“I’m old enough to get a letter from my girlfriend without you—”
“This isn’t just any ordinary letter, Johnny!”
I heard a rustling of paper.
“You’re going to read it?” Johnny’s voice was incredulous.
“First it starts with how much she loves you. She probably says that a dozen times. Then, ‘The whole school could have caught on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed, because I was just looking at you. I would have kept staring at you until my hair was singed and the skin started to drip from my bones...’”
“Whoa!” Emilie breathed into my ear.
Ick, I thought.
“Give it back to me!”
“And here she says that she might as well be dead if she can’t be with you....”
Johnny bellowed, “You have no right!”
“I have every right! Later on, and I quote, ‘It’s like you’re the best drug in the world and I need you in me all the time, pulsing through my veins.’”
I didn’t realize how clenched my body was until I bit my tongue sharply and tasted warm blood in my mouth.
“All right! You’ve made your point!”
“No, Johnny. I haven’t. The point is, this isn’t just puppy love. It’s getting way out of hand. Stacy is just getting way too obsessed—”
“She’s not obsessed! What are you saying?”
“She says in this letter that she can’t live without you. She says if she can’t see you every day, she’ll kill herself. It’s not normal, Johnny!”
I shivered, remembering the picture in Stacy’s nightstand again, with the boy’s face obliterated, the pen almost wearing through the paper. Had she felt like that with him, too, that she would kill herself if she couldn’t see him?
Johnny’s voice was quieter when he spoke, as if maybe with Mom reading the note he’d heard Stacy’s words for the first time. “She’s not being serious, though. She’s only trying to say...”
“Johnny.” Mom’s voice was lower now, more controlled. “I’m worried that you’re spending so much time together. You’re not seeing your friends, you’re not keeping up with your grades. The things she says in this letter—they’re not things a sixteen-year-old girl should say. You’re both very young to be so serious.”
“Oh, no,” Emilie said. I felt her grip on my arm, tightening like the blood pressure cuff in the doctor’s office.
“We’re too young to be so serious? I’m too young?” Johnny’s voice escalated with each syllable. “You know, that’s really rich, coming from you!”
“Here we go,” Emilie whispered.
I pinched her arm. “What? I don’t get it.”
Emilie pinched me back, hard. “I’ll explain later.”
Mom’s voice had escalated again. “Johnny, you have no right to say that. It was a different time, a different situation!”
Johnny’s laugh was mean. “I can’t believe you’re using that on me. Somehow you’re going to make even that be my fault.”
“Johnny, that’s enough!”
It occurred to me that somehow Johnny had never learned to be submissive, to roll over and give up like Kennel when we caught him gnawing on one of Dad’s work boots. Emilie and I might push the boundaries from time to time, but we gave in just before getting ourselves in trouble. Johnny didn’t stop, and that’s what made him tenacious in the ring. But it also made him act impulsively, and earned him more than his share of punishments over the years.
“So it was okay for you, it was okay for you and Dad, but it’s not okay for me? Stacy’s ‘obsessed,’ but you were just, what? A normal teenage girl in love? You must not have been so pure and innocent, because—”
A slap—a sound so vivid that I could almost see Mom’s palm connecting with Johnny’s cheek. He must have stumbled backward; there was a thud as his body connected with the table. Emilie gasped. I winced, as if it was me who had been slapped.
“Never mind,” I whispered to her. “I get it now.”
Mom’s voice was shaky. “You apologize for that. You apologize right now.”
Johnny didn’t say anything. There was a scraping sound, as if a chair was being dragged across the linoleum, followed by a heavy thud. Emilie’s fingernails dug little half-moons into my arms.
“Johnny!”
But the screen door was already slapping behind him, and before Emilie and I made it to the kitchen, Johnny was down the porch stairs and getting into his truck.
“We’re not done!” Mom yelled, but the Green Machine had already shuddered to life, stirring up a spray of gravel before roaring away on Rural Route 4. I didn’t have to be a genius to know that he was going to see Stacy.
Mom’s words lingered in the kitchen like an ugly bruise. Looking around, I saw what had caused the crash. Johnny had thrown one of our heavy kitchen chairs against the wall; it lay toppled on its back, one of the spindles hanging loose.
Mom tucked her T-shirt into her jeans and, without saying a word, righted the chair. With a little pop, the spindle slipped back into its place, and she slid the chair under the table.
Back upstairs, I lay on my bed, facing the wall, staring at nothing. Maybe Mom was right—Johnny and Stacy were getting too serious. I blushed, remembering how Johnny had pinned Stacy to the ground, the breathless way her chest had heaved beneath his. Did she really think of Johnny as a drug, that she needed to keep coming back for more? Would she really kill herself if she couldn’t see him every day? I pulled my quilt over my head, feeling suddenly as if I knew too much.
nine
That fall, tension in our house lurked around every corner. Stacy still came over sometimes, but she didn’t always come inside. Instead, Johnny went out to meet her, and Emilie and I would spy on them as he leaned her back against the Camaro for one of their long, passionate kisses.
Mom would watch from the kitchen window, flicking the porch light on and off, like some kind of Morse code: I’m watching you. I see what you’re doing.
Each night was its own battle, but the afternoons were generally quiet and peaceful, with Mom still at work and Johnny and Emilie at one sort of practice or another. When the bus dropped me off from school, I’d run down the driveway to check in with Dad in the barn, give Kennel a hundred kisses, fix myself a peanut butter sandwich and curl up in my own secret fort—the back of the hallway linen closet.
This was one of the few benefits of being short, I’d discovered—I could squeeze my body into unexpected places. When Johnny and Emilie used to play hide-and-seek with me, I was always the winner. I could slide into the narrowest of cracks behind an open door, climb into dresser drawers and stand upright in a vacuum cleaner box with inches to spare. Then a few years ago, I’d discovered the hollow at the back of an upstairs closet. It was just a narrow space behind the closet shelves, about four feet high and two and a half feet deep—too small to bother sealing, too awkward for storage, and perfect for me. It was a great place for reading; all I had to do was move our guest towels out of the way and I was in.
With a couple of Grandma’s old quilts and the flickering light of a Coleman lantern, my hiding place was as neat and comfortable as any hobbit hole—and no one could bother me. I could spend uninterrupted hours with books of true crime, or my new favorite obsession, the Guinness Book of World Records. I marveled at the world’s tallest person, who had reached eight feet, eleven inches and only lived to be twenty-two. Eight feet—I