Chapter 8
Kieran’s father appears to be in his early fifties, streaks of gray in the reddish-brown hair over his temples and ears and lines marking the skin at the corner of his eyes and across his forehead. Other than the hair and a few wrinkles, the bifocals pushed up on the top of his head and a slight double chin are the only real signs of age. Even covered up with a heavy knit cardigan over a black t-shirt, he strikes me as being in pretty good shape—Kayla must have inherited her athletic build from him. I steal a glance at Kieran, whose lanky frame makes him seem like a deflated balloon next to his father.
“Dad,” Kieran says, voice flat. The two engage in a three-second stare down before Kieran remembers his manners. “Sorry…this is Zip McKee.”
Mr. Lanier offers me his hand. “Nice to meet you, Zip. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
I brush off my curiosity at what “I’ve heard a lot about you” might mean, given that one of his kids has become my best friend while the other one acts like she wants to run me down with her car.
“Nice to meet you, too, Mr. Lanier,” I respond, and instantly panic that I’ve called him the wrong thing. “Dr. Lanier?” I try, which prompts a friendly smile.
“Call me Jim. And thank you for bringing Kieran home.”
Kieran opens his mouth, but I cut him off. “I’m sorry we’re so late. Totally my fault. We were talking and I lost track of time—”
“And I told her I didn’t want to come home,” Kieran interrupts, the continued flatness to his voice starting to creep me out a little. My back rises at the tension building in the hallway, and now I kind of wish I hadn’t offered to come in with him.
“You told your mother when you called you’d be home as soon as possible after the game,” Jim reminds him, and I’m about to apologize again when Kieran pipes up with “And in case you didn’t understand me, I told Zip I didn’t want to come home. Kayla and I are the only kids in this town who aren’t allowed out on school nights.”
I bite my lower lip. Kieran’s exaggerating a little—I’m guessing more than a few people don’t get to go out at night during the week. At the same time, it’s not like there’s a whole lot of trouble to get into in Titusville, unless you happen to be hanging out at someone’s house whose parents run a meth lab in the basement. Rumor has it, only about three families with kids at Titusville Junior/Senior High fall into the meth-making category, most of the cookers around here being too young to have children in junior high or high school.
“I just want to be like everybody else for once,” Kieran continues.
“You’re not like everybody else.”
“So you’ve mentioned. Repeatedly,” Kieran snaps.
Jim Lanier lets out a sigh. “At any rate, you should probably go upstairs and start your homework so you can get to bed at your regular time.”
The two males engage in another stare down before Jim jerks his head toward the staircase. Kieran gives him an “Okay—whatever” eye roll before picking up his backpack. “See you tomorrow,” he whispers to me. “And, thanks.”
I nod, voice stuck in my throat, as Kieran slings his backpack over his shoulder and heads for the stairs.
“You’re grounded, by the way,” Jim Lanier calls after him, which prompts Kieran to belt out a curt laugh.
“My whole life is grounded,” he spits as he jogs upstairs, nearly crashing into a woman heading in the opposite direction.
“Kieran—” she starts.
“Goodnight, Mom,” he mumbles, barely pausing. He turns on the landing and disappears up the second flight of stairs, his footsteps heavy on the hardwood floor above. The woman closes her eyes briefly and opens them again, the smile that follows directed at me.
“You must be Zip. Carlie Lanier,” she breathes, floating down the last few steps and gliding toward me with her arm outstretched. As I shake her hand, I give her the once-over and determine Kayla didn’t get her runner’s build from Jim Lanier because Carlie Lanier is Kayla—Kayla with about thirty years on her. The same jet-black hair curls around Carlie Lanier’s shoulders and the same blue eyes pierce me as they do almost daily at school, only these eyes are trying to shoot me through with kindness instead of stabbing me with cruelty. Even in baggy gray sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, “NYU” emblazoned across the front in purple block letters, I can tell Carlie’s in shape as well. I think once again of Kieran’s skinny build and the t-shirts and hoodies that always appear to be about to drown him, and I wonder how he must feel coming home every day to a family who looks like they just walked out of an aerobics video.
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Lanier,” I respond, giving her an embarrassed smile. “Sorry I brought Kieran home so late.”
“Please call me Carlie. And thank you for bringing Kieran home. We’re certainly not angry with you. He can be rather headstrong sometimes.”
Jim and Carlie stare at me for a moment before glancing at each other. He tilts his head toward the living room, and her shoulders hunch up in response. I, meanwhile, stand and watch like an idiot, shifting my weight from one foot to the other as the realization takes hold that I’m witnessing one of those silent conversations between people who have been married for years and are still very much in love. My grandparents do their version of this in front of me sometimes, and I’m always kind of fascinated by how a few shifts of their eyes and rapid chin lifts indicate things like “I’m bored and we should go home” or, more often, “You tell April. I don’t want to tell April.”
“After talking to your mother, we gather you’ve had a rough night,” Carlie says.
The game. Hearing Kieran’s secret and now enduring this meeting with his parents almost made me forget about Regionals. Incredible. I reach up, pretending to scratch an itch on my forehead, and I feel the sliminess of dried sweat along with some acne bumps along my skin at the hairline. And I bet I probably smell, standing here in the warm ups I slid on after the game without taking a shower. Right now, I’m so wishing I’d dropped Kieran off in the driveway and left.
“We’ve been eager to meet you,” Carlie continues. “Of course, we’d hoped it would be under better circumstances.”
“Well, my grandmother’s been talking about inviting you over for dinner. She wanted to give you some time to get settled in.”
At this news, the silent conversation between the Laniers begins again, Jim pursing his lips and Carlie responding by nodding her head at him slowly. Obviously, I’m not as familiar with their body language as I am with my grandparents’, so I’m essentially a foreigner in a strange land with no translator.
“We’d…I think we’d like that,” Jim replies, his voice warm and slightly surprised.
“I’ll tell her,” I say, nodding my head. “Gram loves entertaining. She’s a pretty good cook, too.”
Jim and Carlie exchange glances as if deciding which one of them is going to speak next, and I’m kind of blown away by the tension of this whole scene. I mean, I get why I’m uncomfortable. I’m a teenager with these mixed up feelings for Kieran and here I am, meeting his parents for the first time. But Jim and Carlie are supposed to be the calm, cool adults taking some sort of twisted delight in making one of their kids’ friends squirm.
Then it hits me—Kayla and Kieran are loners, which makes Jim and Carlie new to the whole “meet your kids’ friends and make them uncomfortable” routine, and this knowledge alone is enough to help me relax. Some of the stiffness melts from my shoulders and I stop trying to angle my nose toward my armpit to figure out if I reek as badly as I think I do.
“While you’re here, we’d…” Carlie starts, before looking back at Jim. “Maybe we should go to the living room and sit for a minute?”
He nods and glances at me, and, as if we’re passing the nod around a circle, I tilt my head in agreement toward Carlie and follow them across the hall.
While the entryway looks the same as when the McCafferys lived here, the living room screams to me that I’m in someone else’s house, becaus
e Mrs. McCaffery’s taste couldn’t be further from Carlie Lanier’s. I remember Erwin and Lottie McCaffery’s white couch with the tiny pink flower pattern and baby blue stripes, the matching chairs, and my favorite piece of furniture—a heavy oak coffee table whose legs met the floor with carved wooden bear claws. On the McCafferys’ fireplace mantle sat a large textured painting of a barn in shadow against an orange sunset sky that my mom told me had been there at least since she was a little girl back in the Seventies.
The first thing I notice when I walk into the Laniers’ living room, however, is that they’ve replaced the shadow barn with a framed poster print by someone named Kandinsky that’s…well…I have no clue what it’s supposed to be. The print tells me the name of the painting is Composition VII, which doesn’t exactly help me figure out what the jumble of shapes and swirls and colors represents. What I can see, however, is that the moss color in the painting matches the overstuffed couch that faces it, which complements the two easy chairs separated from either side of the couch by glass end tables, tables that match the oval glass coffee table in front of the couch. The McCafferys’ living room was a craptastic garage sale next to what the Laniers have done in here, and I tiptoe across the hardwood floor to one of the chairs and ease myself down as if I’m afraid as soon as my butt hits the fabric, everything in the room will be completely fouled thanks to my presence.
“We just wanted to tell you how grateful we are for your friendship with Kieran and Kayla,” Jim starts, shifting on the couch so he can put a hand on his wife’s knee. “I don’t know if they’ve mentioned that they didn’t have many friends in Asheville.”
I want to point out that they haven’t mentioned anything, but I say “Yeah—Kieran’s told me.”
Carlie gives me a brilliant smile that I’ve never seen from Kayla. “People tend to avoid them because of Kieran’s condition,” she explains. “And they’re both sort of quiet and shy to begin with so…anyway, we’re thankful they’ve found a good friend in you.”
Kieran’s never struck me as particularly shy, given the easy back-and-forth nature of our conversations right from the beginning. Then again, I don’t see him talk to anyone else at school, which I’m guessing is mostly because people are too afraid to talk to him and not the other way around. My mind hits upon him telling me earlier how he walked up to Brad Wallace and asked him if they could ride together on the spirit bus to Tusculum, which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a person who wants to be isolated from other people would do. I keep a smile on my face and don’t voice any of these thoughts to the Laniers, responding to Carlie with “Well, it’s been great getting to know him…I mean, them. It’s pretty exciting having new people around here. You’ve probably noticed Titusville isn’t exactly a non-stop thrill ride.”
Neither Lanier acknowledges my little joke, and the air pressure in the room seems to grow heavier, as if it’s going to squeeze my head until my brain explodes all over the Kandinsky print above the fireplace—not that anyone would be able to tell the difference.
“We’re just not used to Kayla and Kieran having people to confide in other than us,” Carlie continues. “We’re a very private family, and we’re quite protective of Kieran. We don’t want…” Carlie’s voice fades and she brushes whatever she was going to say aside with a wave.
Putting a hand to my chest, I start babbling. “I…I hope you know I would never hurt Kieran or turn on him or anything. He’s my friend and…” I swallow hard, unable to imagine what they’d think if they ever found out Kieran had told me about his dreams.
“Really—it’s fine. We believe you,” Jim says, his voice gentle. “Kieran being so close to someone is new territory for us, I suppose. So, we hoped we’d be able to meet you and…” Jim doesn’t finish his sentence, but instead squirms a little on the couch, his hand squeezing Carlie’s knee.
“We can’t say it enough,” Carlie notes, picking up the conversation. “We’re so happy Kieran and Kayla can count you as a friend. You’re obviously a lovely young woman, and you’re welcome at our house anytime.”
“Thank you,” I eek out.
“We were sorry to learn your game didn’t go as you’d hoped tonight,” she continues. “Basketball season is over now, correct?”
I nod, a thought popping into my head that allows me to contribute something to the discussion other than variations on “Thank you” and “I’m sorry.” “Yeah. Spring sports practices should start next week if Kayla wants to run track. People don’t need to try out or anything. They’ll just figure out what distances she’s good at and she’ll train at those.”
Carlie leans forward, interested. “Kayla had mentioned something about track season, so we’ll remind her.”
“They’ll make announcements at school, too, so…” Now it’s my turn not to finish a sentence. Desperately wishing to end this little chat, I reach for every teenager’s last resort. “I’m really sorry, but I’ve still got a lot of homework and...”
Jim shakes his head as if I’ve just woken him from a nap. “Of course. Of course,” he says, standing, and Carlie follows his lead, motioning for me to walk ahead of them into the hallway. But Jim sprints in front of me so he can take my coat from the hook inside the front door.
“Well, it was great meeting you,” I lie, turning back around to face them after Jim’s helped me into my coat. “Again, I’m sorry I brought Kieran home so late.”
“Not a problem,” Jim says. “Glad we were able to meet you as well. We look forward to hearing from your grandmother.”
“Yes,” Carlie agrees. “Kieran can give you our number if you don’t already know it.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Jim reaches past me to get the door, and we exchange goodbyes as I step out into the cold. I bury my hands in my pockets and hunker down into my coat collar, practically jumping off the front porch and flying over to the driveway, eager to get back to the safe familiarity of the Camaro. The frigid air doesn’t send a chill down my spine, because the iciness is already there thanks to Jim and Carlie and their strange formality and their…fear, I guess, of my turning on Kieran for some reason. Once inside the car, I crank the heat in an attempt to wipe away both the cold and the several layers of weird I’m drenched in thanks to Kieran’s parents. Exhaling as warmth floods the interior, I back the car around into the space next to Kayla’s Jeep and ease forward down the driveway toward the blacktop, beyond relieved I’ll be in my own living room in less than five minutes.