Torn Away by Jennifer Brown Page B

I’d freaked out, refusing to step down off the couch until Mom had checked the whole cabin over. But Marin had been fascinated by the bug.
    “It’s got poison?” she kept asking, and when Mom would answer, “I don’t know, honey. Some scorpions are poisonous,” Marin would crouch low, her butt hanging inches from the floor, her bare toes pushed into the nap of the carpet, cords of her hair dangling down past her knees, and would stare at it. A few seconds later, she would look up. “Is it the poison kind?” And Mom, checking under a couch cushion or in the linen closet, would absently repeat, “I don’t know, honey.”
    At one point, Marin was crouched so low her nose was between her knees and I couldn’t help myself. I tiptoed off the couch and snuck up behind her.
    “It moved! It moved!” I shrieked, bumping her in the back with my knees and making her pitch forward.
    Marin had shrieked, catching herself just short of fallingover, and had shot straight up and run out of the room, bawling her eyes out while I laughed.
    “Really, Jersey, did you have to?” Mom said, exasperatedly chasing after my sister.
    Marin had spent the whole rest of the weekend terrified, crying and running from every bug she saw.
    Sitting in the backseat of my grandfather’s car, heading toward the part of the state where I’d seen my first and only scorpion, I thought about how I’d done that to her. I’d taken away her fascination and replaced it with fear. She’d died scared of bugs, because that was how I’d shaped her.
    Without thinking, I reached into her purse and pulled out another stick of gum, cramming it into my mouth with the first. I spread the foil out on my knee and drew a picture of a stick figure crouched over a little black blotch on the ground.
    Marin loves scorpions, I wrote. I liked that truth better. I folded up the foil and dropped it in with the others, then leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the chain stores and strip malls fade away into the fields and farms that were to become my new reality.
    Neither of my grandparents bothered to shake me awake. Instead, they relied on the slamming of their doors—
whoomp! whoomp!
—to alert me that we’d stopped. I lifted my head from the window, wiping my damp cheek on my shoulder, and blinked the parking lot into focus. My grandfather had come around the car and was standing next to my grandmother, both of them staring at the doors of a grungy-looking diner.
    After a few seconds, my grandmother turned and bent to look in the car window. “You comin’ in?” she said, her voice muffled by the closed window.
    I didn’t answer, didn’t move. Wasn’t sure how to do either one. So she simply nodded once and turned away. Together, they walked into the restaurant without me.
    I shook my head and gave a disgusted little snort.
    I didn’t want to go inside. I wasn’t hungry—my stomach was too tied in knots to even think about eating—and I really didn’t want to have to try to make conversation over dinner with these two people. But it had been days since I’d had any sort of real meal, and I knew that now it was up to me to make sure I did things like eat and shower and sleep. Nobody else was going to care.
    My grandparents were sitting at a table near the restrooms, side by side, their shoulders touching.
Who does that?
I thought.
What couple doesn’t sit across from each other so they can talk?
But then I decided that I was just as happy it wouldn’t be my shoulder grazing against one of theirs, and I slid into the chair across from my grandmother.
    “We already ordered,” she said by way of greeting, but the waitress had appeared, carrying two glasses of iced tea, which she plunked down in front of my grandparents. “Didn’t think you were coming.”
    “That’s okay, sweetie, I haven’t put the order in yet. Need a menu?” the waitress asked. Something about the softness in her eyes reminded me of