“Oh! Sorry,” Callie shook her head at her poor manners. “Jacob, this is Tyler. He’s a fellow nursing student,” she explained as they shook hands.
“Hence the shoes,” Tyler held up his pair and let out a small chuckle.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Jacob replied
“Jacob goes to Westbridge, too,” Callie added. “We have a few classes together.”
Tyler looked between them again. “Oh,” he nodded, not-so-subtly giving Jacob a once-over, his shoulder sagging a bit at the result of his appraisal.
“Uh, we’re working on a Psych project together,” Jacob explained, tossing the poor guy a bone. “That’s why we’re here. Just taking a break.”
“Oh,” Tyler repeated with a bit more enthusiasm this time. “Well, that’s cool. If you need a hand with anything, let me know. I love psychology. You, um… you have my number, right, Callie?” he stammered, pushing his blonde hair away from his glasses.
“Yeah, I think so,” she curtly replied, putting a few unsatisfactory pairs of shoes back on the shelf.
Tyler’s face fell at her brief reply. “Okay… well, I guess I’ll see you in class, then.”
“Yeah, see you,” she said, looking up from the shoes she was trying on and giving him a smile and a wave.
He returned her grin brightly and headed toward the cashier with pink cheeks.
Jacob smirked at the exchange, appraising Callie’s blissful ignorance as she pursed her lips at the shoes on her feet, stepping around on them to get a good feel. With a grimace, she sat back on the bench and removed them, putting the box back on the shelf. She huffed out a sigh and turned to Jacob’s amused expression.
“What?” she asked with widely innocent eyes.
He chuckled. “Seems like somebody’s got a crush,” he nodded toward the registers.
Her eyebrows pulled together as she glanced toward the front of the store, and her cheeks reddened. “He doesn’t…,” she began, but trailed off as she pondered the thought.
Jacob laughed again. “He seems like a nice guy. You should give him a call,” he encouraged.
Callie turned her flushed face back to him. “I don’t know,” she shook her head.
“Why not?” he asked, absently checking out the men’s shoes on the shelves behind him, not that he had the money to buy any of them anyway.
She didn’t answer. When he looked back, she was staring at him, but she turned away when he met her gaze, biting her lip and tucking her hair behind her ear.
“I don’t think I’m gonna find anything today. I can come back another time,” she shrugged. “Should we get back to it?”
He was taken aback by the abrupt change of subject, but he agreed, and they headed to the grocery store. They chose multiple different venues for their observations, so as to get a wide variety of shoppers to unknowingly participate in their experiment.
The rest of their work passed by in relative silence, and much to Jacob’s dismay, only took up a few hours of the day, leaving him the rest of the evening alone with his thoughts again. He didn’t have much homework to get through, so he wasn’t looking forward to heading back to his room. He even wandered casually into the kitchen, hoping perhaps to stumble upon the girl from the night before for another distraction, but the room was empty.
As he plopped onto his desk chair, he swiveled mindlessly and let the slight rush of vertigo jumble his thoughts enough to create the illusion of a clear mind. Pushing himself over to the nightstand, he reached for Maggie’s journal, tucked away in the single drawer. He figured since he was already depressed, nothing in the book was bound to do much more harm.
He flipped it open to his makeshift bookmark and began reading the next entry.
April 15th, 2004
A cop came to the house today. Jake was out getting dinner, so it was just me and Dad, and they barely even talked to me at all. They asked us both some questions… in the same room…. As if I’m going to say “oh, yeah, all that noise last night was my Dad beating the shit out of my brother, so you should probably arrest him” right in front of the guy.
Apparently one of the neighbors heard shouting last night, which is no surprise, given how hard Dad and Jake were going at it, so they called the police. Not sure why it took almost a full 24 hours to come check it out, but I don’t know, I guess they had more important things to do.
I don’t know how to feel…. On the one hand, I’m happy to see Jake standing up for himself more. I’m always wishing he would stop rolling over and just do something for once. And sometimes, like last night, I can see something snap in him and he does. He fights back, and I can’t help but feel proud for a minute.
But on the other hand, it never seems to do any good, and he just ends up with more marks to cover.
As usual, I don’t know what to do, but I know I have to do something. I have to. This is on me. He wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for me. He would be off at a far-away college somewhere… probably studying culinary arts, or French, like Mom. Maybe he would meet a nice girl and get married. I wonder, sometimes, if he would have kids. Maybe. He probably thinks he wouldn’t be a good dad, but I know he would be. I wouldn’t be around to tell him that, but maybe the right girl could convince him.
His life would be so much better if I wasn’t here.
Jacob shut the book and tossed it across his desk. It wasn’t the end of the entry, but his vision was too blurred to keep going. With a jagged breath, he wiped the wetness from his cheeks. These were the hardest entries to read. He always knew his sister was a dreamer, but what he didn’t realize until after she died was how often she dreamed for him, more than she dreamed for herself. She dreamed for him to have a normal life, just as he dreamed the same for her, and it crushed them both to know it would never happen. It crushed her enough to move her to pack a bag, walk out their front door, and leave everything behind, in the blind hope that her absence would set him free, somehow. Free from her, free from their father, free to grow and learn and have a life of his own. Free to fall in love.
His eyes welled again when he thought of Sarah, and he wondered what Maggie would think if she could see him now.
Sorry, Mags, he thought. This was the one thing you wanted for me, and I blew it.
His sadness was rapidly turning to frustration – anger, even – at himself, for screwing everything up. Of all the ways he tried to make her life better, to sacrifice for her, in the end, Maggie had been the one to make the biggest sacrifice of all. She gave everything. Her friends, her home. Her life.
She wanted him to live, even if it meant she had to die, and here he was, squandering it all away. Every choice he made, from her death to his arrest, was a slap in the face of that sacrifice. She wanted him to be free, and he stubbornly insisted on keeping himself in bondage.
And yet, despite all of his reckless choices, every stupid thing he did in the past sixteen years, he had been granted the most miraculous of second chances. His chest ached at the injustice of it all. If anyone deserved a second chance at life, it was her, not him, and that truth held him down, tied him to her in the grave of their past. But… is that what Maggie would have wanted?