Pulse

Chapter 39

Cian

I was horrible at entertaining myself. Without Lucie here, as she was attending school, and without Vinny, who was discreetly Eden-hunting, I was alone at the house. I hated every second of it—just me, my bedroom, and the faint drone of women's voices from downstairs: Mom's book club.

I checked the clock.

Ten in the morning.

Which meant three hours until Lucie's classes were over and we went to see Eden, and three hours was roughly equivalent to a movie or two, so maybe if I pulled out the DVDs or something—but three hours was also six different intervals of thirty minutes, which was sitcom length.

I sighed, rolling over and pressing my face into the pillows. One of the worst feelings ever, I thought, was boredom. The world was moving around me and I was this still commodity, unable to move myself along with the tide. Time stopped for no one.

Another glance at the clock.

10:02.

Great.

The voices had drowned out downstairs, and now only my mother's carried, in the same fluctuating tone she used to tell Vinny and me bedtime stories with, the timbre of her voice rising and falling in rhythm with the tension of the storyline. Back then, when Vinny and I were small, she had been different. She hadn't been so worried about imperfection, worried that if anyone even saw an inch of something that wasn't immaculate, it would be the end of her. Back then, it was easier to see her as my mother and not as that person who was always trying to fix me.

I went to the bedside and reached my arm over the side of it, clawing underneath the bed's frame until my fingers grappled around something firm and rectangular, leathery beneath my palm. I hoisted it up, flopping it down on the bed.

It was an old photo album that was falling apart at the spine, all stained pages and faded ink and sepia photographs with frays at the edges. In gold that was slowly disappearing, this was embroidered on the front: Horne. 1995. 1995 had been the year my parents were married, and they considered that year the beginning of us, though children didn't enter the picture until three years later.

I sighed, and because I was bored enough, pulled it open.

The first few pages were wedding photos. Mom, clad in white lace with ribbons woven through her blond hair, smiled at camera as Dad in his expensive tuxedo held out a piece of cake to her. They looked so happy there, mouths open in half-laughs, that it was almost hard to imagine what they'd become now: mannequins that put on a different costume for every average passerby, showing something off every hour of every day.

Next came me with chubby cheeks and baby fat.

I skipped hurriedly past that section.

Here was Vinny at his first soccer tournament when he was four, stick-thin legs carrying him across the turf as he teetered a little on his balance. Six-year-old me cheered him on from my perch in an Elmo lawn chair.

Here I was at the spelling bee in second grade, and in third, and in fourth, and in fifth.

Here was Vinny swinging a bat.

Here was Vinny and I playing catch. I was holding the glove wrong.

Here I was at the regional chess tournament, at the poetry competition, at mathletes.

Here was Vinny's fifteenth birthday—

I froze, squinting at the photo. He was identical to the ghostly Vinny I saw everyday, though markedly more pink. Live Vinny was all sun-kissed and sandy-haired and freckled, a wide smile on his face as the lit candles on 1 and 5 cast an orange glow about his young face. Eden and I smiled from either side of him.