Page 11 of Them Bones

There were some clothes folded up in the drawers – underwear, t-shirts, sweatpants, some jeans. Socks. He practically drooled at the pleasure of pulling on fresh, clean, thick socks. His feet hadn’t felt warm since July.

He sat down awkwardly on the mattress, half-expecting it to smell like cigarettes. But it just smelled like laundry detergent.Clean.

He laid down, his hands behind his head, and stared at the popcorn ceiling. There was some water damage in the corner, and the carpet was threadbare. But this was probably the cleanest room he’d been in for over a year. Cody’s had never been the picture of cleanliness (except the backs of the toilets) and geese weren’t the best roommates. This place was worn out but tidy and had been recently vacuumed. He wondered if Laney did it or Dustin did.

Half an hour later, Laney knocked on the door while simultaneously pushing it open.

“I gotta get to school.”

“What grade you in?” he asked.

“Ninth.”

“The worst.”

“It’s fine,” she said, but he could tell she was lying. “I’ll be back around 3:30. Dustin stays home. He’ll keep to himself, but if you want company just knock. He won’t mind.”

“Which one’s his room?”

She reached out her hand, and without thinking he took it. She heaved him up, though he used most of his own strength since she couldn’t have been more than one hundred pounds and Lord knew she didn’t need to break a bone as well as her face, today. He expected her to drop his hand, but she didn’t. And despite the nuclear alarm bells going off in his head, he didn’t either.

She pointed to the closed door to the left of the bathroom. “Ma’s,” she said. She knocked quietly on the other door and paused, backing away when there was no response. “That’s Dustin’s.”

She led him down the hall and back down the split entry into the basement. The cheap, yellowing linoleum was curling in the corners and at some of the seams, but it was as clean as the rest of the house, kind of shiny, like it had been freshly mopped. For a ten- and fourteen-year-old, they were strangely domestic. They passed through a set of French doors leaning against the wall – unhung – and down a narrow hallway with wood paneling.

“Mine,” she said, nodding her head at the brown wooden door.

She reached for the doorknob, but he circled her wrist with his free hand and shook his head.

Why?He felt her ask.

He hesitated, aware that there was something strange unfolding between them, some kind of unusual connection that was enabling him tohearher, somehow. Feel her. Like they were both hooked up to cables attached to the same car battery and it was giving off little electric warning shocks.

Because,he finally thought back, testing it out.

Her lips parted, and he could feel her shallow breath through his t-shirt, on his sternum, right where she’d kissed him.

Okay,she seemed to say. And then she dropped her hand and stepped away.

“I really gotta get to school. I’m gonna be late,” she said cheerily. Out loud. And then she sauntered back down the hall where he heard her grunt while sliding on her boots, and the rustle of her putting on her coat, followed by thethumpof the front door closing.

He stood on the other side of that doorway for five whole minutes before he finally willed himself to go back upstairs.

LANEY

Laney couldn’t concentrate.

She put her pencil on the farthest edge of the desk and watched it roll slowly towards her, snatching it out of the air before it dropped onto her lap. Over and over.

She felt like her insides had been scooped out with a shovel. Her entire midsection wastotally missing.It was an odd sensation, feeling like your lower body and upper body were connected by space taken up entirely by someone else.

She’d never communicated with anyone the way she communicated with Dustin, and she’d been unnerved when Shane asked about it.It’s like you’re speaking your own language…Dusty had always talked to her like that. And she’d always talked to him. But it had never, ever occurred to her that someone else might understand.

It had unraveled her a little, or a lot, maybe. More than his naked torso, shockingly beautiful despite his ribs jutting out. More than the damp collar of his t-shirt, soaked from his freshly dewy hair. Calling her and Dustin out was like he’d found the one loose thread that could pull her apart and tugged.

She understood why Dusty liked him. She wondered what had happened, the way Shane scowled when he mentionedthose twats.Dusty didn’t like Laney getting involved with his problems, but she wasn’t stupid and knew he had to deal with assholes more often than not. She’d helped when they were both younger, but one time a boy named Trevor had kicked her as hard as he could in the gut. Turned out he’d been wearing steel-toed boots, and he fractured her rib. After that, Dusty stopped letting her help. She knew he was still being bothered, but he was also growing up and needed to learn to fight his own battles. His tactic was usually invisibility. And it worked. Mostly.

Laney had never mastered invisibility. “Always picking fights with someone twice your size,” their older brother Cary had said with a grin.

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