Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips Page A

drive up and down Highway Ninety, and eventually we’d wind up at the Dairy Queen. We talked and drank tall boys. We’d see how long we could hold our breath before we passed out.”
    â€œYou’d actually pass out?”
    â€œWell, yeah. Sure. After two minutes. That was my record. Dad told me I should be able to make two and a half—mind you, he didn’t know about the beer part of the evenings, only the breath holding—but Mom told me I would kill myself.”
    She never had to ask questions. He offered up whole pieces of himself as if they were unbreakable.
    â€œWe went to Allison Shum’s basement and pretended to audition for MTV,” she said.
    She had been something of a star at those slumber parties because of her talent for remembering lyrics. Scott had taught her. He had loved music—real music, he always said. He loved Springsteen and Dylan. He had tight, neat rows of cassettes lined up against his walls like dominoes. She liked the clicking sound they made when they rubbed against one another. He had carefully alphabetized them, and she liked the B’s best:
Back in Black
,
Band on the Run
,
The Beatles
,
Beggars Banquet
,
Between the Buttons
,
Blonde on Blonde
,
Blood on the Tracks
,
Born to Run
. Each case held a tiny picture that she could pull out from under the shiny plastic. She would study those pictures—cheekbones and squinting eyes and clouds of hair—most of them just blurry enough to leave her looking for more. These were the men who made Scott’s music.
    She loved those men, too. When she tried to talk about songs in kindergarten music class, no one else even knew who Bob Dylan was.
    Still, she was not allowed inside Scott’s room when he was not there. Once she had unraveled some tapes, leaving shiny piles of ribbony spools all over the carpet. She didn’t even remember doing it, but Scott had told her the story plenty of times. So his room was officially off-limits. Sometimes when no one was looking she would scan the hallway, then go bounce on his bed with one quick, serious leap and retreat. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly good mood, he would let her come in while he was there, and sometimes he would even play what she requested on his boom box. When she was inside, he sat on his bed and she sat cross-legged on the carpet, back against the bed. The carpet was green and yellow, thick and rough. She imagined grizzly bears would feel like Scott’s carpet. It scratched her cheek when she tried to lie down on it.
    She realized Silas would never know the girl who had daydreams about carpets. He would never know her at ten, when she’d eaten grass because that stupid Elliott Nash dared her. And she’d never see him fifteen and drunk and trying to make himself pass out. He would never hear her mother squeal as her father ran his finger up the back side of her knee. He would never know her as a girl with a big brother and two parents. And maybe that was as it should be. She didn’t really know that girl, either.
    â€œI chewed my nails,” she said.
    Her nails had bled, the skin of her fingers white and soaked and sad. That was after the accident. She didn’t think she’d chewed her nails before the accident. She had hated the sight of her hands. Her mother had beautiful hands. They were piano player’s hands, artist’s hands, even though her mother was neither of those things. For a while, the weeks after the accident, her mother would wrap two slender fingers around Ren’s wrist and lift up her mangled fingernails. She would make a
tsk
ing sound with her tongue, and Ren never knew whether the sound was annoyed or sympathetic. After a few months, her mother did not notice Ren’s hands anymore.
    When Ren was little, her mother’s hands were cool on her forehead. Her mother would rub her feet—and Scott’s feet, too—with deep, long strokes. Her mother could curve her fingers and