Author's Note: Title taken from a Gary Allan song by the same name (download it, it's awesome). Will be a two-shot.
Thanks in advance for reading. As always, the support is tremendously loved and appreciated.
I don't own Degrassi.
I.
Her dad's across town, away from here.
Her mom's here, but not really.
Darcy's not here at all.
So that leaves Clare…where?
She's been trying to figure that out for months now, but wonders more and more if it's nowhere.
II.
A rainy day. Tuesday morning. Her mother asks her, hesitantly, how she would feel about moving in with the Martins.
She gapes at her mother, who is not really asking, as much as her tone tries to hide it. Something tells Clare that her mother has already packed up the guest bedroom, which became her mother's bedroom after the divorce, and if she bet money on it, she had already moved some of her own things into Jake's dad's house. Maybe she's already spent the night there once or twice, risking her daughter waking up before her and wondering where her mother was in order to spend one more hour curled in bed with him.
She makes a note to ask Jake. He's always been more aware of this kind of thing than she has; he would know, even if he never saw her mother come or go from the house.
Her mother is still waiting for an answer.
"I don't know," she says. "Isn't it a little…soon?"
That's not the right answer. Her mother's face closes up, then tries to smooth over again.
"We've been dating almost six months, Clare," she says brusquely. "I would never move you into a house if I thought it wasn't time. We're not being hasty. We're being practical."
Her mother's voice is tense, loaded with reasons like bullets and logic. Or something she thinks passes for logic, anyway. Logic tends to be a little skewered when the world has been turned upside down, Clare has come to realize.
"Besides," her mother adds, "with the wedding coming up so soon, we'll need all the time we can get to plan together. It's really what's best for everyone. The easiest way to go about all of this."
What about what I want? Clare thinks, but she's unable to speak the words aloud.
Clare knows her mother's just trying to justify it to herself, more than explain anything. She's already made up her mind, and Clare's.
III.
She's with Jake that night against her will, but her mother makes her. They're at his place, while their parents go out to a play.
(Or to play, but Clare would rather never think about that, ever.)
She wonders why her mother is eager to leave the two of them alone in the wake of the bombshell that her daughter and soon-to-be son
(stepson, Clare reminds herself. Jake isn't her mother's son. Jake is distance. Jake is separate. Jake is not family. Not really. Just like she'll never be Glen's, and he'll never be hers.)
had dated, but she figures Glen must have smoothed things over with her mother, because now she has no qualms about leaving Clare alone with Jake.
They're supposed to be watching Entourage, something Jake picked and Clare tolerates. But her mind is too distracted to pick up the nuances of comedy. Before they can get past the opening credits, she's made an excuse and disappeared to the bathroom, curled on the floor with her head pressed to the freezing tiles, shuddering in silence.
IV.
They end up living together, in this house on the water that has three rooms.
The divorce papers are barely dry and her mother is already moving in with her boyfriend.
Clare isn't sure how this works. One night, she's sleeping in her own bedroom she's had since she was three, in the same bed covered in the same pink down comforter. Now, she's sleeping in a room with too many corners and edges, she has her own ceiling fan, and Jake is fast asleep down the hall in a room that smells like wood shavings.
V.
Her mother makes dinner for them all that first night. They eat in the family room on kitchen chairs, because Glen hasn't had time to put together the kitchen table yet, and their mail-order couch is three days late on delivery. They use paper plates, and Jake can't hide the smile in his eyes when Clare drops her corn on the cob and it rolls away from her almost underneath his dad's seat, leaving a buttery trail behind.
They talk chores, carpool, and unpacking the rest of this house with both Clare and Helen's things as well as what's left of Glen and Jake's, still in the garage. It's average, run-of-the-mill domestic stuff taken so entirely out of context that Clare can't wrap her mind around the fact that Holy shit this is actually happening, right now because it's boring and homey and just too fucking weird.
VI.
Things are always quiet around the house. Nobody yells or screams, and there's no arguing or even raised voices. A big change for Clare from the past year.
She and Jake circle around each other like birds. They never meet in the middle, just keep circling. She wonders if he's really trying to give her some space out of consideration, or he just thinks it's funny.
They've barely spoken since Prom, barely even looked each other in the eyes. Clare wonders if it's just her that's avoiding it, or if Jake's doing it, too, or if they both keep shooting glances and missing each other by enough time to keep that wall up.
When the two of them do talk, it's always corn-starched with courtesy. Who's doing dishes after dinner, who's taking out the recycling, what was the trig homework, can you pass the salt, please?
Never about their families (or, really, their missing ones), never about relationships, never about how weird this really is.
It's calm. It's non-confrontational.
It's driving her insane.
She figures that it should be comforting. A year ago, all she wanted was for everyone around her to just shut up, already. She should be grateful that she's not constantly on the verge of her parents' inability to say that it's over; that she's still not holding onto that phantom hope that it will all just go away, and everything will right itself again. It should make her feel content, that things are smoothing over.
But instead she feels even emptier.
The tension is almost more than she can take.
It's too quiet in this damn house.
VII.
The talk is relentless.
Even though school has been out for weeks now and she expected the gossip to be as stagnant as the July air, it's instead like a brushfire; once the spark catches, it's impossible to stop.
For weeks, Clare just assumes that it's because they're hot gossip; once a new wave comes along, they'll forget all about her and Jake and the weirdness surrounding their lives, and everything will go back to normal.
Turns out, the ocean of school gossip is going to stay still for a long time, even when school is out.
Apparently, a couple whose parents are dating makes for all sorts of juicy discussion. And none of it particularly flattering. The ewww factor makes it particularly intriguing, as if Clare and Jake are totally okay with the fact that they're practically siblings and decided it's okay to tongue your sister.
If anyone knows how to make incest look sexy, apparently it's Jake.
It doesn't seem to faze him, but that doesn't surprise Clare.
She tries to not let it get to her, but every time she swears she hears someone whisper, her skin crawls with the disgust they must feel with her.
VIII.
She hears from Eli a few times a week.
When Adam was in the hospital, they saw each other regularly, because the two of them were always popping in and out. They never talked to each other one on one, and never talked about anything more important than video games, movies, and how much hospital food sucks. Never about the past, never about the inside-out Wonderland her life seems to have become recently, never about his therapy or his medication or his anything. CeCe comes to pick Eli up one afternoon, and the awkwardness is so excruciating, it makes Clare want to die.
She erased Eli's number from her phone months ago, but it's a number she still knows by heart, even though there were times that knowledge felt like it was against her better judgment. She knows that Eli knows, at least a little bit, what her life is like, now, and with Alli gone for another two weeks, she doesn't have too many other allies in her corner.
She knows that she could pick up the phone anytime and call him, and he'd answer before the first ring ended.
481-5234…
Or maybe he won't.
She has yet to dial the number.
IX.
Jake has a Rand McNally atlas in the glove compartment of his truck. She takes it one day, then locks herself in the bedroom and pours over it. Studies it like she'd study literature. The roads are the plot, the cities and terrains and provinces she travels through the symbols and allegories. Mountains and terrain, those are the obstacles in the hero's journey.
She casts herself as the main character, of course, a drifter travelling from one place to the next with never a destination in mind. Choose-Your-Own adventure book. Only, every ending's happy.
She lets her fingers trace the back roads and alternate routes between major cities and passing through small towns, places with generic names like Lincoln and Westboro and Thomasville. Names of towns that could be anywhere in the world; names where people blend together like watercolor.
She wonders what life would be like, in those towns.
Maybe she's meant to be a nomad. Should quit school, give up on university, just hop into a car and drive. Drive through every one of these passerby towns, never staying in one place for long, just to see how long she can make it in one place before she moves on. She can give up her dreams of being an author, being a professor.
Forget Degrassi. Forget drama, and relationships, and living in a house that's too big and where she's a square hole in a round peg. No roots to settle down, no connections to tether. Just driving through the world, with no destination in mind.
And anyway, she wouldn't have to give up on writing completely. She could write letters to the people she'd left behind: Dear Mom, Dear Dad, Dear Darcy, Dear Alli, Dear Adam,
(Dear Eli)
(Dear Eli, Passed through a town today named Heathcliff. Remembered that we'll never agree on Wuthering Heights. Dear Eli, Picked up a radio station that played The Cure as I drove through some flat rocky area that had no name. I think you would appreciate the perfection of that moment if you had been there with me. Dear Eli, There's this great place in the town of Meridian that bakes better bread than CeCe; don't tell her, she'll think I betrayed her. Dear Eli, I started and finished reading Pygmy by Chuck today; I get why you said it was his worst book, didn't make it through forty pages. Dear Eli, I've come to the conclusion that Ayn Rand is sexist. Also, I don't like how her 'philosophy' leaves no room for interpretation. She just tells you what she wants you to feel. Dear Eli, You would love the sky here.)
She wonders if she'd get lonely.
Maybe Jake would come, too.
The nomad life just might be for him, too. Passing through lives the way he passes through relationships – easily, one at a time, and breaking loose with no sadness or dizzying confusion, because there was nothing to invest but a good time, and if you lost that, well, there's always more of that to go around.
Like heartache.
(Dear Eli, What's wrong with me?)
X.
"Are you pregnant?"
Her mother almost runs the red light. She slams on the brakes just in time, lurching the both of them forward.
"Clare!" she shrieks. Her eyes are wide. "No, I'm not. Why would you ask that?"
"I don't know, Mom, because you're marrying some guy you started dating last week?"
Her mother's lips purse in that way Clare knows so well and hates even more.
"It's been eight months," she replies.
"And that's supposed to mean that you know him?" Clare explodes.
Her mother doesn't blink at her tone.
"I know him better than you think I do," she says coldly.
Clare doesn't want to think about what that might mean. She stares out the window.
"Look, Clare-Bear," her mother says. "I know you feel like I sprung this on you at the last second, but we know this is what we want. And even though it's been a short amount of time, we can't just sit here until some invisible 'waiting' line's been crossed, just so we can feel like we're making the right decision. We know it's right."
"Whatever, Mom," she mutters, arms crossed over her chest.
"Do you hate Glen just because I'm marrying him?" her mother asks, "Or because he's Jake's dad?"
"I don't hate Glen," Clare argues. "I'm just not ever gonna call him 'Dad'."
"I'm sure he would never expect you to," her mother says. "He would never push that on you."
"Is Jake gonna call you Mom?" Clare asks.
Her mother shrugs. "I don't know. We haven't gotten to talk about that."
Green lights flash, and suddenly they're moving. Everything outside becomes a blur. Clare tries to focus on the line of trees decorating the roadside, but it makes her feel trapped, claustrophobic. Like she's staring at cell bars.
"He's the best person for me," her mother whispers. "And I need you to accept that."
XI.
This new house has a pool.
Something Clare used to beg her mother for when she was younger, but now she barely notices. She can't imagine when they'll actually get around to using it here.
Her mother already loves it. She's perched outside on a lawn chair, magazine in hand and sunhat covering her face. In a bathing suit, which Clare finds weird. Even when she was little and her mother would take her and Darcy to the community pool, her mother always wore a cover-up over her one piece. Always modest. Always covered.
Jake doesn't like the pool. He has to clean it, gathering the dead leaves and spiders and making sure the filter's working properly. But Clare figures it's more than that.
He had water in Muskoka. Real water, not some over-chlorinated pool water that gleams with chemically-enhanced blue that's too clear to be real. Not like that trickling little creek that runs like a scar through their backyard. And the land around them at the cabin was real land, not suburbanite gardens and regulations as to where and how you could plant your own landscaping. There's nothing wild here. Everything is immaculate. Everything is regimented.
Like a jail.
She sees him down by the creek a lot.
XII.
She steps outside, bare feet on the damp soil, drawing the blanket around her. The sun is coming up, baptizing the sky with its new beginning.
He hands her a cup of coffee, and pulls his jacket tighter around him.
"Sleep all right?" he says. He can't hide his grin, and it makes her angry.
"That some kind of joke?" she snaps.
He rolls his eyes."Just trying to lighten the mood, is all."
"Well, you're doing a terrible job of it," she tells him, turning to look back at the water before she sees him smile at her because fuck it, this isn't funny. It's gross and weird and wrong and gross and eww and weird. Ewwww.
They sit quietly for a while, sipping their coffee and looking at the water.
"Look," he says finally, "if it helps, I'm as weirded out by this as you are."
She snorts. "I'm sure you're not."
"What, you're telling me I think it's all great that our parents kept us up all night with all that noise?"
Clare shudders so violently she nearly spills her cup. "Don't say that," she moans. "Please, don't."
"Sorry," he says.
It's the tensest silence Clare's ever felt.
"Excuse me for not knowing the protocol," he tells her after a bit. "This isn't the type of situation I've ever had to handle before."
He takes another sip from his steaming mug.
"I think I'd make a good brother," he tosses in.
Clare stands up so fast she spills her coffee; cursing as hot liquid runs down her legs, she stands over Jake in a hazelnut-scented rage.
"Are you serious?" she yells. "Are you really being serious right now? Or are you just making a big joke out of this, like everything else?"
"What did I say?" he yelps.
"I kissed you, Jake!" she screams. "You were my boyfriend!"
"Ex-boyfriend, we broke up," he reminds her.
"We'd been making out for months," she continues breathlessly. "Being PDA everywhere in school, fooling around when my mom's not home, the whole school knows we've been hooking up, and now you want to tell me that you're okay with being my brother? Are you sick?"
She doesn't understand how he can take this in such a stride; how it doesn't make his skin crawl.
She puts her palm to her sweaty forehead. Her heart's pounding. Caffeine and worry. Not a good mix.
"I didn't want to get hurt," she murmurs. She turns to him, accusing. "You said that we wouldn't get hurt."
He sighs. "Yeah. I did."
"You said that things wouldn't be awkward when we ended them," she says. "It looks like you were wrong."
"That's not exactly our fault," he points out.
"But still, things got awkward. They got messy and complicated and weird and everything we promised up and down they wouldn't be."
They're quiet for a while, staring at the line stretched across the sky.
"Messy is not the way we wanted it to end," she says again.
"There you go again," he mumbles.
She rounds on him. "Excuse me?"
"The looping." He sighs. "Are you really going to torture yourself with this?"
"Torture myself with what?"
He shakes his head. "Forget it."
"No!" she shouts, startling both of them. She gets to her feet unsteadily. It's too early for this intensity, but everything she's been holding back since Prom night, since moving into this house and living in silence has been let loose. Everything is unspooling and tumbling out at her feet. She can't hold it back any longer.
"Look," she tells him, "taking a risk was a bad idea, a very bad idea!"
"So you regret ever giving us a try?" Jake asks.
"Maybe," she says. "I don't know. Do you?"
"I don't know!"
"Right," she replies. "No need to take a risk when you don't have anything to lose. Anything to feel."
"Oh," he says drily. "I get it. So now you're telling me how I feel."
"Did you feel anything at all?" she shouts. Her cries echo across the quiet morning. "Tell me something. Was any of it real?"
"Of course it was!"
"Then why do you just not care?" she demands.
"I did!" he says. "The only difference between you and me is that I don't fucking drown in everything!"
"Oh you are so full of shit!" she yells.
"What the hell is going on out here?"
Their parents are standing on the porch. Clare's mother looks furious. Glen's arms are crossed over his chest, his face a mixture of disbelief and disapproval.
"It's seven thirty in the morning," her mother says crisply. "What the hell are you two doing up screaming at each other?" Her eyes narrow at Clare. "And cursing?"
"I thought that was what siblings were supposed to do," she says bitterly. "Argue."
"You watch your mouth, Young Lady," her mother hisses. "You are out of control."
"Jake?" Glen says. "You have anything to say for yourself?"
Clare watches him shove his hands in his pockets and stare at the ground.
"No sir," he mutters. "I do not."
"Get inside," her mother says. "Both of you. Not another word."
"You're really gonna stand there and tell me what to do?" Clare snaps.
"Clare," Glen warns. "I think you should listen to your mother."
"Clare," Jake echoes. "Come on."
It feels like forever that she and her mother stand there on that deck, staring at each other. Her mother's self-righteous fury, drawn around her like that bathrobe, and every inch of Clare crackling with injustice, with humiliation, with dizzying abandonment.
"Fine," she mumbles. She stomps inside, and when the door to this bedroom she's supposed to think of as hers slams behind her, there's a whole story written in the bang of the wood and rattle of the rusty hinges.
XIII.
Therein lays the problem with living with a person you're currently angry with.
You can't really avoid them.
She can hide from her mother as much as she wants, because she's pretty sure her mother is doing the same. But Jake always appears to be in the corner of her eyes, mowing the lawn or helping his dad sand furniture out back or grilling dinner or watching TV two feet away from where she's trying to choke down her pride and baked salmon.
Just like the Biblical tale, after three days, she returns. As much as she wishes she didn't have to.
"Jake," she says.
He's sitting at the breakfast table, gulping OJ and eating hash browns almost in the same breath. He peers over at her from across the room, guarded, as if expecting more fireworks.
She sits across the table from him, her sweaty hands folded primly in her lap.
"I'm sorry for the other day," she mumbles, staring at the etched wood of the new table. It's as smooth as warm skin. "I shouldn't have said those things to you."
He sets his fork down, watching her from over his plate.
"Why not?" he asks. "You think they're any less true now?"
She looks at him in surprise.
"You think they're true?" she asks.
Jake shrugs. Dodging her eyes, he gets up and dumps the rest of his plate into the trash, running it clean under the sink.
"We're supposed to be family," he mumbles, drying the plate with a dishrag. "If we can't be honest with each other, then I guess…"
He looks at her and tosses one arm up in the air, an unspoken olive branch.
She's not sure what he means about being honest. If it means he saw any truth reflected back in her ferocity that morning, or if he's talking about his own words. Or if they're both hanging onto their separate glimpses of reality like a shield, something to grip onto with white knuckles and block any oncoming blows to what's soft and exposed underneath.
All she knows is, this isn't a reunion. Or a union, even.
Maybe she's too lost to be found.
XIV.
Jake's playing a CD on the ride home from school one hot afternoon. She doesn't know what day it is, or month. Everything melts together in this weather, and her life is already too off-balance for her to keep anything straight anymore, even the days of the week.
It's some song she doesn't know, by some singer she's never heard. Her voice is mesmerizing; it's dusty and soulful and bluesy, all steel guitars and lonesome. Clare doesn't know it but knows she feels it, and when the chorus roars in, her voice is so thick with her throaty wail that it sounds like it comes straight up from the ground. It's devastating, lonely.
Sorrow's mouthpiece.
"Turn it down," she tells him.
He glances over at her.
"You don't like it?" he asks. "I can change the CD, if you want."
"No," she says, feeling bitchy. She can take it.
The song storms on. It's about promise, betrayal, and second chances. Or really, the promise of a second chance, with the good chance that it will end in betrayal.
"Turn it off," she begs.
He gives her a look before switching the dial. Something with horns comes on. Lots of drums, and lots of shouting. Fast beats. Something about bouncing off walls.
She relaxes immediately.
Jake is looking at her with something like concern. "You okay?"
She closes her eyes, nods her head.
"Fine," she says faintly.
XV.
There's a knock on the bathroom door, startling her. She's lost track of how long she's been sitting here, shivering in the freezing darkness, or what time it is now, or how long it's been since she was conscious that there was such a thing as time. Sensations that disappeared are now coming back. There's an ache in her knees from kneeling on the floor too long, and her toes have gone numb. Her stomach is empty, but she still feels nauseous. Her throat is dry, her eyes heavy. Too much crying.
"Clare," Alli calls from behind the door. She almost doesn't recognize it. Alli who. She forgot that anything else existed outside of herself, and she even forgot that she existed, too, for a moment.
"Clare!" Alli hollers again. Clare closes her eyes, tries to read the tone. Her own name sounds like a foreign word in Alli's mouth. She doesn't recognize the syllable, the sound of the letters strung together meaninglessly. She can't tell what Alli is saying.
"Clare, let me in!"
The doorjam jostles frantically. There is pounding on the door; it echoes through the bathroom and in her skull, rattling everything.
Stop it. She grabs her head. That hurts.
"Clare! Clare! Open the door! Let me in!"
Alli is screaming now. Why did she come to this wreck? What did she expect to see?
The door stops shaking. The screams stop shattering. Another voice. Placid. Steady. Man.
There are whispers.
She can imagine, now, clearly, what is going on, on the other side of the door. Alli, wild-eyed and frantic, beating on the door and rattling the door knob, skittering on the edge of panic. Probably in tears, or on the verge of them. Jake, collected and soothing, putting an arm around her, whispering something into her ear, sending her downstairs. He would give her something to do – get a glass of water, get some aspirin, get a blanket – so when she returned, she could do something to help, instead of just standing here and screaming at a door that won't open.
There's a knock on the door.
"Clare," Jake calls. His voice is too calm, even for him. It doesn't sound real. "Open the door."
She raises her head.
"Open the door, Clare."
How is she supposed to answer that?
"Clare!"
It's the first time she's ever heard him raise his voice. She didn't know he could. It makes her jump. The bathroom is the worst place for someone to shout. Everything echoes. His voice is everywhere.
"Open this door," he commands. A new tone. It books no argument. "Right now."
The tone reminds her of being six. Of doing something wrong, and the fire in her belly when her parents sat her down and "talked" to her.
She staggers to the door. Her legs have been buckled for so long, she's forgotten how to walk. She stumbles against the door, and when she fumbles with the knob, she falls straight into Jake, who catches her in surprise.
"Well, hello, there," he says gently, when she falls right into him.
She peers at him. Tears are blurring her eyes so badly she can't see his features. She bites her lip, a futile effort. She's going to break soon, and this is all wrong.
Jake lowers the both of them to the ground. He sits beside her on the bathroom floor, and stays there while she cries. He makes no move to touch her, doesn't try to comfort her in any way. Just sits there.
For some reason, that's better than what she expected. She just wants someone to witness this, see her breaking apart, because lately, she feels like she's in an ocean's tide, sinking so slowly that no one even notices she's slipping below the surface, being sucked into the earth with every oncoming wave.
Alli lingers in the doorway, a blur of brown and blue and purple. She might be in tears herself, because Clare can hear sniffling, but Clare's eyes are too blurred to see anything, even the individual tiles on the bathroom floor. Everything runs together, and under the too-harsh sink light, it's like a mirage. Like she's losing her mind.
They sit there for a while, just the two of them. She is trying to remember how to breathe, and trying to listen to Jake do it, because maybe then, she can remember how this thing is supposed to go. Living like a normal person.
Everything will be okay. She will put food into her body, she will drink and bring her voice back to her scratched, ravaged throat. She will behave like a person, instead of a doll, posing and bending unnaturally into a place that does not fit her. She will take a breath and everything will be okay.
She staggers. She sways. She stands.
XVI.
It's a few minutes later. Nothing's okay.