Tangled Up with My Insufferable Stepbrother

Ember Hayes' POV

On the day I turned sixteen, I was working a derivative.

The heat in the house had nowhere to go and settled on whoever was standing under it, and the fan on its highest setting only stirred the stale air in slow circles. Grandma called my name up the stairs, and on the third call I put the pencil down with the last step of the problem still unfinished.

"Girl from the Hayes house—are your ears broken? You can see your own face in the bottom of that tank. Go bring the water back."

I didn't answer. I stood, and the floorboard under my foot creaked once. In the living room my father sat on the couch with the television on and the sound off, two fingers holding a cigarette, the ash grown long enough to drop. I walked past him. He didn't lift his head.

Grandma's scolding followed me out the door, working its way from my mother to me to every girl in town who should have been married off by now and wasn't.

I counted to myself. Two years—starting the month I had the diploma in my hand, I was taking my mom out of here, and the farther the better.

The bucket hung behind the door, and the tin caught my shin on the way, sharp enough to sting. I picked it up and stepped outside, and the heat hit me full in the face with the raw smell of coal dust under it.

The slag heap north of town stood taller than the church steeple, and when the wind moved, black grit settled on windowsills and clotheslines and everybody's face, and in everybody's dinner too.

The water was outside town, past a stretch of gravel road chewed to pieces by trucks, then up a slope. The sun was mean that hour, and I walked with my eyes mostly shut, grass dead by half on both sides of me.

That was where I saw him.

He stood at the edge of the slag pile with his back to me, a camera raised. It was an old one, wrapped in black leather, the lens pointed down at a heap of stripped rock that had been lying there for decades, nothing anyone in town would glance at twice.

He was as still as the rock itself, shoulders hunched a little, his index finger resting light on the shutter, waiting on something nobody else could see.

The shutter clicked, barely audible. He lowered the camera, thumbed the advance lever, shifted his angle, and lifted it again. I stopped where I was and forgot to keep walking.

Nobody around here looked like that. People here wore work clothes with black packed under their nails, walking with their shoulders caved in and their heads down, braced for the next thing to land on them. His shirt was dark, the cuffs buttoned neat, and the wrist showing under the cloth was clean. There wasn't a speck of coal dust on him.

My breathing went crooked before anything else did. My palms went damp. The bucket handle cut into my fingers.

I knew I should go. I had already been looking too long.

He turned, and his eyes landed on me and went over me from head to foot, like he was deciding whether I was worth speaking to.

Being looked at like that, I caught how long I had been holding my breath—it had gone stale in my chest, and when I finally let it go my ribs moved with it. I shifted the bucket to my other hand, and the handle pressed a fresh white line across the base of my fingers.

"Does this road get you out of town?"

"It does." Hearing my own voice, I was quietly relieved. It came out steadier than I'd expected.

"Which way?"

"Down the slope and due south."

He frowned and turned to look back the way he'd come, and the look on his face said plainly that he didn't believe me and had no intention of asking twice. I walked past him, and the grass stalks rasped against my pant legs. My heart was going absurdly fast, fast enough that I wondered whether he could hear it.

"My car's at a fork about half a mile out," he said. "I drove in on this road. There's no second fork once you're in town."

There was mud on his pant leg. The shoes looked expensive, with a white scrape along one edge. I stared at the scrape, and it took me one beat too long to understand that he was waiting on an answer.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. "Bottom of the slope, that's Coalbank Road. That stretch is torn up right now."

The second it left me, I regretted it—as if I were that eager to keep him talking. My ears went hot first, hot enough to sting.

He let half a breath out through his nose. The irritation was faint. I heard it anyway.

He dug out a wallet and worked two bills loose, holding them out. "Show me the way. Call it payment."

I looked at the money for two seconds. Going back now meant Grandma taking one sentence and stretching it into ten, all the way to dark.

But money was money.

I put out my hand and took it. My fingers weren't quite cooperating. The bills were new, the corners stiff, and they made a sound in my grip.

"Thank you," I said.

He froze for a moment, as if those two words hadn't been on his list, then turned his face away and slung the camera back onto his shoulder. I folded the bills twice, tucked them into the innermost pocket of my pants, and pressed them down with my hand.

I walked in front. He came behind, his steps heavier than mine. Neither of us said anything else. I could hear the camera shifting against his shoulder, and I could hear the mess going on inside my chest.

At the fork the car sat in the shade of the trees, dark, polished clean, belonging to none of it—not the slope, not the dust, not the town. He opened the door, paused, said, "Thanks," and then the door shut and the engine caught. The car swung off the gravel and the trees swallowed it.

I stood there and replayed the words a few times before it came back to me that I was supposed to be getting water.

I walked fast on the way back. The full bucket dragged my shoulder down and water slopped over the rim and ran down the side onto my cuffs, cold. Only two things turned over in my head: the soft click of the shutter, and that clean strip of wrist.

By the time the tank was full, the sun had slid off center. Grandma stood on the porch with that rag she always had in her fist and swept me top to bottom with her eyes.

"Where'd you get off to." She broke it out one piece at a time. "Tank's bone dry and you don't notice? Nobody in this house lifts a finger, and you're the one with all day to drift around—"

My father was still on the couch, the television still silent, a fresh cigarette going. I set the bucket down and walked past him. His eyes were on the screen, but whatever was playing on it, he wasn't watching. Grandma's scolding chased me to the stairs. I didn't answer once. Answer her, and she'd stand there another hour.

The heat was still in my room. The derivative sat half-finished on the desk, the pencil lying across the edge of the page. I pulled the bills out of my pocket, smoothed them flat, and slid them between pages seventy-eight and seventy-nine of my math book.

Outside, my mother's shape was coming up the road from the far end, walking fast, a bag in her hand. I heard her below, talking to Grandma, keeping her voice low; I caught half of "I'm home."

Then the stairs creaked, two knocks landed on the door, and she came in, turned, latched it behind her, and sat down on the edge of my bed.

"Ember." Her voice wasn't the one she usually called me with.

My hand was still on the math book.

"There's something I need to talk to you about. Just you."