Coffee, Grit, and my Dad's Best Shoes 4.3

I drove on the way back. Francis was prattling on about this boy from school and how stupid he was, because all he seemed to be capable of discussing was how Asian girls are supposed to have tight nose-scrunch-worthy-slang-for-vaginas. His brother had told him so. "He looks at me every time he says it, too," she mumbled. "It's really gross."

My throat was dry, my jaw was set, and my mind was stuck warring between 'panic attack' and 'hunt the beast down and kill him with my bare hands.' Honestly, the latter was pretty gruesome coming from a pacifist, but this was my nine year old sister. The moral code I had surrounding violence was more than breakable, if for her sake.

"Does it make you uncomfortable?" Nicky asked, the picture of calmness- a cloak she only donned around those under sixteen. If France had been seven years older, pacing would have been involved. Yelling would have been involved. Hair-ripping would've been involved.

But that was fine, because I needed the calm. I took a deep, steady breath, ignoring a sideways glance from the resident picture of serenity.

"Yeah," France said, and I felt her feet hit the back of my seat. I didn't even tell her to stop kicking- the jolts hurt my back, but it was more a welcome distraction than anything else, at that point. "I didn't even think kids my age talked like that."

I saw Nicky swallowing in my peripheral. Tightly. "You need to tell someone, kiddo. Someone who can, you know, actually help." Her voice sounded like she was pulling it taught, and the sideways glances in my direction weren't letting up. "Your mom. A teacher. His mom."

"I guess..."

Deep breaths, Braz.

"... would probably show-"

He wouldn't do anything. Not that young.

"He scares me, a little."

"You definitely need to tell-"

That's a load of crap and you know it. Age is pretty much entirely irrelevant, given the circumstances.

And then it hit. I didn't even have time to process what 'it' was, but it wrapped itself around my heart and squeezed, and it wasn't a good kind of tightness. Not the love-related, butterfly-accompanied squeeze that I'd been feeling for the past month. It was the panic-induced, I'm-going-to-throw-up squeeze that was, unfortunately, a far more regular occurrence in my life.

I barely registered a red light and slammed the breaks, hands unclenching so that my fingers (which were sore, now) could unbuckle my seat belt. "I need you to drive," I said flatly, right as Nicky was polishing off what to say to the teacher, turned around in her seat so that she could demonstrate how to make a proper fist. Just in case.

She frowned at me and went for her own buckle without saying a word, slipping out of the passenger seat when I stumbled out of the driver's. It took all of two steps to get in front of the car.

"You okay, Sugarplumb?" she whispered as we passed by the hood, hand momentarily meeting my shoulder.

I shot her a quick, pleading glance. "Not entirely okay, no."

She paused, her heel the only part of her left foot that was pressed against the street. "Wanna stop and grab a couple bags of Skittles on the way?"

I nodded, offering a small, grateful smile. "Yeah." Skittles were our official Braz's-mind-is-slowly-killing-him food. Had been since we were thirteen.

She smiled back, and when the seat-exchange was complete, France frowned at me. "Braz?" It wasn't her vying for my attention. The tone voiced, plainly, another 'are you okay?', and all I could do was try to smile at her in the rear-view mirror.

"I'm fine, France. Just make sure to tell the teacher, okay?" I took a deep breath. "I can come in with you, too, if you need me. Or Nicky." I nudged her elbow. "Right?"

She nodded, popping a gum bubble as the light turned green. "Definitely. I'll beat the little punk up for you too, if you need it." She drummed her thumbs against either side of the wheel, prying one off to squeeze my hand before putting it back.

I sucked in a lungful of air as France thanked her.

"Oh. We're stopping at a gas station for some candy. Just a heads up. I need gas, too." We were pulling into one even as Nicky said it, because it was right on the corner after the light and easily accessible. She parked at pump four and looked over at me. "You coming in?"

I shook my head, mostly because a dangerously large lump had formed in my throat and my heart was squeezing again. "I need a second," I whispered, gesturing at the back seat with nought but my eyes.

Nicky took a deep breath of her own and pushed her door open. "Gotcha. Hey, France?"

The summoned perked up. "Yeah?"

"Why don't you help me pick something? I've got some cash that I want to burn, and it's healthier to burn it on someone else than it is to burn it on me." She piled out, and Francis was already nodding and following her. I startled when their doors slammed shut.

Someone outside- a boy, from the sounds of it, and I was assuming an employee- started talking to them, and I buried my face in my hands before he saw it or I saw him. I waited for the voices to fade before pulling my knees up, feet pressed against the edge of the seat, and tried to ignore the footsteps and rustling jacket outside. It wasn't all that difficult; my heart was pumping blood to my head fast enough that the steady drone drowned him out.

I tried to take deep breaths, but they stuttered, and each one made the burn in my chest more acute. I slid a hand down, gripping the front of my jacket, fist pressed against the space over my heart. It was hammering. I could feel it through the fabric, and I tried to focus on that. On the fact that nothing was surfacing. Not a flashback, not a memory, not a vision of my baby sister having to live that moment. My entire upper body shuddered. I never, ever wanted her to have to live that moment.

Of course, when you focus on how that sort of thing isn't surfacing, it's prone to start.

I pulled my face out of my knees, not entirely sure of when it'd been pressed into them, and let my feet hit the floor. I bent, elbows digging into my thighs, hands fisting around my bangs, lungs trying to remember what they were supposed to do and the speed at which they were supposed to do it.

You're fine, I told myself, in my head at first, but then, because things were intent on trying to surface, a verbal, "You're fine," that was so quiet I barely heard myself. I didn't believe it, so I tried again, a little louder and twice as raspy. And then I gave up, rubbing the heels of my hands against my cheeks, trying to dry them before Nicky and France got back. Deep breathing replaced it, and whatever flashback had been trying to push through, I swallowed it with lines of poetry. The nature kind. The kind that I wrote every time I felt happy; the kind that you could incorporate technique into, because you weren't some teenage amateur writing about your broken heart or how some boy made it dance.

I'd just started to calm down when I heard their voices; muffled, lighthearted. Francis laughed at something Nicky said, and their doors swung open simultaneously. They both saw me. I knew that they both saw me, and with Nicky, it was one thing. With Fracis? God, I just felt guilty. She was nine, and she'd already had an abnormally acute sense of mortality for almost four years.

That was my fault.

Neither of them said anything. Nicky dropped a grocery bag onto the floor by my feet, and I shifted them to accommodate for the inanimate passenger. France buckled up without a word. And that was it, the whole way back to the house. Nicky turned on the stereo halfway there; some obscure jazz artist who I couldn't remember the name of, but took comfort in because I had a thing for saxophones and raspy voices.

The rest of the ride was composed of just that. Just the music. Just me trying to breathe. Mom was home when we got back, sifting through a pile of papers from the kitchen counter. She glanced up and smiled, but it faltered when she caught my gaze. I looked at the floor and set the grocery bag on the shoe rack so that I could shed my jacket.

"Have fun?" she asked, obviously unconvinced that we had.

"Yeah," Nicky answered for us, tossing her jacket over her arm. She snatched the bag from the rack before I could pick it up again. "Was work okay?"

Mom chuckled, lifting her hands to roll her thumbs in circles over her temples. "Oh, it was as okay as it could've been." She looked up. "You two are sleeping in your room, Braz?"

I blinked a few times, lifting my chin just enough to fleetingly catch her gaze. "Yeah," was all I could make myself say.

She nodded- I just caught it in my peripheral- and turned her attention to my sister. Which was nice, I suppose. She knew that if I wanted her to know, I'd tell her. And right now, I wanted to try shake it off on my own (in other words: with the assistance of Nicky) before it got out of hand.

"Did you have fun, France?"

She grinned and nodded, far more enthusiastically than my mother had, and bounded over to the kitchen. "Yeah. We went to that wing place they always go to." She looked over her shoulder as I looked up, gaze flickering from me to Nicky, who gave her an encouraging nod. She turned back to Mom. "Um. Can I talk to you about something? From school?"

Mom's eyebrows furrowed, and I decided to take my leave then. Privacy for them, sanity for myself.

Nicky followed at my heels, closing the door to my room as soon as we were both inside. The first thing out of her mouth was, "I'm going to rip their fucking heads off, Braz." It was almost startling, but only because Nicky rarely swore, and f-bombs were the rarest of all.

I looked up at her, already halfway finished folding myself onto my bed. "I think that my family would find that somewhat conspicuous. As would the police." I rolled onto my back, knees up and together, hands covering my face. "I appreciate the gesture, though."

She sighed, falling onto the edge of my bed. I was only vaguely aware of it when she started playing with my hair. "Do you know how much anger I've been repressing since I've heard they're coming over? I don't think that 'conspicuous' will be able to stop me." She bent and kissed my forehead, and that's when the tears started trying to push themselves out.

"I'll be okay." It was raspy, terrified, and one hundred percent unconvincing.

Nicky didn't say anything- just kept combing the tips of her fingers through my hair and existing, which was more than I could've asked of her already.

I took a few seconds to push down what would have been my second panic attack, hands sliding up, fingers tangling in my bangs. "I have to tell Parker," I whispered.

"No you don't." She unglued her gaze from whatever she'd been looking at to frown at me. "If you want to tell Parker, tell him, but it is not by any means any of his business whatsoever. Not yet."

I sighed, pulling my hands away from my face altogether. "No. I want him to know, this time. I mean-" I swallowed. "I mean, it might... I don't know. He just deserves to. And we're older now. I doubt that things will be as innocent as they were the first time. And... it's just in case, you know?"

Nicky nodded, eyes falling to her lap. "I guess so." She licked her lips. "Do you have any physical triggers, even?"

I shrugged and rolled onto my side, drawing my legs up to a point where it probably qualified as half-spooning her, but she was sitting up and it was entirely platonic anyway. Chances were we'd fall asleep tangled together in the least sexual, least romantic, most innocent way known to man.

"I don't know. But I don't want him to touch me wrong, and for me to start freaking out for reasons that are totally beyond his understanding." I paused. "It's a precaution. And a trust thing."

She looked at me again, and this time, she looked more worried than stormy. "That's a pretty big trust thing, Braz. But God damn me if I'm going to advise you to not talk about it. I kind of wish that the entire world knew and that both of them were locked up somewhere dark and awful."

I heaved another sigh. "There isn't a day I don't regret not reporting it, Nicky. But it's not like I can do anything about it now." It'd been three years and a half years. I had no evidence. Zero. And I knew for a fact that the court didn't care if you couldn't supply. We couldn't afford a decent lawyer anyway.

Neither of us said anything for a while, and I started feeling guilty for ruining what was supposed to have been a fun night. Not that she wasn't used to it. And more than that, it wasn't like I'd meant to. Some things were just stronger than your own will.

"You wanna watch one of the movies?" I asked finally.

Nicky took a few seconds to respond, but when she did, she reached over to grab the bag of Skittles and nodded.

"Yeah."