Dive Read Online Free Page B

up or straightened out things between them.
    But I’d never been part of a real house, with a newspaper delivered to the front lawn and yellow tomatoes growing out back. So in my mind, you were the lucky one. You’d had the paper and tomatoes your whole life, and the way I saw it, Lyle had rooms to spare. Even if you were mad that I was budging in, I didn’t concern myself about it, not really. Not enough to say I didn’t want your work space for my very own bedroom. Not enough to stop myself from scraping BEN into the trunk of your backyard maple. Not enough not to list your address as mine when I started scouts camp that summer.
    Your moods were nothing, in exchange for what I got.
    On Lyle’s instruction, you cleared out your posters from the walls of your work space, along with your comics collection and Spider-Man rug, and we weren’t better than two strangers on the third floor, no more than a bathroom and the silence between us. Even at Mom and Lyle’s engagement party, you played that game of always stepping out of the room I walked into.
    You hated me fierce all through that first year, and when I remembered to, I hated you back.

M ALLORY DOESN’T COME TO visit us until the movie is starting. She crouches next to Lyle’s seat and they whisper together. I lean hard over my armrest, but I can’t hear their secrets. The lady sitting on the window side has fallen asleep and her breath is crawling too close on my ears and neck. I hold my shoulder up to my ear, then I zip my jacket all the way to my chin. Then I nudge the lady with my arm to redirect her breath. The first time doesn’t work so I nudge harder and she wakes up with a gasp noise.
    “Would you please mind your space?” she says in a whisper that has slurp in it.
    “You were breathing on me,” I answer, in my regular voice. Lyle turns and with one hand he pushes my chest deep into the seat back.
    “Is my son making trouble?” he asks.
    “He woke me up,” huffs Slurpwhisper. “He elbowed me.”
    “I’m very sorry about that. Ben and I will make certain it won’t happen again,” says Lyle. They talk over me like I’m not even here.
    I stretch back my neck and roll my eyes and go, “Shheeez.”
    “Come on, Ben,” Lyle says. “What would Ms. Faunce think? At the last parent-teacher conference, she told me you’d been maturing in leaps and bounds.” He takes his hand off my chest. Even though it didn’t really hurt, I go, “Oww!” and start a wild coughing fit. Leaps and bounds—like I’m some dumb rabbit. Ever since that conference, Lyle’d been way over-talking those leaps and bounds, even though old Ms. Faunce is the type who’d put in a good word for any kid.
    “Bennett,” Mallory whispers. “Do you want to trade? If you give me your word that you’ll behave, I’ll let you.”
    “Trade for the rich-people seats?” I ask, leaning over Lyle, who is looking at Mallory like she just lost her mind.
    “Right.” She nods at me slowly. “But you have to promise you’ll be a man. Promise me no horsing around up there. No elbowing, no nonsense.”
    “I promise, I promise,” I say.
    “I’ll tell the flight attendant Lyle and I want to talk privately, and that’s why we’re trading.”
    “Okay, yeah.”
    She pats Lyle’s arm and is back in a minute with one of the plane ladies.
    “Nice meeting you,” I say to Slurp-whisper as I stand up. She opens one eye at me and frowns.
    Mallory leads me to her big spaceship seat and makes me promise her again. So I promise her again. Then the plane lady comes over with earphones and a blanket. I move back the seat as far as it can go, set my earphones to a good music station, and settle in.
    Inside my mind swims up a picture of you, the way I imagine how you are now, asleep in a germless steel bed and wearing one of those tie-back napkin nightshirts that hospitals use for clothes.
    Ben, if you want to use my old room as your work space, you can have it, you tell me in pretend.