Article 5

An acidic taste crept up my throat. It seemed unthinkable that he would follow such a ridiculous rule, but his compliance made the transformation seem even more real. The thought that Chase had changed so quickly after being drafted made me feel like I’d never really known him at all.

I was beginning to think that maybe I’d gotten the wrong impression of Tucker, and that any hope I’d harbored for the return of my old Chase was about as likely as me going back home and finishing high school. But these thoughts felt just as wrong as what Chase was telling me now.

“So my CO—my commanding officer—made Tucker and me partners. He told me I couldn’t make rank until he passed all his courses.”

“And that’s what you wanted?” I spouted. “To move up?” I tried to picture Chase as MM leadership, calling the shots in an overhaul, charging people for Article violations. He couldn’t be that heartless, could he?

“Got to be good at something.” The sound of his voice was as foreign as the look on his face when he’d taken my mother away. I shivered.

“He didn’t go down without a fight. Fought me a few times at first. Then he started fighting everyone. He fought so much that the other guys harassed him just to see him lose it. Like it was funny.”

I tried to ignore the wave of pity I felt for Tucker.

“The officers even got into it. They started setting up matches for him after drills at the boxing ring on the base. Word spread. Lots of guys came to place bets. If they bet on Tucker, they usually won. That’s when our CO got it in his head that Tucker would be good leadership material.”

“How’s that?” I asked, confused. “I thought they hated him.”

He shrugged. “Maybe they did at first. But when he fought they started to see the soldier he could be. Vicious. Unstoppable. But still too much of a liability.”

Chase cleared his throat then and scowled, and I felt a wash of relief that he seemed to struggle with this concept. There was still some humanity inside of him.

“Our CO offered him a deal. If he would just dedicate himself, work hard, be the damn poster boy for the FBR, then they would stop the fights. They’d put him on the fast track to captain, which normally takes years, but they were going to make it happen in months if he just played nice.

“It was a double bind. The harder he pushed, the more they wanted him. The more he conformed, the more they wanted him. He couldn’t win. They started rigging the fights, to try to break him….” He trailed off.

“How?” I asked.

“Nothing terrible,” he said, the color in his face rising. “Sometimes they’d make him run before a fight. Or wouldn’t let him eat that day. They started setting him up with bigger guys. He got knocked around a lot more and… it got worse. He quit trying. He took their deal. After that he didn’t really have anything to fight for.”

Nothing terrible. Right.

I chewed my lip, quietly making sense of the last few minutes. Feeling a fresh sense of grief for not one, but two good people.

“He’s jealous of you.”

“What?” Chase’s head shot up.

“Tucker’s jealous. You got out. You’re free. He doesn’t want you to have what he can’t.”

Chase considered this.

“What I don’t get,” I said slowly, “is why you’re jealous of him.”

“Why would I be jealous of him?” Chase blinked, taken aback.

“I don’t know. Maybe because all you wanted to do was move up, but he was the one chosen.”

“He paid for it.” Chase’s shoulders rose an inch.

“I know, that’s the part I don’t get,” I said. “It’s pretty sick to be jealous of someone that was practically tortured. Even if he did want to be a soldier….”

“He didn’t!” Chase said with sudden vehemence, slamming his fist down on the table. My spine straightened.

Silence.

A heavy sigh escaped between my teeth.

“I thought you said Tucker wasn’t drafted. That he enlisted.”

Chase’s eyes were dark and indecipherable. He looked right at me, but he wasn’t seeing me.

“Right… he enlisted…. I only meant that he didn’t adjust well.”

I lowered my eyes to the fist that had banged the table. I watched the way the gnarled knuckles couldn’t quite straighten.

His hands hadn’t been like that last year, had they? I would have remembered. They’d been calloused but still soft when he’d touched my face, gentle when they’d run through my hair. They were rough now. Fighter’s hands.

And just like that, all the mixed emotions I’d felt for the two soldiers during this story—the pity, shame, and anger—were tossed into the air like bingo balls, jumbled chaotically, and then suddenly reassigned to their rightful places.

Tucker, the career soldier. Chase, the broken rebel.

Once, soon after Roy had left, my mother and I had gotten into a horrible fight; the worst we’d ever had. It was about the same thing. How I’d made him leave after he’d hit her, how I should have minded my own business.

I hadn’t known what to do. I’d hated her for saying those things, for blaming me for Roy leaving, even though she was right: I’d made him go. I hated that she couldn’t see how terrible he had been and how I’d saved her—us —from more of the same danger. But when I looked at her red, swollen eyes, all of that fury burned into something different. I just felt terribly sorry for her. So I’d gathered her in my arms and squeezed her as tightly as I could and told her that we were both going to be okay. She fell apart, but I was right. We were both okay.

I had the overwhelming urge to do the same for Chase now. To hold him so tightly his ribs hurt. To tell him we’d both be okay. I didn’t though. Maybe because I still didn’t trust him. Maybe because I didn’t trust myself. The truth was, even if I held him now, even if he’d let me and he did fall to pieces, I would have no idea how to put him back together. I had no idea if any of us, my mother included, would be okay.

“You were right about the double bind,” I said softly.

He stood too quickly, the chair tipping and cracking against the floor behind him.

“No, wait.” I didn’t want him to leave, but I didn’t know what else to say.

And just like that, the gate closed. His eyes dulled, his mouth relaxed, and the connection that had just threatened to build between us disappeared.

Without another word, he grabbed his coat off the chair and was out the door.

“Chase,” I called, but my voice had little volume.

I sat down at the kitchen table and clicked off the static hum from the radio. Absently, I traced the thin, raised welts on the backs of my hands and I thought about his hands, and how deeply the wounds beneath some scars ran.

* * *

“DO you miss them?”

I regretted asking when he hesitated.

“Yes.”

“It was really awful, wasn’t it? The accident I mean. I-I’m sorry, that was a terrible thing to say.” I chewed my fingernails.

“No, not terrible. I just…” He scratched his head. “I’ve never actually talked about it.”

I remembered the police knocking on our door. Telling my mother what had happened. They had needed someone familiar to wait with Chase until his uncle arrived from Chicago. I remembered the tears that had stained his innocent face.

At fourteen, Chase had lost everything.

“I was so sad for you,” I told him. I thought of how his mother would let me braid her thick, black hair. How it stayed in place even without a tie. His father used to pat my head and call me “kiddo.”

“My sister was a nightmare,” Chase said, and laughed a little. “She was a little better after she