For All You Have Left

Chapter Fifteen Leo

“So, what’s Lucas doing tonight?”

Hannah looks at me and pushes her lips to one side, as if she’s thinking.

“Video games; weird, scary movies; watching a rerun of some dumb, old football game — everything he can’t do when I’m there,” she says, sending me a devilish smirk.

“So, he’s in heaven?” I ask.

She laughs. “Of course.”

I plop down onto the couch with a big bowl of popcorn. “Okay, what are we watching?”

“Something really girly,” Hannah suggests. “And preferably something with Leo.”

“Oh, you know what?” I remember. “I just got The Great Gatsby…”

“No, you didn’t,” Hannah breaks in. She dramatically sighs and throws her hand to her heart. “I love Leo.”

“I’ll…take…that as a yes then.”

I get up, grab the movie and feed it into the DVD player. Then, I plop right back down onto the couch with the popcorn.

“You know, when we were kids, I was convinced that I was going to marry him,” Hannah says.

“You were also going to marry Prince William and one of the Hanson brothers too,” I remind her.

She stops and seems to think about it. “Dang it. I was, wasn’t I? What happened to me?”

I stare at her with knowing eyes.

“Lucas.”

She looks up at me and then nods her head. “Lucas,” she simply repeats, sighing happily to herself.

She grabs a handful of popcorn out of the bowl in my hands and shoves it into her mouth.

“Hey,” she says, still chomping on the corn.

I barely even make out the word, her mouth is so full. It’s a few seconds before she swallows and starts again.

“Do you remember that stupid game we made up when we were kids where we would pretend to sleep if someone came into a room?”

I start to laugh. “Yeah.”

“How did that start anyway?”

“Mom,” I say.

Hannah points her finger at me. “That’s right!”

“She would call us to do something, and we would just act like we were sleeping. Evidently, you don’t wake a sleeping kid.”

Hannah bursts into laughter. “We got out of doing so much work with that. How did she never catch on?”

I shake my head. “How was she never concerned by how much we were sleeping all the time?”

Hannah stops laughing and squints her eyes in what looks like a thought. “You know, I have no idea.”

She’s quiet for a little too long, so I look over at her and catch her smiling to herself.

“That was such a stupid game,” she adds.

I stuff a handful of popcorn into my mouth. “But it worked.”

Snickering, she dramatically nods her head. “That it did.”

“But, anyway,” she goes on, shifting slightly on the couch, “the first time I met Lucas, I was a freshman in college, as you know, and I was at a friend’s house. Lucas was there, but I had never met him before. He was the only person I didn’t know out of like maybe six or seven of us sitting in the living room that night.”

She stops and looks at me. “Have I ever told you this story?”

I start to shake my head. “Uh-uh, I don’t think so.”

“Okay,” she goes on without missing a beat. “Anyway, Andie, one of my friends, was just about to walk into the room when Lucas all of a sudden whispers ‘sleep.’ And almost by instinct, my head goes down and I close my eyes.”

All my attention darts to Hannah.

“No,” I say. “There can’t possibly be another soul in this world that knows the sleep game!”

“Well, he did,” she says.

“You’re kidding?” I think my jaw is stuck open.

“I know, right?” She laughs. “Everyone else just looked at us like we were crazy afterward. It’s such a stupid, simple game. But he knew it.”

She grabs another handful of popcorn. “I swear I fell in love with him right there.” I watch her shake a finger at me. “There’s always that moment when you just know you love someone.”

Hannah’s attention goes back to the screen then, while my mind travels back to Andrew and to a little dirt baseball field in the pouring rain. I had loved him before that day — even though I hadn’t realized it. But in that moment, in the pouring rain, I knew there was no turning back.

A few minutes pass before the old memory eventually fades and my mind gets stuck on Lucas again. “I still can’t believe he knew the sleep game.”

It looks as if Hannah just barely gets her eyes to leave Leo and to venture back to mine.

“How?” I ask. “And how have you never told me that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just always forget. Evidently, he made it up too. I think one day he did it to get his little cousins to stop bothering him or something and then he found out it could work as an easy prank, and then, I guess it just kind of stuck.”

“All this time, and I never knew.” I think about it for another second and then cock my head to the side. “Hannah, he’s like one of us.”

“I know!” she squeals. “And we’re such a rare, strange breed.”

“Yeah,” I say, still chewing my mouthful of popcorn. “I know.”

“God,” Hannah says, shaking her head. “We were a mess when we were kids.”

“That. We. Were,” I agree, drawing out every word for emphasis.

Hannah’s quiet then, and so am I. Leo has returned to the screen, and instinctively, our eyes are glued to him again. But it’s not long before Hannah breaks the silence.

“Hey, you remember when we tied James to that chair and left him under that old tree that one time?”

I almost spew my popcorn everywhere.

“He said he was Houdini.” The little details come flooding back to me — as if it all happened just yesterday. “He said he could get out of anything.”

“And he did get out of it,” Hannah says, dramatically nodding her head.

“Yeah, like twelve hours later!” I swallow and start to laugh. “Do you remember that night? James came walking into Grandma’s house right before dinner, and he was with Grandpa.”

“Yeah, and he looked so terrified.”

“Well, we had completely forgotten about him. It was dark, and he was only like seven. Wouldn’t you have been terrified?”

Hannah lowers her eyes, and her shoulders rock forward. It looks as if she’s trying not to laugh. “You know, Grandpa never said anything about it.”

I think back to it for a second.

“You know what? He didn’t,” I remember. “But I do think he made some kind of deal with James though because you and I both know that James didn’t get out of that chair alone.”

“Hell, no, he didn’t get out of it alone. I tied the knots! But what do you think the deal was?” she asks.

“I don’t know, maybe like Grandpa would go along with James’s story of him getting himself out of the chair if James wouldn’t tell Grandma what had happened.”

Hannah’s hand flies to her mouth. “You know, that makes sense because even though James bragged about getting himself free later, neither he nor Grandpa ever said a word about it at dinner.”

She pauses before she continues. “And plus, I guess Grandpa knew what he was doing. Remember when Grandma found out that James was our electric-fence tester?”

“Oh my gosh!” My hand instantly covers my heart. “I thought her eyes were going to pop right out of her head.”

“I know! All I remember is that she was holding that big ball of bread dough. Remember?”

I nod my head in confirmation.

“I know she thought about chucking it right at us.” Hannah grabs another handful of popcorn and stuffs it into her mouth. “But it’s not like we forced James to do it.”

I almost choke on a kernel.

“Hannah, you said if he didn’t do it, you’d tell everyone in the fifth grade that he used to wet his bed.”

Hannah’s eyes snap shut, and her narrow shoulders simultaneously jerk forward. “Oh, yeah.”

I throw a piece of popcorn at her.

“Poor James,” she adds, fishing the popcorn out of her hair.

I stare at her in amusement as she struggles to free the kernel from her long strands before my eyes slowly travel back to Leo on the screen. “Poor James,” I agree.

“Good thing you were nice to him,” Hannah says. I feel several popped kernels hit my head. “Or who knows how he would have turned out.”

I shield myself from the flying corn. “Yeah, I totally claim his normalness.”

We both look at each other then and laugh until our stomachs hurt because I think we both know that, based on our wild childhood, there’s not a good reason in this world as to why any one of us turned out fairly normal.