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“Sounds fucking brilliant to me.” I said.
“I figured the end of next month. You think it will work out okay?”
“What do you mean?” I gave Oliver a close look.
“That this was worth it. The Sydney thing. That Leah will go to college and not drop all the plans she had before…before the thing happened.”
“The accident,” I said.
“Yeah, you know what I mean.”
“Why don’t you just do it?” I demanded.
“What?” Oliver furrowed his brow.
“Stop beating around the bush. Do you talk to Leah about your parents?”
“No.” He took one of my cigarettes. “I don’t really see it as the best thing right now. She had a really bad time, Axel; she couldn’t deal. It was difficult…”
“If she never faces it, she’ll never get past it.”
Oliver shook his head, a little angry. “What the hell do you want me to do? I spend three weeks a month hundreds of miles from here, and now she’s better and the last thing I want to do is bury her in shit again. Months ago, she couldn’t even stand to be around anything that reminded her of them. So no, I don’t feel like mentioning them. I don’t want to make her feel bad or see her suffer more.”
“But Oliver…”
“You weren’t in the car.”
“You weren’t either.”
“Exactly. That’s the difference. She was.”
He stood up and I followed him around the porch. I wasn’t used to arguing with him. At least, not about anything serious. Once, when we were drunk in college, we had come to blows and we both ended up with bloody noses. The next morning, we didn’t even remember why. I think it was over a girl or something to do with one of the coasters at the place where we were partying. Anyway it wasn’t important or else we would have figured it out.
“Wait, Oliver!” I grabbed his shoulder.
“Sorry. It’s just, I don’t know…”
“What’s up?”
“Everything’s so different…” He ran a hand through his hair. “Not just Leah. My life too. I don’t even know what I’ll do when I finish the job in Sydney and come back here…”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
He bit his lip. “That Bega’s there. And if everything goes as it should, Leah will live in Brisbane. I don’t know if it makes sense to come back to Byron Bay like nothing ever happened. I don’t know if I can be the same person I was…”
I wanted to tell him, We’re your family, but the words got stuck in my throat. I understood that feeling that maybe you didn’t belong anywhere. Before I could say anything, Oliver clicked his tongue, hugged me quickly, and said goodbye after stealing another of my cigarettes and tucking it behind his ear.
I was tense and just as edgy as before. I sat back down on the steps and lit another. I watched the smoke, self-absorbed, remembered what I had told his sister a few days before. That I’d fuck her with my fingers. That all I could think of was her mouth. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I was losing it. No doubt.
I was losing my head over her.
65
_________
Leah
It was a warm autumn night, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the talk we’d had that day at school about making decisions, choosing a path, mapping our future. The whole school year was ahead of me, but I’d already known what I wanted to do for years.
