Derrick knelt on the floor next to me. I knee walked, finding my phone charger on top of the small wardrobe. I plugged in the phone and sat back on my ankles, looking back at Derrick.
Derrick’s gazed at the dark carpet and the light fixtures in the wall. He touched the ceiling that was painted a similar dark color. “Did you do this?”
“The guys did,” I said.
Derrick smirked. “You really are in deep, huh?”
I bit my lower lip, unsure how to respond.
He tilted his head, looking around my shoulder. “What’s back there?”
I motioned for him to follow, crawling toward the platform. The rose sconces lit the way, revealing the pink and black bean bag chair and the collection of photos.
Derrick made a low whistle, plopping cross-legged on the carpet. “Honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t remake your bedroom. That’s what they do. Lure you with nice things and suddenly they’re asking favors.”
“They’re not that bad,” I said, feeling defensive. Maybe it was a mistake to show him this. What was wrong with favors? Or was it a favor at all he was talking about? Maybe he meant how they were always working. I thought of Kota and Nathan pitching in at the diner, not giving it a second thought. That wasn’t a favor. It was being nice and helping.
His dark eyes and angular face fixed on me. “Do you know what you’re getting yourself in to?”
A finger fluttered to my mouth, pinching my lip to my teeth. “I think they’re nice. They do good things.”
“Yeah. But they aren’t normal.” He motioned to the attic space around us. “Secret attic spaces. Secret plans. A secret school no one can visit unless you’re a member.”
I remembered something Mr. Blackbourne had told me when I first asked him questions about the Academy. “They said they’d be swamped with applications and parents wanting to get their kids inside.”
“Or maybe,” Derrick said, “they are up to stuff they don’t want other people finding out. Secrets are kept for a reason. It’s usually a bad reason.”
I didn’t have a response. It was the same attitude Mr. Hendricks had, but Derrick had been closer to the guys than our principal. “I’d like to keep this attic a secret. Is that wrong?”
He flinched. “I guess not. That’s where it starts though. First it is little stuff like attic spaces. Next thing you know, you’re burying bodies in the woods and sworn to a blood oath or something like that.”
“They wouldn’t do that.”
“Will you ever know for sure?”
You believing there’s a secret makes it seem more important than it is.
Mr. Blackbourne’s words echoed through me. If I trusted in what Mr. Blackbourne told me, the Academy’s secrets were a lot like this attic space. Would it be a huge deal if Marie or Danielle knew? It wasn’t illegal and it wasn’t really important. It was simply less complicated keeping the information limited to a select group of people, people who were used to swearing secrecy and keeping their word.
I smirked at Derrick, feeling more confident in my answer. “I’m pretty sure they don’t kill people.”
Derrick laughed. “Yup. They got to you, too.”
I pouted. “Is it that bad?”
Derrick shrugged. “Not really. Just make sure you find out all the details before you sign up completely. I mean seriously, they never take a day off.”
The phone started rattling on top of the wardrobe. A text message was coming in.
“See what I mean?”
♥♥♥
I responded to Kota asking if I was okay. I let him know Derrick was with me at my house. He didn’t seem surprised by this and told me Nathan would be back later that afternoon. If Derrick had to leave before Nathan got back, he wanted me to head for the diner. North was there, Luke wasn’t.
It was tempting to head to the diner anyway, but given that North was there and none of the others were, I was hesitant. I didn’t mean to avoid him, but if he was grumpy, I wasn’t sure he’d want me around. There was also the way Uncle had reacted when North fed me the slice of strawberry. I wasn’t clear on what it meant, and I wanted Kota or the others around if I were to return.
Derrick, however, was prime to get outside and do something. I followed him out to the driveway, and watched as he played basketball. I was going to join him, but part of me was tired still, and I wanted to be lazy.
At one point, the basketball rolled out of control toward the wide work shed at the very end of the driveway. It smacked against the shed’s front rolling door.
“What’s in there, anyway?” Derrick asked. He clasped at his side, breathing heavily. He’d removed his shirt, and his chest glistened with sweat. He swiped his forehead with the back of his arm.
“A bunch of boxes,” I said. “Actually, I don’t remember.” Now that I was thinking about it, I was curious, too. I’d been so busy with Academy secrets that a lot of the boxes my parents hadn’t unpacked in the shed left me wondering if there was anything forgotten and possibly useful.
I stood, and crossed the driveway toward the shed. Derrick followed behind me, an eyebrow cocked, curious.
I turned the latch, and tried pulling the large front shed door up. It stuck about a foot off the ground. Derrick joined me, and tugged the door. Together, we managed to lift it over our heads.
Inside, the collection of boxes was bigger than I thought. “Well,” I said. “I think I found my new weekend project.” I counted the boxes, and I guessed it would probably take a week for me to clean it out if I were to do it alone.
Derrick squinted into the space. There was a blue utility carpet on the floor. A collection of shelves encircled the walls. I found a switch for the overhead fluorescent tube lighting. The lights flickered overhead but were dim for now, warming up. When they finally flickered to life, we stepped inside, glancing around.
“What’s in these?” he asked, pushing at a wardrobe box.
“I don’t know,” I said. “When we moved, there was a lot of stuff in the old garage, things we weren’t supposed to play with or old toys we’d outgrown.”
Derrick weaved his way further into the shed, scanning the items placed on top of boxes. There was an old lamp on one, and I was sure it didn't work anymore. There was an old kitchen chair with a broken seat. It made me wonder why they bothered to bring half of the items if they were broken.
I was starting to open the lid to one of the taller boxes to peek inside when Derrick called to me. “What are these?” he asked.
I weaved my way through until I was behind him and leaned to look around his arm. There were a couple of old bicycles sitting together on the ground amid more boxes and broken furniture.
Memories reeled back through me. “I forgot about those. We got those when we were eight, I think.” It was before my mother had gotten really sick. My father had bought them used from a neighbor who had been moving at the time. After she started on the medication, and we slowly became restricted to being isolated in our rooms a lot, I’d forgotten about the bikes. They weren’t very useful to me when I used to escape and take walks through steep hills. I wasn’t allowed to ride them in the street, and the bikes couldn’t go through the woods. “Marie’s is the white one,” I said, pointing to the corresponding bike. “Mine was the gray one.”
Derrick knelt and picked up the white one, pulling it loose and holding it up. He inspected the tires and the chain. “Looks like it still works. The tires need filled. Let’s see if we can’t fix these.”
We found a tire pump on the shelf. Derrick tinkered with the bikes, filling the tires and testing the chains. I watched him work, a bemused smile on my face. Derrick said he didn’t like getting called up to work, but when something sparked his interest, he didn’t seem to mind digging in and putting in some effort. Maybe that’s why Mr. Blackbourne or the others thought he might be a good candidate for the Academy.
When he finished, he took up the white one. He shifted the pedals, and glided smoothly out of the shed
and out onto the driveway. “Not bad,” he said. He pumped the pedals a few times and then stood on them as the bike coasted. “Try the other one.”
I picked up the gray bike, nervous because I hadn’t used it in a while. I wondered how stable I would be since I was out of practice.
I balanced myself and sailed out of the shed, standing on the pedals like Derrick was doing. I did shake at first but quickly adjusted, getting used to it again. I pedaled out to the end of the drive and made a wide turn almost into the yard to loop back around.
“They work,” Derrick said. He stopped, leaning over his and touching the chain, pushing at it with his finger. “Could use a little WD-40.”
“Don’t know what we could do with them,” I said. “It’s a short street. And there’s the busy road without a sidewalk at the end.”
Derrick shrugged. “Who cares if they’re useful? Why not just have them for fun?” He straightened again, tensing up and pushing the pedal down on his bike. “Let’s go.”
I pedaled after him, and followed his lead down the road. He raced me around the bend, past his house and out toward the diner on the other end of the half circle street.
When we got close to the diner, he paused, stopping in the middle of the road and putting his bare feet on the blacktop. I stopped my bike next to him, confused. “What’s wrong?”
He gazed out toward the diner, his eyes looking over the collection of cars. “It’ll be busier over here. A lot more people than usual.”
“It’s North’s and Luke’s uncle’s diner,” I said. “That’s good that it is busy, isn’t it?”
Derrick frowned. “Micah and Tom live across the street there.” He motioned to a trailer that was planted on the other side of the highway, and to another one about a hundred feet down the road on the same side. “It’ll make it harder for them to cross over if there’s more people coming here for this place.”
“Now who sounds like they’re Academy cavalry looking out for everyone,” I said, and grinned. “They’re old enough to look both ways.”
Derrick made a face at me, turned the bike around and started racing down the street without replying.
We circled around the neighborhood a few times. When we were done, we pedaled back to the shed at my house. We spilled out under the shade of the open shed. Late September warmth was kicking my butt. How was I so cold the other night at the football game? The weather changes felt out of place to me.
Derrick was telling me about his own old bike, how he broke the frame and hadn’t bothered to get another one, when a familiar sedan pulled into the drive. I perked up, expecting Kota but Nathan stepped out of the driver’s side. He was in jeans and a red Nike T-shirt. Even from the short distance away, I could see the dark circles under his eyes. How early had he gotten up?
Derrick sat up and held a hand up across his eyes against the light, looking out at Nathan as he approached. “Your entourage has arrived,” he said, and smirked.
“Very funny,” I said. I waved at Nathan.
Nathan smiled as he approached. “Hey Peanut.” He gave a short nod to Derrick in greeting. His eyes fell on the bikes. “What are those?”
“Sang and I found them in the shed. We fixed them up,” Derrick said. “They’re pretty nice. Still work. We’ve been riding around on them so I think the tires are okay.”
Nathan laughed. “You two have been having fun, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, happy that I could prove that I could get along for an afternoon without them hovering. Not that I wanted them to not come over, but I didn’t want them to feel they had to watch me every minute.
“I was going to sleep all day. Her bed is pretty comfortable,” Derrick said, and jerked his head in my direction. “But she tackled me.”
“I thought you were Gabriel!”
Derrick laughed, pushing a hand through his brown hair. “And I thought you were trying to kill me. I didn’t mean to throw you that hard.”
I was giggling at this until I caught a sullen look from Nathan that I didn’t understand. He recovered, a smile half masking his serious eyes. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?” he asked me.
I attempted a smile, unsure how to approach that now that he was looking so strange. “No. I’m fine.”
Derrick stood up, stretching. “I’m going to find Danielle. If she’s still sleeping, I should wake her up. She’ll be more of a pain Monday morning if she’s too far off her schedule.” He stumbled out of the shed, heading to the side door in the garage.
I giggled. That sounded like normal siblings looking out for each other. I wondered why Marie and I weren’t like that. I stood up, brushing the dust off of my shorts.
When Derrick was out of earshot, Nathan turned on me so fast that I was startled and took a step back. “What happened?” he asked, almost sounding as demanding as Mr. Blackbourne.
A finger fluttered up and hovered over my mouth. “Huh?”
“He was in your bed? What the hell is that about? What’s been going on here?”
Was he angry with me? With a shaking voice, I told him about how I jumped on Derrick and how later we came outside and fixed the bikes. I skipped over how I showed Derrick the attic. It didn’t seem important. “So I guess Danielle and Derrick spent the night.”
“He didn’t ... I mean ... you didn’t sleep in the bed with him?”
My lips parted in surprise. Why was he asking me about this? I’d thought at first he would be more concerned about Danielle and what she knew. The question threw me off kilter. “No. I told you. I thought it was Gabriel or someone else. I jumped on him and when he woke up, we came outside.”
“I don’t see why he had to sleep in your room,” he said.
“I didn’t know he was going to.” What was this? My insides rattled, feeling the waves of tension from Nathan I hadn’t experienced from him before. “Honey?” I said softly. “What’s wrong? It’s okay he did, right? I mean, you guys sleep ...”
“That’s not the same thing,” he snapped, his voice deepening and thick with jealousy. His hand shot up, pointing toward the house. “He can’t sleep there.”
I stepped back, my hand dropping from my mouth to the base of my throat. My tongue stilled behind my lips. Did I mess up? Why was he angry with me over something I had no control over?
His eyes widened in surprise when I backed away from him. “Sang, I’m sorry,” he said in a softer tone.
“I didn’t know,” I said, my lips trembling.
Nathan sighed, frowning. He took a step closer to me, his arms out and open but stopped, inviting me in but hesitating as if worried I wouldn’t want it. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. Come here.”
I bit my lip, keeping my hand at the base of my throat. I stepped closer. When I was within arm’s reach, he encircled me, drawing me into his body in a tight hug. Instinctively, my arms wrapped around his neck. Feeling his warm hug, I let out a shuddering sigh, relaxing.
Nathan pressed his cheek against the top of my head. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I know nothing happened. You’re not that type.”
“What type?” I asked, still confused.
Nathan uttered a couple of syllables but whatever word he meant to say ended with a grunt. He pulled back enough to where he could look down at me, his blue eyes locking with mine. “Sang, I know we’re kind of different. I trust Kota and the others with you. I trust our family.”
I scrunched my eyebrows at him. “Derrick wouldn’t hurt me,” I said.
“I know,” Nathan said. “He’s not us, though.” He twisted his lips, looking pained again. His big hands rubbed at my back. “I’m just a little jealous. I don’t like the idea of him sleeping in the bed you and I sleep in together. I had this image of you being there with him and I just ... I can’t think like that. I don’t like it.”
“We didn’t do anything,” I said, surprised by his frankness and wanting to ease his worries. “I swear, I thought it was Gabriel or Luke or one of the others when I wal
ked in ...”
He half smiled. “I know. It’s not what you did. It’s what he did. And it wasn’t his fault, either. I shouldn’t really feel this way. I can’t help it. I don’t know, maybe it was arriving and seeing you both hanging out and being so casual about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
“I thought you ... you said you didn’t get jealous.” It sounded so wrong. I felt it sounded like I just said he shouldn’t get jealous at all, as if another guy could come around and he shouldn’t think twice about it. It wasn’t what I meant. I didn’t understand.
He brought a hand around to rub a palm against my cheek. “I said we shouldn’t feel jealous over things we don’t need. Or worry over things that wouldn’t change.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed. “Like Kota’s mom. She wasn’t going anywhere and as long as I stayed a good person and a close friend, she still cared about me and she still cared for Kota.”
The puzzle pieces clicked. “You think Derrick could make me stop caring about you?”
“He isn’t us, Peanut. If you ever dated him, or say Rocky or someone else, they’d want you for themselves. I know we’re different, but ... I mean ... we’re something now, aren’t we?”
I knew my cheeks must have been a mass of redness. “Us?” I asked, without really understanding what he was trying to ask me.
This set the corners of his mouth rising. “Yeah. Us. We’re an us, aren’t we?”
I wasn’t sure again what he meant. Did he mean I was with them? As in part of the family? “If you want me.”
His eyes softened. He picked up my hand, drawing it to his mouth, and kissed the knuckle. “I want you, Peanut. I knew it when I met you. You’re different. You belong with us ... with me.”
His inflection made it clear. Kota was okay. Silas and the others were okay. Derrick wasn’t. There was a line, and it began and ended with the Academy, with this small circle of friends that I had started to depend on. It wasn’t normal, like Derrick said. What I needed to figure out was, was this what I wanted? Would I ever understand it and would I ever fit in?