The Breaks Between You and Me Read online

  Taiya Collier

  The Breaks Between You And Me

  Copyright © 2022 by Taiya Collier

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

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  Contents

  1. PROLOGUE

  2. CHAPTER ONE

  3. CHAPTER TWO

  4. CHAPTER THREE

  5. CHAPTER FOUR

  6. CHAPTER FIVE

  7. CHAPTER SIX

  8. CHAPTER SEVEN

  9. CHAPTER EIGHT

  10. CHAPTER NINE

  11. CHAPTER TEN

  12. CHAPTER ELEVEN

  13. CHAPTER TWELVE

  14. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  15. CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  16. CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  17. CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  18. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  19. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  20. CHAPTER NINETEEN

  21. CHAPTER TWENTY

  22. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  23. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  24. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  1

  PROLOGUE

  On a night that’s so damn dark my eyes have to squint to find the lines on the road, I yawn for so long that my entire face sighs in relief when my mouth eventually closes and my face un-strains. I let my foot press a little harder than it should on the pedal, and I turn up the radio with my chipped-polish fingers.

  “Hands on ten and two,” Mom chimes from my memories. “Like a clock!”

  And I chime back, “You can’t force me to drive us across state borders when I’ve never driven before!”

  The memory’s clearer than the darkness outside the car, and I can’t help but envision her flipping her reddish wild hair over her shoulders. “I did this when I was your age. Same route: Montana to California. And you know what? All I needed was a map and my hands on the wheel, and all was fine, as it will be with you. Now: keep your left foot on the left side, and let your right foot do the work…”

  Lil pokes my arm, jolting me out of my head as she looks up at me with big eyes. “Harper, harper!” She yells so shrilly that I can’t help but jump and focus the entirety of my attention on her (this is her calling card for me, saying my name so high-pitched that every muscle in my body tenses attentively).

  “What, what?”

  “Police!” She screams. “Police, police!” And I realize I was so caught up in my reminiscing of the past I didn’t even hear the sirens or see the flashing lights that fire up the night in red and blue. My eyes widen so large that I feel my eyebrows reach my hairline. I swerve to the side and pull the gear down. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” I murmur under my breath.

  “Bad words,” Lil murmurs worriedly under hers.

  I look into the mirror and see the cop approaching the side of our car. He wears glasses that seem a bit too reminiscent of the seventies and has ginger hair and an accompanying, orange-tinted mustache. “Do you know why you’ve been pulled over today?”

  I clear my throat and sit up straight. Then I give my best smile. “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “You’re driving awfully recklessly.”

  I shrug, sigh, and then clasp my hands together. “Sorry about that. I’m just a bit tired. You know how it is on Montanan roads in the nighttime: dark as hell and tired eyes have a hard time differentiating things.”

  And let me tell you, he is not in the slightest convinced by the smile I’m so dearly plastering to my apologetic face. He shifts his weight to his right hip and swings the beam of his flashlight toward the inside of our car, which is so messy it actually hurts. Then he glances back at me. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen, sir. And my sister over here is—”

  Lil holds out six fingers and yells shrilly, yet again. “Six years old!”

  And do you know what? He’s not even impressed by Lil’s exuding cuteness! All he says is: “Parents?”

  I cock my head. “Driving without an adult in the car is not a crime, if I can remember.”

  “Can I see your license?”

  I pause for a long while. “Um, I don’t…”

  “Driving without a license is a crime, if I can remember.”

  I swallow. “Well— that’s just what everyone does down here. You know, country roads, small towns.”

  He swings his flashlight to the back of the car instead of the front this time, spotlighting the mess that’s even worse now that we’re all paying it the attention it has yet to receive. There are piles and piles of blankets Mom would wrap Lil and I up in on the chilly Californian nights, and push into the trunk on the sweltering Californian days. There are candy wrappers and fast-food bags and schoolbooks and all of it is so random and chaotic that it’s enough to make the cop’s eyebrows furrow. His eyes focus on Lil and I once more. “I’m curious to know why a sixteen-year-old and a six-year-old are driving a car that appears to be lived in.”

  “Ha ha!” I clear my throat to erase how staccato-y my voice sounds. “We aren’t living out of a car.”

  “Can you tell me where you’re driving from?”

  “California.” And can I tell you, I swear that saying it makes me envision the last two years in some crazy sort of montage-looking-thing, framed by California’s too-big ocean and its blistering sandy shores. I see Mom dashing and prancing and bounding across the shore in sundresses and swimsuits covered in color and I see a littler Lil following her, holding onto her hand and laugh-yelling.

  The cop goes: “California’s awful far from here.”

  “We’re in Montana. Not Canada. The drive wasn’t all too bad.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  My voice lowers. “Parent,” I correct. “My mother’s…” gone, gone, gone, my thoughts yell so loud at me I’m tempted to yell back. But in real life, obviously, I don’t say those agonizingly frank words. Instead, I do what I know how to, and I deflect by saying, “I don’t know why these questions are necessary. It’s late—” One in the morning, to be exact, “—and me and my sister need to get home. It’s a Monday night. Don’t you have actual crimes to prosecute people for?”

  “You two can get on home. But these sorts of things are punishable.”

  My head cocks further. “Punishable? It’s just a fine or something— right?”

  “I’m going to ticket you. You’ll have thirty days to pay it.”

  “How much?”

  After handing me the slip, which seems to yell out a loud $400!, he says, “Get on home safe now, alright?” And he starts walking away, ending the night and disappearing with a whoosh of air and a dramatic poof. I keep the car parked and blink confusedly— holding the ticket and clenching it so tight in my palms the blood drains out of my fingers.

  Lil grabs my leg. “He asked about Mommy.” Her voice lowers to a whisper. “We’re not supposed to talk about her.”

  “If a cop asks, we can’t just keep our mouths zipped.”

  Her entire face creases with worry. “What if he knows?”

  “Lil, the fact that our mother is… Well, it isn’t some—”

  She claps her hands over her ears. She hates when I bring up the mess we’ve been through and our gaping loneliness. Sometimes I forget she’s a six-year-old in need of rose-colored glasses to perceive the world, and it germinates a teeny seed of guilt in the bottom of my belly.

  “I’m sorry. Let’s not talk about Mom, anymore, okay?” I put my hands on the wheels once more and then shift the car’s gear into drive. “We’re going to get home, because we’ve missed it oh-so-dearly, am I right?”

  She nods her head aggressively up and down, a grin spreading across her face. “Uh-huh.”

  “And do you know what the first thing we’re going to do is?”

  Her smile reaches her ears. “What are we going to do?”

  “I’m going to show you around. I’ll take you everywhere. Are you ready to go on wilddd adventures?”

  She yells: “I’m ready!”

  “Sit back. We’re going to attempt to make it back without being pulled over again.”

  Lil mutters a cheerful “Mm-kay,” under her breath and I smile, even though my insides and my brain are chockfull with icky feelings and things. I keep my eyes on the road, that’s absolutely drenched in darkness, but I feel the sudden urge to squeeze my eyes shut and playback the entirety of the last two years. I just want to rewind the time so I can pinpoint the moment my mom changed and I can patch Band-Aids upon all of her inner turmoil to stop her from disappearing on us.

  But I don’t close my eyes, and I don’t rewind the time and I don’t problem solve her absence. Thankfully, I have the will to keep myself from letting my thoughts land on her. The closest I’ll let myself get to thinking of Mom is imagining her sitting in the driver’s seat and me in the passenger, and even though she’s driving, she allows one of her hands to reach over to me. Sweeping my wavy/messy hair out of my eyes and tucking it behind my ear. Hum
ming along to the song on the radio as she smooths my hair, and glancing at me with her usual sunny, slightly tilted smile.

  But I remind myself that beyond this darkness-covered road, there’s you. You: Andy Madden, and beside you, the familiarity of home. And maybe the minute that I’ll put myself back in my hometown and amongst all the people I’ve known my entire life, it will be easier to fill the gaps Mom left behind.

  That thought alone is enough to make me grin my worries away.

  2

  CHAPTER ONE

  From what I remember, green is your favorite color. Although, with all the change you’ve been racking up, it’s bound to have changed by now. Except— when I think of you, I still think of the color green. Andy Madden screams green.

  I remember us as middle-schoolers, after you had convinced your mom to dress up the walls of your room in your favorite color of all time. She took us to buy cans of paint from the store and we carried them in clumsy hands up to your room. She watched us as we took paintbrushes and splattered the color of leaves across the walls.

  Why do you like green?

  In my head, you explain it all over again, a flashback from our two-year-old conversations.

  “Green is the second more popular favorite color, after blue.”

  “Then why is it yours?”

  You rake your hands through your hair and talk slowly, thoughtfully. “My dad, when I was born, said my eyes looked green the first time I opened them. It doesn’t make sense because eyes don’t generally change color when you age, but he said he saw green. Ever since he told me that, I’ve imagined I’m seeing the world through green-tinted glasses. So why shouldn’t it be my favorite color?”

  That’s one heck of an interesting way to look at it.

  Well, as I’m lying on the carpet two days after our sixteen-hour car ride from California, I think about you and the color green. I wonder if the current version of you (who’s awfully hard to imagine, by the way) still aims to see the world through green-tinted glasses. I wondered if you’re that same weird and awkward Andy that I knew two years ago.

  I try to measure the imaginary-change, but in the end, I think most of the change will most likely lie within me, not you. I’ve changed, Andy, and more importantly, the way I look at you has changed.

  I sigh.

  Lil plays starfish. She lies on my back, her tiny arms and hands and fingers wrapping around my back in a lie-down horizontal hug. I feel her strawberry hair slide down to kiss the carpet. She sighs loudly. “What are you doing?”

  Instead of thinking about you, I turn to face Lil and force a smile upon my face. “I’m attempting to distract myself.”

  “How?”

  “By brainstorming.”

  “Brainstorming what?”

  “Our mission!” I turn with my stomach to the air instead of to the rug and Lil rolls off me. She’s grinning, her cheeks flushed and her hair wild and staticky.

  “We’re home.”

  I lean forward on my arms, raising my right shoulder thoughtfully, trying to figure out how to explain that after two years of being in California’s weirdness, I need to work on situating myself in this town again. And most importantly, “The both of us need to distract ourselves from all the bad things that we went through in the last two years.”

  And then it hits me:

  We have oak trees that grow here. They’re so huge and so towering they’re basically like Montana’s skyscrapers. And because it’s summer, they’re all going absolutely wild as seeds fall. l grab Lil’s hand and our barefooted feet gladly neglect all the boxes and bags we have to unpack and run to the green grass at the front of the house. Even though it’s hands down oven temperature outside, these gorgeous trees have been in front of this house since I was two feet tall. They’re magnificent. And last time I spun under them like this, I was Lil-sized.

  Lil watches the little seeds fall from the leaves and spin, the way oak seeds do, like nature fairies. They fall like this every spring, so I tell her we caught them right in action, because we’re just geniuses like that and our timing somehow always matches up to the world’s.

  I brainstorm our next destination while I’m spinning, hair catapulting around me. Our hot skin and empty stomachs are practically begging for ice cream so who am I to stop us from walking to town to satisfy those needs?

  Lil gets mint chip ice cream and I get cotton candy with rainbow sprinkles. Although I’ve grown tons in the last two years, I’m beginning to doubt that my taste buds have. When I was a lump in Mom’s stomach, she was consuming rainbow-sprinkled-one-scoop-peanut-butter-one-scoop-cotton-candy at this pink-walled store on our teeny-tiny main street. It’s always empty in this place and the bubblegum pink walls are taped up with memoirs. Pictures, and things, and memories of past moments in multicolored lives.

  Lil’s beaming, by the way. Her ice cream smile is practically at her ears at this point. She tucks her long hair behind an ear while she finishes off the last scoop with her color changing spoon.

  It’s summertime, I know, but I’m not gonna let that put a wrench in our plans so I grab Lil’s dairy sticky hand in my equally sticky palm, and whisper to her enthusiastically, “Do you wanna see my school?”

  Our town’s high school is bigger than it should be. Maybe that’s because there’s so much land here: tree-dotted, people-spotted, land— made for large plots of houses and stores and farms. This school was my mom’s and before that my grandfather’s and before two years ago, it might’ve been mine, if Mom hadn’t hauled our asses up to California like her own travel luggage and taught me out of textbooks and personal anecdotes.

  The doors to the school are wide open and invite us in, and my converses and Lil’s pink flip flops smack loudly on the solid ground as we go from room to room to peer into the empty classrooms. We run through the halls and talk too obnoxiously and once we’re tired out from all of that, we sit on the gross but somehow homey floors of one of the empty classrooms. My legs are crisscrossed, pretzel style. Lil’s on her stomach and has her chin on her hands.

  “Mission complete,” I tell her proudly.

  “We’re sit-ua-ted?”

  “I mainly needed to distract myself,” I tell her. “But yes. I’m already starting to feel at home again. And you should be too.” I yawn and stretch my hands over my head.

  Oak trees and ice cream and old school classrooms are memory-reliving and all, but I still feel the hollowness of a Mom-less world, and I know I need to find out what I can do to feel home enough and make her absence less painful.

  I tug at the ponytail holder nagging tightly at my hair.

  I can’t help but remember the fact that in the living room at home, Lil and I’ve got boxes to unpack, counters to clean, and dust to erase. The amount of things to do gives me the urge to procrastinate, but I steer my mind toward productivity by reminding myself that if anything, I’ve got to get rid of the wild messiness that Mom’s lifestyle built around us.

  Lil grabs my hand as we stand up. She swings my arm to and fro and then goes, “You said there were people you wanted to see.”

  “Like who?”

  “The boy!” She giggles.

  I pause. “I don’t remember there ever being a boy.”

  She laughs and yanks on my hand until I give in and we’re walking out of the school. She says it’s too icky-smelling in here and we should go, “Home, where it smells nice!” even though she has no idea what home smells like, since we haven’t been there in two years.

  We step out of the building and she races ahead of me, and I look heavenward toward my canvas of sky blue, actively trying not to remember the fact that you’re here, in this town, somewhere among these paved roads and these small-town shops.

  Lil starts running, hair flying behind her in the breeze. She moves so fast I literally cannot process her. I close the door behind us when we reach the house, and Lil’s fingers grip the TV remote and turn it to a reality channel and at that, our work commences.

  I show her how to clean glass windows, so the sunlight can come in better, all pure and heavenly. And, how to wipe down the huge old wooden table that managed to stuff itself inside our super teeny-tiny kitchen. We empty out the mass grave of boxes until they’re only a small pile, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until with a poof, it’s gone!