Growing Close

It had been nearly four agonizing hours of silence since the car trip started.

Calli shifted uncomfortably in her seat, trying to keep the numbness from creeping back into her tailbone again. In the driver's seat, her stepbrother Mark grasped the wheel with one hand and took a drag from a cigarette in the other. She made a mental note that it was his fifth smoke in the past half an hour, and she was sick of it.

"Is that really necessary?"

Mark glanced over at her with a confused frown. "What?"

"All that smoking," she replied, "it's disgusting."

"You haven't spoken in four hours and that's the best you have to say to me?"

Calli shot a glare at him that could peel paint off a wall. "You know, you could try a little conversation once in a while, too. I'm not here just to amuse you."

"No, you're here to babysit me."

"What?"

"Don't deny it, Calli," Mark said accusingly, "I'm not stupid. Dad's never trusted me, and I know there isn't a chance in hell he'd let me take this trip by myself. So he sent sweet, innocent little Calli along to make sure I don't fuck up."

"And whose fault is it that your dad doesn't trust you in the first place?"

"Fuck you, Calli," Mark spat at her, "I'm no daddy's boy, but don't pretend I don't know about the shit you've done."

"What are you talking about?"

A frustrated sigh escaped from his lips. "Don't play dumb, Cal. Remember Kevin? Last summer?"

Guilty as charged. He knew he had her, but she remained as stubborn and stoic as ever, not to be defeated by this nineteen-year-old kid. "Kevin doesn't have anything to do with anything," she said, "you're full of shit."

Mark let a loud, sarcastic laugh slip from his mouth. "Kevin? We're talking about the same Kevin you took behind the cabin at the lake while my dad and your mom were out fishing? Any of this sound familiar? You took him back there and blew him?"

Calli made a disgusted face despite the fact that his point had been made. "Oh, Jesus Christ, Mark. That's none of your goddamn business, how the hell do you know about that, anyway?"

"Oh, Calli, oh, oh my God, faster, suck it faster, oh yeah-"

"Shut the FUCK up," she screamed at him. He smiled victoriously as she fumed for several moments. After his moment of glory, guilt set in.

"Listen, Cal," Mark said quietly, "I'm sorry, I'll never bring it up again. I know you didn't exactly want to come on this trip with me, I know Dad pressured you into it."

Calli calmed down noticeably, and seemed almost flattered by his apology. "It's alright, Mark, you're right, they did pressure me into coming along to look after you, but I know you don't really need it. To be honest, I thought this trip might turn out to be kind of fun."

Mark flashed her a guilty smile. "Yeah, I guess we've pretty much screwed up that possibility, haven't we?"

"Well, we still have a long way to go before we reach Florida. We might be able to salvage this, don't you think?"

Mark shrugged. If only. It had been a miserable nine years they had spent together before this, both children of broken, entirely dysfunctional homes whose parents had come together simply because they needed "somebody." Mark had needed somebody too, but it didn't turn out to be an older stepsister. The torture they had put each other through for those years was beyond the understanding of normal siblings.

"How do we fix this?" Mark asked.

"I dunno...how do we fix the last nine years? How do we fix the fact that we hated each other just to spite our parents?"

"Maybe we ignore the past nine years," Mark suggested, "maybe we ignore everything up to this trip and just start over."

Calli thought deeply for a moment. The last nine years would be hard to ignore for anyone in her position. To wake up one morning and find that you have a new stepfather and a pesky little brother, especially one as spoiled as Mark had been, was quite a shock.

"Okay," Calli said, "we ignore everything. As of right now, I'm not even your stepsister."

"Is that right? So who are you?"

"Just a friend."

Mark nodded agreeably. It was a good idea. "Good enough. Friends. So how do friends like us start out?"

"I don't know...tell me something you've never told anybody."

"Something I never told anybody, huh? Something like what?"

"Anything," she said, "a dark, terrible secret."

"Well, I've got plenty of those." He needed a cigarette for this kind of conversation, so he pulled one out of the pack, then thought twice when he caught a quick glance from Calli out of the corner of his eye. "Okay, a dark terrible secret, let's see...when I was seven years old, I tried smoking a cigarette. It made me cough so bad I spit it out on the floor and burned a hole in my mother's five thousand dollar Persian rug."

Calli stared at him for a moment as if waiting for more. "That's it? That's your deep dark secret?"

"Yeah, what else do you want?"

She throws back her dark hair and laughs. "You have to do better than that."

"No way, it's your turn."

"Okay, okay, but your next turn you have to do better because that's just weak." She smiles at him playfully, and he can't help but smile back. He had never noticed how radiant her smile was until now, but he had never gotten to see it much before.

"Alright, fine. Now go."

"Okay. When I was sixteen, I dated a twenty-seven-year-old guy."

"What? Jesus!"

"Yeah," she continued, with an almost nostalgic tone in her voice, "I never told a soul, if the parents had found out they would have slaughtered me. One weekend I told them I was going on a band trip for school, I even printed up the permission slips and everything. He and I flew out to San Francisco, stayed in this little bed and breakfast, went to all the clubs, listen to jazz and poetry, it was a blast."

Mark was in a state of genuine disbelief. He knew his stepsister had been bold in her teens, but he had no idea how much so. All at the same time he was shocked and fascinated.

"He was twenty-seven," Mark manages to voice through his surprise, "that is so very much illegal. Tell me something, honestly, you're twenty-five now, would you even consider for a second dating a sixteen-year-old."

"No, not a chance in hell, but it's different for women."

"Ah, I see, the old double standard. It doesn't make it any less weird either way."

"It wasn't weird," Calli argued, "it was actually very sweet. He was so gentle with me. I mean, girls by nature are usually terrified of losing their virginity, but he made it so special and so-"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Mark interjected, "you lost your virginity to the guy?"

"Yeah, so?"

"So? So he was old enough to be your father."

"My father? He would have had to have me when he was eleven, Mark."

"Okay, so he was old enough to be, you know, like an older cousin or something."

Calli giggled as Mark began to see his argument crumble before him. He had never made her laugh before, made her cry plenty of times when they were younger, though. She was filled with a sense of relief now that they were finally starting to break the ice between them.

"Yeah," Mark continued, "so whatever, the point is the guy was a cradle-robbing perv."

"Ha-ha. Let's move on, it's your turn."

"My turn, yippee. Give me a minute." How much could he really tell her? After all, no matter how much they tried to ignore the facts, she was still his stepsister, there was no changing that. Mark decided to take a chance and tell her something he never thought he would have the opportunity to tell her. "When I was young, I used to sneak to your room and watch you while you undressed."

Dead silence. He suddenly became aware that he, more than likely, had made a serious mistake in judgment. Some things were just never meant to be told.

"You did?"

Mark nodded. There was no going back now. "Yeah, I did." More torturous silence followed, and he didn't know how long he would be able to stand it.

"Time for a bathroom break," he said sheepishly, and pulled off at the first exit he could find.