All the Little Lights
Page 19

I choked on the stale, humid air, deciding to open a window. The summer had been miserably hot, even for Oklahoma, and autumn wasn’t offering much relief. Even so, Mama didn’t like to run the air conditioner unless we were expecting guests.
But we were. We were always expecting guests.
Footsteps scampered down the hall upstairs. The crystal chandelier rattled, and I smiled. Poppy was back.
I left my backpack at the door and climbed the wooden steps, two at a time. Poppy was at the end of the hall, standing by the window, looking down on the backyard.
“Do you want to go out and play?” I asked, reaching out to pet her hair.
She shook her head but didn’t turn around.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Bad day?”
“Daddy won’t let me go outside until he gets back,” she whimpered. “He’s been gone a long time.”
“Have you had lunch?” I asked, holding out my hand. She shook her head. “I bet your dad will let you go outside with me if you eat a sandwich first. Peanut butter and jelly?”
Poppy grinned. She was practically a little sister. I’d been taking care of her since the first night she visited. She and her father were the first to come after Dad had died.
Poppy walked clumsily down the stairs, then watched as I rummaged through the cabinets for bread, a knife, jelly, and peanut butter. The corners of her dirty mouth turned up while she watched me slather together ingredients and then add a banana for good measure.
Mama use to sneak in something healthy when I was Poppy’s age, and now, five months from my eighteenth birthday, I was the adult. It had been that way since Dad died. Mama never thanked me or acknowledged what I did for us, not that I expected her to. Our life now was about making it through the day. Anything more was too overwhelming for me, and I didn’t have the luxury of quitting. At least one of us had to keep it together so we didn’t fall apart.
“Did you eat breakfast?” I asked, trying to get a sense of when she’d checked in.
She nodded, stuffing the sandwich into her mouth. A ring of grape jelly added to the dirt and stickiness already spotting her face.
I fetched my backpack and brought it to the end of our long, rectangular table in the dining room, not far from where Poppy sat. While she chomped and wiped her sticky chin with the back of her hand, I finished my geometry. Poppy was happy but lonely like me. Mama didn’t like for me to have friends over, except for the occasional visit from Tess, who mostly talked about her house down the street. She was homeschooled and a little weird, but she was someone to talk to, and she didn’t care about the goings-on at the Juniper. It wasn’t as if I had time for things like that anyway. We couldn’t allow outsiders to see what was happening inside our walls.
Bass thumped outside, and I pulled aside the curtain to peek out the window. Presley’s pearl-white convertible Mini Cooper was full of the clones, now seniors like me. The top was down, the clones laughing and bobbing their heads to the music as Presley slowed at the four-way stop in front of our house. Two years ago, jealousy or sadness might have seared through me, but the discomfort of numbness was the only thing I could feel. The part of me that wished for cars and dates and new clothes had died with Dad. Wanting something I couldn’t have was too painful, so I chose not to.
Mama and I had bills to pay, and that meant keeping secrets for the people who walked the hallways. If our neighbors knew the truth, they wouldn’t want us to stay. So we were loyal to her patrons, and we kept their secrets. I was willing to sacrifice the few friends I had to keep us all happy and lonely and together.
As soon as I opened the back door, Poppy bolted down the wooden steps to the yard below, planting her palms on the ground and kicking over in an awkward cartwheel. She giggled and covered her mouth, sitting on the crispy golden grass. My mouth felt dry just hearing it crunch beneath our feet. The summer had been one of the hottest I could remember. Even now, in late September, the trees were withered and the ground was made of dead grass, dust, and beetles. Rain was something the adults talked about like a fond memory.
“Daddy will be back soon,” Poppy said, a tinge of nostalgia in her voice.
“I know.”
“Tell me again. The story about when you were born. The story about your name.”
I smiled, sitting down on the steps. “Again?”
“Again,” Poppy said, absently pulling bleached blades from the ground.
“Mama wanted to be a princess her whole life,” I said with reverence. It was the same tone Dad used when he recounted the story at bedtime. Every night until the day before he died, he told me the Story of Catherine. “When she was just ten, Mama dreamed about fluffy dresses and marble floors and golden teacups. She wished for it so hard she was sure it would come true. She just knew when she fell in love with Dad that he had to be a secret prince.”
Poppy’s eyebrows and shoulders lifted as she became lost in my words, and then her expression fell. “But he wasn’t.”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t. But she loved him even more than she loved her dream.”
“So they got married and had a baby.”
I nodded. “She wanted to be royalty, and bestowing a name—a title—on another human being was the closest she would ever get. Catherine sounded like a princess to her.”
“Catherine Elizabeth Calhoun,” Poppy said, sitting tall.
“Regal, isn’t it?”
Poppy’s face scrunched. “What does regal mean?”
“Excuse me,” a deep voice said from the corner of the yard.
Poppy stood, glaring at the intruder.
I stood next to her, raising my hand to shield my eyes from the sun. At first, all I could see was his silhouette, and then his face came into focus. I almost didn’t recognize him, but the camera hanging from a strap around his neck gave him away.
Elliott was taller, his frame thicker with more muscle. His chiseled jaw made him look like a man instead of the boy I remembered. His hair was longer, now falling to the bottom of his shoulder blades. He hitched his elbows over the top of our peeling picket fence with a hopeful grin.
I glanced over my shoulder to Poppy. “Go inside,” I said. She obeyed, quietly retreating to the house. I looked to Elliott and then turned.
“Catherine, wait,” he pleaded.
“I have been,” I snapped.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his khaki cargo shorts, making my heart ache. He looked so different from the last time I’d seen him, and yet the same. Far from the lanky, awkward teenager just two years earlier. His braces were gone, leaving a perfect smile behind his lying lips, bright against his skin. The deepness of his complexion had faded, and so had the light in his eyes.
Elliott’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. “I’m, um . . . I’m . . .”
A liar.
The camera swayed from the thick, black strap hanging from his neck as he fidgeted. He was nervous, and guilty, and beautiful.
He tried again. “I’m—”
“Not welcome,” I said, slowly retreating up the steps.
“I just moved in,” he called after me. “With my aunt? While my parents finalize the divorce. Dad is living with his girlfriend, and Mom stays in bed most of the day.” He lifted his fist and gestured behind him with his thumb. “I’m just down the street? Do you remember where my aunt lives?”
I didn’t like the way he ended his sentences with question marks. If I were to ever talk to a boy again with even a smidgen of interest, he would talk in periods, and only sometimes in exclamation points. Only when it was interesting, the way Dad use to talk.