chapter six

Early in the morning, the sun comes through my window at an angle that hits me right in the eyes and sometimes I'm stuck awake before I needed to be. And it sucks because I can't fall asleep until like three in the morning so when I wake up my head's banging and my eyes are burning and by four in the afternoon I already need a nap. But this morning I didn't really mind. From the time I fell asleep to the to when the sun hit my eyes, my mind kept replaying images of my brother and his bones.

I rolled off the bed and planted my feet on the floor. Most people didn't like the feeling of cold hardwood on their skin first thing in the morning, but it woke me up, kept my eyes open. I didn't ever feel like closing my eyes again, honestly. The sun felt inviting; I leaned against the window and pressed my forehead against the glass. Early mornings, my head felt clear, clearer than it did at any other point in the day. I guess that's why I didn't move my bed; I liked the time to think, even if it was about nothing in particular.

Sunday mornings were my favorite time of the week. There was nothing to do and there was this sense of peace that made me feel warm. But when I leaned against the window and thought about nothing, there was something tugging in my gut, like I was longing for something but I had never longed for anything before. There was nothing worth longing over, and the only thing in life I really ever wanted was the truth about Bear. My eyes danced over the roots of the trees. Sometimes, when I've had some wine and it's dark. I stare at the trees behind my house and they're far away from the house that I'm never really sure if what I'm seeing is right, but sometimes I think I see Bear.

The branches and the leaves shake and I think about what could be making them move. I don't think about the wolves as much anymore, because every time I did I was reminded that every theory I had was wrong. It made my head spin around and my face get red and I almost started to feel sick. I couldn't think about it anymore; I kept my journal under my bed and only took it out to look at the handwriting and wondered who cared enough to tell me I was wrong. I chewed on my lip. Whatever was going on, I felt lost in it.

I could taste blood on the inside of my cheeks but I couldn't stop biting. It was a bad habit I've had since I was a kid. It used to get really bad and my mouth would fill up with blood and I'd spit it out all over the ground. Bear used to think it was cool. The last time I chewed my mouth so much there was more blood than spit was the day I hit Jared. It was like, hours after, when I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling and I was crying. It was weird because I don't cry. I didn't cry when the pulled Bear's body out of a pile of dirt and I didn't even think I was crying because of Jared or Kim. But I think it was that longing feeling that made my chest feel compressed. I stopped biting on my cheek.

"What would you do without me?" my mother asked, her voice yanking me from the trees. I turned to see her standing at my doorway with a pile of laundry in her arms. "Hmm?"

I shrugged. "I'd probably be a prostitute. Why?"

She put her hands on her hips. My mom was a weird mom on this reservation. Most people here have lived here their whole lives and never left. We have this feeling that this is where we belong. A lot of tribes have been displaced; our colonizers take tribes and move them around the country and put them in lands they didn't know and couldn't fertilize. There's a lot of tribes from all over the continent planted in Oklahoma. Not much of us leave because this is our land and it always has been. But my mom left. She graduated high school and broke up with my dad and left. My dad followed. I don't know what happened and I don't know where they went but I knew my mom always had this weird need to rebel against anything and everything and I guess that included her people. While they were gone, they had Bear. By the time they came back, my mom was pregnant with me. And she's done everything she can to separate us from who we are. She didn't raise us like the rest of the kids on the res were raised. To everyone here, she was foreign, strange. She moved and talked in ways other people didn't understand.

"I called Kim's mother and talked to her. She told me you and Kim have been fighting," she smirked, like she was a smart little detective who figured out an impossible case, "of course you didn't tell me. Anyways, I invited them over tonight, so that you two have the chance to work things out. Isn't that great?"

My stomach dropped quicker than my stomach. "You did what?"

"Don't be so dramatic. It'll be good for the both of you to hash things out."

"Hey Mom, have you ever considered that maybe you shouldn't interfere with my life like this? That maybe you should've, I dunno, stayed out of it?" I balled my hands into fists at my side, worried that if I moved them I might throw them into the wall.

Her eyes rolled. "Listen, honey, you're so stubborn. If I didn't push you in the right direction, who knows? You probably wouldn't have ever talked to her again."

My mom is bulldozer. She is a steamroller. She is iron and I can't stand her. "Yeah, but if I did never talk to Kim again, it would've been my choice."

And then she laughed. Chuckled like I was being stupid and I didn't understand, like it was her relationship and I couldn't understand what was happening between them. "You're seventeen, Remy, you don't get to make choices."

She left my room with the laundry under her arm.

I held my phone in my hand and waited for it to buzz. I only had a couple more hours before the buzz wouldn't matter and I kept looking around and bouncing my knee. My bedroom door was locked and the sun was high in the sky. I didn't know where my mom was or my dad and I hadn't talked to her since she barged into my room and she hadn't tried to. Everything I was doing felt like a bad idea. And I guess I was so desperate to avoid talking to Kim that I thought that bad ideas were better options.

The phone buzzed, and I looked down at the message. I reached for a pen on my dresser and scribbled down the digits on the palm of my hand. My heart was beating quickly, and I stared down at the phone number on my palm. I could just leave. I could just crawl out of my window like I had done a hundred other times. But I couldn't get the car keys from downstairs and I wouldn't have an excuse.

Hands shaking, I dialed the number. "Hey, Embry? It's Remy. Do you wanna like, go for a drive and get some food or something?"

When I was thirteen, Bear brought my outside and threw a pair of gloves at me. He said, "Remy, you've always been a tough kid. But you need to get tougher. Put those on, and hit me."

Bear was tall and skinny but he was strong and the muscles in his arms were clearly defined. And I admired him, because he was tough, and people liked him, but they didn't fuck with him. I wanted to be like that too, so he taught me to fight. We would go in the backyard every day after school or on the weekends and then he would make me put on those boxing gloves. I would hit the pads he held in his own hands and lift the dumbbells and we kept going like that until my arms were strong like him.

And after he died I never stopped. Ever since then, I had never been weak. And I had gotten into a fair few fights with a couple of girls at parties Kim dragged me too after I had had too many shots and I never lost. I've always been strong.

But when I sat next to Embry in his car I had never felt so diminutive in my entire life. Normally, when I'm next to someone I'm fairly confident. I think that if anything were to happen I'd be there and I could stop it. But when I sat in the passenger seat looking that arm muscles that were the size of my head I thought that if Embry was some psyho killer I wouldn't stand a chance.

"So why'd you call me?" Embry asked, flicking his eyes over to me. He was smiling. It was a little smile, like he was ready to drop it any second. "I know you gave me like a loose maybe, but I thought I'd have to ask like, three more times before you actually said yes." I didn't say anything, but scoffed. "I mean, I never thought you'd call me."

I shrugged. I thought about putting my feet up on the dashboard of his truck but I figured it would be rude. And I wanted to ask why every single boy on this reservation had a truck. "You gonna question it?" I asked, and I didn't like how almost everything I said made Embry smile a little bit more. "I thought spending time with you would be preferable to any other activity for the night."

When I had told my mother about my plans with Embry, with a little tag of Oh, Mom, I'm sorry I forgot to tell you, she was a blend of annoyed and overjoyed. She liked that I was talking to someone, I guess.

"You mean like, talking to Kim?" I shot him a look, eyes raised. He chuckled. "Don't worry, I don't blame you. You shouldn't have to be forced into that situation."

And suddenly I was mad once more. "Your best buddy Jared tell you?"

"No," Embry says slowly, looking at me when he said, "I haven't talked to Jared since you hit him. We've been, uh, clashing about some things. But, word travels fast. Kim tells Jared; Jared tells Jake; Jake tells me. Basically, I know everything."

The anger in me dissipated as quickly as it appeared, and I looked at him with softer eyes. Embry was gentle; his voice, his demeanor, everything about him. Even after he was maybe inducted into a cult. Being around him was strange. There was always this rage just beneath the surface with me, ready to be tapped. But when I was around Embry, it was faded. It wasn't completely gone, but cooled down.

I looked out the window, and the green of the trees blurring together. "You seem pretty confident in that fact," I mumbled, and looked back over at the driver's seat. "What have you guys been fighting about?" I asked, knowing that it wouldn't possibly be me, but it made me feel a little bit weird. Fluttery.

"We're not fighting," Embry corrected quickly, "we're just, clashing. He's being kinda, I dunno, disrespectful to me, and he thinks I'm doing the same. So we're just...avoiding each other right now." I nodded, wanting more details but nervous to ask. I guess I didn't want an answer. "Do you wanna tell me more about yourself?"

"I thought you knew basically everything," I said, throwing him a little smirk. "That's a really loaded question anyways. Like, what else would you want me to say?"

"I don't know? Maybe like, fun facts about yourself. Like, tell me your favorite color."

"No," I replied, "that's lame and cliche. Hit me with a better one."

Embry tapped his fingers against the wheel and I watched the muscles move in his arms and his face. And when he looked at me there such a familiarity in his eyes that I almost forgot that he used to never acknowledge my existence. He said, "Okay, fine. If you could be any animal, any animal at all, which would you be?"

I bit down on my lip. "You're really bad at this. Hitting me with cliche after cliche. How about this, what's your zodiac sign?"

"My what?" he asked. "You mean like, my star sign or whatever?" I nodded. "I have no idea."

I rolled my eyes. "When's your birthday?"

"May sixteenth," he replied, "what's that?"

I scrunched up my nose. "Oh my god, you're a Taurus. Ugh, god."

There was this sort of panicked look on Embry's face that made me laugh. And I liked how worried he was and little he knew. "What is that? Is that bad?"

"It's not bad," I said with a laugh, "I'm just an Aries, so we're not that compatible."

And Embry looked at me for so long I was worried that he might crash the car. And he said, "That's impossible, Remy."

Embry Call was an extraordinary dude. Not in the fact that he was nice to me or that he so determined to be my friend or anything else like that. But because he put back three double cheeseburgers and ate like half of my fries. I sat on the top of the picnic table and watched as he finished off his last one. "Do you have two stomachs?" I asked, face mixed up with disgusted and disbelief. I was almost impressed.

"I work out a lot," he said, mouth still full of beef and bun. "I gotta fill up on a bunch of calories cause I'm like, always working out and stuff." He looked up at me and my half eaten meal. "You gonna finish that?"

I leaned back on my hands. "No," I replied, and looked back towards the setting sun. "You can go for it if you want."

He swallowed. "Didn't you say you were hungry?"

"I was hungry. Then I ate, and now I'm not."

And while Embry started talking about how I should eat and that the burgers here were great, I watched as a familiar, beaten down powder blue car pulled into the parking lot. Dirt was flying up under the wheels as it halted to a stop. "Oh shit," I mumbled, cutting off Embry in the middle of his sentence.

"Oh shit," he echoed me when he realized that Kim was jumping out of the driver's seat and rushing towards me, with Jared tailing right behind her.

I had never really seen Kim this mad before. I mean, mad at me. I had seen her mad at Jared plenty of times, and even then she was usually crying. But the rage was clear on her face and her mouth was tight and eyes focused. "So you can blow me off for two weeks and then bail on me last minute to hang out with Embry, huh?" her voice was raw like mine got.

And I stayed sitting on the top of the table with my jaw locked and I didn't move an inched. I stared Kim down with hard eyes and watched her chest rise and fall with her heavy breaths. But next to me Embry stood and stared Jared down. "What the fuck are you doing, man?" he asked, something underlying in his voice that I couldn't place. His shoulders were broad and he placed himself in front of me blocking me from Jared.

Jared didn't speak but crossed his arms and I fantasized about hitting him again but this time harder and with a closed fist.

"Hello? Remy? I'm fucking speaking to you over here," Kim said, tone sharp as she waved a hand at me. Her face was flushed. "Are you gonna say anything to me?"

"Dude, why did you come here?"

"You can't just ignore me forever."

"I think it's fair, considering everything she's done."

"Why would you even tell her we were here?"

"You were supposed to be my friend, Remy."

"I'm not gonna let Kim get treated like shit."

"You've literally been ignoring me for two weeks and I didn't even do anything."

"I swear to god if you say anything to her again-"

"Honestly, Remy, I'm starting to think that Jared's not the problem here. That he's never been the problem."

And I got mad again. I got so mad that there was nothing in the world that could've stopped me from setting fire to everything and not even Embry's ability to dull my rage was enough at this point. Because it was all building up. Everything that Jared had ever said to me, every time Kim bailed on me for him, every time I braided her hair while she cried so hard over him she got snot bubbles. I was sick of it all so I stood and jumped off the table and pushed past Embry and I got real close to Kim, and I told her, "If you were my friend and you cared about me the way you said you did, you would've broken up with Jared the second you found out what he said about Briah. The amount of times he's made you cry is higher than the amount of girls he's fucked, and that's pretty fucking astronomical. You've chosen him over me over and over, and I'm tired of it."

Embry put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back a step. "Remy-"

Kim was crying when she said, "Jared was right about you and he was right about Briah. You and your whole family, you're just so, so fucked up."

But I stepped back forward and looked at Kim's tears and felt invigorated by them. I knew she didn't mean it. I knew she just wanted to hurt my feelings. But I was feeling petty enough to let it work. "If you ever try to talk to me again, I will knock your fucking teeth out."

The car ride home was silent.

I curled up against the door, as physically as far away as I could get from Embry as possible. I listened to his breathing. I knew he wasn't happy but his breathing was low and even and counting the inhales and exhales let me focus on something. And all I needed was to focus, because otherwise I might break down. It was dark out now and I couldn't see anything that wasn't in front of the headlights. I was shaking and my head was pounding and I felt like if I moved I would rip the car radio out.

Embry didn't speak and I wasn't sure if it was because he didn't want to or if it was because he thought if he did I'd lose it. I thought both were true, but when he slowed the car down and pulled over on the side of the road and spoke, his voice was gentle. I didn't look over at him when he said, "I'm sorry."

"What are you sorry for?"

I could sense him turning his body shifting towards me. "I'm just sorry for how things ended up. I didn't think any of that would happen. I was caught off guard, and I didn't defend you well enough."

And I turned my head to face him but kept my body distant. His stupid eyes were still glossed over. "Why would you defend me? Jared's your friend."

He sighed, shifting around like he didn't know how to answer that question. The only questions he couldn't answer started with 'why.' "I just think they way you've been treated by them isn't fair."

"Okay."

"But I don't think you should've threatened to hurt her," he said, and I turned my head back away. "I mean, I think you guys could still come back from this, but that's just-that's not you, Remy."

And I looked Embry in his stupid gentle glossy eyes and said, "Well, you wouldn't know. Because you don't know me. You know Jared and Kim and Quil and Jacob and everyone else on this stupid reservation, but you don't know me and we're not friends. Take me home."

"Remy-"

"Take me home."

He sighed, and put his truck back in drive. He didn't say anything to me for the rest of the drive and I didn't say anything to me and I intended to never say anything to him again.

And when he dropped me off I slammed the door and ran inside to down my mom's most expensive bottle of wine.

do u hate it? sorry i forgot to update for so long i was playing animal crossing. anyways these early chapters may seem really full of drama but this is intended to be like a super mega dramatic story so just expect that throughout the whole story. pls leave some gnarly reviews and thank u to everyone who has reviewed already they help me update.. kk love u