,” he mutters.

  “Don’t talk to me,” she tells him, still blocking his path. She’s skinnier than him, but she’s not moving. She turns to me. “Alison,” she says.

  I stand there, frozen, hot, skin prickly like a rash. “Alison,” she says again, but then nothing else. Like it’s a heavy bag she set on the ground, and she’s expecting me to pick it up for her.

  “What?” I finally ask. I’m not giving her more than that.

  She looks at me, stunned that I’m not scrambling to explain myself. “What the hell do you mean, what? Where were you?”

  I’m not giving her one speck of where I was. Not a stone or leaf or piece of dirt. Not a name, not a town, not a road—nothing that would let her take what’s mine and make a picture of it in her head. There’s one thing that I realized I can do this weekend: I can refuse. I can lie down in the middle of the road and I can lock myself up and I can refuse to move. I’ve done it once before. So now I try it on her.

  “Nowhere,” I say. In my peripheral vision I see Jeff look at me, shocked.

  “Nowhere? Alison, you were gone for two days!”

  Locked in, clamped down. “So what.”

  “So what?” her voice climbs upward.


  “Yeah, so what,” I say, adrenaline kicking in. I’ve never done this before: just flat-out defied her. Never in my life. I’ve always shut my mouth, kept my head down, given her just enough to keep her off my back. I’ve never even imagined I could say, This is what I’m doing, whether you like it or not. I’m dizzy from it, like at the top of the hill on the roller coaster just before you dip down and your stomach is suspended midair. “I went out. Get over it.”

  She looks at me, shocked, and digs in. “I’m not going to ‘get over it,’ Alison! You’re grounded. For a month. At least. No, you know what? Two months.” She looks at me like she won and now I’m supposed to give up and go hide in the corner.

  “And what if I don’t listen to you?”

  “You don’t have a choice.” She takes a step toward me. Her cheeks are red, her eyes awake now. I feel Jeff behind me; he takes a step toward me, too. He has my back.

  “Sure I do,” I say. “I’m not grounded. I’m going out. See? Easy as that.”

  She takes another step. “I am your mother, Alison.” I can feel her breath: it’s too much, too close, too crowded.

  “No, you’re not.” I shove her off me, hard. The heat in my chest floods my arms down into my fingers.

  She stumbles backward; I just keep going. I’m hurtling downhill too fast to stop now, even if I wanted to. “Were you my mom when you locked yourself up in your fucking room and cried for two fucking years? How about when you let Dad leave? Fuck you. You haven’t been my mom since Andy died.” Telling the truth is a good kind of pain, like when I jam a safety pin through my earlobe and the blood comes out, hot and sharp, striking through the thick dull of everything else.

  She steps back like I hit her. “What’re you so shocked about?” I say. “It’s true. All you care about is what you’ve been through and everything you’ve lost. You don’t give a shit about me. So quit trying to pretend you do.” Now I’m up in her face, and her eyes are welling up. “You just want me to be what Andy was so you can feel like he never died. But he did, okay? He died. But I’m alive. And you don’t get to say what I do and what I don’t. Not anymore. I’m not going to fucking UCSB, and I’m not fucking staying here.”

  Her eyes panic and she scrambles. “You can’t do that, Alison. You can’t—”

  “You can’t fix it,” I cut her off. “And I can’t fix it either. Andy died. Our family broke. And you’ve been using me to try to put it back together, but it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work.” I’m crying now, for real, tears hot on my cheeks, and I don’t care. “It doesn’t work,” I yell, from a place way down past where I can control. “I’m done fixing it for you.” And then I lie: “I’m moving out. Okay? I’m moving in with Jeff. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” And then I grab Jeff, who grabs our stuff, and we run out, letting the door slam shut behind us.

  I pound the wet pavement toward Jeff’s car, yank the door open, and jump in. He throws our stuff in the backseat.

  “Are you okay—?” he starts to ask, but I cut him off.

  “Drive,” I tell him, my rib cage heaving hard. He fumbles for the keys.

  “Drive,” I say again. He does. Once we’re in motion, he looks over at me, checking on me. I don’t want to talk yet.

  I roll down the window, letting the damp wind cool my burning cheeks, and slowly I stop sweating and catch my breath. “I’m not going to school,” I finally say. “Don’t take me there.”

  He looks at me confused. “Wait. You’re not going to class? Does that mean . . .”

  “I don’t know. No.”

  “But you said if you missed lab, you don’t—”

  “Just stop fucking questioning me, okay?” I snap. I can’t think about that right now. Not at all.

  He pauses for a second.

  “Sorry,” I say, still a little rough.

  He tries again. “So are you saying—?”

  “Yes,” I say. Then I take a breath and settle. “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” It feels weird in my mouth, sounds weirder in my ears. I think of Andy again, and my chest crumples with shame. Like I’m killing something inside me. But I can’t go back and live with her again. I can’t. Not after that.

  “Okay,” he says, then a second later, “Are you sure?” He takes his eyes off the road to look at me, and someone honks.

  I don’t think it even matters if I’m sure. I think I made the choice already. The stuff I told my mom—that’s the kind of thing you can’t come back from. “Yes,” I tell him, yes, I’m sure I want to be with you and I want to leave this place and school is miserable and I’m sick of trying to be something I’m not for someone else when I don’t even know what I want to be for my own self, and the Free State is weird and it’s illegal but at least people saw me there, for what I am, not a reputation or a tragedy, not a story or a symbol, not the legacy of someone else’s life or its hope for resurrection, just Alison, just me.

  I wrap my hand around his on the gearshift. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  And then he guns the engine and we drive away from my whole entire life.

  CHAPTER 7

  When we get back to the Free State, it’s already gotten bigger. There’s an old school bus parked in the clearing, chalky black primer painted over the yellow. I stand on tiptoe to see in the scuffed-up windows and all the seats are gone, replaced with a plywood loft and a cookstove, milk crates holding filmy baggies of dried beans and rice. The brown mini-fridge is covered with punk-band stickers; dirty T-shirts litter the floor.

  “Alison!” I turn, caught snooping. Sage runs toward me, T-shirt sleeves pushed up to show her strong shoulders and tattoos. “I didn’t think you’d come back!” She throws her arms around me; it makes me shy, but I let her.

  “Hey.” Jeff tilts his chin at her, like I’m here too.

  She looks at him a second, then says “Hey” back.

  “So what’s the deal with the—” I jump in, pointing at the bus.

  “Oh! Yeah,” Sage says. “I guess word got out about your lockdown.”

  “Wow,” Jeff says. He looks at me.

  “Yeah,” Sage says, not pulling her gaze off me. “People in Portland heard shit was going down, so a bus came up for support. They stopped in Eugene and picked up some guys on the way.”

  “That’s crazy. How’d they even know?” I’m not used to people doing things because of anything I do.

  “When people hear things are heating up, they come around. Want to make sure we’ve got support. And then some people, y’know, they like it. Wanna get in the fight.” Sage eyes Jeff. “Your friend’s over by the kitchen,” she tells him, meaning Dirtrat.

  Jeff looks at me like I’m supposed to come with him, but Sage looks at me like I’m not. I feel caught for a second; I want to go with Jeff, but I don’t want to have to choose. Finally I tell Jeff, “I’ll catch up with you later, okay?” He looks a little stung, and I want to say, I’m sorry, wait, I’ll come, but he heads off too fast.

  Later Nutmeg brings me to the front lines to help him with the dragons. The buckets of wet cement are heavy and I want to just let him do it, but he says, “Here,” and props up the bottom so I can pour the sludge into the hole he’s dug. Plastic cuts my fingers; it takes my whole body’s strength to keep the bucket up and aimed right. But he helps me, and I do it, and before it dries, we sink a crossbar in, wedging the metal into the sticky, thick cement, lining it up so it’ll stay steady even when someone’s trying to take it apart.

  “You built stuff before?” he says after we’ve built two more.

  I shake my head.

  “Natural talent, I guess.” He grins, and I realize: it’s the first time in years anyone has told me I was good at anything. The knot in my chest loosens a little. Maybe if he saw this, Andy wouldn’t think I was an idiot for leaving school. Maybe he’d see that I’m good at something, too. Maybe it would be okay with hi
m. I tell myself, I’m doing something; it’s okay with him, over and over, till a tiny part of me starts to believe it.

  We walk back toward the fire pit and the kitchen, sweat drying sticky on my cheeks. The new kids are there, five of them with Aaron and Exile, eating some kind of tofu glop with spaghetti sauce. They heard about us from some campus action group, although I’m not sure they actually go to college. The guys all have a lot of tattoos like Jeff and Dirtrat; there’s one girl with purple hair and a lip ring who scares me immediately. The other girl is super-skinny; her blond head is shaved, except for, like, this fringe of bangs, her T-shirt is dirty, and she never looks at anyone except for one of the guys—Bender, I hear someone call him. I’m pretty sure he’s her boyfriend.

  I’m finishing my glop when Jeff and Dirtrat come from the direction of the car. Dirtrat scrapes the dregs from the tofu pot and plops down on the ground. Jeff sits next to me, close enough to touch, and I lean into him, feeling his flat stomach beneath my spine, following his breath. I look around and realize that right now, I have something I haven’t had in a long time: people who want to be around me, who aren’t mean or trying to get something from me. I haven’t had that since I was in the van with Andy and his friends. I feel like a normal person for the first time in a long time.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later on I lie in Andy’s tent with Jeff, looking out the mesh window at the sky. I set it up when it was still light out, just to see it. I remember it from when we were kids, the green tent with its orange cords. Andy showed me how to put it together way back then; today I was surprised I still remembered. I drove the stakes into the ground, clicked the poles together, saying to him in my head, See, I’m still doing what you showed me. I’m still listening to you. My sleeping bag is laid out inside it and I can feel the rocks through it, poking through the softness. I curl into Jeff and listen to his steady breath, sleeping.