J A S O N
I woke up to someone jumping on me, not just anyone, but Zoe, and not just anywhere, but right next to my bad leg.
"Watch it!"
At this, Zoe screamed and moved away as fast as she could. I was confused at first, and then not at all. She thought I was Daisy. I hadn't exactly woken her up last night to let her know we had switched rooms. I had just collapsed in bed, pulled the blanket over my head, and scrolled through social media until I couldn't anymore.
"What the fuck are you doing here?!" she screamed.
"You're gonna wake up everyone," I said, trying to turn around under the blankets, eyes still half-closed. When I managed, Zoe was sitting at the end of bed, arms crossed over her chest, hair a mess, eyes still puffy with sleep, and the lines of a frown on her forehead.
"Where's Daisy?" she asked.
I sat up straight, "First of all, we've shared a room before, so don't look soâ"
"When we were kids," she said before I could go on. "And only because you were too scared to sleep on your own â"
"No!" I interrupted. "It was because my parents didn't want me sleeping on my own."
"Because they didn't want you getting scared," she insisted. She was right, but I didn't care. I was going to deny having believed Anabelle was real up until the day I died.
"We've gone on a tangent," I said instead, smiling right after. "See what I did there? Did I use that right?"
She gave up the frown to smile, "You did."
I smiled too, "I'm a genius."
"Where's Daisy?"
I shrugged, "It's not my place to tell you."
She smiled again, "Very funny. Where is she?"
"Hopefully getting some dick," I said, only to get hit with a pillow for it. I moved to throw it back at her, but she was already getting up, the back of her t-shirt showing a picture of the guy from Twilight. I dropped the pillow so I could stop her from leaving.
"I thought you were better than this, Zoe."
She rolled her eyes but sat back down.
"Just explain yourself."
So I started, "Fine, it was way past midnight, I wake up to Luke fighting his inner demons in his sleep. Like the good guy I am, I leave him to it. I find a peanut butter jar in the back of the fridge. I get a spoon. I start eating it. Daisy walks in and screams like a little bitch when she sees me. Why is she there? Because I was right, like I always am, and we should call pest control for just this one room. We tell each other what brought us to the kitchen. I ask, do you wanna switch rooms? She says, yes, I really wanna lose my virginity to a guy that watches the same cartoons as my brother. Fast forward to minutes ago, you almost break the screws in my leg."
Zoe was smiling, her legs crossed, sweatpants tucked into her socks, "Very funny."
"You've said that already."
"And I lied both times."
"No, you didn't."
"Yeah," she admitted. "I didn't."
I threw the pillow at her. She caught it in her hands and put it on her lap.
"So what's the deal with them?" I asked.
"Daisy and Luke?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know," she said with a shrug. "But it's nice, right? I always thought they would be good together. She's incredibly smart, and funny, and kind, and so much herself, and he's the same, really. They're just very good at being themselves, in the same way some authors are very good at writing in their own voices. You start reading and you know right away it was them who wrote it. I think they're good like that, you know? I also think they're very much each other's audiences, and that right there, that's one of the best things in life. To be known by someone, and to have the privilege of knowing them too. If that makes any sense, which maybe it doesn't, but you know, that's what I think anyway."
"No, it makes sense." I said. "The last part, at least."
"You don't think they would be good together?"
"No, I do. They're both idiots. I just don't know much about writer's voice, and all that, but I get what you mean about what a privilege it is to know someone, like, really know someone," I said, looking at the pine trees growing outside the window, the lake stretching out behind them. "When I was with Allora, I felt like the luckiest fucking person in the world. I would have been happy just keeping her company for the rest of my life. I'll also deny all of this if you tell it to anyone ever, and I'll never talk to you again."
"Why?" she asked. I kept looking at the window. After a while, she said, "I feel like that about everyone I love."
I turned to her. She had a soft smile on her face.
I said, "That's not normal, Zoe. You should talk to a therapist."
Her smile grew bigger, "Shut up. Can I draw something on your cast?"
"As long as it's not a dick."
She laughed and got up to get something from her bags on the chair by the window. She came back holding a pen and then jumped back on the bed. I moved my leg from under the blanket and she pushed my sweatpants up to my knee.
"These are disgusting," she said, looking at all the drawings covering almost the entire cast. This was because every time I drank too much at a party, the guys added something new, almost always a dick.
I pointed at one next to my knee, and smirked, "That one's mine."
She covered her mouth, "No way! It's really fucking ugly, Jason! You should have it checked out â"
"Fuck you."
She pulled her hand away from her mouth, and went on, "I'm serious. This doesn'tâ"
"I was kidding, Zoe," I stopped her.
She shook her head, "I don't think you were â"
"Do you want me to show you my actual dick?"
"No, I'm good, thank you." she said, shaking her head, an awkward smile on her face.
"Then you'll just have to believe me."
"Or not," she said, leaning over my leg again to finally start drawing. At first it was just a stick figure, but then she drew something on its back, another stick figure, except this one was made of scribbles, the ones people do to cover up a mistake or just anything really. In the end, it looked like the normal one was carrying the other. She looked up at me, and said, "This is you."
"It looks nothing like me."
"It's you," she insisted, "Carrying all that anger around."
"I don't just carry it around. Sometimes I throw it at people."
She smiled, "Not just sometimes."
I said it was my turn, so as to change the conversation, and reached for the pen in her hand. She stretched her arm in front of me. When I started drawing a very ugly dick, she pulled it away and called me a dick instead, except she was smiling, and so was I.
We went downstairs for breakfast after, where Daisy and Luke were already having cereal, and laughing about something, and no one said anything about the room switch, or Luke's nightmares, or even the mosquitos. Dad was already outside, getting the canoes ready for us, even though the lake was covered in a thick fog, and it was freezing outside.
Still, after breakfast, we all paddled our ways down the lake, cutting through the mist in the cold, laughing when Luke and Daisy convinced Zoe there was a bee in her hair, which made her jump in the water to get away from it. All of us, except dad, of course, who sitting next to me in the canoe didn't think it was funny at all. Probably because the water was freezing, and we were half an hour away from the house, and he didn't want Zoe to have a cold, because dad didn't want Zoe to have anything bad happen to her, ever.
So, when Luke and Daisy kept paddling away, still laughing as they left Zoe behind, he had us go to her rescue. I watched him pull her up from the water, trying not to laugh, and help her get out of her vest, and her jacket, and her sweater, all of them heavy with ice water. Then he took off his own jacket and gave it to her, right before turning to me and telling me to give her mine too, which I did, of course, not just because he asked me to, but because her lips looked purple, and her cheeks red, and she couldn't stop shaking, an apologetic smile on her face as she explained she was allergic to bees.
Dad didn't need an apology. He needed us to paddle as fast as we could back to the house, so she could have a hot shower, and put on some dry clothes, and sit in front of the fireplace with a mug of hot chocolate, because, again, dad wanted only good things for Zoe. He treated her like she was his own, which I thought was nice, because Zoe's dad had up and left before she was even born, and she had only her mom, at least in the USA.
This whole weekend, after all, had been to make up for the fact that I had accidentally punched her in the face. Dad had been seriously furious at me when he heard it, even after I had explained it all to him, and had grounded me for a month, or thought he had. I could live without video games for a month. I hadn't told him that, for fear of him taking anything else from me. These days, I didn't have much left, so I couldn't really risk it.
Eventually, the sky cleared, and so we set the table outside in the backyard, and had lunch under the trees, grilled fish, and vegetables I had helped dad with while the others sat with Zoe around the fireplace, and apologized, again, and again, and again.
After lunch, dad and I watched a football game on tv, while they played cards on the back porch, and laughed for hours. Mom came on Sunday and made pie and then spent the rest of the day reading on the couch by the window with the view to the lake, where the others had gone canoeing again, this time with the promise of not going in the water, or just too far down the lake, under any circumstances whatsoever.
I went fishing with dad and Uncle Pete and came back when everyone was getting ready to leave, smelling like fish that I hadn't caught. Uncle Pete gave Daisy a hug and a book he had read last week that he thought she would like. Then he left, because, according to him, there were too many people around and no alcohol at all.
On Monday at school, Luke sat next to me in gym class with a bad case of asthma while everyone else ran the mile and started telling me about all the other animated shows he liked to watch. I didn't stop him.