Untaken (35 page)

What he said didn’t make sense all of the time, he’d still get confused with his words, but this was Jake, who used to say nothing at all.

Was he really changing? Becoming more like us? I thought so. I wanted to believe that he was, because the more like us he was, the safer he’d be.

“Hello? You coming with us or not?”

“Sorry, I was thinking,” I said. “Where are you going again?”

“We’re going to the lake. Catch us some fish, since
someone
is sick of eggs. I thought I’d take Jake—he’s never been out that way before. Be good to show him how to use the fishing poles.”

“Make sure—”

“We’ll be careful,” Brandon said with a grin. “No one is going to fall into, off of, or out of anything. So, you’re not coming?”

“I want to finish the new coop. Jake says he saw the coyote out in the woods again.”

“Hey, don’t put them chickens in without me,” he added.

“Why not?”

“I want to see what they think when they see it for the first time.”

I laughed. Brandon was crazy about those hens. They’d all follow him about like he was their mom. God help us when we got round to eating one of the goofy things instead of just their eggs. Brandon would probably insist on having a funeral before dinner.

“They’re not even going to know the difference. It’s not like they’re going to throw a little house warming party or something,” I told him.

“They will too know the difference!” He shoved me and I shoved him back, threatening him with the slimy egg spoon, until we were wrestling for it like it was a gun.

Boom! Here’s yolk in your eye.

This got me giggling, and Brandon squinted at me, smiling.

He looked different than the skinny Brandon of winter. I sometimes forgot
how
different until I was close to him like this. Working outdoors all spring had made him tan, and he had muscles where there used to be nothing but scrawn and gangle. I’d grown a lot over winter, too, but Brandon was still taller than me.

He had one hand wrapped about my wrist and the other one slung around my waist. Our eyes met, and I felt my cheeks going red. That stupid blush! Sometimes if I even just thought about how awkward it would be to blush it would happen. It didn’t mean anything, not really. I pushed him away from me, turning to drop the spoon into the bucket of well water in the sink. He stood behind me, so close that the warm outdoorsy scent of him was all I could concentrate on. I needed something to say.

Something normal.

“So,” we both said at the same time.

I was saved by a loud bark at the door, then Jake and Dog came bustling through.

“I saw a deer! A big deer and a baby deer! Dog made them run away; she’s a bad Dog today, isn’t she?”

“She’s a bad Dog every day,” said Brandon. Dog tipped her head to one side and wagged her tail. That Dog was the only creature on earth dumber than the chickens, but at least the chickens managed to stay out of trouble for more than three minutes at a stretch, which was more than I could say for Dog.

“You about ready to go, buddy?” asked Brandon.

“Sure. Where we going again?”

“The lake.”

“Dog hasn’t seen the lake before,” said Jake. “She wants to know if the lake is scary.”

Brandon caught my eye and we grinned at each other. It was okay between us. Everything was perfectly normal.

“You can tell Dog that a lake is just a big bit of water, with fish living in it,” said Brandon.

“A river?”

“Bigger than a river,” I told him, “and it doesn’t move.”

Jake’s mouth hitched down and he frowned.

“You’ll see it for yourself soon enough. Go get your coat, we’re taking the bike.”

“But Dog can’t ride on the bike!” Said Jake, stamping his feet. He reminded me so much of Mikey for a second that I felt a wave of grief run through me like cold water.

“Dog can stay here and help Gracie. You need to be quiet to catch fish.”

Jake stomped off to his room, muttering under his breath.

Brandon turned back to me. “Something wrong.”

“No more than usual,” I told him.

“Sure you won’t come?”

“Someone should stay here. Make sure you’re back before dark, okay?”

“Sure thing.”

I turned back to the dishes before he could say anything more and lost myself in scrubbing the plates, until I heard the door close and the roar of the trail bike starting up.

I was worried Jake would fall clean off the back of the bike one day, even taking into consideration the way Brandon drove like a little old man, but it was less conspicuous than the SUV and guzzled less fuel. It was also better for negotiating the roads, which weren’t in such great shape these days. The branches brought down by the winter storms blocked parts of the road, and the places where the frost had seeped in and cracked the surface crumbled away more every time it rained. It made foraging trickier, but I hoped anyone trying to find us would have the same problems.

A few minutes later, Dog reappeared and flopped miserably on the kitchen floor beside me, panting heavily from chasing the trail bike down the road.

“And you can just stay in here,” I told her. “No chicken dinner for you.”

The coop took up the rest of the morning. It had taken me a while to get the hang of working with the wood. Brandon seemed to have a knack for it, but even when I followed the instructions to the letter, the things I built always ended up crooked or wobbly. I guessed that there were some things where you either knew how to do it or you didn’t, and following the instructions didn’t help too much. I couldn’t feel too mad about it. It was nice that Brandon had found something he was good at. Although, if he caught anyone watching him, he tended to pound his thumb with the hammer, or screw up his measurements, just like the old Brandon would have.

The coop wasn’t bad. It looked pretty much like the one in the book.
We should paint it
, I thought. Red and white would be pretty.

No, no paint. New paint would be easier to spot from the road and the sky, and would be a sure giveaway that someone was living here. “We’ll just never have anything nice ever again,” I told the chickens.

With the coop finished, there wasn’t much to do. I walked around the cabin to the vegetable garden. We’d hoped to scrape enough food from the garden to supplement what we’d scavenged, but, like the chickens, the vegetable patch was thriving almost too well. Half of the produce growing there wasn’t even supposed to be ready for months, but the vines were thick with plump bean pods and heavy tomatoes, and the soil bulged with potatoes and onions.

We’d found sunflower seeds down in the basement, and I’d given them to Jake to plant, telling him not to get discouraged if they didn’t sprout. The sunflowers had already shot up so high that they towered above the house. I’d never seen any grow so fast or so huge before, and although they were conspicuous, Jake was so pleased with them that we couldn’t bring ourselves to cut them down. I stared at them nodding innocently above me. It was the good earth up here. That’s all it was. If I was going to start worrying when we did manage to grow food as well as when we didn’t I’d drive myself nuts. Besides, for all I knew, that’s how plants were supposed to grow when you didn’t have landscapers coming round every week to keep them tidy.

I filled a bucket with beans and tomatoes. There was no way we’d be able to eat all this stuff before it went bad. We needed more books. A cookbook to tell us how to put things in jars. Finding the jars would take time, but time was something we had plenty of these days. Too much time.

I should have gone with them. With nothing to do, it was easy for my mind to stray again and again to all the things that worried me.

Doc and Terry. Jake.

Brandon.

“It’s not a crush,” I told Dog, who had long since escaped the kitchen and was snapping at bees, with indignant yips and growls. “I guess it’s not a crush, right? I’ve never had one before, not on a real life person anyway. It’s just because we’re stuck here together. If things were normal, I wouldn’t even be friends with him. And you know what? Most of the time, he just makes me mad. So, I bet it can’t be a crush. Just cabin fever or something.”

He’d probably had a girlfriend before all this happened. A popular girl. Not a dork with a computer instead of friends. I imagined the girlfriend with blond hair and long legs, and a whole wardrobe of cool clothes. A car, too. The girlfriend would have had a red car, and she’d have let Brandon drive, and would have told him how awesome he was instead of sighing when he took the bends too slow.

“This is really dumb,” I told Dog, sternly. “Like, super dumb.”

Dog yapped at me. Even Dog thought it was dumb.
There must be
something
to do around here.
I pumped water, then swept the kitchen. I cleaned the gun. I filled the new coop with straw.

“Okay, I give up,” I told Dog finally. “What Brandon doesn’t know won’t hurt him, right?”

We were trying not to use electricity unless absolutely necessary, to conserve the generator fuel, but not going crazy was a necessity too. I hoped 6_star was online. I wasn’t going to tell her anything important—there was no need for Brandon to get so bent out of shape every time I went online.

I just needed someone to talk to was all.

Jake

ou got to sit still, or they won’t come close,” Brandon told him.

Jake sighed. He could feel the swimming things down there. The “fish,” and others, too. Creatures he didn’t know the name for, minute and squirming, engaged in their miniature quests to feed, to play, to escape predators or ensnare prey, to create others like them.

There were no fish near where they were sitting right now, so Jake couldn’t see the point of being quiet. Brandon was just being bossy telling Jake to be quiet when there weren’t even any old fish here.

Brandon doesn’t know the things you know. You’re not like Brandon. Not a little boy.

He silenced that sneaky inside voice with effort. He wasn’t going to let it creep in today. Not with the lake and the new woods to explore. The lake was wonderful, the way it looked as though there was a second sky living in it. “A reflection,” Brandon said it was called. There was another Brandon in the reflection. Another Jake, too. A Jake who lived in the sky.