Love Over Matter (6 page)

Ad nauseam.

It’s not like I
don’t
want
to move
on; I do. But I can’t. Not without George. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I
say. “Message received. Again.” I duck into the Prius for my
English books (we’re simultaneously reading
1984
and
Brave New World
—sort of a compare and
contrast assignment), which have been absorbing space in the
backseat all weekend. I wiggle the Orwell text from the seat
crevice, a startling sight catching my eye. “Haley, come here!” I
shout, my voice shrill with alarm. She’s not moving fast enough.
“Haley! Help!”

I sense her behind me.
“What?”

All I can do is point.

“
Oh . . . my
. . . God,” she drawls, three measly syllables stretching
the length of the alphabet song. She pushes in front of me and
stares at the seat, where, tied in a compact little knot, lies an
empty Funyuns bag. “Omigod, omigod, omigod!” she squeaks, shifting
to staccato rhythm.

I poke absently at her spine. “When
did Mom get this car?”

She shrugs.

“
Think!” I demand. She goes
for the chip bag, which to any normal person would look like trash.
But we know better. “Don’t,” I warn. “Don’t touch it.” Disturbing
this relic would be akin to defacing George’s grave.

Haley shimmies back out of the car,
her face ashen. “It can’t be . . .” she says warily.
“Can it?”

“
When did Mom get this
car?” I repeat, doing some mental math, although it’s all but
impossible that the Funyuns bag has been kicking around the Prius
since before George died.

Haley nibbles her lip.
“July, I think. Or maybe August.” She stares me dead in the eyes.
“But it was definitely
after
seventh grade. I remember, because Mom and Dad had
the station wagon when they took us to Six Flags.”

My sister is right, leaving only one
explanation: the hungry ghost of George Alfred Brooks has been
noshing on delicious onion-flavored snacks, twisting the empty
wrappers into his trademark bowtie knots (when he was alive, he
claimed the packaging took up less space in landfills this way) and
planting the evidence for me to find.

I want to say something, but my jaw
just drops and hangs there, slack and dopey looking.

“
What’re you gonna do?”
asks Haley.

There’s no protocol for how to act
when the dead best friend you secretly loved suddenly resurfaces—or
at least his garbage does. “I have no idea.”

chapter 5

I came close to kissing
George once. It was a sky-blue summer day, the same day his beat-up
old skateboard let go of its rickety back wheel and the day
after
I let go of the
sixth grade.

“
C’mon, slowpoke!” he
called over his shoulder, the board wobbling back and forth as
it—and he—careened down the hilly sidewalk by Lemon
Park.

I was in the street, trying but
failing to race him, my child-sized scooter no match for his skill
or agility. “You win!” I yelled, winded from the competition,
though most of it was downhill. I sucked in a breath and blew it
out. “I surrender!”

George hit the valley at warp speed,
spun around a turn and coasted into the dinky parking lot beside
the basketball court—or what passes for a court in Milbridge: a
jagged slab of tarmac, roughly rhombus shaped, with two off-center
posts, backboards and hoops attached but nets MIA. “You didn’t have
a prayer,” he told me, all macho and—dare I say?—a little full of
himself.

I rolled over to join him, my ankles
on the verge of spraining. “Where did I put that trophy again?” I
asked, patting around my shorts.

He flashed a grin that traveled all
the way to his oversized eyes. “You never learn, do
you?”

Our first meeting, huddled behind the
tire of that moving truck, had cemented a rivalry between George
and me—a friendly one that, from early on, assumed a flirtatious
bent.

I noticed Ian and Robie (last name,
not first) tearing up the court with an epic man-on-man battle.
“Wanna go two-on-two?” I asked George with a nod at his
pals.

He squinted, his eyes shrinking to
normal size. “Us versus them?”

We had challenged Ian and Robie (or
Ian and some other less-than-athletic partner) to a friendly game
of hoops before, so there was no reason for him to act so
skeptical. “Sure. Why not?”

He didn’t answer right away, but I
could tell from his body language (stiffening spine, nose twitch,
darting eyes) that he wasn’t on board. “Eh,” he said, “I don’t
know.” I felt an excuse brewing. “Wouldn’t you rather do something
else?”

Wow, he was off his game today. I
started wandering toward the court. “Like what?”

“
I dunno,” he said
tentatively, his skateboard clunking along behind him instead of
buddying up to my scooter in the grass. “Talk?”

He sure did know how to
stun a girl. I mean, it wasn’t like we didn’t talk all the time;
we’d just never
talked about
talking. “Um, all right. If that’s what you want,
I guess.”

Ian shot George a quick wave, then
made a killer basket from half-court. George tossed the wave back
and steered me by the shoulder toward the playground. “So what’s
up?” I asked as we plopped down in the sand at the edge of the
jungle gym.

He scanned for eavesdroppers, though
the park was deserted. “I found out something,” he told me, more
serious than I’d heard him before.

I hadn’t a foggy clue what he meant.
“About . . . ?”

“
My mother.” He stared at
the ground, poked an ant hill with his sneaker.

Well, that narrowed it down, but I
still couldn’t assume. “Which one?” We’d exchanged a few words
about his biological parents, but only when the subject came up on
its own and never in much depth. Already this interaction felt
different.

“
The real one,” he said,
the syllables rolling off his tongue.

I got a knot in my stomach. “Is it
good or bad?” I asked, trying to brace myself.

He shrugged.

“
Am I going to cry?” It was
common knowledge that George considered me overly sensitive, the
way I got worked up over TV commercials and, God forbid, the news,
which was always dismal enough to throw me into a funk.
You’d cry over spilt milk,
he’d say as a running joke. And it was pretty much
true.

He brought his gaze to mine. “I’ve got
her name.”

“
Nuh-uh.”

“
Yep,” he said with a twist
of his lips. He leaned forward and groped the back of his jeans,
withdrawing a tattered, quarter-folded piece of paper. “Look and
see.” He slipped the paper to me sideways, as if it were a
clandestine love note.

I didn’t want to open it. Someone had
broken George’s warm, kind, funny heart, and now I was going to
have to admit that such an evildoer existed. “Who gave you this?” I
asked, pinching the paper between my thumb and forefinger and
holding it up to the sun for a sneak preview.

“
I stole it.”

My lungs quivered.
“You
stole
it?”

He displayed his palm, which featured
a gash outlined in dried blood. “Tore up my hand busting their safe
open.”

“
Your parents? You broke
into . . . ?”

“
Out of character, huh?” He
beamed his pearly whites again.

“
You could say
that.”

“
So . . . ?”

“
Shouldn’t you give me a
drum roll or something? This seems too big to just
do it
.”

He froze, as if an important thought
had occurred to him. “I had a different name, you know. So don’t be
surprised.”

I clenched my jaw and pried
the edges of the paper apart, revealing a jumble of lines,
checkboxes, and unfamiliar text. With a lump in my throat, I
scanned the page. “Ruth Elizabeth Dawson?” I read, my gaze drawn to
the contents of the box labeled MOTHER’S NAME. Under my
breath
,
I
repeated, “Ruth Dawson.”

He gulped. “Keep going. It gets
better.”

I glanced at the address listed for
his birth mother. “New York? You weren’t born in
Vermont?”

“
Uh-uh. Unless that thing’s
a forgery.”

“
Ha-ha,” I said, following
up with a genuine chuckle. “I doubt your parents would keep a
forgery under lock and key.”

He quipped about his official birth
certificate being the fake, but I was too distracted by the unusual
spelling of his real name to pay much notice. “Uh-NAT-uh-lee?” I
puzzled, my face scrunched in concentration over the letters, which
read: A-N-A-T-O-L-Y.

“
For someone so smart,” he
said, snatching the paper from my hand, “you really are
quite . . .” He shimmied closer to me, launched an
arm around my shoulder and, with his thumb pinned below the word in
question, brandished the sheet before us. “An-uh-TOE-lee,” he
sounded out, in a voice that suggested I was hopeless.
“See?”

“
An-uh-TOE-lee?” I
parroted. He gave me an
mm-hmm
and a squeeze, his face—that perfect, freckled,
saucer-eyed face—only inches from mine.
Play stupid,
I thought.
Mispronounce something else. Give him a reason to
stay.
“I like it,” I said in a come-hither
voice.

He licked his lips, the gesture
seeming to occur in slow motion. “It’s not weird?”

“
Well, uh, it’s kind of
. . .
exotic,
” I offered, his cinnamon-scented breath snaking into my
nostrils and making me dizzy.

“
You always did have a way
with words, Cass.” He jostled the paper. “But what about this?” he
asked, his thumb inching toward the box marked FATHER’S
NAME.

It was empty.

“
Clerical
error?”

“
Really? That’s the best
you’ve got?”

“
Alien
abduction?”

In a radio-announcer voice,
he crowed, “It’s a
swing
and a miss.” His arm dropped off my shoulder.
“Nice try, though.”

“
At least you know your
mother’s name. That’s
something,
” I said, hoping to cheer
him. “If you can find
her,
who knows what—”

“
I can’t,” he blurted. “She
doesn’t exist.”

I furrowed my brow. “Huh?”

“
Not a trace. Nothing,” he
assured me in a pained tone. “She’s a mystery; a
phantom.”

“
All right, you’re freaking
me out.” I hopped up off the sand. “She has to exist, unless
. . . unless she’s . . .”

“
Dead?” he said, finishing
my thought. “Uh-uh. I checked that out too. There’s no record of
her being born
or
dying.”

“
Well, that just doesn’t
make sense.”

He folded the birth certificate and
pocketed it, then stood to face me. “Tell me about it.”

My fingers drifted toward
my mouth. “What did you check?
How
did you check?”

“
Online databases. Vital
records sites. Stuff like that,” he said matter-of-factly. “There
are thousands—
tens of
thousands
—of Ruth Dawsons, just none that
fit my search criteria.”

The way he’d presented the information
made it seem like a done deal. “Oh.”

“
So that’s that, I
guess.”

I studied the gentle slope of his
nose, the enticing fullness of his lower lip, the hint of dominance
in his chin for evidence of an alternate identity. “Anatoly? Did I
mention that I like that name?”

“
I believe you
did.”

* * *

The first day back to school after
spring break is always rough, but today was even more of a
nightmare than usual, because 1) we had a sub for English who,
instead of teaching, spent the whole class period regaling us with
tales of his failed publishing history (he’s written fourteen
novels and been rejected by every publisher in the known universe)
and then proceeded to slice our eardrums to shreds with a clunky,
mechanical reading from one of said orphan manuscripts, and 2) I
got a nosebleed from, of all things, a runaway (or flyaway, as it
were) paper airplane that decided to use my face as a landing
strip.

It goes without saying that, once the
ketchup faucet in my nasal passages ran dry, I decided to walk the
mile and a half home instead of taking my chances on the claptrap
of a bus the Milbridge School Department is so gracious as to
provide us.

* * *

“
Oh, hey Cassie,” our
cleaning lady Rosita says when she notices me schlepping along the
sidewalk, the hatchback of her car swung wide open. She reaches
inside and muscles out a caddy full of spray bottles and microfiber
cloths. “How’s it goin’?”