Mixed Signals Read online

  My dad winked at my mom and his mustache twitched flirtatiously.

  “Gross, you guys,” I said as I pulled away and stepped into John’s embrace. “See you later, big brother. I would have a saccharine moment with you, but I shouldn’t keep Edwin waiting.”

  “Oh God. I’m sure your version of saccharine involves sadly strumming some late-nineties power ballad. I can live without that, thanks.”

  “Don’t think twice about calling us if you need anything,” Mykhail said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. He ruffled a hand through his shaggy blond locks and stared at me for a moment, his blue eyes focusing on me as he processed whatever thoughts were bouncing around in that beautiful astrophysicist brain of his. “The adjustment to college can be rough. Really rough. You can go from feeling like you know everything to thinking you’re a moron overnight. I know you can handle this, but remember that it’s okay if a program isn’t for you. If things suck out there, classes will be starting at Burnell in another year or two, once the government agencies move to their new location. Whatever happens, you won’t be a failure, okay?”

  Mykhail had a pretty stressful life in academia, but I wondered if he’d somehow read my deepest fears as he’d studied me because his words were so exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. I knew my family believed in me, but hearing him say it eased some of my burden. I pulled him into a long hug, messing up our assembly line. “Thanks.” It was nice to be reminded that fucking up wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  “Don’t listen to him,” my mother said, slapping at his arm. “My wishes take precedence since I was the one in labor with you for thirty hours. I want good grades, lots of activities and no dropping out. Oh, and a list of people you think could have marriage potential by midterms. You have to make up for lost time!”

  John slipped his arm through mine and walked with me to the car. “I’ll probably be at Oswego at some point to follow up on business with the mesh network and internet systems in the region. The school is serving as the local hub, and there’s the power plant and all that...” He waved his hand around. “I won’t bore you with the details. When I visit, you can take me to the dining hall so I can relive the glory of my college days. Well, the disgusting food portion of my glory days.” He looked at Mykhail with a level of adoration that ruled out any future peenish possibility.

  “Okay. We can meet up if I’m not drowning in peen, I guess. I’ll keep you updated.” I turned to catch Edwin looking at me with a slightly horrified expression. It wasn’t as if I’d never joked around with my family in front of him before, and sex jokes with John were a given.

  “Ready to ride?” I asked flirtatiously, just to see if his eyebrows could lift any higher. They drew together instead. He slipped on his mirrored aviators, shielding his eyes from me. Instead, I saw a warped reflection of how I must look to him—tight jeans, high heels and hair that spiked out as if trying to gather attention from the atmosphere around it. Was this me? Really? For some strange reason, I almost asked Edwin. I stopped myself right before he shook his head, laughing to himself.

  “Let’s roll, Mags. Wouldn’t want to keep your fans waiting.”

  “I don’t have any fans,” I said, my voice neutral. I didn’t know whether to be snarky or smiley since his tone was unreadable.

  “Not yet, you don’t. Let’s go.” It should have been a compliment, but it left me feeling exposed instead. I reached for the hair I used to be able to pull across my face, but the old Maggie was gone. I climbed into the rumbling truck and watched my family recede in the side-view mirror as we pulled off.

  Chapter Three

  Edwin’s truck was old, like most cars that were still up and running. It was the high-tech ones, operated by key cards and running on electricity, that had borne the brunt of the Flare, their systems combusting as the burst of energy flooded their circuits. Like my parents’ old-school van, the engine in Edwin’s aging monster growled steadily and ran without a hitch. It would’ve been a smooth ride if not for the cracked and pocked roads that had gone three harsh winters without upkeep.

  There simply weren’t enough government workers to do everything. The rebuilding effort had become the biggest supplier of jobs in the new economy, with the president enacting a kind of postapocalyptic New Deal. Most of the contractors who’d been recruited to work on the massive repair jobs were funneled to the larger cities first, where the population was still relatively high despite the number of casualties. Others, like Edwin, did what they could in the areas that had been deemed lower priority. Unfortunately for everyone, roads weren’t prioritized over repairs to the power grid, infrastructure reinforcement and making homes and buildings places where people could live and work again.

  Living in a less populated area had one perk, in addition to the relative insulation from the calamities people trapped in major city centers had experienced—parts of upstate New York were serving as a testing ground for the first new electrical grids, as well as the mesh networking that was taking the place of fiber optics and cell towers. While many of the more populated areas still had patchy access to power sources, with rolling blackouts becoming the norm, we were doing well. Strange that it took an apocalypse to make me appreciate living in the middle of nowhere. The horror stories that had come out of places like New York City...

  I glanced at Edwin, and his gaze shifted from the road to me and back again. He was a hard guy to sneak a peek at. One of the things I’d noticed the first time John had brought him home, apart from his attractiveness, was how closely he paid attention to everything. Not in a scary way, like Gabriel had when we’d first ventured out of the house to interact with other people, but as a kind of default. He’d been the only one to notice Stump, who’d just become mobile, almost tumble off of the couch. He’d brushed past me, carefully, and tugged him back by the diaper. At dinner he caught a cup of water that John had knocked off the table with his elbow while talking too animatedly.

  John had chalked it up to Edwin’s military training, but I’d done JROTC for two weeks, eventually giving it up due to my ill-fitting uniform and an embarrassing experience with what happened when you locked your knees while standing at attention—and I knew being in the service didn’t necessarily make a person so aware. It was something that was just part of him.

  I pulled my gaze away from him as he ran a hand over the close-cropped hair that converged into a smooth vee at the back of his neck. He wore his hair shaved down and edged perfectly now that barbershops were back in business, but when I’d first met him it’d been longer, thick and tightly curled. I’d wanted to run my fingers through his hair, to feel the soft part of a man who was hard everywhere else under my palm, but Arden had trained me well enough to resist that impulse. Touching someone’s hair was an intimate act, she’d said as she’d brushed through my tangles one day. A pang of longing I thought I’d gotten under control throbbed through me as I imagined what it would be like for Edwin to run his fingers through my newly shorn locks, how the tips of his callused hands would feel caressing over my scalp.

  Outside my window, a group of kids marched through the overgrown grass alongside the road, heading in the direction of the town we’d just passed through. It’d looked better than the abandoned places with boarded-up stores and houses marked with spray painted crosses to show where bodies had been found, but for some places, “better” was an inconsequential term. One of the kids had a rifle tucked under his arm, and the other carried a brace of limp rabbits. I’d had a pet rabbit when I was that young, but things were different now. Those kids might be the only ones putting food on the table. Meanwhile, I’d been complaining about going away to school, where other people would be taking care of most of my needs.

  “Are you excited?” Edwin asked, finally breaking the silence. “I heard you weren’t that into leaving your family, but that’ll change once you get to school. You’re gonna love it.” Was he a
lways this chipper? I couldn’t remember the last one-on-one conversation we’d had since my spontaneous v-card offering. “Independence, making new friends, learning mind-blowing shit. It’s gonna be great. Learning mind-blowing stuff. Sorry.”

  I dropped my head back onto the headrest and groaned in annoyance. “You know you’re driving me to college and not preschool, right?” I took a deep breath and sang in a cartoonish falsetto. “Shiiiiiiiiiiit!” I filled my lungs and belted out again, this time in a deep alto, “Fuuuuck!”

  He ducked his head in embarrassment. “Okay, I get it, Maggie. It’s just a little hard to remember you’re not a kid anymore.”

  Wonderful.

  I tilted my chin up in the air. I certainly wasn’t behaving like an adult, but he’d hit a sore spot. When you’re older, you’ll be glad I said no.

  I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms against my chest. “Since the tender age of sixteen, I’ve been living with someone who uses the term ‘fuck-fuckity-fuck-fuck’ at least three times a day. Cursing won’t scar a kid for life. And, again, I’m not a kid anymore.”

  Edwin was now wearing the uncomfortable smile he sported when we usually interacted. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m not used to being around younger people, okay? Maybe it’s because I skipped a grade,” he mused playfully, but he’d opened himself up to interrogation now.

  I turned in my seat so I was leaning a bit over the invisible driver/passenger divide. “You’re only six years older than me, Old Man River. Or is it five? Tell me again about this huge gulf between us.” I cocked my head to the side and watched him, not leaning back in my seat until he’d squirmed enough for my taste. I was being overdramatic, but the residual humiliation I was feeling spurred me to make him feel awkward too.

  “Maggie, there are certain points in your life when one year is like...a dog year, or something. Life changed so much and so quickly when I went away to college. You’ll see soon, and then maybe you’ll cut me some slack.” His voice wasn’t angry. It was placating.

  I wasn’t the only one thinking about our previous encounter. He was referencing how I always had just a little bit more edge in my voice when joking around with him at family dinners. How I went for the jugular when we played board games and badgered him until he folded during poker. Ever since that night he’d turned me down.

  Edwin, I’m old enough to know what I want. I don’t need flowers and a soft bed. I need my virginity gone and with the person I choose. Is that really so hard to understand?

  I cringed in my soul at the fact that I’d actually said those words aloud. I had wanted it over with, and still did—that passage to adulthood that had become less and less likely as the years passed at the cabin, surrounded by my family. I couldn’t explain to him why it was so important to me to be rid of it; he hadn’t believed me when I’d told him I was being practical and not romantic. Why wait for an inevitable disappointment, or worse, when you could get it out of the way and continue on with your life knowing it’d happened on your terms? Unfortunately for me, I’d chosen a dude who’d almost made a career out of following strict codes of conduct, so my plan had been foiled.

  I turned my embarrassment outward, onto him. “So, in your mind, I’m like forty-two years younger than you? That doesn’t even make sense. How did you skip a grade with that shoddy grasp of mathematics? And how did you manage to get along with the older kids if age difference is such a big deal?” I was annoyed with him, but also a bit intrigued. Keeping my distance from him over these past years, first because of my inability to speak in front of him and then because I was too angry and ashamed to try, had also meant that much of what I’d learned about him had been secondhand. When he came to the house, I’d go up to my room and blast one of the eclectic CDs John had gifted to me or run chord riffs until my fingers bled. So I didn’t know he’d gone to school young, or even how he’d ended up at military school.

  “I skipped two grades, actually—fifth and sixth. I guess the math wasn’t so hard at that point,” he said. His hands were tight on the wheel and he glanced over at me. “Besides, I’m talking theoretical mathematics, and it doesn’t come into play at that age, really. There are plenty of differences between a fifth grader and a seventh grader, but they’re basically still in the same time zone. But—and maybe we can ask Mykhail about this—I think there has to be some kind of space-time rift that happens when people who are twenty-six talk to people who are twenty. It garbles the communication and makes everything weird.”

  “Well, I wasn’t exactly interested in talking back then, so that wouldn’t have been a problem.” I hadn’t meant for those words to leave my brain, but there was no taking them back now.

  His head swiveled in my direction, and I was surprised to see his dimples emerge instead of a scowl. “I can’t argue with that logic. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  It was obvious that we were both talking about what had happened between us, even if we wouldn’t admit that out loud. He was trying to make me smile, but I hated the way he could so calmly dismiss what I’d wanted. I reminded myself that he couldn’t have known why his refusal was such a blow to me; to him I had just been a silly girl acting on a whim. “Look, I’m only saying that you don’t magically get some special skills once you turn twenty. The adulthood fairy doesn’t drop down and sprinkle you with responsibility dust. There have always been teenagers with full-time jobs, living on their own or supporting their families, hell, even raising children. There’s no reason to act like they aren’t as capable of making decisions as adults.”

  Edwin sighed, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from straying to the rise and fall of his chest and the patch of skin exposed by the unbuttoned collar of his shirt. I’d seen him without his shirt as he hammered and sawed and built a home for Darlene from the ground up; I didn’t have to imagine the musculature beneath the fabric. His deep voice drew my gaze to his mouth, but I looked away before I got to his eyes. I didn’t want to know if he’d seen me blatantly eye-fucking him in the middle of asserting my maturity.

  “Everything you said is true, Mags. But there are also people who’ve spent their teenage years in an isolated environment and who’ve only recently started venturing into the outside world. Someone has to look out for them, right?”

  He wasn’t trying to be cruel. In fact, his voice was warm and supportive. But his implication, that I was an inexperienced baby lamb, still stung.

  I reached over and turned on the radio, only to be met with static. I hit the seek button, and eventually the tuner picked up a working station. The familiar, jangly guitar of a Beatles song filled the car.

  I sat back in my seat and crossed my arms again, but the sulk that made my bottom lip poke out began to diminish as the interplay of rhythm and melody seeped into me, lifting my spirit even as I tried to keep it tethered to the ground. John, Paul and George were strumming, Ringo was banging away and despite the sometimes depressing views outside my window, my life was pretty good. I could sit and sulk, like the kid I was trying to prove I wasn’t, or I could take this opportunity for a fresh start with Edwin. Now that we’d cleared the air between us, at least a little, I could appreciate why he hadn’t slept with me, even if it had ruined my plan.

  My foot began jumping of its own accord and my fingers tapped against my elbows, hitting notes on invisible guitar strings.

  “I tried to learn this song once, and I just couldn’t get it right, no matter how many variations I tried.” I hope he recognized my music talk for the olive branch that it was. “Arden walked in on me one day and laughed because I hadn’t realized that this part—” I paused and bounced in my seat as a complicated arpeggio trilled through the car “—was actually a recording being played backward.”

  My seat dancing came to an abrupt halt when Edwin jammed his finger into the search button, filling the car with static. When I looked at him, his hands gripped the wheel hard. His m
outh was a grim line and little crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes showed the footprints of some deep-seated pain.

  “Are you not a fan of the White Album?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

  His hands squeezed the cracked plastic of the steering wheel. “That was one of Claudio’s favorite songs. I just... I can’t.”

  The white noise emanating from the radio station seemed to pick up the broadcast of his despair, transmitting the emotion so that it filled the cab of the truck. I felt nearly suffocated by it; I wanted to hold my breath like I used to do as a child when we drove past the local cemetery, to keep the bad luck out.

  Unlike Arden, Edwin had always been positive that his family had survived the Flare. Unlike Arden, he’d been wrong. New York City hadn’t fared well during the blackout. Even though they’d had a larger law enforcement presence and more resources, the population was too large and the resources too few and far between. Millions had survived, but thousands had also died in the panic and food shortages that had followed the Flare. Edwin’s mother and brother had been in the latter group.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No worries. You couldn’t have known. It’s just...some days are better than others. All of this back-to-school stuff is making me think of him a lot, so hearing that particular song really—” He stopped and took a deep breath. “Claudio never went to college, but he worked his ass off to make sure I could without my mom having to pay for it. That sounds like an after-school special, right?”

  “After-school special? What’s that, some kind of weird sex act?”