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Alicia’s first memory is walking towards the front door. Just that, a fuzzy outline of the rug and the doorknob so high up and the buzz of her father’s voice in the background.
Her second is Nick holding her. He’s smiling and his hair is clean and short and combed, babyfat cheeks and clear clear eyes. He lifts her up and props her on his hip and calls her his Leeshy Loo.
++
When Nick is ten his science teacher shows the class a video about the dangers of drug addiction. He fills out the pledge to abstain and scribbles his name at the bottom, childish blocky letters. At recess the school stands in the grass field and releases red balloons. He watches his float away, smaller and smaller in the bullet blue sky.
When he gets home, raising a hand to his friend on the sidewalk, he hears the pitter patter of tiny feet scrabbling down the hall. He drops his backpack and Alicia leaps into his arms. He swoops her around and props her on his hip while she babbles into his ear, babyfat still clinging to her cheeks. They share a pudding cup, sitting crosslegged on the living room rug and when she tugs at the school-provided red ribbon bracelet around his wrist he slips the rubber circle off and over her hand, hanging loose on her tiny bones.
The first time Nick got drunk, right before he tipped the glass mouth of the bottle into his mouth, he thought about that stupid coloring page he’d had to do that week when he was ten. One of those pages where the message is revealed if you follow the color by number directions, and he’d done it, dutiful, and read the message: ‘alcohol kills’. Then he closed his eyes and swallowed until his throat burned from his stomach to his tongue.
The first time he got high he coughed until he threw up. Then he laughed and reached for the joint again. He thought of that again, aged ten and promising to stay sober forever, the first time he smoked heroin. He thought he’d be laid out. On the floor, out of his mind. Instead–it’s just better. Everything is better and he sits on the porch with his friends and a beer and thinks he might understand what happiness really feels like. When he thinks of home he remembers her, Alicia, and how she cried when she’d really first truly understood what he’d become. Then he reaches for whatever can make that image disappear the quickest.
++
When Nick is two and his mother is at the hospital, his aunt takes him to the library and fills out the form. The librarian hands him the shiny plastic and his clumsy chubby fingers rip the new library card from the packaging. He tugs at his aunt’s hand when she tries to lead him to the children’s section and whispers his request into her ear when she bends down.
They find the right book and his aunt finds the answer. “Three months,” she reads, and helps him count on his fingers. “Six to twelve weeks.”
“I’m going to be there,” he tells her as they leave. “For her first smile. First everything.”
She touches his cheek, playful, as she does up his carseat buckles. “You are going to be the best big brother there ever was.”
Nick remembers holding her. He had to sit on the couch very still and use the harsh gel to clean his hands, the smell wrinkling his nose. He listened very seriously when his father explained how soft her bones are, still forming. Delicate, a new word, and he cradled her, fresh out of the hospital, in his arms. He remembers her eyes were very blue, and she stopped fussing when their father settled her in his lap. She blinked at him and he kissed her forehead, feather light.
++
When Nick was three he heard his parents whisper fighting in the kitchen when he went to the bathroom at night. Something about testing, something about development. He crept down to the nursery and leaned over her crib, peering in the darkness. Touched the wispy strands of her dark hair.
“Gotta learn soon, Leesha,” he whispers. “It’s easy, I’ll show you.”
He holds her by the fingers and leads her around the house, waddling with her clumsy shuffling steps. He chants her name and cheers and she giggles at him, clapping her hands when they take a rest on the floor. He puts her against the wall takes two steps back.
“Alicia,” he says, opening his arms, and she walks.
++
When she was very small Alicia broke a glass. Her grandmother’s wedding glass, and she’d just wanted to touch it but it was too heavy for her small hands and smashed on the floor in front of her toes and she’d been too frozen to even cry. Nick appeared before their father did and pushed her into the next room. “Shh, shh, Licia, it’s okay.”
He’d gotten the belt from it and she’d crept into his room late late at night and he was still awake to lift the blanket for her. Slid under against his side and touched his back gently through his shirt. He swallows his wince and tucks her under him. Tells her it’s okay and she falls asleep with his hand clenched in hers, claiming.
++
When Alicia is two, their parents start taking her to a special doctor. The first time, they leave Nick with a sitter, a girl who lives down the street. Nick watches cartoons and eats ice cream and doesn’t think much of it.
The next time they try to take her to the special doctor she screams until her face goes red and her eyes puffy, shrieking and wailing and going limp and stiff in turns while their father drags her into the carseat.
The third time she holds her breath until she goes blue, and Nick gets strapped in next to her. He plays in the waiting room and waits for her. When she comes out there’s a crease between her brows, tiny features strained. She’s sucking her thumb and when she reaches a hand out for his she smiles when they touch. The doctor murmurs.
The fourth time they play together, blocks and beads on a wire track. Nick goes inside with her and they play cards against the doctor. Nick holds them and Alicia points at which ones to play.
“You’re letting us win,” Nick accuses, two hands in.
“You’re cheating,” the doctor says. Nick shrugs. Alicia hates to lose, scrunch faced and big teary eyes, nostrils flared. When they win she looks at him like he hangs the moon.
Their father dies on a sunny Thursday and they never go back.
++
Alicia stood inside his room at his window with her face screwed up and her fists clenched at her sides and her babychub face turning red as she refused to breath and worked her way up to a tantrum like never before. “Stop it Leesh,” Nick hisses, lying flat on the roof with his head hanging off and peering furiously at her upside down. “It’s too high for you. You’re too small.”
Alicia lets out a wail.
“No! Licia, we’re gonna get in trouble!” He reaches through the window and hauls her up, her little feet kicking. Plops her on the roof with a grunt of effort. “Okay? You’re here.”
She blinks at him. Touches the roof dirty shingle with her fingers. She beams at him, toothy and giggly again, and he sighs before tucking her against his side. “Nicky,” she says, wiggling closer. “Can I have ice cream now?”
He kisses her forehead. “In a minute. Come look at the view with me.”
“Okay,” she says, eager excited, and crawls next to him as they make their way across to the top of the slanted roof. They look across the neighborhood and can see the edges of the desert and he helps her point one toddler clumsy finger at her school, bouncing in excitement until he tells her to stop or she’s gonna fall.
He’s chipping at a shingle with the tiny penknife their father gave him two Christmases ago and she’s bored waiting for him. She pokes her fingers in the leaves in the gutters and there’s a branch in the corner she wants to tug out and snap into little pieces. She totters on her knee, arm outstretched, and barely manages a yelp before she tips over the side.
“Alicia!”
She blinks up at him, his face swimming. Her back hurts and there’s branches all around her and something wet trickling on her forehead and she barely takes a breath before the pain hits and she screams.
Nick carries her into the house, rocking her while she sobs, thick fat tears and miserable hitching of breath and terrible high pitched whimpers that have him tearing up too. “It’s going to be okay,” he promises, and she can’t see him because there’s something stinging and metal in her eyes and her mouth and when he puts her down on the sofa to get the cordless phone from the kitchen she screams, heels kicking, for him to come back.
He comes back with one of her sippy cups and paper towels and a handful of chocolate candy and feeds them to her in between sips of juice while he pats the towel at her and tries not to jostle her arm and says that mom is coming home to take her to the hospital. “It hurts,” she tells him, miserable.
“My fault, Licia. You’re being so brave,” he says, and holds her in his lap and tells her nonsense stories until their mother comes home with a slam of the front door and a glare.
“You know better to bother your brother,” her mother scolds in the car, Licia strapped into her booster chair and Nick tucked next to her in the middle seat instead of riding in the front like he’s done since their mother agreed he was old and big enough to do so. “What if he fell trying to catch you?”
Alicia curls into herself, miserable and hurting and run of out of tears, and Nick touches her knee, comforting. “Stop it mom, her arm really hurts.”
“Wait until she’s got a cast and three stitches in her forehead,” Madison mutters.
++
The first time she told him she hated him she didn’t mean it. He’d just taken the last slice of pizza before her hands could reach it and she glares at him from across the cheap plastic table they eat at together, their parents at the dining table a million miles away.
“I hate you,” she says, face screwed up. A speech impediment clings to her syllables, stubborn despite the face he knows she has speech therapy twice a week at her grade school. He hesitates. They split the slice and he lets her have the crust. She kisses his cheek, garlicky and clumsy and greasy lips. “I didn’t mean it.”
He wipes her fingers with a napkin, her knuckles under his hands. “I know.”
++
When Alicia was six they were at the pool and she’s upset because Nick is ignoring her. She seethes on a lawn chair because she can’t go in unless Nick is with her and he’s too busy in the hot tub with his stupid friends. She stands, little tiny wisp of a child, and goes to the edge of the water with the confidence of a child who hasn’t figured out what death means. She sways for a second, frozen, and then there’s a sound somewhere and she jerks and loses her balance and falls. She remembers the sudden hush of the world when she went under and she remembers the stream of bubbles from her mouth, all her air gone.
And the first frisson of real panic she’s ever had in her life. Flailing and gasping and feeling her
lungs shudder and her vision grey. And then a hand, plunged, fingers stretched out, coming towards her, and she would know that hand anywhere, more quickly than she’d know her own.
He hauled her out and laid her flat, panicked eyes, fluttering hands. Licia, Licia, oh my god.
His lips on hers, chlorine and sunscreen and chapstick, and he breathed air back into her lungs.
++
At sixteen, Nick comes home from lurking under the flimsy bleachers and Alicia is eating mini-pretzels in the kitchen. He reaches for one and she slaps his hand away. “You’re drunk,” she says, flat.
“Shouldn’t you be more cheery?” he sneaks a handful before she can hit him again and crams three in his mouth at once, crunching with his mouth open. “Red ribbon week got you feeling blue? Didn’t release your stress with a little red balloon?”
She rolls her eyes at him and grabs a water bottle out of the fridge. “They don’t do that anymore, don’t you know? The latex kills birds.”
“Sounds about right.” Nick vomits into the sink by her elbow. Alicia flips the garbage disposal on before she leaves. Her bedroom door slams and Nick laughs at his warped reflection in the stainless steel.
++
Before the summer he gets high for the first time, they were at the beach and he tripped chasing her into the surf. He cursed and she came back immediately, feet slapping in the wet sand. He’d fallen on a shard of glass, and he looked at his cut and sighed and muttered and then mussed her hair to make the concern melt away. She pulled the bandana out of her hair and wrapped it around his ankle and felt his blood warm on her fingers. When he limped off to find their mother and a bandaid she dove her hands into the silt and found the glass, jagged and gleaming.
She carved a hooked slice across her anklebone, just where his was, and let the salt sting in her wound. She tossed the shard into the ocean and followed him up the beach.
++
“If you don’t take me,” Alicia says, fifteen and cherry lipgloss and arms folded, “I’ll tell.”
Nick glares. “You’re such a fucking brat,” he hisses.
Alicia rolls her eyes. “And you couldn’t even climb out a window without breaking the screen. Hello? Mom’s not even home, use the front fucking door.”
“Don’t curse,” he says, and flicks her in the ear before mussing her hair.
She yelps. “Nick!! Fuck off.” She smoothes her bangs back out. “Soooooo…”
“Yes, god, fine. But you can’t drink. And don’t even look at the boys.”
Alicia rolls her eyes again. “We literally all go to school together.”
Nick slings an arm around her, fresh shirt and cologne and already smelling a little like piss-cheap beer. “Not at this party you don’t. At this party they are every person you’ve ever seen in an after-school special about poor choices and innocent girls.”
“I’m not that innocent,” she mutters, and then smiles like an angel when he narrows her eyes at her. “What is a mara-joo-guana?”
“Brat.” He licks his finger and sticks it in her ear and then runs for his room while she screeches and chases him.
The party is loud and Alicia preens a little to be one of the only freshmen there, nodding at the older kids as cool collected as she can. Nick sticks next to her for a little while, snatching the red solo cup out of her hand, but soon becomes distracted by some of his friends and she ambles to the kitchen so a senior boy she vaguely recognizes can crack a can of beer and she can try to drink it without screwing up her face noticeably.
She sticks to the wall and listens to the music and watches people get progressively more ridiculous and thinks it’s a little boring, to be honest.
“Hi,” someone says, and she turns. Timothy, she thinks, or… Jake? She recognizes him as the senior from her freshmen orientation. “Nick’s sister, right?”
“Alicia,” she says, and extends a hand before she can stop herself. She freezes in horror, but he just sort of smiles and takes it, firm gripped.
“Jason,” he says. He leans against he wall next to her and smiles at her jokes and the beer doesn’t taste so bad when he’s teasing her about how she tripped during her school photo and telling her that her hair smells good. He touches her hip and tells her she’s drop dead gorgeous and looks three years older than she is and she glows under his attention.
Her first kiss is sloppy wet and cheap beer and he doesn’t wait to slip his tongue in her mouth. He’s got a little stubble, poorly shaved, and it scratches at her lips and her cheek. She doesn’t really feel sparks or the jump in her chest all the books say she should but it isn’t terrible and he is cute and when he presses her into the wall and drags his teeth across her throat, that feels good. She tilts her head back and feels a little floaty but when he catches her hand and presses it against the front of her pants she freezes up. “Wait–”
“What the fuck–” Jason is yanked away from her and she blinks twice. Nick throws him into the improvised dance floor a few feet away, other people yelping as he staggers into him. “We’re leaving,” Nick snaps, his fingers tight around her wrist.
She digs her heels in. “I don’t want to.”
His eyes narrow, dangerous, his lips are whited out in fury. “I swear to god,” he hisses, “I–”
Someone stumbles through the doorway. “Cops!”
They get snagged trying to get out using the backyard fence. The officer shines the big light in their eyes and she goes from fighting Nick and telling him he’s hurting her arm to tucking behind him and peering out from behind his shoulder. They take Nick a few feet away and ask her if he’s made her do anything she doesn’t want to do and sigh really big when she tells them the truth. She makes her eyes really big and teary and hitches her breathing and tells them she’s on honor roll and he just came there because she got scared and called him to pick her up. “Just go home,” the officer tells him. “And maybe warn your little sister about boys like you.”
Alicia wipes her crocodile tears off on the sleeve of his jacket and he strips it off so she can wear it around her shoulder and snuggle her nose into the hood of it. He looks at her a little odd until he sighs and slings an arm around her neck to kiss her temple. “Maybe we are more alike than people think.”
++
The first time she saw him high it drew her up short. Something off, something wrong, and Madison doesn’t notice but she does, always. Standing at his door because he hadn’t stopped to smooth her hair right before she goes to sleep, tiny uncertain voice: “Nicky?”
He turns and he smiles and he looks so happy but she steps back. Goes to her bed and curls up under the blanket and shakes because that’s not her brother, it’s not.
The next morning he’s throwing up in the bathroom and Madison tells her to stay away so she won’t catch his stomach bug and he looked up from the toilet and they lock eyes and he looked away first, ashamed.
++
Nick tries to remember when report cards get mailed home. He was good at it when he was younger. Candy or a little toy and magnets to pin them up on the fridge while she bounced at his elbow and beamed a gap toothed smile.
He’s not good at it now. It occurs to him, slumped on a couch in a house of people he doesn’t know, a nameless party and the high singing in his blood, that he hasn’t done that in almost eight months. He loses track of his thoughts and closes his eyes to watch the colours flash on the inside of his eyelids.
There’s no car in the driveway when he comes home. He lifts the matt and finds the key where his mother leaves it for him and lets himself in. The house is quiet and when he checks his mother’s room the closet is faintly ajar, the bed stripped. His room looks just the same and he lies on the bed. He hears a key in the lock and steps in the hall as Alicia comes in, dropping her bag by the wall and flopping onto the touch, earbuds in and music leaking out. Her leg hooks over the back of the sofa and she hums along, arching her back and stretching out of the cushions. Her top tugs up, and a little colored jewel glints in her belly button.
Nick crosses into her line of vision. “When did you get that?”
Alicia starts, violent, eyes wide, rocketing upright. “Jesus Christ!”
Nick tugs at the white cord dangling across her chest, jarring the earbud out of one ear. “Forget me already? It’s only been three days.”
Her face flattens into a sneer. “It’s been a week, jackass.”
Nick pauses. He shrugs. “So? You get a tramp stamp too, while I was gone?”
“Yeah. It’s a pink bow.” She sighs at him, stepping close, fingers ghosting through his hair, tucking it away from his face. “You’re a mess.”
“Mom gone?” She scritches her nails behind his ear and he tilts his head into her hand.
“For the weekend.”
“Mm,” he says. She leans forward, resting her head against his chest.
“I missed you,” she mumbles, like a secret.
“I know.”
She makes mac and cheese while he showers and finds clean clothes. They eat on the couch together and he falls asleep with an old movie on, his head pillowed in her lap.
He wakes up sweating. His stomach rolls and he retches weakly off the edge of the couch, spitting on the carpet. His body clenches up in a wave of pain and he groans. There’s a cup of water, still, on the coffee table, and he drains it even though it tastes old and brackish. He stumbles to his feet and makes his way to his room. It takes him a minute, when he opens the door, to properly understand what he’s looking at.
Alicia, in pajama shorts and a t-shirt, eyes wide, half leaned over, sleep mussed hair. His mattress shoved off the frame and her hand coming out of the hole he’d carved into the box spring. The baggie crinkles in her fingers.
Nick’s vision goes red. He crosses the room in a blink and slaps her hand so hard she cries out, the baggie hitting the carpet with a soft noise. She flinches from him when he reaches out and his hand freezes in the air between them. “Leesh,” he tries. She spits at him and flees, sticking to the wall as she goes around him, her hand cradled against her chest.
He picks a new hiding spot. The baggie is half open, and he sucks the spilled powder from the carpet.
He knocks at her door and tries the handle. Locked. The light under the door shifts and it creaks–she’s leaned against it. He presses his hand flat on the wood. “I’m sorry.”
“I wasn’t–I just wanted it to be like it was.” Her voice is low, subdued, almost too low to hear. “How it used to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Nick says again.
Alicia makes a sound like she’s been crying and she’s angry about it. “You’re always sorry.”
++
Nick is watching television when he hears the kitchen window creak. He walks in while she’s still got a leg over the sill. “Forget your keys?”
Her eyes are vague and glassy and she smiles at him too happy and too wide. “Mom home?”
“Date night. Didn’t even notice you weren’t here.” Her eyelids shutter, fast; she’s hurt and he almost feels bad about it. But there’s something hot and angry in his chest and she smells like weedsmoke and tobacco and cheap beer, cheaper cologne. Fury rises hot and fast and his vision shakes and he doesn’t understand why. “Never thought you’d be so dumb.” His voice stays even and flat and he follows her to her bedroom.
“Mm,” is all she says, absent-minded. He touches a stack of pink truancy slips on her dresser, obvious and prominently displayed.
“You’ll never unseat me as family fuck up, you know.” He flicks them and they flutter through the air, land gently on the carpet. “I think Mom would have to consider you part of the family for that.”
She slams the door in his face and he has to jerk back to avoid being struck. He storms back into the kitchen and slams around, raging and guilty. He chugs half the bottle of cooking wine and wishes for something sweeter, stronger. He pours a bowl of the cereal she likes and goes to her room. He sighs. He knocks.
“Shouldn’t you be at a flophouse?” she shouts, faintly slurred and through the door.
He nudges the handle and smiles when it turns easily under his hand. The door creaks open, slow, and he pokes his head through the crack. “I’m taking a tolerance break, if you must know.”
“I don’t care.” Alicia is under the covers, curled on her side facing away from him. White and purple polka dot comforter on top of pale pink sheets, huddled up into a lump. He steps closer and shakes the bowl at her, the cereal making whispering noises against the ceramic. She makes a noise, dismissive.
“C’mon, Leesh. I’m sorry.”
She sighs. Rolls over. Face wiped mostly clean, mascara clinging gunky and dark to the corners of her eyes and a smudge of lip color on her chin. “You’re an asshole,” she says.
“I know.” She lifts the edge of the duvet and he swallows, quiet. Sets the bowl aside and steps out of his shoes, shucks his hoodie. Crawls next to her in his jeans and his wash faded t-shirt and nestles her against his chest. Rests his nose against the back of her neck and breathes easier. “We’re getting too old for this,” he says. “I’m of age now, you know.”
“I know. Mom made a cake.” She shifts in his arms, tense at first but relaxing bit by bit.
“Was it good?”
“I don’t know. She threw it away when you didn’t come home.”
Nick hums. He feels warm. Alicia breathes against him and her hair tickles his nose. He sleeps until her alarm buzzes and he doesn’t dream.
++
Nick comes home at three in the morning and his room has been ripped apart. Drawers open, clothes on the floor, mattress flipped and the pillow cup open, one of the floorboards torn off. In the middle of the mess a book lies flat in a clear circle on the floor. Atop the book the box he keeps his stash in has been smashed into splinters, empty.
Nick stares. He swallows. He checks to make sure his mother isn’t home and kicks Alicia’s door open. She’s waiting for him, on her bed, still in pajamas with a hoodie on over her top. “I heard you come in.”
“What did you do.”
Alicia snorts. “Oh come on, Nick. We both know what I did. Think of it as part of step two. With me as the higher power.”
“Oh?” He advances on her, snarling. “Is that so, little sister?” She slides off the bed, retreating.
“Little genius girl, all ready for Berkeley and everything. So smart, aren’t you?”
“Nicky,” she says, high pitched. She hasn’t called him that in years and years. He shoves her hard enough her back hits the wall. She shoves back and he topples, tussling. They bounce off the edge of the bed, rolling onto the floor. She shouts something, struggling, and he flips to pin her down on her stomach. She curses, wriggling, and he slams his weight down, lying on top of her. She goes still, and they breathe hard, panting and twitching. “Nicky,” she says again. Lower, softer, almost pleading.
Nick can smell her shampoo, her hair tickling his cheek. Can feel her, warm and slender and pliant under his hips. He stands and steps back. She pillows her head on her arm and blinks at him. “Don’t do that again,” he says. She sighs, parted lips and fluttering throat, and doesn’t look away while he leaves.
++
Alicia is stretched out in the tickly cool grass and floating gently, feeling mellow and soft. She hears the front door and rolls to her feet, fawn legged. She wanders through the door and smiles smiles smiles. “Nick.”
“Hey.” He’s grinning, a little cocky and almost already wincing at what she’s no doubt about to shout at him or snipe and just even glower in teary relieved fury, but he’s clean and he looks sober and his clothes aren’t grunged up and Alicia is just so–
She walks into him with a solid noise and wraps tight arms around him. “Asshole,” she mumbles, but her voice is sighy, breathy. She noses into his neck and he pulls her away. He stares at her.
“What did you do,” he snaps, furious. She rolls her eyes at him.
“Nothing Nick, god.” She moves to turn and he grabs her wrist. Her bones grind and she yelps.
He yanks her close and brings her hands up to his face, his nose bumping her fingers. He inhales and curls his lip. “You don’t do this.”
“How would you know?” Alicia grins at him. She feels too good to get properly angry and his grip has gone suddenly limp. She pulls away and sways, humming. “S’okay, Nicky.”
He looks gutted, destroyed, and she tugs at his shirt collar, wanting to make him smile. He swallows and takes her by the shoulders, gentle until he shakes her, hard. Her teeth clack. “You won’t ever do this again. Not ever.”
The little prick of pain has her annoyed enough to glare. “Why? You do.” It staggers him and she watches his throat work as he searches for a response. Finally he looks away and she shrugs again, her mellow back. She wanders through the house, floating. She mumbles about butterflies and the giggles, girlish. His steps shadow hers, his shape a flicker in the corner of her eye as he follows her.
++
Alicia has a countdown in her head. Twenty-seven days, and then she files a missing person’s report. She’d considered something more physical, maybe on her phone or in the notebook she uses to doodle when she gets bored in class, but she likes it better in her head. It’s not as if she could ever forget how many days it’s been since she’s seen him.
++
Twenty one days and Madison and Travis announce at dinner they’re going on a short trip. Alicia glowers at her plate and shoves her food around. “I hope you have a great time,” she says, vicious and monotone all at once. She stabs a green bean.
“Alicia,” her mother says, sharp.
“Twenty one,” Alicia snaps back. Her mother sighs.
“If he’s not here when we get back I’ll start calling the hospitals.”
“Don’t forget the morgues.”
“Alicia Clarke.”
Alicia throws her fork down and loves the way her mother winces at the metallic ceramic clatter. “I’m not hungry,” she says, and stomps to her room. She doesn’t slam the door, because that’s a little too cliche, but she flops facefirst on the bed and yanks a pillow over her head and screams into the mattress.
++
Alicia comes home from school on day twenty three and drops her bag on the floor of Nick’s room. She tears it apart. Every book, page by page, every pocket of every smoke smelling jacket and grungy jeans. She pauses after going through every inch of every drawer and every shoe and goes downstairs for a steak knife. She cuts open the pillow and flips the mattress over to drag the serrated edge ragged and ripping through the fabric. She finds nothing and shreds it, stabbing and tearing with her fingernails until she’s panting. She closes the door behind her.
She’d lost a nail, and she’s wrapping a bandaid around her finger when she has a thought. She goes into the garage and finds his bike, dust covered and flat tires. A spider skitters across her shoe and she kicks it away. She finds what she’s looking for hidden in the back tire.
++
Day twenty five and Alicia waits until the sun goes down. She sits in front of the windows and watches the light slink away and the stars come out, unraveling a full roll of toilet paper until it’s piled around her in folded lengths and she’s holding the brown paper tube in her hand. The kit has been sitting on the kitchen counter for two days, and she paused in front of it when she passed, fingers hovering.
She goes to the backyard and uses the light of her phone. She fumbles at first, and a lot of it goes up in wasted smoke, her fingers white from the tiny baggie, lighter shaking in her fingers. She coughs so hard she retches, and has to pause, concerned she’s making too much noise.
++
Alicia walked into Nick’s room and heard him inhale sharp, surprised. “Twenty seven,” she says, which doesn’t make sense to him, and lies down on the ravaged mattress. She shivers at the scrape of fabric on her skin and kicks off her shorts, yanking her shirt off to feel the prickle all over her body. She hears the desk chair creak and turns her head, blowing her hair out of her face and smiling. He’s sitting there, watching, and his face is closed.
She sighs, shivering, and runs her palm down from her sternum to her belly. On the third stroke her fingers nudge under the waistband of her underwear. She murmurs, wordless, and he makes a noise to the side. She opens her eyes and sees him watching. She slips her hand into her panties and his eyelids flicker. She touches herself and lets out a soft noise at the first wet swipe and he looks away. She frowns. Her next noise is louder, cracked open, her head spinning in the best way, and she lets her neck loll and her eyes roll up as she eases a finger into herself, moaning.
“Nick,” she says, clearly, and she thumbs at her clit and she means to ask him if it feels this good all the time, if this is what makes him love the drugs more than her, but it all gets fumbled lost on the way out her throat and she moans again instead, “Nick, Nicky, oh.”
His feet drag on the carpet and he turns even farther away and doesn’t see her break, just for a second, before she comes, free hand reached out to him, pleading.
++
Alicia is three chapters ahead in chemistry and her lab partner never does anything to help. “If anyone in this whole school could use an edible,” she’s told, after taking her partner’s notebook away to do the chart herself, “it’s you, Clark.”
She floats through English and has no memory of History and throws up violently during Spanish. She cuts the last period of the day and staggers home, fumbling for three minutes to get her key to fit right in the lock. Nick is sprawled out on the couch watching television, and he barely raises his head up to look at her.
“You sick?”
Alicia hums. She’s looking at her bare feet on the tile and trying to remember when she took off her shoes and socks, but she keeps losing track of what she’s trying to think about. She looks up and starts, because at some point Nick has appeared in front of her, frowning. She giggles at him and touches the tip of her nose with her nail, pressing until it indents into the cartilage. Nick peers at her closer, nose to nose and her eyes cross so she giggles again.
“You’re high.”
Alicia shrugs, pushing past him. She wants to lie down and put her headphones in and stare at her ceiling and enjoy the little tingle thrums in her veins when she inhales too fast. “You’re hardly one to criticize.”
He grabs her shoulder. “Who gave it to you.”
“You did,” she says, and it throws him enough she gets to the start of the hall before he grabs her again.
“Don’t be a brat. Just tell me who it was.”
“Or what?” she challenges. “You’ll ground me, Daddy? He died, Nick, just let me live my life.”
He recoils and she giggles again. She walks on her tiptoes between the lines of the hardwood floor and she’s in her room before he comes after her again. She yelps as he pins her against her mattress. “Is that what you want, baby sister? Someone to punish you?”
She wriggles against his hands. “What the fuck Nick–” he’s high too, she realizes, blown pupils and vaguely unfocused look about him. Something stronger than what she’s floating on.
“Good girl needs a strong hand?”
“Get off me!”
He straddles her, heavy on her hips and his hands holding her wrists to the sides and her feet kick helplessly. “Tell me.”
“Courtney Yevits,” she snaps. “God, you’d think you’d be calmer on that shit.”
“Don’t talk to her again,” he orders, and she rolls her eyes.
“That’ll make Chem labs real difficult, Nicholas. Use your brain for once, I’ve only been complaining about her all semester.”
He tightens his grip until she hisses in pain. “You won’t get high again.”
She glares daggers, yanking her knee up to hit him in the back. It doesn’t budge him, but he grunts in pained annoyance, so she does it three more times. “You’re not the boss of me.”
He slides off and she starts to sit up, huffy triumphant and another insult on the tip of her tongue about his hypocrisy and inability to keep track of anything happening in her life, ever, but she finds herself being dragged across his lap. It’s been so long since they rolled around on the ground tussling as kids that she hasn’t realized how much bigger than her he’s gotten, keeping her face in the sheets and her feet not enough to leverage her free with just his arm braced along her back. “Fuck you!” she spits, planting her knees and her toes in the mattress and getting a few inches up each time before he shoves her back down. The first hit shocks her silent and frozen, hard enough it hurts through her jeans and her underwear, her pulse pounding in her temples.
He grips her ass, moving it slightly, and hits her again, harder. She makes a pained noise, then kicks up even harder, fighting to be free and being unable to budge more than a few inches in any direction. His next three hits are progressively harder, until she whimpers and flinches and whispers for him to stop Nicky please.
“Don’t fight,” he tells her, and when she goes limp obedient and trembly he rubs at the back of her neck while he spanks her.
By the time he’s stopped she’s crying quietly, biting at the fabric and her high clouding the pain response, her ass aching and feeling so bruised tender that she sobs when he rubs across them. “Say you’re sorry, Leesh.”
“Fuck you,” she mumbles, but her legs are limp and she doesn’t even flinch away when he hits her two more times, harder so she cries out in pain. “M’sorry,” she babbles, “I’m sorry Nicky I won’t do it again.”
“That’s what I said the first time,” he says. “Take a deep breath.”
Another minute passes, or maybe five, Alicia isn’t sure. She lays across his lap and sobs snotty into the sheets and drools a little and fists her hands where they’re sprawled out and promises she won’t ever do it again, not ever, and she’s sorry for mouthing off to him and she’ll be good if he stops, she will.
It takes her a long while to realize he’s stopped. Lifted her shirt up to rub the small of her back and tickle his nails across her spine. Massaging her thighs to ease the ache of being clenched up and tense, down to her calves and the delicate bones of her ankles. “Nick,” she says, hoarse.
She feels him take a deep breath. “Leesh, I just–”
The front door slams. He jumps up, toppling her out of his lap onto her back on the bed. She cries out, pained, flinching away from any sensation on her bruised ass, and he rolls her on her side before leaving, shutting the door behind him. She hears him greet their mother and tell her Alicia went to bed earlier, feeling ill.
She lies on her belly and cries a little more and when she’s done she feels sleepy in the best way, wrung out and clear headed and she stands to take off her jeans, wincing, before stretching back out. She reaches behind her and touches the bruises that are definitely forming, feeling the flush heat of them and the ache when she presses down. One hand behind her and one between her legs and the mattress and she pants into her pillow and flushes bright red with shame and has the best sleep of her life.
++
They’re on the couch this time. She brought home her Spanish quiz with the ‘F’ in bright red marker and neglected to inform him that the lowest grade is dropped at the end of the semester. Summer has just started to sneak up, and she’s wearing soft cotton shorts and barely there underwear, strategically picked out this morning, her jacket discarded in the kitchen and her tank top riding up and she wiggles into position on his lap.
“You’re smarter than this,” he tells her, disapproving, the beer sweating in his hand. He pushes the back of her shirt up and shakes the bottle so it drops on her skin, making her shiver. “What did you do instead of studying?”
“Talking to my friends,” she mumbles, a pillow under her chest to keep her level and the rough fabric perfect to drag her cheek across and sink her teeth into.
He clucks his tongue at her. “Don’t you have a time management schedule in your planner?”
“Mm.”
The first hit makes her groan, shivering violently and tipping her hips up.
“Does this help?” he asks, gathering her hair up away from her face and tucking it over one shoulder. “Do you need it?”
It’s another five minutes before she’s in enough pain to go floaty and say: “Yes. Please Nicky I–”
He shushes her. “I’ve got you, I–”
“Nick? Alicia!” The door shuts behind Madison and they can hear her tossing her keys into the bowl in the entryway, the thump of her bag against the wall and floor.
Nick’s hands tighten on her, holding her down as she starts to squirm in panic. “Shh,” he orders. “Stay still.” He tugs a blanket over the two of them.
Alicia squeezes her eyes shut, her heart thundering.
“Hi mom,” she hears Nick says, all charm and sweetness. “Alicia fell asleep.” The remote clicks and she hears the blare of a commercial. “I’ll wake her in an hour.”
“She fell asleep like that?”
“Couch hog,” Nick agrees. “Why do we put up with her again?”
She pinches his knee from where her hand is and he twitches in response before adjusting the rough light throw blanket where she’s sprawled in his lap. “I’ll watch with you,” Madison says, sitting on Nick’s other side. She props Alicia’s feet in her lap and Alicia’s has to fight to keep her breathing even. Nick’s hand rubs over her ass under the blanket and usually she’s able to scarper away to her room afterwards but she’s trapped here with her mother just there and he can feel the wetness when his fingers slide down to between her legs.
“You… don’t want to start dinner?” Nick’s voice is hesitant and he pets at her, comforting and gentling.
“In a minute. Let me watch tv with my favourite son.”
It’s a cop show, Alicia thinks the generic banter and interrogating and questioning of suspects and she lies there very still and stays very quiet and Nick rubs over her panties until she’s soaked through, until she can smell herself and doesn’t know how Madison can’t.
“Alright,” Madison says, when the end credits are rolling and the tv says to stick around for a sneak peek. “Casserole okay?”
Nick’s fingertip is inside her, just half an inch, every so often turning and wriggling. “Sounds perfect.” She feels the couch shift and hears her mother start to putter in the kitchen and Nick leans down to whisper in her ear.
“So that’s why you’re so bad.”
She bites her lip, flushed with arousal and embarrassment and being caught and figured out. “Please,” she whispers.
“Shh,” he murmurs, and holds his hand over her mouth and coughs loud when he shoves two fingers in deep and the sudden stretch burn makes her yelp and cry out. She pants wetly against his palm and he turns the television up and tells her to stay quiet and to perch up on her hips and fuck herself back on his fingers and when she comes with someone else inside her for the first time she passes out.
++
She’s at a party and Nick is in the kitchen. “So this is what you’ve become,” she says, hopping up on the counter. “The creepy guy who hangs out at high school parties after he’s graduated.”
He hits the spot on her knee that makes her reflexes jump. “Brat.”
She’s got a mixed drink and she knows everyone there and she doesn’t have any homework due on Monday and she lets her friends drag her over to dance. When she looks out she sees Nick in a corner with a college girl, body tilted towards her and his cheeky disarming smile. She scowls deep when he sees her and winks before leaning a little closer to the girl batting her eyelashes at him. She finds the boy from AP Econ who asked her to the last school dance and lets him stand behind her and occasionally hump against her ass while she dances.
She’s walking into the bathroom when he finds her. Shoves her inside and shuts the door behind them and has her bent over the sink before she can say a word. Shoving her dress up and she spreads her legs and tilts her hips back and doesn’t care her head is hanging in the sink because he’s pulling her panties aside and growling filth at her and only roughly gropes at her for two minutes before he’s sliding all the way inside in one movement. She cries out, the thump of the music drowning her noises, and he grips her hip and slams her into the edge of the counter while he fucks her relentless.
He curls a hand around her throat to feel the pressure and to hold her head up to watch him fuck her in the mirror and he slaps at her ass through the rumpled fabric of her dress and then to shove her down and hide her when the door slams open. “Occupied,” she hears him snarl and her feet kick when she tries to wriggle free and he holds her still.
“Shit, sorry dude,” some guy says, and she doesn’t hear him start screaming about the Clark siblings fucking each other so he must not have recognized her dress or seen her face. Everyone is pretty shitfaced and nearly everyone is rolling and even though she’s still a little sick to her stomach from the threat of being found out it’s never been enough to stop. The door shuts again and Nick pulls out. She stays on the counter, panting and weak kneed and spread legs. Dripping down her thighs and throbbing while he locks it securely and double checks it.
He spanks her a few more times, tells her it’s for the drinking and the slutty dancing and then puts her on her hands on knees on the rug, facing the door, and fucks her with a finger teasing at her asshole and whispering in her ear that the spanking obviously isn’t enough anymore and he’s thinking of new punishments for the next time she’s bad, maybe in the middle of the night so she has to stifle her sobs and stay quiet and not wake up their mother just down the hall and take her punishment like a good slut. Her muscles give out and he makes her come on her belly with her chest on the tile and drooling from three fingers pinching her tongue and holding it out of her mouth.
He pulls out and comes up her dress across her back and walks her through the party stinking like him and shivery and her panties tucked in his pocket. He pulls over into a strip mall parking lot on the way home and leans his chair back and she sucks him off with his fingers pulling at her hair and afterwards he cradles her jaw and kisses her soft and tells her she’s so, so beloved.
++
The world goes away and he never does get the hang of not leaving her behind.
++
He finds her again by accident. What are the odds, he thinks, picking his way through the dead bodies. She’s against a wall, the roof rotted away and collapsed, and so covered in blood it drips heavy and wet and thick from her to the concrete ground.
For a heartstopping moment he’s not sure if it’s her or if she’s turned, she’s so crumpled and still and blank faced. He carries her away and she doesn’t speak for three days. He finds a gas station with plumbing that still works and she moves in his hands like a doll, holding poses but otherwise oddly, alarmingly, off-puttingly still.
All he has is an extra shirt for him, but it covers her enough for him to wash her clothes out and lay them on the picnic tables. He thinks this might have used to been a national park of some kind. It’s pretty, still. The world almost looks like it used to be, and he hates it, the itch in his spine. He sits in the grass with her nestled against him, and she feels so much colder than she used to. When he adjusts her his fingers slip against her thigh, cold pale skin warming where he touches her.
He points the car nowhere and rolls her window down so she can feel the breeze on her face. They stop to eat and watch the sunset, and sleep with the car locked up tight. She screams in her sleep unless he crams himself into the backseat with her. She starts sucking her thumb again and he remembers she did it for years and years, until the dentist told her she was shifting her teeth around.
“There’s no orthodontists anymore,” he tells her, nudging her. Her brow creases and she continues, loud and sucking in the silent car. “Can’t fuck up your teeth now.” He wiggles an index finger against her teeth until she opens her mouth for him, obedient. He rests it against her tongue and she sleeps, softly, tongue sliding across his knuckle and her hands by her sides.
“Never thought I’d miss you chattering in my ear.” The sun dips below the horizon, all pretty and yellow and red and playing out through the fluffy clouds. They’d passed a sign today saying they’ve entered Nevada, and he wants to keep going, the car blistering hot during the heavy oppressive daylight sunshine. “You know mom always said my name was your first word.”
“It wasn’t.” Her voice rasps. Hoarse and lower than he remembers. “But it was close enough.”
She leans her head on his shoulder and cries until she falls asleep. He carries her to the car and kisses her forehead when he buckles her seatbelt.
++
“The world’s ended,” she tells him. He’s not sure how old either of them are. The fire burns low and she’s in his lap and she’s harder against him. Leaner but warm. Somehow her hair still smells the same. “Why are you still playing by the old rules?”
“I don’t know,” he says, because it’s true. “I never knew.”
When she kisses him she tastes like blood. Maybe hers, maybe his, he isn’t sure, but it doesn’t matter; it’s all the same, after all.
++
There’s a bruise on Alicia’s ankle. She sits folded up in the shade of the metal sign at a gas station and waits for Nick to finish filling the cans. He goes inside and she knows he searches through the back counters. She doubts anyone hasn’t picked through whatever drugs anyone had been so careless to leave behind, but he looks every time. Alicia blows out a breath to ruffle her hair, greasy and stringy, and touches her ankle. It’s pretty, she thinks, small and yellow and green and purple flecked. She presses down and feels the prickle ache, less painful every day.
She’d fallen, somewhere, sometime. All the towns run together now, in her head. All the houses look the same and the road stretches on forever. Tripped over something and slipped down a rocky gravelly hill and Chris caught her, thumb digging in hard and this wrench in her leg that jolted her hip so bad she limped for two days. “I got you,” he’d said, and pulled her away from the drop.
++
They’re at a beach, and Nick is asleep in the driver’s seat. They’d found the car, fully functional, half in a ditch. “I always knew you’d look good in a Nissan,” he’d teased, and she rolled her eyes while she packed water in the trunk. Her first car, she thinks, and feels it rumble under her. They never wear seatbelts and sometimes she sits with her back out of the window, arms crossed on the roof, feeling the wind on her face, until he flicks her shoe to come back inside.
Nick is asleep in the driver’s seat and Alicia unfolds herself from the back where she’d been curled up. She slithers out of the back window and finds the bottle of cough syrup where he’d hidden it in the cracked open bumper. She’d claimed to be feeling ill and gotten him to drive the whole day instead of switching halfway, and he’s slumped against the door, hair against the window. Alicia walks onto the beach and shivers. She keeps going, the sand firming underneath her as she nears the surf. The waves lap into her socks and shoes and she gulps the syrup down. Drops the bottle in the ocean and has a flash–a thought, from another life–littering is an eight hundred dollar fine. Licks the fake cherry from the inside of her cheeks.
She sits in the damp sand, legs folding abruptly. The ocean sounds like music and the stars flicker to the beat. There’s an alcohol swab in her pocket but her fingers fumble and it floats away into the dark. The needle pricks and the water stings and both sensations swirl with coloured light. She cups her hands in the swirl and takes it into her mouth, the grit grainy grind between her teeth and the salt sour bitterness on her tongue. She spits it out and giggles. She lays back and stretches out and lets the water numb her, slowly slowly slowly rising. It’s to her shoulders and her hair when Nick finds her.
His head blots out the moon and his hair dances. “Alicia,” he says, and his voice stretches like taffy. “What did you do?” His hands are rough and they yank her up and she sags, refusing like a child to keep her feet under her. They collapse in a thump of a pile and she giggles with her fingers to her mouth to feel the bump of her mirth escape.
“Dextromethorphan,” Alicia says, enunciating carefully. She manages it and smiles at him, triumphant.
He drags her up the beach a ways and she crawls into his lap, her fingers on his lips. He says her name again and she catches it between her teeth, tilting forward to slip it against his tongue. He kisses her soft and easy, and she makes quiet noises, tilting away to rub her nose and cheek against his neck. She rests her head on his chest and listens to his heart creak. “Come on,” he says, and this time when he stands offers his hand she takes it. The world swims and swirls but his hand is warm and steady and she follows him, footsteps in his footsteps.
He pushes her down, sudden, and shushes her. “There’s someone there,” he whispers, and she squints towards the car. A figure, slight and stooped and filthy, one hand on the trunk. It makes a rattling noise in its chest and thumps its fist down and Nick starts to edge away, tugging on her arm.
She resists. There’s something–something in the way the figure slumps to the ground. The fold of his legs. How the back of his hand steals to his too long hair. “Chris,” she says, and it’s not until she hears herself she knows she’s right. She throws Nick’s arm away, shoving him backward, and stumbles forward. “Chris!”
Nick calls out from behind her but she’s running now, tripping over herself. She falls to her knees beside him and pulls the hoodie away and Nick curses behind her, drawn short and shocked. It is Chris. Bloodied and eyes so black they’re swollen shut, fingers at odd angles. He’s limp and wasted away and filthy and she cradles him close. “Ssshh,” she promises, even though he hasn’t made a sound, his breath reedy and weak. “I’ve got you.”
Then she throws up and passes out.
++
She wakes up on a bed. Sits up, blinks. Has a half second of warning before she vomits over the side of the bed. She blinks at the splattered bile and recognizes the generic carpet–a motel, of some kind. She crawls out of the bed and stumbles into the next room through the adjoining door. Nick looks at her from where he’s standing by the bed. “You’re up.”
“Fuck you.”
Nick doesn’t even roll his eyes. He looks back down at Chris. “Can you believe this? Just walking down the road, right where we were.” He touches a fingertip to Chris’ forehead. “Unbelievable.”
“We promised we’d stay out of hotels. Stay in the car, sleep off road. You promised.”
“Believe me,” Nick snaps, “you’ll be glad for a bathroom.”
Alicia snarls, her stomach clenched up, sweat beading on her hairline. She’s opening her mouth to fire back when Chris twitches. He mumble moans. Alicia’s voice comes out whisper soft, afraid. “Is he…?”
“Not infected.” Nick opens a water bottle and trickles water into Chris’ lax unresponsive mouth.
“Hasn’t said anything yet.”
Alicia stumbles to the bathroom. They stay for two more days.
++
On the last night Alicia feeds Chris two stale slices of bread and makes him drink an entire bottle of water. She tucks the blankets around his body and walks to the other twin mattress, where is Nick is sprawled out fully dressed, hands clasped behind his head. “I’m mad at you,” he says.
She shrugs. “Some people. Can dish it out but can’t–”
“Don’t.” He breathes, heavy and angry, and she slides to straddle him. Leans down and licks into his mouth, dipping, drawing away.
“Can’t take it,” she finishes. He grabs her by the arm and turns, pressing her down hard. She lifts her hips to help him rip her shorts away and scrabbles her hands at his zip. Just enough time to feel him harden against her fingers before he shoves her hand away and fucks into her. Hard and it hurts and she growls when he slows down, her hands on his ass to pull him deeper.
“Fuck,” she breathes, and he bites her throat, sucking.
The bed squeaks and the mattress creaks and Alicia can still hear Chris breathing in the bed next to them, his heart beating even if his mind hasn’t quite returned yet. Her toes curl when she comes and she forgets her anger, murmuring Nicky while she shudders. He pulls out and her eyes flash open. “So fucking mad,” he pants, fist curled around himself. “What were you–” she replaces his hand with hers and he groans.
“I wasn’t,” she murmurs. She rises and he cedes, leaning until his back is against the mattress, upside down on the bed, and she’s cradled between his thighs. “I wasn’t thinking.” She takes him in her mouth and feels his hands in her hair and holds him until he shouts and goes soft, swallowing quietly and suckling. She lets him slip out, drool stringing, and wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. “Still mad?”
He pants, neck stretched out, muscles slowly relaxing. “Fuck you, Licia,” he says, and stumbles to the bathroom. Alicia stands on wobbly legs and pulls her shorts back on. She curls up sweaty next to Chris and smoothes his bangs with her fingers.
“Come back soon, okay?” She kisses his temple and lays her head against his side. “We miss you.”
++
Alicia lasts two more sullen days of silent driving before she sighs. “Chris,” she says, conversational, leaning forward to stick her head between the front seats. “Tell Nick he’s being a hypocritical asshole.”
Chris blinks with unfocused eyes. He’s not much better but he’s also not any worse. He eats when they press food into his hands and walks where they point him. Goes to the bathroom when Nick does. His face looks better, and his clothes are clean, and it’s not quite having her family back but it’s closer than she ever thought she’d be, anyway.
“Chris,” Nick says, mirroring her casual, faux-sweet tone, “tell Alicia getting high and trying to Ophelia herself in the ocean–” Alicia snorts, loud and derisive, “–is hardly a fitting death for a Clark.”
Alicia snaps her fingers in the air. “Chris, he’s right. All Clark siblings die choking on their own vomit–”
“We could need that later,” Nick snaps, directly to her. “If–if one of us gets sick, even a cold, in this world? We should have saved it. You should have saved it.”
Alicia blinks–it’s only for a half second, just one flicker of her eyelids, but for that half second, she believes him. It passes and she gapes instead. Then she punches his shoulder. Crawls into the front, hitting him, clawing. He shouts, wresting at the wheel and stomping the brake, and she flies forward into the dashboard, jarring. The car creaks to a halt, tires crunching and engine still rumbling, until Nick cuts it. He stares at her, a tiny red line open above his eyebrow. She sits up with a groan and shoves the passenger side door open, crawling over Chris’s hands folded in his lap.
“Hidden in case we need it for a cold,” she says, so Nick can hear how ridiculous he sounded. “You ever get tired of the taste of your own bullshit?” She slams the door.
++
He drives next to her while walks with her arms crossed and she turns off the highway he follows, tires crunching slow. She’s in what used to be a roadside convenience store when he steps next to her and takes her hand in his. “I’m an asshole.” He brings her hand to his face and kisses the inside of her wrist, his expression quiet and stripped bare. “But you’re not.”
Alicia goes on her tiptoes. He bends his head and she licks across the wound she’d made, gentle. Kisses the tip of his nose. “We shouldn’t leave him alone.”
++
Chris has nightmares. He wakes screaming, Nick’s hand over his throat and Alicia stood alert with her knife spinning nervously in her fingers, scanning. He whimpers late into the night.
They find a camp shower and strip naked, Alicia carefully working Chris’s jeans off while Nick undoes his shirt. They clean him carefully and they’re all shivering when they’re through. “I should cut my hair,” Alicia muses. She cuts a look to Nick. “You should cut your hair.”
“Don’t cut it.” Nick tugs a lock, teasing. “Not yet.”
They leave Chris alone in the car to refill the water bottles and he makes it nearly a quarter mile before they realize he’s run off and catch him. Alicia finds a dog leash and clips the ring to her beltloop. She ties the other end around his wrist and Nick stops her before she’s finished.
He loops it through Chris’s belt instead of his wrist and then clips it back to Alicia’s waist. “It doesn’t matter,” she tells him.
Nick makes a gentle circle of his index finger and thumb around Chris’s wrist and murmurs a soothing noise when Chris shifts. “It matters,” he tells her.
++
“It’s my birthday,” Alicia announces one morning. She realizes that they haven’t spoken in a full day. Touches when it’s time to switch or get out, little smiles of thanks and companionship.
Nick arches an eyebrow. “And how do you know what day it is?”
Alicia shrugs. The air is just the right amount of cool and their gas cans are full and Chris smiled that morning when Nick tripped over himself and hit his head on the car frame getting in. “Women’s intuition.”
“Is that what that’s good for?” Nick leans over Chris to open the glove compartment. He fishes out a snack bar and tosses it at her.
“Sneak,” she accuses, but unwraps it and takes a bite. Stale chocolate chip and hard granola. “You didn’t even sing.”
She’s finished eating and settled back for a doze when Nick starts humming the familiar tune, indulging her, and she noses into the collar of her jacket with a little sigh. Chris hums along for the last three bars and Nick meets her eyes in the rearview mirror.
++
Alicia finds the book in a rest stop bathroom, abandoned and damp. She lays the pages out on the hood of the car while they eat and Nick escorts Chris to the toilet. “Not on the reading list for Berkeley,” Nick notes, giving the book a cursory glance before settling next to her on the picnic bench. Alicia feels a jolt of surprise–she’d forgotten Berkeley. Feels like a million years and a hundred lives ago. She’ll never go to college.
She sits with her ankle locked around Nick’s and Chris shuffles close. He folds his legs up and Alicia leans into him, tucking him against her side. Nick rips open a bag of peanuts and they watch the vultures circle them in the sky.
++
“You’re supposed to talk to them, right?” Alicia puts what readable pages there are in order and presses the book flat between two ripped pieces of cardboard. “That’s what they do on tv.”
“I think that’s for coma patients.” Nick is shirtless and just starting to turn red around his shoulders, and Alicia feels her eyes go dark to look at him. He snaps his shirt at her before tugging it over his head. “Not in front of baby brother.”
“You spent enough time in the hospital, did you see anyone like this?”
Nick pauses; his face goes distant. She waits but he never answers.
++
Chris gets a cold. Alicia sits up with him, cradling him mostly upright to help his breathing. They start a fire and boil water and hold his face over it so he can breathe the steam. “You were right,” Alicia says with tired red rimmed eyes, staying up to feel him cough weakly in her lap. “We should have saved it.”
Nick drips a little water into Chris’s slack dry mouth. “You just got to it first, Licia. You know that.”
Alicia holds Chris tighter. “I want to pretend.”
Nick sits behind her, broad chested and solid and warm. He smells like her, and like Chris, and himself, all mixed up and muddled and tired and dirty and worn out too young. “It’s going to be okay.”
++
Chris mumbles in his fever dreams, sweating and burning in her lap in the backseat. Nick drives with the radio turned on, the crackle drowning out his harsh dark whispers and delirious ramblings. Alicia murmurs in his ear, sshh, shh, it’s okay. He vomits everything they feed him and they’ve focused on trickling water against his tongue, tiny drops at a time.
It’s dark and they’re still driving. There was a sign marking a truckstop ahead. Trucker stop and Nick says maybe they have something. More water, at least. Alicia squints until her eyes hurt and reads three pages of The Velveteen Rabbit, over and over. She stops when she can’t focus her eyes anymore. “How far is it?”
“Ten minutes.” Nick turns his head, checking on them. He touches her cheek with his palm and she leans into him. “You should talk to him.”
Alicia pulls her jeans up and takes Chris’s hand in hers. She presses it against the scar she gave herself the night he came back them. She leans her forehead against his and whispers. “Please, please.”
++
Chris opens his eyes four hours after his fever breaks. “I’m thirsty,” he says, and his voice rattles and rasps when his vocal cords shake the dust out.
++
They don’t ask where he was or how he got away. Alicia shows him how they store the water for maximum efficiency and Nick mutters about running out of gas, one day.
“I don’t know how old I am,” Chris says one afternoon, lying on her chest in the backseat. Alicia trails her fingers through his hair. She remembers that when she was eleven, she used to tell Nick time wasn’t real because it made him puff up indignant and squawking and chase her around the house to tickle her until she cried. She wakes up now when the sun comes up and they sleep when they get tired. Her watch stopped working one morning and she unbuckled it from her wrist and let it drop while she walked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nick says. Chris falls asleep with his hand pressed against her heart.
++
Chris sits on the beach and stares at the moon, reflected in his dark flat eyes. Alicia reaches out, hovering just over his shoulder, then drops her hand. “Chris.”
He turns. He steps into her space and she tilts her head up. Their first kiss feels like their hundredth, comforting and familiar and steady. She presses him into the sand and pins hips down, swallowing him down until he hits the back of her throat. When he comes he tastes Nick; love, family, everything.
Nick carries them to the car, one by one, and does up Chris’s zip. They smash together, crammed into the back, blankets twisted. Alicia and Nick kiss over Chris’s head and then nuzzle both his temples, one on either side. Three hands form a tangled knot and they sleep.
++
Chris doesn’t like to be touched unexpectedly. Nick says his name, gets his attention before moving close, and Alicia follows his lead. It takes days–it might be weeks, Alicia isn’t sure, but then something breaks. Chris crawls against her one night and shivers and keens and she holds him and murmurs into his hair and dusts kisses across his face until Nick’s warm bulk settled on the other side. They hold him between them and keep him from shaking apart.
++
Sometimes Chris sits and looks at his hands and thinks about how easy killing is. He doesn’t have callouses and his skin, while rougher than it was, is still smooth, soft with youth. There are things he does now, almost every day. he wakes up when the sun rises. He knows how to dig in the woods for a place to shit. He can start a fire and count the seconds to know when the water’s boiled long enough to drink. He knows how to swing a weapon so it hits between the vertebrae in the back of the neck and doesn’t get stuck.
++
Alicia gets real quiet sometimes, curled up and staring into their tiny fire. Sometimes she won’t eat unless Chris hand feeds her, coaxes little slivers of whenever she caught with her knife and her fishing line or him and his slingshot, nudging them between her lips and how she chews, automatic. He talks to her continuously when she stops blinking and cups his hand over her face to shield her from the dust.
Nick hovers, worried. Chris wakes in the night to hear him coaxing her to drink, whispering he’s sorry when he forces her jaw open and trickles water on her tongue.
++
“It’s like everyone finally caught up,” Nick says one day, while they’re standing ankle deep in a stream. “Everyone’s finally caught up with me.” The water is cold and bracing and numbing, and it feels good trickling past in a sluggish current. Alicia is up a tree just behind them, mapping out a route. Nick says it again, “Finally finally.” He doesn’t seem to care Chris doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
++
Nick wanders. The first time they’d woke and he wasn’t there Alicia had lain down in the scrabbly crabgrass and refused to move for a day. On the second day he carried her, staggering faintly. on the third Nick appeared from a shadow and grinned at them and shrugged when Alicia slapped him across the face.
Now he comes and he goes and Alicia’s face doesn’t flicker much, anymore. Sometimes Chris likes it, because she leans her head on his shoulder and says his name more gently and sighs and pets his hair while he sleeps in her lap.
Sometimes Chris wishes fiercely Nick won’t ever come back.
++
Alicia kills a little girl with pink ribbons in her pigtails and stops talking altogether. Chris knows it’s bad when Nick stops wandering, but there’s nothing else to do except give her back her knife from where he picked it up from the dirt and wiped the blood off on the leg of his jeans.
++
Nick slings an arm around Chris’s shoulder when they walk next to each other. when food is hard to find he gives Chris extra from his portion–they both give Alicia extra when she’s not looking. he calls Chris baby brother and then laughs like they’re both in on the joke.
++
Chris isn’t paying attention when the walker corners him, half naked and without a weapon, piss in his shoe from when he jerked and whipped around at the noise. He’s vaguely annoyed he’s going to die with his dick out, but he thinks it might make Nick smile.
Alicia beats the walker’s head in with a handheld rock. There's viscera across her face, on her lips. She wipes the back of her hand across her face and spits by the side of the road. Chris cleans himself up and they hold hands back to camp. She starts talking again, rough hoarse teasing. She tells Chris his hair is ridiculous and Nick smiles so wide his teeth glint.
++
They sleep all three of them spooned together and Chris’s thoughts churn only sluggishly with thoughts of what her throat would feel like under his fingers and how much more of her attention he’d get if he slit Nick’s throat while she sleeps. Nick pats his hip and tells him to give it a rest for once, knowing little snicker under his voice. Alicia hums from within the circle of his arms and sets her teeth above the pulsepoint in his wrist.
It is so much easier, Chris thinks, now that everyone’s finally caught up with him.
++
They sit on the ground in the middle of a highway and Alicia cuts their hair. Choppy and with blunted scissors and their hair leave grease streaks on her fingers. She makes them matching and squishes their cheeks between her palms. “Adorable,” she declares, and when Nick sees himself in the car window he chases her across the empty lanes, her giggles floating up in the air. He scoops her up and twirls her before dragging her back and holding her down on the hood of the car.
“No,” she yelps, twisting and breathless, and Nick holds her steady while Chris picks up the scissors.
The last bit of her hair flutters away on the breeze, all of them bearing chin length ugly chopjobs, and she holds out a hand to keep Chris close. Kisses him with her eyes open to watch Nick crowd closer. Nick slides to his knees and eats her out, quick tongue and clever fingers, and she moans into Chris’s mouth while he palms across her chest under her shirt.
++
Alicia is better than either of them with a gun but Chris is the best with the cheap slingshot held together by tape. The night he kills a bird he whoops, his voice rising sharp and jubilant. They crowd around it, frowning, and do a shit job of cleaning it. Nick drops it in the fire twice on accident and it comes out black burnt and chewy. They rip the flesh apart with their nails and press it between each other’s smiling lips and kiss while it’s still hot and burning on their lips.
++
“It’s my birthday,” Alicia says.
“It was your birthday yesterday. It’s my birthday.” Chris leans his chin on her shoulder and they watch Nick walk out of the camp shower, naked. “Happy Birthday to both of us,” he says, smug. She nips at his hand on her shoulder before slipping two fingers between her lips and wolf-whistling. Nick flips them off and Chris laughs against her cheek.
“It’s my birthday,” Chris says later, Alicia stretched out trembling between them, Nick inside her and Chris’s thumb in her mouth against her teeth.
“You’re as bad as she is,” Nick says, and Alicia moans when he pulls out. He pinches her hip, fond and soft eyed. “Brat.”
She smirks at him around Chris’s fingers and makes her next moan a little louder, arching her body up. Chris’s hips flush against hers, all the way inside, and he holds her mouth open, gently, for Nick to slip into her mouth, bitter and perfect on her tongue.
++
The gas cans are full and the day is clear. All Alicia can hear is the wind whistle, and then–her name. Nick leaned against the car door and Chris’s head poking out the window. She takes her place between them and the road stretches on forever.