We're waking up to find what's broken down. – "Better Days" by Birdtalker

Claire

I don't think Quil's intention of the whole 'let's dry hump on my couch' thing was me being scared to look my mother in the eye when I go home, but that is the outcome.

Another is the sound of Quil's I'm coming groan following me for all eternity. I'll hear it over the waves when I'm surfing; it will echo in my mind when I'm reading textbooks. Trying to sleep? Forget it.

I'm not trying to be dramatic or anything, but I die every time I remember it.

And she may have cancer, but if my mother catches wind of anything that happened at Quil's this afternoon, I will die at her hand.

I decide to text Callie before I leave Quil's: cover me when I get home?

SISTER: duh
SISTER: but what for
SISTER: oh and bring home tampons

I snort. And then I wince. If Callie needs tampons today, I will invariably need tampons tomorrow, my mother the day after. (And my father will need enough Advil to last him the entire week too.) I text back quickly — yeah. explain later, just be distracting.

But after stopping for tampons and painkillers and chocolate while I'm at it, a distraction isn't needed. The smoke alarm is distracting enough when I open the front door.

Dad groans as he opens the oven. My sister's mixing a salad at the table. "Callie, could you—" he slides the charred casserole from the oven— "Hannah, sit back down, I've got this."

Through the haze of gray smoke, I see my mother roll her eyes at him before she lowers back to the armchair. Then she winks at me.

The alarms are shrill and abrasive in my ears, but I wink back, dropping the goody bag on the coffee table as I head for the hall closet to grab the broom.

"Your father's going to turn me into a vegetable," Mom shouts over the sirens. At this point, Dad is opening the window above the sink, managing to knock off one of the plants on the windowsill, a sharp enamel-cracking sound somehow cutting through the other noise. Callie's waving a dishrag halfheartedly over the casserole—or maybe it's lasagna? Whatever it is, it is now dead.

"Dr. Nadyafi said you need to rest as much as you can," I shout. I find the hush button with the end of the broom, but the sudden silence is just as loud as the alarm. Mom lets out a relieved sigh, and I study her from across the room, the broom still in my clutches. "Especially since you're doing the chemo instead of the surgery."

Something loud crashes from the kitchen again. "Fu—" Dad just barely cuts himself off.

When I pass Mom to go to help him, I walk into a wall of tension. Mom's sitting up a little straighter than she was seconds before, and Dad's jaw is stretched tight as he braces against the sink.

Callie catches my eye, her dark brows knitted tight, the question in them clear. I shake my head because I don't know what's going on either.

But I know being hungry won't fix anything for anyone.

I move to the stove, studying the lasagnarole. It's actually, to my surprise, baked chicken breasts. The bottoms are stuck to the pan, but the inside is fine, still juicy. I'll just cut off the burnt bits and brown it again on the stove. There's rice already simmering on a back burner, broccoli off to the side and ready for the steamer.

"Claire, I can do it," Dad says. The weariness in his voice is apparent, each of his words tumbling out like a heavy stone.

"Don't worry, Dad. Callie and I can finish up."

I check over my shoulder, and he's rubbing at his jaw, then the back of his neck. He's still in his work clothes, a metallic tang hanging around him from his iron-working gig.

"You sure?" he says.

Callie steps up, nudging my shoulder with hers. "Absolutely."

He looks at us, side by side, and something softens and hardens in his gaze at the same time. He nods once, then reaches into the fridge for a beer.

"What's up Dad's ass today?" I whisper to Callie once he's in the living room with Mom.

Callie giggles as she pulls a sauté pan from a bottom cabinet. "He's probably just PMSing."

We finish the dinner he started, laughing almost the whole time.

"So he, like, grinded on you?" Callie says, a big bowl of popcorn and chocolate chips propped on the bed between us.

As far as sisters go, I've got the best—and the worst. She'd hardly been able to wait for us to make it upstairs before she called my bluff.

"I was on top," I correct, my face warming. "But there was definitely grinding. Grindage? Grounding?"

She sighs, laying back on the bed. Her head hangs over the end. "What do you think sex is like?"

"Well, I think—" but my answer is interrupted by a distinct sound from somewhere else in the house. "What was that?"

Callie sits up suddenly, her knees jostling the popcorn as her feet find the floor. She doesn't say anything, but I know we'll check it out, eavesdropping at the top of the stairs the way we have for over a decade now.

The voices become more defined as we reach our hiding space, and Callie looks back over her shoulder like she's regretting not bringing the popcorn.

"Why won't you do this, Hannah?" Dad says, quiet yet firm. "You've known for almost three months and haven't made any decisions about anything. The surgery is still the best option."

"But the worst for me!" Mom whisper-hisses back. "Do you know what it would do to me? How many women develop body dysmorphia and depression after mastectomies? And they want to take both!"

Callie and I share a look, her golden-brown eyes welling with tears. We've heard our parents fight before (they're human, and we have ears) but not in a while, and not like this.

Dad scoffs. "Well, God forbid Hannah, but I'd rather you have depression and no tits, than tits and goddamned cancer."

I'm not sure whether it's Callie or me or Mom that gasps, but I feel the words like a sharp knife in my own gut. Callie moves to take a step down to them, but I grab her around the waist. I want to go too, but we can't.

My mother's sigh floats to us. "Jon."

"Seriously," Dad continues. "What is this really about? You're not like this. You love your body. I love your body."

"This body?" I picture her gesturing wildly to herself. "This body that's killing me?!"

Callie's head drops to my shoulder, and she buries her face in my hair.

We need to go. I feel the need to leave, to stop listening, just as much as I need to stay and see this through. Some things aren't meant for us. It must be a sign of maturity to let them go when you realize that. I'm not feeling very mature right now. We stay; we listen.

"Hannah," Dad says, but his voice breaks on the second syllable. "Daka. Don't talk like that."

"No, be honest. Can you look at me and tell me you'd still want to love me if I didn't have this body?"

"Of course—"

"If I didn't have these?" Fabric rustles, and I'm even more glad we didn't sneak down the stairs to peek through the banisters. Her voice is shattered when she speaks again. "Because I don't know if I could. If I could love myself."

Wetness dribbles down my neck—Callie's tears—and I hardly hear Dad's response over the sound of my own heart. Breaking feels an awful lot like beating. Every pound of it against my ribs places another bruise on my soul.

One beat.

"Hannah, look at me," Dad says. I imagine him taking her face in his hands the way he often does before he kisses her forehead, or when they're dancing. I don't think they're dancing right now.

One beat.

Dad clears his throat, and I feel the need to do the same to dislodge the rock there. "When I see you… When I look at you, I see your soul. I see your heart. I see your spirit. And these," he says about something I can't see but can make an educated guess on, "aren't any more important than any of those things."

One beat.

"What if it's not enough, Jon?" Mom's voice is barely audible now, and the extra emotion there isn't helping. "What if I do the surgery and it just… doesn't work? Then I'll be broken twice over."

I can't picture my mother being broken once over—let alone twice—but this must be harder on her than I realized. Than my father even realized.

Maybe harder than she realized.

"I fed our daughters with this body," Mom is saying, and it's the final crack in my heart that does it, forces me to find my backbone, my feet, my conscience.

I tune out. Wordlessly, I tug Callie back toward my bedroom, and surprisingly, my legs don't feel like jelly. They don't really feel like anything at all.

We shut my bedroom door as quietly as possible.

"You probably want to call Quil," Callie whimpers, tears running in torrents down her ruddy cheeks. To anyone else it would be indecipherable, but I speak Sister. "I'll just go to my room."

The sound of Quil's name, that echo of his groan, is enough to send a sparkler of something running through my blood. But the ice-cold of my parents' fight replaces it quickly, and I shake my head, leading Callie back to my bed.

"No, Sissy. Come here, lay down."

And I tuck my little sister's head under my chin, a bowl of cold popcorn and melted chocolate chips I set on the ground now and will forget about by morning, only to kick it over onto my carpet.

Callie cries herself to sleep in my arms, and I continue straining my ears for downstairs noises.

Eventually, I do hear something.

Not more fighting, though.

Not verbally, at least, and not in the traditional sense. It sounds carnal, and it takes me an embarrassingly long second to place it.

What do you think sex is like, Callie had asked me—had that really been tonight?

The honest answer is: I don't know, not really. But I think, as I listen to my parents downstairs, it's probably many things all at once. A way to express love and anger. A way to be in the moment and out of it. Something that makes you feel both more and less at the same time. In my mother's case, a celebration of a body living and a mourning of one dying.

So maybe the question shouldn't be what is sex like? but do you get to pick how it makes you feel? Because right now, it seems like a crapshoot.

The Pack has a lot of traditions. Making bets on any and everything. Thanksgiving and Christmas at Jacob's cabin. A phone tree for when babies are born.

Sunny weekend days at the beach.

The beach is my happy place, and when all my favorite people are here with me, it transforms into a euphoria. The wind is strong, bringing in the sickly-sweet smell of water and seaweed. The rocks and sand beneath my feet are warm, and it travels straight to my heart.

I could live here, in this moment. It's so different than what I'm used to, with The Gray a permanent dark cloud at home. This is dreamlike.

So is Quil's chest at my back.

When the two of us got here this morning at dawn, it was just the two of us in the water. I'd taken longer than usual to enjoy the serenity, the feel of the waves lapping at my calves. I'd needed it.

My mother started chemotherapy two weeks after that fight with my father. She's gone through two rounds so far, and for the most part she still looks the same. Happy, easygoing smile and temperament; music every possible moment, laughter filling the air when it isn't.

It's August now, the start of my senior year rearing its ugly head at me everywhere I look. In the stack of college applications, sorted by preference and then deadline, I've yet to fill out. The ones out of state have moved closer and closer to the garbage can. If I miss a deadline for one of those, I won't be concerned. If my essay doesn't match exactly what they're asking for, I won't be heartbroken.

Around us, the Pack is carefree and unconcerned.

Embry is running with Sadie in the water, their new puppy Blue trying to eat each wave as it attacks the shore. Bethany is to my left, her face hidden under a wide-brim, floppy hat, keeping up conversation with five-months-pregnant Kim Cameron on her other side.

Nessie or Jacob usually has baby watch, and today is no different. Marie and her cousins Harper and Alex—Rachel and Paul's twin girls—play at Jacob's feet, "building" a "sandcastle" underneath the lone beach umbrella someone invested in a few years back. Sam Uley sits beside him, his youngest Lucas asleep in his lap. Levi, his big brother, is content to run back and forth between them and the water.

The rest—Paul, Nessie, Jared, Rachel, Emily—are doing some weird version of water volleyball with no net and a soccer ball. I can't tell who's winning, or even what the teams are.

Katie and Seth Clearwater are absent today, having taken a trip home to Montana to see Katie's family. They travel a lot with Katie's work (tourism photography); they just got back from their annual trip to Yellowstone at the end of June.

I admittedly don't know enough about Katie's story, about the decision she made to move away from her family. It brought her to Seth, sure, but it took her away from the only security she'd ever known.

"Maybe I won't go," I say absently.

"To dinner?" Quil asks, his thumb running circles in the lightened stripes decorating my upper thighs. He loves to trace the stretch marks there, along with their sisters on my hips.

"To college."

Everyone that can hear me, does. Wolves past and present pause for a millisecond, look in our direction, and Kim and Bethany's conversation stops midsentence.

"I need to be close by, I think," I mumble, not that it makes a difference. "In case…" That's it. Just in case.

Bethany whispers something to Kim before standing, and she helps Kim to her swollen feet. They leave us alone, walking toward the water. There, the game continues at a higher decibel than before. Even Lucas contributes to our semblance of privacy, choosing this moment to start wailing for food.

"There's a college in Port Angeles," Quil reminds me. "The community one in Forks. You don't have to go away to go to college. Take classes online or something."

I think about my friends from school. Maya and Stefanie have already decided they're rooming together at UW. Taylor talks every day about her big move to Texas. Even Jaxyn's already narrowed down his choices to three schools. He told me last week, when we got lunch for the first time all summer (after I conceded to his weekly standing invite), that he's waiting to see which school offers him the best financial package before deciding. His top pick is in Chicago.

"Or maybe not being close by would be better. I'll go to school in London or Amsterdam or Dubai."

Quil chuckles, his lips pressed to my temple tickling my skin. "It's a good thing we have our passports then, isn't it?"

His words stick—in my head, on my heart. I crane my neck to look at him. "You'd go with me?"

"Anywhere." He looks serious, not questioning that decision for a second.

The noise of the world around us fades. "What about the Pack?"

"The Pack isn't really needed anymore," he says, shrugging. "Not like I'd need to be around you, at least."

He pulls me back to him firmly, wrapping his arms around my bare middle. He can probably feel my heart thudding. I can feel his.

"Where would you stay?" I ask. "What would you do?"

"You," he says without hesitation, and it takes me a second or two to realize that that one answer is to both questions.

My skin feels tight, hot, liquid all at once, and I bolt to my feet, squeezing my legs together a little as I make my way to the water. I have to cool off.

I don't look back, but I can hear him following me.

To anywhere.