A Void the Size of the World - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

One of Rachele Alpine’s first jobs was at a library, but it didn’t last long, because all she did was hide in the third-floor stacks and read. Now she’s a little more careful about when and where she indulges her reading habit. Rachele is a high school English teacher by day, a wife and mother by night, and a writer during any time she can find in between. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she writes middle grade and young adult novels. Visit her at RacheleAlpine.com.

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A Void the Size of the World

1

I didn’t mean to kiss my sister’s boyfriend.

At least, not the first time.

The day it happened, thick gray clouds sagged and hung so low that it made you think you could reach out and brush your hand along the bottoms. The air blew fast and forced trees to bend toward the ground as their branches stretched for invisible objects. I kept an eye on the darkening sky as I headed home from my job where I scooped ice cream for sunburned kids, tired parents, and classmates. I snuck free cones even though my manager strictly forbade handouts. It wasn’t the most glamorous job, but it was a paycheck. And a paycheck meant money that would get me out of this town one day.

I felt the rain on my back before I saw it; large blobs of water fell on my neck and covered the sidewalk in polka-dotted specks around me.

I was still a ways from my house, but only a block from Morton Park. I ran and hoped I could make it there before it poured, because the only thing worse than being covered in ice cream was being soaking wet and covered in ice cream.

Most of the park wasn’t anything special; it had the usual swings, slide, climbing gym, and seesaw. What made it different was that there was also a graveyard for half a dozen old construction tubes dumped in the grass by the city. They were pulled out of the street when it was repaved with asphalt. The tubes sat covered in graffiti and forgotten except as an alternative jungle gym for kids brave enough to scale their massive shapes.

My sister, Abby, and I used to beg Mom to take us here when we were little. Abby would quickly scurry to the top of some massive piece of equipment and I’d try to follow. I wanted to keep up with her, but instead, I’d slip back down and skin my knees. Abby would stand tall and proud, and the only way I could join her was when she reached out her hand to pull me up.

It was by those same tubes that I saw Tommy.

He had on the giant headphones he always wore, his head bobbing to the music. He moved farther and farther away from me, and I told myself to go over to him before he was gone. But I couldn’t. These days it was impossible to be near him.

Because he wasn’t mine.

A crack of thunder rattled the earth, and Tommy looked up and noticed me. But if he was surprised that I was in the park, he didn’t show it.

“Rhylee!” He gestured at me to come toward him, but I remained rooted to my spot.

He hurried over instead and the air felt charged. It sizzled and crackled.

“Duck in here,” he said and pointed at the construction tubes. “We’ll be able to stay dry.”

I followed, grabbed the top, and pulled myself through feet first until I was sitting on the bottom of the tube next to him. He placed his headphones around his shoulders, but didn’t turn them off. The sound of piano music mixed with the rain that slapped the top of the tunnel, creating an angry symphony. I recognized the notes. It was a piece he wrote a few months ago. Whenever Tommy was working on composing music, he listened to it over and over again on a constant loop.

I sat with my back against the wall and feet stretched up on the other side. I pushed away some garbage and tried to slow my breathing.

I didn’t belong here. I was an impostor, pretending to be comfortable this close to Tommy. The thought was ridiculous; we’d been best friends for years, but that had changed. I’d worked so hard these last few months to avoid him. And now here we were stuck together until the storm passed. It was as if the universe had decided play some cruel trick on me, to remind me of what I couldn’t have.

Because he was my sister’s boyfriend.

“What are you doing in the park?” I asked, not quite believing that chance had brought us to each other.

He ran his hand through his brown hair. It was wet, and the ends turned up in curls along the nape of his neck. He needed a haircut. “I was teaching a piano lesson. The family lives about a block away and I thought I could outrun the storm. What about you?”

“Serving Webster’s World Famous Custard.” I repeated the lame slogan plastered across my lime-green T-shirt and pretty much everything else at Webster’s.

“World famous?” he asked, his eyebrow raised.

“Oh, yes.” I nodded. “People flock from far off lands to sample our vanilla custard with rainbow sprinkles.”

“I remember that cone you made for me a few weeks ago. You do put those sprinkles on perfectly. Not too much but not too little.”

“What can I say? I’ve found my calling.” And suddenly it was like old times again. The two of us talking and joking.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

It felt as if someone had knocked the breath right out of me. Those words were what I’d been dying to hear for so long, because I’d missed him too. After all, this was Tommy sitting next to me. The boy I grew up with; the two of us inseparable as we ran between our houses that sat side by side, only my family’s field creating a separation.

“Yeah, well, things are different now,” I said and wanted to say so much more, everything I’d held inside for so long.

“Different sucks.”

“Whose fault is that?” I asked, not quite sure of the answer. I still didn’t understand what had happened the night that changed everything. It confused the hell out of me, and no matter how much I tried to figure it out, I just went around and around in circles, finding myself back where I started.

Tommy stared outside the tunnel. The rain warped everything and made it feel as if we were hiding in some kind of fantasy world.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette and a lighter, then waved the two at me. “Is this okay?”

I started to tell him it wasn’t, smoking was disgusting, but stopped.

“If you share,” I said instead.

“You smoke now?” Tommy asked and tilted his head, as if what I said surprised him. As if I wasn’t allowed to change anything he knew about me.

Tommy smoked with some of the other boys at school. They hid behind the baseball dugout, slipping away during lunch. My sister would never dream of smoking, because of running; she said it messed up your lungs. So this, this smoking, was something I could do that Abby wouldn’t.

I shrugged as if it was no big deal. “I haven’t in a while,” I lied.

“Since Gina and Joe’s wedding?” Tommy asked with the goofy lopsided smile I loved.

I narrowed my eyes at him and stuck out my chin. “I’ve smoked since then,” I told him, which wasn’t true at all. In seventh grade when his sister got married in their backyard, the party went into the night, and as our parents celebrated with an endless supply of alcohol, Tommy and I had slipped away with a beer hidden under his jacket and a pack of cigarettes we found abandoned on a table. We drank the beer, passing it back and forth, the foreign taste making our heads foggy and light at the same time. We lit cigarettes and pretended we knew what to do as we coughed our way through tiny puffs that made our eyes water. After, we lay in the field and watched the stars sparkle and shine in the inky...