The rivals of casper roa.., p.12
The Rivals of Casper Road, page 12
“Your father’s been having terrible reflux lately,” she said. “So he’s taking a new medication.”
She talked for several minutes about his father’s health and her friend Joanie, whom Zachary had never met and wasn’t entirely convinced actually existed since his mother’s relationship with her seemed to revolve entirely around Zumba and smoothies.
“I’m up for a promotion at work,” Zachary said. “I fly to Denver for the interview next week. If I get it, I’ll be the youngest person ever to hold the position.”
“That’s wonderful,” his mother said. “Congratulations.”
“Well, I didn’t get it yet,” he said.
“I’m sure you will, sweetie.”
Zachary began to sweat.
“No, it’s not guaranteed. It will be competitive,” he said. That wasn’t quite right, but he didn’t know how else to say it. She was congratulating him like it was nothing—a done deal, a guarantee—and it was notable, significant, a standout. Making it sound guaranteed stripped the achievement from it.
“Well, if they’re smart, they’ll pick you,” she repeated.
Zachary sighed.
“Listen, I need your help with something,” his mother said. In the space of one sentence, she’d shifted completely into the intensity that Zachary knew so well.
Suddenly he wished he’d never called.
“There’s movement with your sister’s case. I’ve been contacted by someone who worked as a waitress in a diner sixty miles east of here. She guarantees that your sister came in three days in a row and was meeting someone. So I need you to go to the diner and ask for Sharon Barklee. Barklee—with two Es. And then put up flyers all around Riverton. You can design them, right, honey? Like you did before? You’re so much better at it than me.”
“Mom, Mom. I can’t go to Riverton. I work. I have a job. I’m going to Denver.”
“You can go after work. It’s a 24-hour diner.”
A familiar tornado of exhaustion and frustration swept Zachary up. This was the fifth or sixth person in the last ten years who had claimed to see Sarah. And of course they did, because his mother kept advertising a reward for a sighting of her.
The first time it had happened had only been a year after they moved to Garnet Run, and even Zachary had gotten his hopes up, despite thinking he’d resigned himself to Sarah’s permanent absence.
Things happened. People left and came back. You never knew. Sarah was young and maybe she’d changed her mind. He’d gotten caught up in it all, just like his parents had. When it proved to be nothing, he’d felt like he was grieving all over again. But the next time it had happened, he’d known better.
But his mother had been sure the next time too. And the time after that. Every time she was sure, because she didn’t have anything else to be and keep living one day after the next. He didn’t want to take that away from her, but he’d been done helping her sustain it years ago.
“Mom,” he said, as gently as he could. “Sarah wasn’t at that diner. That waiter didn’t see her. I’m not going to Riverton. I’m sorry. Can we talk about something else?”
“You could go on a weekend,” she continued, her voice taking on the steel edge of someone who would have her will done and pity anyone who got in her way. “It would be a nice Saturday drive. You could get some pie at the diner, talk to Sharon, and put up the flyers. It’s lovely out.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not going. You need to ask someone else.”
His mother started in again, and her inability to be reasoned with infuriated Zachary. This conversation was over.
“I’m going to hang up now, Mom. I love you.”
Then Zachary ended the call and lay down on the floor with his eyes closed, trying to scrape her voice out of his brain.
* * *
“A haunted hayride?”
“Yeah!” Bram stood in Zachary’s doorway, dressed in denim and flannel, looking like he should be doing something with hay himself.
“Why?”
Bram wrinkled his brow.
“Um, because it’s fun and seasonal and awesome?”
“Well, it beats driving sixty miles to ask a waiter about my dead sister’s ghost,” Zachary muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Um, yeah, okay.”
“Great!”
Bram stepped inside and folded Zachary into a full-body hug.
It was quickly becoming one of Zachary’s favorite things. Being completely surrounded by Bram’s warm, muscular body made him feel safe and cared for. He nuzzled his face tighter against Bram and breathed in his sunny smell.
“Mmm,” Bram hummed, and stroked up and down his spine. Then he worked his fingers at the nape of Zachary’s neck and into his hair, and Zachary melted. Bram took his weight easily.
“Don’t stop,” Zachary said into Bram’s chest.
“What?” Bram asked, but he followed the instruction anyway, so Zachary didn’t repeat it.
After several minutes of cuddling and petting, Zachary felt like a recharged battery.
“You okay?” Bram asked.
Zachary nodded.
“Okay, then get your coat!”
“Oh, you meant...now?”
“Yeah! It’s a Saturday in October, we’ve gotta do Halloween-y things!”
“Oh. Okay.”
For all that Zachary loved horror movies and loved designing and executing his Halloween decorations, he’d never pursued Halloween-y activities. But it did sound fun. Especially if Bram was going to be with him.
Yeah. Definitely better than talking to a waiter about his dead sister’s ghost.
* * *
The thing about riding on Bram’s motorcycle was that it made the getting there part just as much of an event as the being there part. The cold air kissed Zachary’s face and his clothes snapped around him like the wind was trying to pull him inside it. The familiar countryside whipped past at a new speed, the autumn leaves blurring to dappled color and light.
They pulled into a farm about twenty miles away and Bram helped Zachary off the bike. He felt expansive and oxygenated, like a drink fizzing over the top of the glass.
The sky around them was huge, and the air smelled of sweet decomposition and apples. Autumn in an orchard. Zachary hadn’t experienced it since he was a child.
Bram grabbed his hand and interlaced their fingers, excitedly pulling him toward the sign for the hayrides.
A pumpkin patch to their right promised perfect pumpkins for carving, and the orchard to their left promised perfect apples for bobbing—not that Zachary would ever bob for apples; it was horribly unsanitary.
So they had that whole Halloween vibe nailed.
Mostly, though, Zachary paid attention to the feel of Bram’s warm hand in his, since apparently they were holding hands now.
They passed a scarecrow with straw leaking from between the buttons of its shirt.
“Hey, you’re twins,” Zachary said, pointing. The scarecrow’s plaid flannel was a shade darker blue than Bram’s but otherwise identical. It wore blue jeans as well.
Bram chuckled and let go of Zachary’s hand to stand with an arm slung around the scarecrow.
“Take a picture for my family?” he asked.
Zachary pulled out his phone. He took several shots that displayed their matching outfits fully. Then, almost before he realized he was doing it, he zoomed in on Bram’s smiling face, and snapped a picture just for himself. A picture to prove to himself that he had the attention and care of this glorious man—at least for a little while.
Then he deleted the picture because it felt creepy to take it without Bram’s permission.
He sent the pics of Bram and the scarecrow to Bram’s phone and Bram sent a group text that popped up on Zachary’s phone.
Found my soul mate, the text said, and for a moment, Zachary’s heart leapt into his throat. But then he realized it was referring to the scarecrow, obviously.
A flood of messages pinged in Zachary’s phone, all from numbers he didn’t know.
A raised eyebrow emoji, a laughing emoji, a GIF from The Wicker Man, which made Zachary have a favorite sibling of Bram’s even if he didn’t know which one it was.
“Um,” Zachary said. He held up his phone.
“Oh, uh. Should I not have included you?”
Bram’s cheeks pinked. Zachary could tell he meant it to be something nice, but he didn’t really have any interest in a bunch of random texts from people he didn’t know.
“It’s nice,” Zachary said carefully. “But also very distracting if they keep writing.”
“Got it,” Bram said. He got a message then that said, END.
“Does that make them stop?”
“Yep. Sibling code.” Bram winked.
Zachary wasn’t sure that using the word end to ask people to end a conversation quite counted as code, but he appreciated its efficacy nonetheless.
“Okay, ready?” Bram asked, excitement firmly back in place.
“I guess so.”
They queued up with families and young couples near a fleet of tractors pulling wagons. Hay bales were stacked along the edges for people to sit on. When Bram and Zachary were waved into a wagon, Zachary squirmed to find a comfortable way to sit, but the hay was pokey and itched through his pants.
Bram slid off his jacket.
“Stand up.”
He put the jacket down on the hay, and when Zachary sat down again, the itchiness was gone.
“Won’t you be cold?”
“Warm-blooded.”
“Thanks.”
Bram put his arm around Zachary’s back. One of the boys sitting across from them with his family kept staring at them. Zachary’s stomach tightened. Was the kid going to say something? He reminded himself that when it happened he shouldn’t tell the kid to shut up because that would make his parents mad and it had been a long time since Zachary got in a fight, but he was pretty sure in a moving hayride would be a pretty unpleasant place to take it up again.
Fortunately, once they started moving, there were other things to draw the kid’s attention.
They drove through a wooden cutout arch that announced they were now entering a haunted field.
“Shouldn’t we be doing this at night?” Zachary asked, confused.
Bram bit his lip.
“Um. I thought it would be too scary at night,” he whispered haltingly.
Zachary smiled, incredibly endeared.
“Well, I hope you and all the six-year-olds have a great time,” he teased.
Bram chuckled warmly and gave him a friendly noogie.
The “haunted” part of the hayride mainly consisted of people in masks jumping out from behind stacks of hay bales on the ground. They were clearly keeping it G-rated for the family crowd (and Bram).
Zachary entertained himself by mentally editing the hayride into something truly scary. He was about to tell Bram about how he’d execute a particular effect when the man in question grabbed his hand and squeaked.
A person in a clown mask had just jumped out from behind a tree.
Bram blew out a breath and calmed himself.
“You okay?”
Bram turned wide eyes the color of the autumn sky on Zach and blinked. “This is scary,” he asserted.
Zachary patted his hand and decided he shouldn’t share his specially edited scary edition of the hayride with Bram, even in broad daylight.
The hayride did have one neat effect. As they approached the end of the ride, passing through a twin wooden cutout arch to the one at the beginning, the whole trailer let out a collective sigh of relief. And just as they were doing so, three different masked people jumped out from behind the arch and shot them with silly string.
Several people screamed, the kid who’d been staring at them earlier jumped up, and Bram leapt over the side of the cart to the ground, and ran toward the orchard.
“Er. Excuse me,” Zachary said as he stepped over people’s feet to get to the back of the car.
He jumped down and followed Bram, who had his hands resting on his thighs, panting.
“You okay?”
“Oh my god!” Bram said, wide-eyed. He grabbed Zachary and hugged him close like a stuffed animal after a nightmare.
“That one really got me,” he said.
Zachary stroked his back and slid his hand into Bram’s. A strange sensation lodged somewhere between his throat and his stomach. A fluttery warmth that seemed to intensify every time Bram squeezed his hand or smiled in his direction.
Chapter Seventeen
Bram
Zachary went about choosing a pumpkin with intent seriousness. Bram didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he supposed Zachary would know it when he saw it.
For the moment, Bram was happy to trail after him as he subjected the pumpkins to scrutiny.
It had been a long time since Bram had felt like this—at the beginning of something that he knew, deep inside, in the place that even the recent hit to his confidence couldn’t shake, was significant.
He and Drake had been a whirlwind at the beginning. Bram had been smitten and their chemistry had been undeniable. He’d thrown himself into the relationship with everything he was and planned their future.
He’d imagined the two of them having what his parents had: a partnership of love and support and mutual caring that could weather anything the world threw their way.
After the breakup, when Bram was at his lowest, staying in Moon’s guest room and crying into her oatmeal, he had realized something. He hadn’t been making plans for a future with Drake. He had been making plans for his future and he had cast Drake in the role of his partner.
He’d taken that epiphany to Moon, who had blinked at him slowly and said, “Yup.”
But although it had apparently been clear to her (and his parents, it was later revealed), Bram hadn’t seen it. And it made him wonder how much else of his relationship with Drake he hadn’t seen either.
Nothing with Zachary Glass had been a whirlwind. In fact, Bram had the sense that if a whirlwind tried to sweep Zachary up, he’d scowl at it and say, I do not have a whirlwind in my schedule for today, goodbye.
Bram snorted at the image.
“What?” the man in question asked.
“What are you looking for?”
“The perfect pumpkin,” Zachary said, as if that should have been apparent.
“What makes a pumpkin perfect?”
Zachary blinked at him. The question seemed to irritate him. Bram put up his hands and let Zachary go back to his search.
After a few more minutes, Zachary stood up and crossed his arms, hugging himself.
“Can’t find the perfect one?” Bram asked.
“There are too many to look at to definitively render a judgment,” Zachary said mournfully.
“What happens if you pick the wrong one?”
“Nothing happens, it’ll just irritate me.”
He sounded huffy and irritated already, and he scanned the offending field of thousands of pumpkins.
Bram stepped close and put his hands on Zachary’s shoulders.
“What if all the pumpkins are actually perfect and your criteria are what’s flawed?” Bram asked gently.
Zachary’s scowl deepened but he was listening.
“The shape and density of the flesh determine what you carve from them. It’s just like whittling. You get a piece of wood and it tells you what it can be. Sure, it might not be able to be anything, but part of the art is letting the natural form determine what you create from it.”
Zachary was listening intently.
“Like designing a structure on an uncleared plot of land.”
Bram nodded.
“Did you pick one?” Zachary asked.
Bram scanned the ground around them and saw a twisted, oblong pumpkin with one side flattened and scarred. He plucked it off the ground.
“Got it.”
Zachary narrowed his eyes. “Now you’re just showing off.”
Bram laughed. “Yup.”
* * *
“I can’t believe with all your Halloween decoration enthusiasm and unchallenged forty-eight-year winning streak or whatever it is that you never carve pumpkins!”
They were back at Bram’s house and had decided to carve pumpkins in the living room, since the floor was already covered for the shelter painting.
“They make bad decorations because they rot,” Zachary said, as if contributing to his decor vision was the only thing anything could be useful for.
“Do you even like Halloween?” Bram asked. “I assumed you did because of the decorations and how much you love horror movies, but would you have the same enthusiasm for this competition if we lived on, I dunno, Cupid Road and this were a Valentine’s Day decoration contest?”
Zachary contemplated this.
“I would still participate. I would still enjoy designing a decoration scheme, although I don’t think Valentine’s Day provides quite as wide a range of possibilities for decor. But I do like Halloween.”
He chewed at his lip, lost in thought.
“I used to love dressing up. When I was ten I went as a geodesic dome and Sarah went as Buckminster Fuller. No one knew what we were.”
He said it wistfully, so Bram did his best to swallow the bark of laughter at a ten-year-old Zachary dressed as a geodesic dome.
“Did your sister like Halloween too?”
“She loved it. And horror movies. Witches, vampires, anything supernatural or spooky. She’s the one who showed me my first horror movies. I was so freaked out. I was maybe eight or nine and she was twelve or thirteen. My parents were out for dinner and she was in charge. She put on this movie Blood Mansion that she really loved. And I was, like, hiding under the blanket, watching through a worn spot.”
