Fade Out by Nova Ren Suma Page A

rings and it’s my brother, Casey. He tells Mom about soccer camp and I listen to her end of the conversation, picking at my peppers instead of eating them.
    “He wants to talk to you,” Mom says at last.
    I take the cordless and step out of the room for some privacy.
    “How’s she doing?” he asks. That’s the first thing he’s said to me in weeks.
    “Fine,” I say, “I guess.”
    “Are you taking good care of her? Are you trying not to be a brat?”
    “I’m not a brat!”
    “Dani. You’re forgetting I know you.”
    “Oh and I’m fine too, by the way,” I tell him. “I’m doing just great. In case you weren’t too busy bouncing balls off your head to wonder about your little sister. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. I’m not dead.”
    He’s silent for a second. “I heard you went to Dad’s,” he says. “Dad told me about the wedding.”
    Now I’m the one who gets silent.
    “How bad was it?” he asks. “At his house?”
    “Bad,” I say.
    “Sucks,” he says.
    “Yup,” I say.
    And that’s all we have to say about that.
    We say our good-byes. He tells me to stay out of his room, and I say why would I want to go in there anyway (though I have, to borrow his CDs and to see if he left any money in his dresser), and I shove back into the kitchen and hang up.
    “You must miss your brother,” Mom says. “And with me, going through”—she waves a hand in the air at absolutelynothing—“all this. And with Maya moving away… This must be a really tough summer for you.”
    Um, hello. Was she walking around all summer with her head in a paper bag?
    But I don’t say anything mean. Not one thing. I know I’m in a difficult situation and I’m allowed to be difficult, but I kinda don’t want to be right now. Casey called me a brat. I’d like to prove that I’m not.
    I say, “I guess.” Then, “But I’m okay, really.”
    And she says, “I’ll think of something fun for you to do. You can’t spend your whole summer sitting in a dark movie theater. It’s just not healthy.”
    That’s when I remember Jackson. And the girl, whoever she is. And Elissa. And the phone calls. And the hole punched in the wall. And I get this new determination. This fire inside me. I decide that this will be my mission for the rest of the summer: to find out what’s up. And if something awful’s going on, to stop it.
    There are some things you might not know about me, too. I may daydream more than normal, and make up stuff in my head, and go on and on about movies, but I do know when it’s time to stand up and do something real for once.
    I take a big bite of my pizza. It’s cold by now. And it’s covered in green slimy things and all I want to do is spit them out. So now you know I officially really, really don’t like peppers. But you should also know that no one’s going to lie to me again and get away with it. I won’t let it happen. That’s a fact.

 
     
    9

Holes in the Wall
    T he next day, I head inside the theater without a ticket. I’ve come before the first show— The Big Sleep hasn’t started yet, so there’s no one (and by that I mean Austin) to tell me to pay or go away.
    The house phone is in a hallway off the lobby, a narrow passage just before the stairs up to Ms. Greenway’s office. That’s where I find Jackson. He’s on his knees on the floor, patching up a hole in the wall. He’s done enough patching with the spackle that there really isn’t a hole anymore. With his back tome, he keeps at it, smoothing the spot. Either his aunt told him to make it neat or he hopes to leave no trace of what he did.
    “Hey,” I shoot out, startling him.
    He jumps, splashing spackle at me. It’s stickier than I expected, like egg whites mixed up with gobs of paste.
    “Oh, hey, D,” he says. “Sorry about that.”
    I wipe some goop off my arm. “What happened?” I point at the wall.
    “Nothing,” he says. “I knocked my elbow into it, no big.”
    Then quickly he adds,