second.
“Are you sure you’re not hungry?”
I shake my head, trying to blind myself to everything happening—not happening—in the kitchen. We are the royal family of leaving things unsaid, of sweeping everything underneath the rug. And while I want to lay the blame solely on Mom and Dad, I know I’m just as guilty. I’m the one who’s pretending to pack for a future that I gave up on months ago. I’m the one who’s leaving because I don’t have the courage to live up to my obligation. I don’t stand for shit, and I know it.
Jake catches my eye, watching me with an inscrutable, catlike stare. It’s a flash of clarity, quickly followed by the fade-out thing, where he’s still staring but his mind is gone, flying into a completely different airspace.
Dad sighs. Shakes his head at the clock, me.
“I’m not hungry, Mom. Love you.”
She squeezes my hand, and I hold on to it for another second, staring at Jake, willing her to look in his direction. To see what I see.
“Okay. Be careful.”
She used to say, “I love you,” when we left a room. But ever since Jake returned home, it’s always fear for our safety. I walk out of the kitchen. Before I get to my room, Mom offers to bake chocolate chip cookies to the thick silence behind me.
I sit on my bed, pulling my duffel bag off the floor and onto my lap. Even if you searched it to the bottom, you wouldn’t know that I wasn’t shipping out in the morning. Pants, shirts, underwear—nothing unusual. I stare at the bag for the hundredth time, trying to find a mistake, a clue that when they come into my room tomorrow, I won’t be here. That I’m throwing this bag in the back of my truck and driving as far as the $1,312 in my savings account will take me.
This was lawn-mowing money. “Give me a hand, and I’ll throw twenty bucks your way” money. Saved through high school because that’s what Bennetts were: disciplined. When my friends went to Myrtle Beach for spring break, I stayed home. When they bought hunting rifles and new rims for their trucks, I kept my debit card in my wallet. And now it was paying off, just not in a way I ever expected.
Sometimes when the entire house is quiet, when all I can hear is the wind outside my window, I try to imagine what would happen when tomorrow came. I had visions of me driving across the state line, music blaring. Of ending up in Montana, Wyoming, or even Oregon. It wasn’t a plan as much as it was a way to escape, a detail that would come on me violently, pushing the air out of my lungs and doubt into my head.
What are you going to do when the money runs out?
How are you ever going to explain this?
You are making the biggest mistake of your life.
When I first committed, I was excited. Dad took me down to the recruiter’s office to sign the papers, and I would’ve taken my uniform and gone right then if it hadn’t been for high school and the hell Mom would’ve raised if I didn’t graduate. I would finally be like Dad and Jake, a part of the brotherhood.
But that’s gone. Because this isn’t about signing a form and not showing up. It’s shirking every piece of responsibility I’ve ever known in my life, and it makes me sick.
Everyone in this town thinks I’m cut from the same cloth as Jake, the fabric that makes a Bennett stand up and say: “I’m going to fight for your freedom.” If you’d asked me before, I would’ve told you that dying was the worst thing that could happen to you. But now I know sometimes it’s worse to come back alive.
There’s a knock on my door, and I throw the duffel bag on the floor instinctively. As if whoever’s waiting out there would be able to smell the deceit.
“Come in,” I say, standing up because I know it’s my dad. I get ready for the fight, the pep talk. They all sound the same lately. But when the door opens, it’s Jake. He stands in the doorway staring at me, as if he needed a second invitation to cross the threshold.
“You ready for tomorrow?” he asks, readjusting the backpack on his shoulder before moving quickly and deliberately toward my bed. The suddenness of it shocks me. It’s like a tiny drill sergeant somewhere