Without Merit Read online

  I can feel the color drain from my face at that sentence. All the color in my body--in this ridiculous moment with this random guy--pools at my feet, leaving me feeling like the second-rate carbon copy of Honor Voss. My twin sister. The girl who is obviously on the other end of that phone call.

  I cover my face with my hand and turn around, grabbing my shoes and my sack. I hope I can put as much distance between us as possible before he figures out that the girl he just kissed isn't Honor.

  I can't believe this is happening. I just kissed my sister's boyfriend.

  I didn't do it on purpose, obviously. I had a feeling she had just recently started seeing someone because she's been gone a lot, but out of all the guys in the world, how was I supposed to know this particular guy was him? I continue to rush away but I can't get far enough before I hear him running after me. "Hey!" he calls out.

  This is why he was watching me in the store. He thought I was her. It's why he asked why I wasn't in school, because if he knows Honor well enough to kiss her, he knows Honor would never skip school.

  It all makes sense now. This wasn't some random connection between two strangers. This was him mistaking me for his girlfriend and me being a complete fool for not immediately realizing what was happening.

  I feel his hand grip my elbow. I have no choice but to turn and face him because I need to make it clear that Honor can never find out about this. When our eyes meet, he's no longer looking at me like I fascinate him. He's staring at his phone and then me and then his phone and then, "I am so sorry," he says. "I thought you were . . ."

  "You thought wrong," I snap, even though it was an honest mistake.

  Honor and I are identical but if he knew my twin sister at all, he should know she would never be caught dead in public looking like I look right now. I'm not wearing makeup, my hair is a mess, and my clothes are left over from yesterday.

  He slides his phone back in his pocket but it begins to ring again. When he pulls it out, I can see Honor's name flashing across the screen. I grab his phone and swipe my finger across the screen. "Hey."

  "Merit?" Honor laughs. "What's going on? Why are you with Sagan?"

  Sagan? Even his name is perfect.

  "I'm not. I just . . . bumped into him. He thought I was you but then you called and . . . let's just say he was confused." I say all this while staring directly at Sagan. He keeps his eyes locked on mine and doesn't even try to take the phone away from me.

  Honor laughs again. "That's funny. I wish I could have seen his face."

  "It was priceless," I deadpan. "But you should know to warn your boyfriend that you have an identical twin." I hand the phone back to Sagan. I back away a few steps and he's holding the phone in his hand, unable to take his eyes off me. "Do not repeat what just happened to her," I whisper. "To anyone. Ever."

  He nods, albeit hesitantly. As soon as I have confirmation that he won't repeat this to Honor, I turn and walk away. Nothing could ever top this level of embarrassment. Nothing.

  Chapter Two

  I am such a fool.

  But God, it was so beautifully unexpected. His intensity caught me off guard but the second he kissed me I was a goner. He tasted like mint and he was so warm, and then the water was splashing us and it was a sensory overload that I wanted to be an overdose. I wanted it all. I wanted to feel everything. That unexpected kiss made me feel alive for the first time in . . . actually, I'm not sure I've ever felt that way.

  Which is exactly why I didn't come to the realization that he thought he was kissing Honor. While that random kiss meant a lot to me, it was nothing new to him. He probably kisses Honor like that all the time.

  Which is confusing, because he seemed to be . . . healthy. Not Honor's type, normally.

  Speaking of Honor.

  I turn on my blinker and reach for my phone on the second ring. It's odd that she's calling me. We never call each other. When I come to the stop sign, I answer it with a lazy, "Hey."

  "Are you still with Sagan?" Honor asks.

  I close my eyes and release a tiny bit of air. I don't have much to spare after that kiss back there. "No."

  She sighs. "Weird. He's not answering his phone now. I'll try calling him back."

  "Okay."

  I'm about to hang up when she says, "Hey. Why aren't you in school right now?"

  I sigh. "Wasn't feeling well so I left."

  "Oh. Okay. See you tonight."

  "Honor, wait," I say before she ends the call. "What's . . . is something wrong with Sagan?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know. Are you with him because . . . is he dying?"

  It's quiet for a moment. But then I can hear the irritation in her voice when she says, "Jesus, Merit. Of course not. You can be a real bitch sometimes." The line goes dead. I look down at the phone.

  I wasn't trying to insult her. I'm genuinely curious if that's why she's dating him. She hasn't had a single boyfriend with an average life span since she started dating Kirk at thirteen. She's still heartbroken over the way that relationship left her feeling like she was choking on scar tissue.

  Kirk was a nice farm boy. He drove a tractor, baled hay, knew how to flip an electrical breaker, and once fixed the transmission of a car that my father couldn't even fix himself.

  About a month before we turned fifteen and two weeks after Honor lost her virginity to Kirk, his father found Kirk lying on the ground in the middle of their pasture, semi-conscious and bleeding. Kirk had fallen off the tractor, which ran over him, injuring his right arm. Although the injury wasn't life-threatening, while receiving treatment for the injury, the erudite doctor sought answers as to why Kirk might have fallen off the tractor to begin with. Turns out, Kirk had suffered a seizure as the result of a tumor that had been growing in his brain.

  "Possibly since infancy," said the doctor.

  Kirk lived three more months. The entire three months he lived, my sister rarely left his side. Honor was the first and last girl he loved, and the last person Kirk saw before taking his final breath.

  Honor developed an unhealthy affliction as a result of her first love dying from a tumor that had been growing in his brain, possibly since infancy. Honor found it almost impossible to love any boy after who was of average health and normal life span. She spends most days and nights in online chat rooms for the terminally ill, falling madly in love with boys who have an average life expectancy of six months or less. Although our town is a bit too small to provide Honor with an ample supply of ailing suitors, Dallas is less than a two-hour drive away. With the number of hospitals devoted to terminal illnesses, at least two boys have been within driving distance to Honor. During their last few weeks on earth, Honor spent their remaining days by their sides, determined to be the last person they saw and the last girl they loved before taking their final breaths.

  Because of her obsession with being loved eternally by the terminally ill, I'm curious what has drawn her to this Sagan guy. Based on her relationship history, I think it's fair of me to have assumed he was terminally ill, but apparently, that assumption makes me a bitch.

  I pull into my driveway, relieved I'm the only one here. If you don't count the permanent resident in the basement. I grab my sack with the trophy in it. Had I known at the antiques store that I was about to experience the most humiliating event in all my seventeen years, I would have bought every trophy they had. I would have had to use Dad's emergency credit card, but it would have been well worth it.

  I glance at the marquee as I make my way across the yard. A day hasn't passed since we moved in that my brother, Utah, hasn't updated the marquee with the same promptness and precision that he gives to every other aspect of his life.

  He wakes at approximately 6:20 a.m. every day, showers at 6:30 a.m., makes two green smoothies, one for him and one for Honor at 6:55 every morning. (If she doesn't have them made, first.) By 7:10 he's dressed and headed to the marquee to update the daily message. At approximately 7:30 every morning, he gives our little br
other an annoying pep talk and then he leaves for school, or, if it's a weekend, he heads to the gym to work out where he walks for forty-five minutes at a level five on the treadmill, followed by one-hundred push-ups and two-hundred sit-ups.

  Utah doesn't like spontaneity. Despite the common phrase, Utah does not expect the unexpected. He expects only the expected. He does not like the unexpected.

  He didn't like it when our parents divorced several years ago. He didn't like it when our father remarried. And he especially didn't like it when we were told our new stepmother was pregnant.

  But he does, in fact, like our half brother that came as a result of said pregnancy. Moby Voss is hard not to like. Not because of his personality, per se, but because he's four. Four-year-old children are fairly liked across the board.

  Today the message on the marquee reads "You can't hum while holding your nose closed."

  It's true. I tried it when I read it this morning and I even try it again as I walk toward the double cedar front doors of our house.

  I can say with certainty that we live in the most unusual house in this whole town. I say house because it is certainly not a home. And inside this house are seven of the most unusual occupants. No one would be able to determine from the outside of our house that our family of seven includes an atheist, a home wrecker, an ex-wife suffering from a severe case of agoraphobia, and a teenage girl whose weird obsession borders on necrophilia.

  No one would be able to determine any of that from inside our house, either. We're good at keeping secrets in this family.

  Our house is located just off an oil top county road in a microscopic Northeast Texas town. The building we live in was once the highest attended church in our tiny town, but it's been our house since my father, Barnaby Voss, purchased the fledgling church and closed its doors to the patrons indefinitely. Which explains why we have a marquee in our front yard.

  My father is an atheist, although that isn't at all why he chose to purchase the foreclosed house of worship and rip it from the hands of the people. No, God had no say in that matter.

  He bought the church and closed the doors simply because he absolutely, vehemently, without doubt, hated Pastor Brian's dog, and subsequently, Pastor Brian.

  Wolfgang was a massive black Lab who was impressive in size and bark, but lacked a great deal of common sense. If dogs were classified into high school cliques, Wolfgang would most definitely be head of the jocks. A loud, obnoxious dog that spent at least seven of the eight precious hours of sleep my father needed each night barking incessantly.

  Years ago, we had the unfortunate distinction of being Wolfgang's neighbor when we lived in the house behind the church. My parent's bedroom window overlooked the back property of the church, which also doubled as Wolfgang's stomping grounds, in which he stomped quite regularly, mostly during the hours my father would rather Wolfgang have been sleeping. But Wolfgang didn't like to be told what to do or when to sleep. In fact, he did the exact opposite of what anyone wanted him to do.

  Pastor Brian had purchased Wolfgang when he was just a pup, not a week after a group of local teens broke into his church and stole the week's tithe. Pastor Brian felt that a dog on the premises would deter future robberies. However, Pastor Brian knew very little in the way of training a dog, much less a dog with the intellect of a high school football jock. So for the first year of Wolfgang's existence, the dog had very little interaction with humans outside of his master. Being that Wolfgang got the short end of the stick when it came to intellect and interaction, all of his boundless energy and curiosity were placed solely on the unsuspecting, and possibly undeserving, victim who occupied the property directly behind the church. My father, Barnaby Voss.

  My father had not been a fan of Wolfgang's since the moment they became acquainted. He prohibited me and my siblings from interacting with the dog, and it was not uncommon for us to overhear my father threatening to murder Wolfgang under his breath. And at the top of his lungs.

  My father may not be a believer in the Lord, but he is an avid believer in karma. As much as he fantasized about murdering Wolfgang, he did not want the murder of an animal hanging over his head. Even if that animal was the worst he'd ever encountered.

  Wolfgang's feelings were mutual, or so it was assumed by the way Wolfgang spent the better part of his life barking and growling at my father, inconsiderate to whether it was day or night or weeknight or weekend, only occasionally distracted by a rogue squirrel.

  Dad tried everything over the years to put an end to the incessant harassment, from earplugs, to cease and desist warnings, to barking right back at Wolfgang for three hours straight after a Friday evening of consuming three glasses more than his usual evening glass of wine. He attempted all of these things to no avail. In fact, my father was so desperate for a peaceful night's sleep, he once spent an entire summer attempting to befriend Wolfgang in hopes that the barking would eventually cease.

  It didn't.

  Nothing worked, and from the looks of it, nothing would ever work, because Pastor Brian cared for Wolfgang a significant deal more than he cared for his neighbor, Barnaby Voss. Unfortunately for Pastor Brian, his fledgling church was at an all-time financial low while my father's used car lot and thirst for revenge were at an all-time high.

  My father made a bid the bank couldn't refuse and one Pastor Brian could not himself raise the funds to match. It helped that my father also threw in quite a deal on a used Volvo for the loan officer in charge of the church's foreclosure.

  When Pastor Brian announced to his congregation that he'd lost a bidding war to my father, and that my father would be closing the doors to the public and moving our entire family into the church, our family became fodder for gossip. And it hasn't subsided since.

  After signing the closing papers almost five years ago, my father gave Pastor Brian and Wolfgang two days to vacate the premises. It took them three. But on the fourth night, after our family moved into the church, my father slept thirteen hours straight.

  Pastor Brian was forced to relocate his Sunday sermons, but with divine intervention on his side, it took no more than just one day to find an alternate venue. He reopened a week later in an upscale barn that was used by a deacon to house his collection of tractors. For the first three months, the parishioners sat on bales of hay while Pastor Brian preached his sermon from a makeshift platform constructed out of plywood and pallets.

  For six solid months, Pastor Brian made it his personal mission to publicly pray for my father and his wayward soul every Sunday before dismissing church. "May he see the error of his ways," Pastor Brian and the parishioners would pray, "And return to us our house of worship . . . at an affordable price."

  This news of being at the top of Pastor Brian's prayer list was unsettling to my father, for he did not feel he had a soul, much less a wayward soul. He certainly did not want the churchgoers praying for said soul.

  Approximately seven months after we turned that old church into our family dwelling, Pastor Brian was seen driving a brand-new-to-him Cadillac convertible. The following Sunday, Barnaby Voss was coincidentally no longer a subject in Pastor Brian's passive-aggressive closing prayer.

  I was at the car lot the day my father and Pastor Brian worked out the deal. I was significantly younger than I am now, but I remember the deal as if it were yesterday. "You stop praying for my nonexistent soul and I'll knock two grand off that cherry red Cadillac."

  It's been several years since any of us have had to listen to Wolfgang bark at night, and several years since my father has greeted a morning in a foul mood. Our family has done a great deal of remodeling inside the church, but there are still three elements that prevent the dwelling from feeling unlike the house of worship it once was.

  1) The stained-glass windows.

  2) The eight-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ hanging on the east wall.

  3) The church marquee on the front lawn.

  The same marquee that remains out front all these years later, long
after my father changed the name atop the marquee from, "Crossroads Lutheran Church," to "Dollar Voss."

  He chose to name the house Dollar Voss because the church is divided into four quarters. And our last name is Voss. I wish there were a more intelligent explanation.

  I open the front doors and walk into Quarter One. It consists of the old-chapel-turned-living-area and a rather large kitchen, both remodeled to reflect their new uses, save the eight-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ on a cross still hanging on the east wall of the living room. Utah and my father worked tirelessly one summer to dismount the eight-foot-tall statue, to no avail. It appeared, after days of failed attempts to remove Him from the living room wall, that Jesus Christ's cross was an actual part of the structure of the building and could not be removed without also removing the studs and the entire east wall of the house.

  My father didn't like the idea of losing an entire wall. He enjoys the outdoors, but he is a big believer that the indoors and the outdoors should remain segregated. Instead, he made the decision that the eight-foot-tall Jesus Christ would have to remain. "It gives Quarter One a little character," he said.

  He is an atheist, which means the wall hanging is just that and nothing more to him. A wall hanging where an eight-foot-tall Jesus is the focal point. Nonetheless, I make it a point to ensure Jesus Christ is dressed to reflect the appropriate holiday. Which is why the eight-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ is currently covered in a white bedsheet. He's dressed as a ghost.

  Quarter Two, which at one time consisted of three Sunday school classrooms, has since had walls added and is now divided into six rather small bedrooms, large enough to contain one child, one twin-sized bed, and one dresser. My three siblings and I occupy four of the six bedrooms. The fifth bedroom is a guest room and the sixth bedroom is used as my father's office. Which I've never actually once seen him use.

  Quarter Three is the old dining hall turned master bedroom. It's where my father sleeps soundly for at least eight hours every night with Victoria Finney-Voss. Victoria has lived in Dollar Voss for approximately four years and two months. Three months prior to the finalization of my father's divorce from my mother and six months prior to the birth of my father's fourth and hopefully final child, Moby.