#calicia

"Is that your bike?" "I'll ask the questions."

oof gosh. it makes me think about... calicia runaways. the original plan was to go to berkeley and he’d finish out high school and join her? she finds out right before the first deposit that her college money went to nick’s last round of failed fancy rehab? and she just can’t stay in that house one second longer?

takes a long time. and it’s harder than it looks on tv. graduated with honors and acceptance to berkeley but the loans are hard. a summer of crashing on couches and nicks friends who know her has the little sister (the ones that never sent her the creepy vibes, and then a few who did because fuck it). getting drunk in playgrounds and she and chris play pretend:

they’ll get an apartment. a shitty one with roaches but it’ll be okay because they’ll laugh when he burns the ramen. she’ll find work study on campus and he’ll drop out to work at coffee shops and study for the GED. 

and in real life she’ll tell him all quiet broken that madison doesn’t want to cosign the loan. that she’ll have to do two years at the same community college nick dropped out of. she’ll have to crawl back to madison’s house and she thinks maybe madison hasn’t even noticed she’s been gone? and he holds her hand and kisses her temple and they get drunk on swingsets and play pretend

I ship stuff based on the chemistry and tension I see, and I’m ready to recognize that they’re brother and sister and that that is an enormous flaw in the ship. Like, I get it. I’m not saying that incest is good or should be practiced in reality. I just go off the cues the writers give me, intentionally or otherwise.

Remember when Jesse McCartney saw them interact for 3 whole seconds before he started taunting Chris and calling Alicia his gf? “You’re looking for your girl?” and “You’re doing your sister?” were real things that were said on the show lol we were robbed. 

I mean...

skipping class and petty theft and vandalism? underage drinking and experimenting with drugs but there are some things she Won't Touch.

wanting to piss off her mother like god jesus fuck please get angry please notice me please just give a fuck?? wanting her brother to see how far she's fallen? wanting to make nick feel fucking guilty that shes following in his footsteps like maybe thatll make him get his shit together oooooof.

“It’s because I’m gonna take a bath,” Alicia tells him.

“Okay.”

“So don’t get used to it.” She finishes placing the butterfly bandage over the cut above his eyebrow.

“Okay,” Chris repeats. “Are we done?”

“We are unless you want a boo boo kiss.”

Chris jerks away from her hands. “I didn’t ask you to help me.”

Alicia tosses the wrappers into the trash. “I didn’t ask you to bleed on my sofa and hog the bathroom.”

Chris glares. “Get out.” He starts to crowd her into the doorway; she stumbles back only a few steps before she refuses to give anymore ground, his chest bumping against hers before his eyes go wide and he retreats.

“The deal was I get to take a bath.”

“I have to pee,” he hisses, one hand sort of poking at her hip without any real force behind it.

“So pee! The backyard is your fucking oyster.”

Chris folds his arms over his chest. “You’re not in charge of me.”

Alicia mirrors him. “And you’re not my real brother. I’m not giving up the only tub so you can piss on the floor and mold up the tile.”

Chris glowers. “I’m not leaving.”

Alicia pauses. She considers, head tilting and lowered eyelids. Then she takes off her shirt. Chris’s eyes go wide and when she reaches back and undoes the clasp of her bra, the straps falling loose off her shoulders, he goes bright red and squeaks by her, fleeing down the hall to his room. Her giggles follow him until he closes the door on them.

++

There’s a punching bag hanging in the garage. It’s dusty enough Chris is pretty sure it was never Nick’s--he doesn’t strike Chris as the type. He found gloves in the attic once when he was poking around, rotted through with mothballs and the crawl of time. The bag is heavy and it creaks when he jabs at it. He likes the way the chain sounds, the feel of packed sand against his knuckles. He still remembers how to wrap them.

Alicia finds him on a hot day, his shirt stuck to his skin and sweat dripping down his spine. “You stink,” she says, sitting on the step on the door leading back into the house. “Why haven’t you opened the door? Get some air in here.”

Chris shrugs. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

Her face flickers, then smoothes out. She shrugs. “Not really.” She drags a fingertip through the dust on the water heater. “Are you done?”

“I guess.” He unwraps his hands, feeling awkward.

Alicia hops up. “Show me,” she demands.

“What?”

“You know.” She mimes making a fist. “Show me how.”

Chris gestures at the bag. “It’s all yours.” She slaps him upside the head. “Hey! What the fuck?” She tries to slap him again and he grabs her wrist, his fingers slippery with sweat. “Stop it!”

She makes her eyes big and soft and sad, fluttery lashes and all. “C’mon Christopher. Who else is gonna teach me how to throw a punch? Me with the poor dead dad?” She rocks forward, her nose bumping against his jaw. “I’ll trade you something. Something good.”

++

“These two knuckles,” he reminds her, chin hovering over her shoulder. He’s close enough to see the sweat beading on the back of her neck, her hair swept up into a messy bun. He lets go of the fist he showed her how to form. “And not too hard.”

“Okay,” Alicia murmurs. Her fist thumps against the bag, weak and a bad angle; it makes her yelp.

He helps her straighten her wrist. “Turn your hips,” he reminds her, and she’s nestled into him as he uses his body to guide hers. “Like that, good.”

“I like this,” she says, twenty punches later, breathing laboured. “Am I good?” She turns over her shoulder to look at him, grinning and glowing in the dark and the dust and the stifling heat, just an inch away from his face. He remembers the way her nose slid just shy of the corner of his mouth, just forty minutes earlier.

“You said you were going to give me something,” he reminds her. “Something good.”

Her eyes flicker. “I did, huh?” She leans closer; sweat and her deodorant and his body spray, mint gum and the cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. His eyes close when her lips touch his, just the barest press. He opens them again when he hears the door open and shut; he’s alone again.

++

Chris comes around the corner, headed for the cafeteria, and hears the shouting before he sees the crowd, gathered up against one of the rows of lockers in the hallway. It’s the noise that draws him more than the promise of a scuffle, less of the usually jeering and more panicked, more real. A boy breaks away, running for the office and screaming for the campus police officer. Two more are pulling a girl up from the ground, another girl lying prone and bloody on the pavement.

Chris has broken into a run before his brain fully processes that brown hair and that jacket; it’s Alicia and Trevor Dutton has the same grip on her arm that he had on Chris’s last week in the locker room--Chris has hit him in a tackle before he’s realized what’s happened.

++

They sit outside the principal’s office together. They can hear Madison’s voice, Travis’s. The police officer and three school officials, the parents of the other girl.

“They talked shit about Nick,” Alicia tells him.

“Okay.”

“Thanks, I guess. For helping.”

Chris shrugs. “Does your hand hurt?”

“Not really.”

Chris shrugs again. “Okay.”

++

He raps his knuckles on the bathroom door. “Hey.”

It swings open, Alicia in front of the bathroom mirror. “You need to pee?”

“No.” He takes the alcohol swab from her fingers. “Look up.”

He cleans her up, gentle on her blooming bruises, just starting to darken on her face, and the small cuts on her knuckles, her hands soft and small in his clumsy fingers. “It doesn’t hurt,” she tells him, when he’s trying to decide if anything needs a bandaid.

“Really?”

“No,” she says, changing her mind. “It does. But I like it.”

Chris shows up with his duffel bag and the room he sleeps smells like wet cardboard.

“Sorry,” Madison says, smiling at Travis, his arm around her shoulder. “A little bit of a roof leak. But Nick is staying at a friend’s for the week, and I changed the sheets.”

“He’ll be fine,” Travis says, cheerful. “What’s a thing between brothers?”

Alicia is leaning her shoulder against the hallway wall. “I would change the sheets again,” she says, pitched low just for his ears and bored sounding.

Travis whispers something into Maddie’s ear and they both giggle, practically scampering down the hall into the master bedroom. Chris watches them go.

“Lasagna in the oven,” Alicia informs him. “Don’t burn it in the microwave.” Her door clicks shut behind her.

Chris looks at his duffel bag, resting on the floor by his sneakered feet. “Okay,” he says to no one.

++ 

Nick’s room smells like cologne and cheap deodorant. Chris drops his bag on the floor and lies on his back on Nick’s bed.

He wakes up in the middle of the night and can hear the springs creaking in the room next to him. It drives him out to the kitchen and he watches the microwave plate rotate in the black room, the tiny light just enough to mesmerize as he waits for the blinking numbers to count down to zero.

He turns around with the plate balanced in his fingers and starts violently, the fork clattering to the floor and hot tomato sauce burning through his shirt. He yelps, his heart racing.

“They’re loud,” Alicia says, barefoot and mussed hair and stifling a yawn against the inside of her wrist. She swoops the plate out of his hands. “Your shirt is dirty.”

Chris rips a paper towel off the roll and wipes at himself, glowering. “You scared me.”

Alicia settles in a kitchen nook chair, long bare legs folded up underneath her, tiny shorts disappearing under the hem of a men’s cut t-shirt that’s much too big for her. “Mm,” she acknowledges, and licks sauce off her thumb.

Chris hovers uncertainly between the fridge and the table. “That was mine.”

“Mm,” Alicia agrees. She smirks at him.

Chris lets the moment drag, thinking. He goes into the freezer and finds ice cream behind the flash frozen bag of mixed vegetables and chicken thighs. Gets a spoon out of the drawer and offers it to her.

Alicia narrows her eyes. Then her smirk eases into something softer, something that matches her pajamas and her scrubbed clean face and the little bit of sleep gunk in the corner of her lips. She accepts his trade and he settles across from her and eats his lasagna while she licks vanilla bean ice cream from a teaspoon and watches him, curious.

She finished before he does, seemingly deciding she’s bored. She stands up, abrupt, and then leaves. At first Chris thinks she’s gone to the bathroom, but the minutes go by and she doesn’t return, the container melting onto the table. He leaves the dishes in the sink and falls asleep on the sofa.

++

They wave goodbye from the front door. Maddie tells them to have fun at their summer program while Travis stores the suitcases in the trunk of the car. Travis pulls him aside and tells him to man up and look after his sister.

“Not my sister,” Chris mutters, then lowers his gaze when his father stares him down.

They wave goodbye.

“There’s no summer program,” Alicia says, watching the car grow small and smaller before it turns a corner and disappears.

Chris blinks. “What are we supposed to do?”

Alicia shrugs. “Whatever the fuck you want. Nick will probably come back at some point for money and food. Maybe laundry, if it’s a good week.”

“Oh,” Chris says, for lack of anything else to say.

“Yup.” Alicia flashes a smile at him. She hikes a bag over her shoulder and walks down the front steps towards the bus stop on the corner. “Don’t do anything Nick would do.”

++

Chris lies on his back on Nick’s bed and stares at the ceiling. He plays a game on his phone. Finds a bag of chips in the bedside table and chomps his way through them and leaves the crumbs on the sheets. Takes a nap. Turns on the television and lets his brain zone out

 Alicia comes home at two in the morning. He listens to her spend four minutes getting her key in the lock and giggling to herself before she spills into the house, tripping over the edge of the rug and laid out on the hardwood floor, dissolved into peals of laughter.

Chris goes over and locks the front door. He offers her his hand up and she scoffs, smacking it aside. “What’d you even do all day?” she asks, only the littlest bit slurred.

“Television.”

“Lame.” Alicia crawls over to the edge of the couch, slow and wavering and Chris follows. She pulls herself up and stretches out. A sit com blares on the screen. “Lame,” she decrees again.

“That’s my spot.”

Alicia sticks her tongue out

Chris lifts her legs, causing her to yelp in surprise, and sits before settling her legs into his lap. She grumbles for a moment, then sighs, head lolling against the cushions. “Did Nick come by?”

“No.” Her face almost crumples, then forcibly smoothes out. She snorts.

“Typical.”

She’s asleep within the hour and Chris thinks he should carry her to bed or at least get a blanket and leave her to rest but instead he slouches down, her warm weight in his lap and the soft rasp of her breathing. He resigns himself to a neckache in the morning and closes his eyes.

 ++

 “I’m bored,” Alicia announces at dinnertime. “What are you doing?”

“Mac and cheese.”

She comes up, bumping against his shoulder, and peers into the pot. “Enough for two?”

“If you think you can keep it down.”

She pulls a face at him. “Hangover has passed, thanks.”

Chris shrugs. “There’s enough.”

She kisses his cheek. “Thanks, baby brother.” She wanders off to the couch before he can figure out how to respond, heat rising in his face and his rabbit quick heart.

++

 Chris wakes up when the window creaks. He shoots upright and slaps the bedside light on and Nick yells, one leg slung over the sill. “Jesus Christ!”

“What are you doing,” Chris demands, glowering.

“What are you doing,” Nick snaps, “it’s my fucking room.”

“There’s a front fucking door,” Chris retorts.

“Whatever.” Nick climbs in and snaps the window shut. “The other room?”

“Roof,” Chris responds, short and still annoyed at being woken so suddenly and with a scare.

“Sucks,” Nick says, not sounding even a little genuine.

Chris folds his arms. “I’m not moving.”

“I don’t care,” Nick says, cheerful, and leaves the room.

Chris blinks. He stops just short of pressing her ear against the wall, straining to hear:

The creak of Alicia’s door, the click of it shutting, and then the barest rumble of low low murmur of voices.

He waits for a long time but never hears anything else.

++

Nick is gone by the time Chris hauls himself out of bed. Alicia is eating ice cream viciously and glowering at the television; there’s a fresh hickey under her jaw. He sits next to her and they stare blankly at soap operas. She goes on, determined and methodical, until it’s all gone, then stares into the empty carton.

“I’m going to throw up,” she says eventually.

Chris can’t think of a single thing to say. She leaves and he hears her in the bathroom, retching.

++

He wakes up because Alicia is crawling across him in the middle of the night. “It’s genetic,” he muses, after he realizes he’s not being attacked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but probably.” Alicia makes a noise of triumph. She stands and then looks at him, head tilted. “You wanna get high?”

Chris blinks, his eyes adjusting slow to the dark. “Yeah,”  he says, “okay.”

++

They smoke on the back porch steps. Alicia mutters about how dirty the pipe is and takes the first hit.

Chris coughs after the first draw, his lungs loudly and emphatically protesting. She laughs at him and he takes another long drag just to prove he can.

The high is soft and sweet and sings sweet inside him. He feels loose limbed and slumped and when he breathes his body tingles. He grins at her and lets smoke tip out between his lips.

++

She’s in his lap. He doesn’t know when it happened but she’s pinching his nose shut and her eyes are crossed and she misses the first time she tries it, landing a sloppy kiss to the corner of his chin, the smoke escaping.

“Hold on,” she says, when he snorts in laughter.

She gets it right the second time, and he opens his mouth to her automatically. Inhales when she exhales and some of it does go up his nose, burning and too hot. She licks at his teeth before pulling away.

“Nick’s gonna be pissed,” she muses.

He cracks her beer open for her. “Do you care?”