Free Josie and Jack by Kelly Braffet Page B

when my atoms start to split,” I said as I scraped Jack’s plate into the garbage. “And I’m not in love.”
    “Only fucking him, then?”
    “None of your business.”
    “I’d say it is.” He stood up. “I’d say it’s very much my business who you have sex with.” He pushed the chair into place and left.
    When I was done with the dishes I went to my room, changed into jeans and a sweater, and tied my hair into a ponytail. I used some of Crazy Mary’s left-behind lipstick and powder. Then I changed my mind about the hair, let it down again, and went to see Jack.
    He had taken off his tie and was lying on his bed. “Look at you,” he said when he saw me standing at his door. “What time is the sock hop, anyway, kitten?”
    I stuck my hands in my front pockets and then took them out and slid them into the back ones.
    “Quit fidgeting,” Jack said.
    “Come on,” I said. “I did your stupid equations.”
    He didn’t move. “Take it.” He gestured toward his leather jacket, which was slung over the back of the armchair in the corner. Jack had brought the jacket home a few years earlier. It had once been black, but by the time he bought it, it had been fading to brown and was half beaten to death. Now it was three-quarters dead, but the sheepskin lining was intact and warm and it was his only prized possession. I picked it up and put it on. It was too big and smelled of old leather, cigarette smoke, and the cologne he sometimes wore. Jack’s face was completely blank.
    “Jack,” I said, and stopped. I didn’t know what I was going to say, anyway.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Better get going,” he said. “You’ll be late.”
     
    When I left, Jack was with Raeburn in the study, laughing about something. Raeburn already sounded drunk. I used the back door in the kitchen and took the path that cut straight through the woods to the main road. There was an old family cemetery back there, one or two graves. The white headstones were worn smooth and they gleamed in the fading daylight.
    Kevin was waiting for me at the bottom of the driveway in his father’s car. He told me that he liked my jacket, and we drove off down the highway.
    We didn’t look at each other. The engine hummed.
    “I’m glad we’re doing this,” he said. “None of my friends quite believe in you.”
    “I know how they feel.”
    “You don’t believe in them either, huh?”
    “Exactly,” I said, although he was wrong. I watched the highway roll under the front wheels.
    At the next stoplight, Kevin leaned over and gave me a quick kiss. While I rode to the high school in Kevin’s father’s Pon-tiac, I was thinking of Jack and Raeburn drinking brandy in the study. I knew that if I looked through the back window I would be able to see our attic window above the trees. I told myself I wouldn’t look back, but eventually I did, and there it was, harmless-looking in miniature and a long way behind me, on top of the Hill.
    Kevin put a hand on my knee. “You okay?” he said.
    “Sure,” I said and pulled Jack’s coat closer around me.
    “Good.” Kevin turned the radio up.
    The high school was built over an abandoned strip mine. The main building, which sprawled around an open courtyard, was tucked onto a series of plateaus carved into the side of the hill, artificially flat stretches of land that had once held the mine’s cranes and loaders. The parking lot where Kevin left the car was at the edge of the uppermost plateau. Looking through the chainlink fence that separated us from the steep drop, I could see the tennis courts and the track spread out beneath me in the dusky valley, each on its own level with its own set of splintering railroad ties serving as steps to the levels above and below it. The air was thick with smoke and music and voices.
    Kevin led me around the front of the school, to a place where there was a wide notch cut out of the half-mile or so of forest that separated the school grounds from the main