I returned my stare to the sketchbook on the desktop in front of me, pulling the pencil from behind my ear. Shading the illustration of a guy I’d seen skateboarding up the drag this morning, I made every effort to convince myself of the thing I knew to be true: Jackie Wallace’s heart was not mine to defend or protect against treacherous friends or disloyal boyfriends. Nothing about her, in fact, was my business.

I flipped a few pages back to the second drawing I’d allowed myself to do of her, during my rainy-day filing shift. Hearing her soft thank you in my head all morning, recalling her smile, I hadn’t been able to banish her face from my brain until I consigned her to paper. Even then, I couldn’t forget her bright blue gaze, so close, or the friendly expression I seldom got from any student when wearing that goddamned uniform.

I turned back to the unfinished skateboarder, but minutes later, made the mistake of glancing down the slope of desks to where she sat three days a week, unaware that I watched her. Unaware of my continual internal battle not to. Unaware of me.

Her fingers stroked metrically across the side of her leg – one-two-three, one-two-three – and I imagined that if I was the one sitting next to her, I’d open my palm and let her trace the music she heard on to my skin.

Then Moore reached over and placed his hand over hers, stilling her. Stop, he mouthed. Sorry, she mouthed back, self-conscious and curling her hand into her lap.

My teeth clamped together and I concentrated on breathing slowly through my nose. Stupid, stupid bastard. It was good I had a sparring session scheduled at the dojang tonight. I needed to hit something. Hard.

5

Landon

The fact that my grandfather and my dad didn’t get each other was weird, because they were like the same person born thirty years apart. I’d never noticed that before we moved in with Grandpa. Maybe because Dad had done everything he could to escape who he’d been, or who he might have been. He’d grown up here, in this house, on this beach, but he didn’t have my grandfather’s drawl, or any accent at all, really. Like he’d worked at obliterating it.

Grandpa quit school at fourteen to work the fishing boat with his father, but my father completed high school, left home for college at eighteen, and hadn’t quit until he had a PhD in economics. People in town seemed to know Dad, but he hadn’t lived here for over twenty years, and whenever we’d visited, he hadn’t hung out with any of them. Those people kept their distance now and he kept his, spending his days on the boat with Grandpa. I imagined them out there, all day, saying nothing to each other, and I wondered if that was how Dad and I would be. If it was how we already were.

He’d given away his nice suits before we moved – all but one. We left our furniture and electronics, dishes, cookware and his library of finance and econ and accounting books. I brought most of my clothes, my video games, some books and all my sketchpads – anything I wanted that was mine – but only what would fit into the car. Cindy boxed all the scrapbooks and framed photos, and wrapped Mom’s paintings with brown paper and lots of packing tape. She and Charles took some of them to their house.

Whenever we’d visited Grandpa before, it had been summer. I’d slept on a sleeping bag on the screened porch, or on the shabby, stale-smelling sofa in his living room – which was actually the only room in the house besides the kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. I didn’t really think about where I would sleep until we got there, two days before Christmas.

A three-foot-tall fake Christmas tree sat on a rickety table in a corner window, looking as pathetic and unfestive as possible. Non-blinking, multicoloured bulbs were affixed to it. The only ornaments were a few actual candy canes, still in their cellophane wrappers and hooked over branches, a dozen shiny silver glitter-coated bells, and eight felt-enclosed school photos of me, from kindergarten through seventh grade.

There was no star. No angel. Nothing on the top at all. No gifts beneath. Just the plastic stand, sitting bare on the wood.

Our trees had always been tall and fresh, chosen at a Christmas tree farm twenty miles out of the city. Mom and Dad always let me choose the tree, and then Dad would pay the tree farmer before cutting it down and strapping it to the roof of our car, where it would hang out over the windshield in front and poke out from the back like a roof-mounted rocket. Last year, the tree I chose was so tall that Dad had to climb to the top of the ladder to circle the top branches with twinkly white lights and add the star.

The tree skirt Mom used looked like a tapestry – trimmed in gold braid and embroidered with gold-threaded words like Noel and Merry Christmas and Ho Ho Ho. There were always lots of gifts on top of it, and most of them said Landon.

I’d been spoiled, and though I’d been somewhat aware of the fact, it didn’t seem to matter, because every kid I knew was the same.

Grandpa grabbed a suitcase from my hand and turned to walk towards the kitchen. That was the moment I wondered where my room would be.

He opened the door to the pantry. Only, it wasn’t the pantry any more. The lower shelves had been removed, and a twin mattress and frame was somehow, impossibly, crammed wall-to-wall inside. From the ceiling, an overhead light hung on a chain – a three-bulb type of light usually found over a kitchen table. I recognized that it had, in fact, hung over the kitchen table the last time I’d been here, months before. The world’s most compact, narrow chest stood crammed into the entry corner. I had to shut the pantry door to open any of the drawers. There was no window.