BECKETT
Jack was sleeping in the passenger seat of Dad’s Bentley convertible, the first in the row of five cars in Dad’s warehouse lineup. Jack had pulled off the sheet covering the car and rolled back the convertible hood. Now his feet were kicked up on the dash, arms crossed, head dropped back on the seat. It took me a lot of years to learn whether he was sleeping or feigning sleep. This time, though, his breathing was heavy, and he was truly asleep. It had been a long night and long day.
I stood next to the Bentley and attempted to dress the mannequin so she wouldn’t be naked for Jack while she traveled on the back of his motorcycle to the mansion.
I jerked a t-shirt over her head, but the shirt sleeve got caught on one of her stationary fingers and ripped a hole in the armpit. I dropped her on the floor in frustration; the jeans had taken me long enough to get on, and now she had a hole in her $100 t-shirt.
I was still ticked at Jack for being Jack in Crash It, so I left the rest of the new clothes strewn out across the warehouse floor. He hated unfolded, messy piles of clothes—an OCD trait that started fifteen years ago, and one he took to a whole new level in our teenage years.
The Bentley where Jack slept was the car we’d taken for the joyride over three years ago while Dad was at a function at the mansion. We’d just turned sixteen. I still remembered Jack’s face. So alive, so free. Somehow, the car’s speed helped detach us from the testing Vasterias was putting Jack through at the time. It also helped free us, if just for a few moments, from Dad’s condescending looks and perpetual judgment.
Now, sitting there in the passenger seat, his face relaxed into a neutral expression, his eyelids heavily closed, Jack looked far from the brother I remembered.
Not that he showed any signs of aging—I seriously doubted if that would ever happen. But he looked older because of the silent weight he carried on his shoulders. To be fair, Jack had carried a silent weight on his shoulders since we were three years old—the burden of believing he’d been the one to kill our mother, that her womb wasn’t strong enough to bear him, that he’d sucked the life out of her, and that he’d set in motion the three-year descent to her death.
But this was more. Ever since yesterday, his burden felt heavier than ever to me. He retreated into himself, even more than normal.
I knew from experience Jack would never tell me why.
All of this made us more irritable with each other, and I despised that. We were on the same team, and there weren’t very many people left who I wanted to be on a team with at all.
I kicked the mannequin away from me. She flopped to her belly on the floor, and I noticed someone had written the word Sari in small letters on her back in permanent marker. Or maybe it was stamped on by the mannequin maker? Either way, the mannequin had a name now: Sari.
Great. I could cuss at her personally.
Do you hear that, Sari? I curse you and your refusal to get dressed.
I sighed. An inanimate object was getting on my nerves.
I’d reached an all-time low.
I needed to rest, too, but there was no way I could fall asleep. The warehouse made me anxious.
What if Dad knew we were here? Part of our plan was to take him by surprise.
It’s not that I thought he would show up, it was more the possibility that he could which unsettled me.
And what about the rest of the night we had coming up? Would Dad believe the ruse long enough to let me come into the mansion? If Dad didn’t believe me, it was all over.
My thoughts were so wrapped up in Dad, and Jack, and life, and our plans for the night, that when the Bentley horn blasted, I actually jumped back before I saw Jack’s heel on the steering wheel, pressing the horn. He was smiling.
Only after a sufficiently obnoxious amount of time did Jack let up on the horn.
My heart raced, and it was impossible to turn toward Jack without feeling like I might punch him.
“You’re so gullible, Beck,” he said. “You got feelings for that mannequin? It sure has taken you a long time to get her dressed.”
“Feelings for who? Sari?” I held her up and showed Jack the word on her low back.
“You named her? Wow.”
I leaned back, lowering my back onto the hood of the Bentley, willing my rapid heartbeat to slow, hoping the whole incident wouldn’t send me into some sort of panic attack like before.
“Here, let me get you a mint. Dad always has mints in his glove compartment. It’ll calm you down. I can hear your racing heart from here.”
“Soggy mints. That’s exactly what I want,” I replied.
I heard the pop of the glove compartment and then Jack jingled a metal tin. “Told ya.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“Here,” he insisted. Jack always insisted. I looked just in time to see a white mint sailing through the air at me.
I caught it.
It actually didn’t look bad. Tasted slightly stale but better than I anticipated.
Jack popped one in his own mouth and leaned back against the seat. “It’s about time to go.”
“I know.”
“You gonna clean up these clothes?”
“Nope.” Good, it was bothering him.
“Bastard.”
Jack chewed up his mint and swallowed. “Listen. When you guys get out of the mansion, I’ll head in the opposite direction on my motorcycle with the mannequin—I mean, with Sari.” He smiled at me, mocking. “You ride to the hotel with Sage, check in, and wait for me to come. It’ll take a few hours for me to circle back around.”
I inhaled deeply. It couldn’t go like that. I knew it, Jack knew it. I made my way to the driver’s door of the Bentley, opened it, pushed Jack’s feet out of the way, and slid into the seat next to him. My hand rubbed across the tan leather of the steering wheel, remembering again the freedom of that night with Jack.
Oh, how many things had changed since then.
“You need to take her,” I said.
Jack looked about to argue, but I shook my head.
“Trust me,” I said, “I want it to be me. I’d switch you if I could. But if some of them do follow you, and it comes to something, you’ll be able to protect her better. It has to be you.”
Jack only nodded once at this, sparing me the pain of words that would agree.
I spit out my mint, sending it out over the hood of the car. It clinked on the concrete and rolled.
I felt annoyed—not at Jack, just at the constant reality of my inadequacy compared to him. The truth really sucks when you have to say it out loud.
And, unfortunately, this truth has always been, and always will be, true.
I hated it most where it applied to Sage.
Jack seemed to recognize this.
“Another mint?” He held up the tin.
I shook my head.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
As he slid the tin back into the glove compartment, I heard a jagged inhale from him.
“What’s this?” Jack said.
He pulled out a pale pink satchel, and I knew immediately it was something of Mom’s.
“Why in the world would he keep this in here?” Jack said, loosening the tassels. Out slid a gold bracelet.
I didn’t remember it, but I could tell Jack did.
He sat frozen, the thin chain splayed out in the palm of his hand. “It was Mom’s.”
We both held there for a few more seconds, as if we kept still enough, time might roll backwards, and we’d have our mom back again. As if, in some dimension, that could actually happen. We stared at the bracelet, the gold glistening, catching the small amount of light from the high windows on the far side of the warehouse.
The magic of the moment flickered away, and reality set back in.
Mom wasn’t coming back.
“We should give it to her,” I said.
Jack frowned. “Who? To Mom? At her grave?”
“To Sage.”
The air was heavy between us.
Jack took a sharp inhale, something solidified on his face. “You can give her the bracelet, Beck. She’s all yours.”
It took a moment for Jack’s words to sink in and then for me to realize why he would be saying them.
And then, the pieces came together, and I knew what Jack had been thinking all along. I knew the extra weight he’d been carrying. Once we got Sage out to safety and the code destroyed, he was leaving—or dying. I thought he’d changed his mind, but that lasted less than two days.
So here we go with this again.
I’d done the “don’t kill yourself” conversation with Jack too many times in our life together, so I went for a different angle.
“Don’t give up on the fight for her now, you idiot. You know I like a challenge. It’ll be more fun that way, when she chooses me.”
Jack didn’t reply. He just stared at the bracelet, then glanced up at me with meaningful eyes.
His look was more decided than I’d ever seen. “I won’t get involved with her, Beckett. But at least she has given me one gift. A reason to stay alive. An excuse not to kill myself off. She won’t be dying, so I don’t need to either. That’s my way out of it. I finally have a way out of it.”
He sounded relieved.
Something stopped up in my throat. I swallowed it away and said, “I’d fight you a million years for her, instead of having her fully, if it meant you wouldn’t believe all the wrong things about yourself.”
Jack huffed. “You don’t really mean that.”
I waited, really thinking about how I felt around Sage. How I felt more like myself when I was with her than any other time, with any other human being. Would I really give that up when I felt like she completed me? Made me more me? Made me a better person? Would I ever stop fighting for that? For the life I knew she deserved?
I grinned at Jack.
“You’re right. I’d rather have her.”
I punched him in the arm. He punched me back. Punching felt better than talking. Besides, how could we talk about all the things we could not say?
“Get out this car before I beat you up,” Jack said.
“I’m going, twin brother, but not because I’m afraid of you.” I jumped out over the door. “We’ve got a girl to save.”