Home > Candy Colored Sky(8)

Candy Colored Sky(8)
Author: Ginger Scott

Eleanor is bundled in black sweatpants several sizes too big for her frame and a Sherpa-lined camouflage coat that looks ready to head out for a seasonal hunting trip, probably borrowed from her father’s closet. Somehow, she still glows like an angel. The cold air has kissed her cheeks and brought pink to her freckled skin. Her eyes are a dull green that sometimes looks more brown in the dark. I’ve stared at them from across lab tables and in the cafeteria for four years. Under the bright fluorescents of my garage, they shine like emeralds. And the blonde hair, usually pulled high in a ponytail or curled into these perfect waves around her shoulders, is twisted into two knots at the base of her neck.

“The boys were just getting started for the day. Young Jacob here has offered to help. You’re welcome to stay.” Thank God Grandpa Hank is able to find his way back to acting like a human.

“Yeah, Jonah doesn’t know shit about cars.” Jake snarks out a jab at my expense.

I wince, squeezing my eyes shut. This time, Eleanor’s laughter produces an airy sound. It makes his insult sting less.

“And young Jacob here doesn’t know shit about spelling or math, so that’s why he hangs around all the time,” Grandpa Hank says, coming to my rescue. I ratchet my shoulders up to my ears and grit my teeth, but Eleanor simply laughs harder. Jake, thankfully, isn’t offended one bit, barking out a quick admission and saying it’s totally true.

For a moment, the green eyes from my dreams seem to find solace in my dusty blue ones. If only for a breath, the madness of reality dissolves on the other side of the garage, and Eleanor can simply be a beautiful girl faced with three very different guys all trying to win her attention. Right this minute, all is incredibly normal, at least for her. And it makes the aching discomfort in my chest from my social anxiety worth every single second.

 

 

Four

 

 

Eleanor didn’t say much after those first few minutes in my garage. She sat in that chair next to my grandpa for maybe an hour, and any time her attention wandered from Jake and me toward her house, Grandpa pulled her back in with one of his army tales or some story about my dad when he was young. I enjoyed those accounts as much as she did.

Some of them were stories I’ve never heard before, like the time Grandpa caught my dad sneaking home drunk when he was sixteen. My dad was typically a quiet man, even in his youth, but for whatever reason, he managed to walk home from a party my uncles had dragged him to seven miles away and could not shut up about it after slipping undetected through the front door. He woke my grandparents to describe all the things he’d seen during his walk.

“A regular tour guide, straight from Anheuser-Busch,” my grandpa joked.

When Eleanor left, the stories stopped. Jake and I poked around under the hood for another hour or so, then called it a day. We pulled out the battery and the alternator, and I made sure to label wires as we went along, like my dad wrote in his book. It drove Jake nuts, but the activity left me feeling a few percentage points smarter about how a seventy-two Bronco works.

I brought my dad’s notebook to school with me today, and it’s given me something to do during lunch besides eavesdrop on the various rumor-pods doling out the latest news about Addy and the Trombleys.

Eleanor was just named homecoming queen at Friday’s game. For some, seeing her fall from grace so quickly feeds an addiction for gossip. They must separate themselves from the reality of it all in order to be so entertained. Why else would a missing nine-year-old spawn so many cruel conspiracy theories followed by cackling laughter? Girls who, just last week, fought over a spot at Eleanor’s lunch table now cast shade and question whether the princess of Oak Forest High had something to do with her baby sister’s disappearance.

“We’re heading off-campus for Tommy’s. You coming?” Jake throws an arm around me while I shuffle my way toward the cafeteria. I shake my head and hold up my notebook, touching it to my head.

“Studying. Thanks, though,” I reply.

He grimaces.

“The Bronco is supposed to be fun. I swear to God, you’re the only person I know who can turn such a kick-ass present into homework. You sure you don’t wanna come along?” My friend leans his elbow into my arm, urging me, but any temptation I may have felt fades the second two of his basketball buddies pile into our conversation, peppering me with maybe a dozen questions on what I know about the Trombley case.

What’s crazier is I’m pretty sure they were at the Trombley party that night, and Addy was last seen the afternoon before the game. I wonder if they’ve been interviewed by police. Jake was. He has yet to stop bragging to me about his alibi—spending the night at Charlotte Hickman’s house while her parents were out of town.

I make up an excuse to duck into a restroom when his circle of friends closes in expecting answers I don’t have. When I’m sure they’ve gone and the rest of the lunch rush is either in line for food or settled at a table, I find a window nook in the hallway and make myself completely unapproachable, sort of par for my course. I pull a brown bag from my backpack and unwrap my peanut butter sandwich, crossing my legs out in front of me and balancing my dad’s notebook open on my thigh.

An old photo slips from the pages, and I manage to catch it before it drops to the floor. The image is folded, flattened from years of being used as a page marker. I straighten the crease and study the young couple standing in formal clothes in front of the familiar Bronco’s front end. There are hints of the people I recognize as my parents in these faces, but they’re so young. The divot from worry that’s become a permanent scar between my mom’s eyes is gone, replaced by smooth skin and a wave of light brown hair that my dad is about to sweep away from her eyes. Her chin tilted toward him, she’s gazing up at him like a teenager in love, which I suppose is exactly what she was. Mom’s always adored my father, that’s something I’ve never doubted. But there’s something about seeing the beginning of their affection for each other that has me caught. Even more than the way she’s looking up at him is the way he’s taking her in, completely. How did this man become so obsessed with his work that he quit pausing to look at her like this?

A tiny flower is tied around my mom’s wrist. It’s purple, like her dress, I think. The color in the photo has faded some, everything a little yellow. This looks like a prom photo. They don’t quite look old enough to be seniors; they’re maybe seventeen in the shot.

Seventeen, just like me.

Curious, I flip the picture over, hoping for a date or some other clue, but the only thing written on the back is a line from a poem or something, written in my dad’s perfect typewriter-like handwriting.

Candy Colored Sky

I ponder those words, flipping the photo around my fingers for a few seconds before tucking it back into the book’s pages and finishing my pathetic brown-bag lunch.

 

 

I think about the photo for most of the day, but don’t pull it out again until my walk home from school. I’m busy studying it as I trip over a new line of tape closing off a bigger section of my street. I stumble but catch myself before completely falling to my knees and taking out one of the traffic barricades with me. The number of people outside the Trombleys’ has doubled from when I left this morning.

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