Breakable Read online

  She gaped at me from the surface of the mirror, but I kept walking.

  Tonight was a turning point. I just knew it.

  She did show up in the rear-view mirror of the car. But she’d obviously decided I wasn’t going to change my mind, because she just sat there, staring. I ignored her as I drove too fast to Mark’s house a couple miles out of town. I stopped at the imposing black gates his father had erected and rolled down my window to yell my name into the intercom. But it buzzed and the gates swung open before I said a word. As I drove through, I patted my pocket and the corner of the letter poked into my thigh.

  With a little luck, Mark’s parents would be gone. We could talk. I could give it to him. Maybe we wouldn’t make it to the dance at all.

  Older Me frowned as I followed the paved driveway around the perfect lawn, to the circle in front of their immaculate house. I was about to ask her why, when I looked into the mirror and realized I had an identical expression on my face. Because I hated this house.

  I didn’t come here much anymore. We’d practically lived at each other’s homes as kids – back when Mark lived in town and his parents didn’t have as much money. But the more successful his father got, the more he discouraged Mark from inviting me over. Funny, though, how the hostility didn’t start until after I found out the truth about where the scars on Mark’s arms came from.

  The memory of that night made me shudder. Older Me looked away, biting her lip, no doubt she was remembering too. It would have been better for me and Mark to have our conversation somewhere else. But this was one of the rare nights when Mom was happy for me to borrow the car. And besides, Mark had asked me to pick him up. He never did that.

  “Is his dad home?” Older Me asked quietly.

  “I hope not.” I parked the car on the cobbled area in front of the garage, and turned on the light to check my make-up before I went in. Beside me, Mark’s house loomed through the dark. A solid brick monument to his father’s success. A monument with sound-proofed walls.

  I shivered.

  “Be careful,” Older Me murmured as I turned the little light back off.

  “Geez, he’s not an axe-murderer,” I snapped. But I didn’t wait to see if she replied. I got out of the car and trotted across the driveway. I wanted to get inside. To see Mark. To see what his face did when I walked in.

  To see whether he was still nervous.

  But as soon as I stepped inside the door of Mark’s house, I knew something was wrong. The open entry hall with immaculate white walls and wood-flooring echoed silence. Not the soft, easy quiet of happy solitude. But the tense, brittle hush that signaled a barely-maintained truce falling on the heels of all-out war.

  If Mark hadn’t been in here somewhere, I would have turned and fled.

  As it was, three paces inside the door, I jerked to a stop. If things had gone wrong with his dad, Mark might not be in his room after all. Or his dad might kick me out if he hadn’t had his fill of whaling on Mark. But someone opened the gate to let me in, so…

  “Up here.”

  Directly in front of me, a wide flight of stairs rose to the second level of the house. I caught sight of Mark just as he turned and disappeared around the corner towards his room.

  This was bad.

  I swallowed hard and ran up, ears perked for any footsteps behind me, or voices rising.

  Nothing.

  I topped the stairs and crept around the corner and down the hall to Mark’s room.

  Downstairs the house was shiny and cold – like a showroom in an architect’s portfolio. But upstairs the hardwood floors gave way to carpet, the walls were dotted with family pictures, and the many bedrooms leading off the hallways on both sides of the stairs were awash with comfortable quilts and plump, soft furnishings.

  When they moved in I’d told Mark it was as if they’d taken his mother’s house and sat it on top of his father’s, then linked them by a stairway.

  Mark hadn’t laughed.

  His room was three doors down, on the left. The door was open. I slipped inside and closed it behind me.

  I barely registered the posters on the wall, the large screen in the corner, and the carpet strewn with gaming controllers.

  Mark sat on the bed, head in his hands. His fingers made claws in his sandy-brown hair. He still wore the light-blue polo shirt and jeans he’d had on at school, despite a dark smudge on his shoulder.

  The knot in my stomach tightened. I walked across the deep carpet to sit next to him on the edge of the bed, laid a tentative hand on his back and swallowed hard. Mark was trembling.

  “What happened?” Not that it was a mystery.

  “I told Dad about the competition.” Mark’s voice was hard. Rough.

  I closed my eyes and dropped my head to his firm shoulder.

  Mark and I were in AP Art. Against my every expectation, we’d both qualified for National Young Artist of the Year. I mean, I’d known Mark would get in. He was incredible. But I was floored when I got the letter too.

  The problem was, according to his dad, Mark wasn’t supposed to be an artist. Last year, when he won a local competition with this amazing water color he’d done, his dad accused him of being gay, then refused to attend the award ceremony. As far as his father was concerned, Mark was going to MIT to be an engineer, just like him.

  Mark snorted into his palms. “I knew he’d get mad. But I thought he was under control. I thought I’d shown him he couldn’t hit us anymore.” Mark’s entire fabulous, six-foot-two frame, shuddered under my arm. Tears tightened the back of my throat. I swallowed them because he needed me right now and I couldn’t get weepy.

  I hugged his back, curled my free arm around his bicep. “Tell me.”

  He needed to get it out. He knew he needed to get it out. He’d learned the hard way that this stuff ate him up when he didn’t.

  He ran a hand through his hair and sat up, pulling out of my embrace. But he took my hand, held it on his thigh, and spoke to it.

  “He got angry,” he said in that dark voice.

  My turn to snort. “Understatement.”

  Mark nodded, still looking at our hands, fingers twined and squeezing so hard our knuckles were both white.

  I hated that he got hurt this way. But there was no better feeling than the times I could touch him like this.

  “Mom tried to get him to calm down. But he went crazy. Shoved her into a wall trying to get to me. I had to…” he swallowed convulsively. “I punched him. Put him on the floor.” He opened and closed his free hand. I stared at his red, swollen knuckles, feeling sick. Two of them were scraped raw.

  “Oh, man.” I tried to sound like I wasn’t about to gag.

  “When he got up… Stace, even I’ve never seen him like that before. He just kind of roared, and came at me. Mom screamed at him to stop. I caught one of his arms, but I missed the other.”

  He stopped. His face had gone pale.

  “Mark? What happened?” I really was whispering now, afraid of what he was going to tell me. Afraid of the silence in this awful house.

  But suddenly he just let go of my hand and stood up, started across the room. “I need to change if we’re going to make it to the dance.”

  The change of tone was so abrupt, it took me a second to realize what he’d said. Then I gaped. “You can’t be serious. Mark, we can’t go to dance after this.”

  Mark scowled. “I’m not staying here.” Then he grabbed his shirt at the back and pulled it over his head and I was left juggling the fierce desire to protect him from himself, with the dry-mouthed awareness of the ladder of muscle that climbed his stomach. He turned, pulled out a drawer, and I got to watch his back ripple and his shoulder blades almost punch out of his skin as he selected a shirt and closed the drawer again.

  Everything he did had this restraint behind it. His movements were sharp and measured. I knew he was seething. Still upset. It was just a little harder forming an argument while he got half-naked in front of me.

  “M
ark–”

  “We’re going.”

  I glared. Marcus Thomas Gray was my best friend, and the nicest guy I knew.

  And he was a stubborn ass when he wanted to be.

  I got to my feet, ignoring the twist of nerves in my stomach. If he didn’t want to talk about it, it had to be really bad. “Mark, you can’t just stop halfway through that kind of story.”

  “Leave it alone, Stacy. I’m fine.”

  “You are clearly not fine.”

  “Let’s just go to the dance. We can talk about it later.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it later – and you won’t want to either. You’re just trying to make me stop asking.”

  “Would you back off, Stace?”

  “No! You told me I wasn’t supposed to let you stop talking until it was all out. I won’t back off until you tell me–”

  “Fine!” Mark yelled, whirling to face me.

  He’d just put on a blue-checked, button-down shirt. It gaped open to reveal a fierce line in his skin. It was an inch thick and angrily red – turning purple in places. It took me a second to realize it was a bruise, forming even as the skin around it swelled.

  Right at the base of his neck.

  The line of his jaw flexed as he met my shocked gaze. I knew my mouth had fallen open, but I couldn’t seem to keep it closed. “He-he tried to–” I reached for him, but he stepped back.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Mark yanked the shirt closed and started buttoning it. The line mostly disappeared behind his collar.

  “But that’s… Mark.”

  He shook his head. His lips pressed into a thin line. “I put him on his ass. He isn’t going to do it again.”

  “That’s what you said last time!” My voice had gone high and thin.

  “Well, this time I’m right.” He grabbed his wallet and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans. Checked his phone, then put that in the other pocket.

  When he started combing his hair I realized he was serious. He was going to show up at this stupid thing they do once a semester in the gym where they get in a DJ and some lasers and pretend the school is a night club for a night. He was going to dance and flirt and pretend his life was completely normal.

  He’d pull it off, too. He always did.

  But he shouldn’t have to.

  I didn’t find the words until Mark had readied himself, checked his reflection in the mirror, and taken a step towards the door.

  I didn’t move. “He could have killed you.”

  Mark jerked to a stop. He stood profile to me, just a foot away. But the tension radiated from him. I was afraid to touch him in case I snapped something.

  “No,” he said quietly. But the word lacked conviction. “It was never that bad. He never… I could always breathe.”

  “I didn’t say he tried to kill you. I said he could have.”

  He stared at the floor. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I get it, okay? But I’ve handled this. I handled him. And I told you the truth. I let you see that I was mad.” He turned and locked eyes with me. “Now I want to go be normal.”

  Inhale… Exhale…

  “Let him go.” The words were a bare whisper, rising out of the mirror behind Mark. How long had Older Me been there? I didn’t know whether to feel grateful, or violated. After all, she must have been through this already. She was the one who told me how important it was for him to talk everything out when it happened. So he could process. So he could hold himself together.

  So he wouldn’t turn into his dad.

  Mark’s eyes were hard.

  Older Me sighed. “He’ll do fine, Stacy. Let him go.”

  I swallowed. Nodded, and threw a hand up toward the door. “Fine.”

  Mark’s granite jaw softened and he gave me a half-smile. The one that warmed me to my toes. With a frustrated groan, I turned toward the door. Mark threw his arm across my shoulder as we crossed the room.

  “You’re my best friend. You know that right?” he said, dropping a kiss on my hair.

  “Yeah.” Though the word made me cold.

  I wanted to be so much more.

  Chapter Three

  Mark played with my music the whole way to school. I knew that meant he didn’t want to talk anymore, so I left him to it. But in my head I kept seeing how it must have been – Mark up against a wall, his father red-faced and roaring, pinning him there…

  I swallowed and shook my head. I had to get it together. Mark hated it when I dwelled and kept reminding him about that stuff. And besides, if we were actually going to the dance, I needed to brace for impact. No doubt Karyn and Belinda would already be there.

  So I drove and Mark fiddled with my player, and the five miles to school seemed to pass in a heartbeat.

  Our school took up three town blocks, bordered on all four sides by tall fences. Like a zoo. Only occasional gates broke the lines and let us animals in. The entrance to the parking lot was lined by imposing, stone walls, left over from the days it was a private hospital. Rumor said it had been a mental institution, but I was pretty sure kids only said that to freak each other out.

  We drove around the lot until we found a spot under a tree halfway down. I pulled in and turned the rearview mirror to check my make-up. Older Me wasn’t there, which seemed odd. I couldn’t stop jiggling my leg, and the corners of the letter poked into my thigh every time I did. It seemed like after everything that had happened, this wasn’t the time for a confessional. Or maybe it was. Maybe it was exactly the time to–

  Mark cursed, low and hard.

  I looked at him, surprised. “What?”

  “I forgot. I need to talk to you,” he said. He kept running his palms down his thighs.

  Twitchy.

  This was good.

  “Okay.” I tried not to smile, because something in the way he’d cursed left me uncertain.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about this. The thing with Dad just took my head out of the game and… I wouldn’t normally do this this way. Okay?”

  “It’s okay,” I told him softly. “Whatever it is…this is me.”

  I leaned a little closer. Mark grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes and swallowed hard.

  “Right. Okay. I need to tell you… do you remember that youth leadership conference thing I went to a couple weeks ago?”

  “Um… yeah.” This seemed random.

  “Well, while I was there, we had to do this assignment thing and we all got paired up. The only other person from our school was Karyn. So her and I worked together.”

  I froze. The ball of hope in my chest shivered.

  That was when I saw what I’d noticed in him through a new filter. The nervous energy. The inability to meet my eyes. The twitchy.

  And, because it was the story of my life, I didn’t really need him to say anymore. Though of course, he did. But the loud pulsing in my ears meant I only caught snatches of it.

  “…one of those things. We were working late at night by ourselves. You know how it is…”

  “…hadn’t really thought about her that way before. I knew how mad you were at her…”

  “…we really got to know each other. Like really. She’s different to what I expected…”

  “…wanted to pretend I didn’t feel that way too. But…”

  I sat back in my seat and the corner of the letter pricked my thigh again. I wanted to scream at it. I turned away from Mark, towards the windshield, seeing but not seeing the groups of people walking along the sidewalk, laughing and talking, completely unaware that my heart was turning hard and brittle, threatening to snap clean in two.

  “Stace… Stace, are you listening?” Mark squeezed my hand.

  I wanted to yank it out of his grip. “Of course.” My voice sounded dead, even to me.

  “I told her you were my best friend. That I’d never date someone who made your life hell. Okay? She said she didn’t have a problem with you. She said she felt terrible about how things had been between you. That it started
because she thought you didn’t like her.”

  He smiled a little and shook his head, apparently warmed by the memory. I wanted to smack the grin off his face. Stupid, gullible, idiot.

  He squeezed my hand again. “Nothing’s going to change, okay?” he said quietly.

  I nodded because I had to. “Yeah, sure. It’s fine.” Like hell. I took my hand back, resisting the urge to wipe it on my jeans. “I wish you would have told me sooner, that’s all. I just…” Are you serious? “I mean, you can date whoever you want, of course. But… Karyn? I mean… why her?”

  Why the sniping, spiteful, two-faced cow who everyone else thought was a princess? Why the one who whispered in her friend’s ears and set them on me like well-trained dogs, then stood back and laughed? Couldn’t he see the glare from that perfect-girl façade she painted on every morning?

  Because he was a guy, I expected him to wax lyrical about her pale, platinum hair, or her flashing blue eyes. Or her dimples – everyone loved the stupid dimples.

  Instead, Mark stared at his feet, squeezed my hand and said the words the sent my heart into freefall.

  “She helps me forget.” He smiled uncertainly and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “She doesn’t know anything about Dad. She doesn’t care if I’m on student council, or if I make starting guard next season… She doesn’t care about anything. She just wants to be with me. And when I’m with her, I don’t care about that stuff either.”

  The expression on his face was a mallet to my frozen heart. It shattered.

  I tried to breathe.

  “Stace?”

  I was saved from replying by his door opening. But then the most irritating little-girl voice on God’s green earth piped up.

  “There you are!”

  Mark swung around and I didn’t have to see the smile break on his face like a sunrise, because his voice dropped into the deep, heavy tone he reserved for whoever he was lusting after at the time, and he said “Hey.”

  That one syllable held more desire, more pleasure in it than every kind word he’d ever said to me. It took the broken pieces of my heart and stamped on them, because I’d been so sure that the next time that voice showed up, it would be for me.