Hand Me Down Read Online Free Page A

covers her mouth with both hands to suppress a gagging sound. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
    “It’s not like it’s the end of the world,” Terrance says.
    I turn on him and in my head I stab his heart through his muscle-shielded chest. “You should leave,” I say. He snorts. “This is because of you,” I say.
    “It’s because of whoever called my parole officer,” he says.
    Mom holds up a hand. “Maybe something good will come out of this whole thing,” she says and half-smiles. She inhales and releases it in uneven bursts. “God does work in mysterious ways.”
    “Is He punishing me?” I say. “What did I do wrong?”
    “Oh, Liz, your teenage hormones are making this feel much worse than it actually is,” Mom says. “Think of it as an adventure.” She twists her wedding ring around her finger and closes her eyes. “That starts tomorrow night.”
    I gasp like she slapped me in the face. “Tomorrow?” I cough and try to inhale but it’s like swallowing glass.
    Terrance laughs. “Man, those parole guys are real tightwads about their rules.”
    There’s a part of me that still thinks this can’t be happening. This is a nightmare and soon I’ll wake up. I pinch the inside of my wrist until it hurts. “Where am I going to go?”
    Mom reaches for me. “We thought—”
    “Don’t touch me,” I say, jerking away so fast I stumble. The barbed wire is in my blood, a million paper cuts slicing up my insides. I need to escape.
    She snorts an irritated burst of air out of her nostrils and says, “In a few years, this won’t seem so bad.” I move toward the door, light-headed, fighting to breathe. She says, “Trust me.”
    Never again
, I think as I bolt outside into the fresh air.
    I run laps around our apartment parking lot; force my thighs to burn, my skin to sweat, my lungs to drown. When every single cell in my body feels singed and smoking and numb, I press myself into the wet earth and soak up the smell of grass and the quiet in the air, the cool softness under my back. I inhale and exhale with the wind, slowing my pulse, calming my heart. I lie there on the damp lawn and watch brown oak leaves float against the pink-orange sky and land on the concrete sidewalk with a crunch.
    Mom said it’s just me, but she’s wrong. She may have forgotten Jaime, but I feel her absence like an amputated limb, a part of me missing but still a constant phantom presence. When I learned about binary planets in seventh grade I thought of me and Jaime, connected by proximity and gravity, relying on each other for stability so we don’t shoot off into space. She’s had me close bysince she was born and I figured the pull I always feel when we’re apart—like magnets or tides in my blood—was just as strong in her. When Jaime left, I assumed she’d come home the way salmon and turtles return to their birthplace. If I move, how will she be able to find me?
    The falling leaves shift to black outlines against a shadowed blue night and the temperature drops with the sun. I shiver. What if Jaime decides, like Mom, that she doesn’t need me at all?
    When I return to the apartment, Noah has been picked up from day care and waddles over to me. “Liz,” he says and hugs my leg. I poke his belly and pick him up, tickling his armpits. He giggles and I squeeze him close. “Good-bye, little brother,” I say, snuggling my nose into his soft neck. “You be careful,” I whisper and tap his tiny chin with my forefinger. He sticks out his tongue, something I taught him.
    Terrance and Mom are watching pro wrestling, oiled men in Speedos screaming threats into microphones and then trying to pin each other. Terrance rests one hand on Mom’s leg and holds a Budweiser in the other. I kiss Noah’s forehead and set him down on his wobbly legs. Mom doesn’t say a word as I walk past her to my room, just stares at the screen while Terrance rubs his thumb back and forth across the top of her thigh.
    I start packing, emptying