Chapter 19 A Combination of Brayden and Brody
A Combination of Brayden and Brody
Eight Years Ago
It’d been two weeks since Ethan and I ran out of gas and Owen Twombley pilfered me pretzel buns like a man obsessed.
Though I was still swept up in his new affections, Owen was, at present, in Albuquerque for a student government summit.
What was supposed to be my low-key weekend of laundry and Survivor had been upended by my postgrad sister whisking into town, newly single and ready to mingle.
Whatever overtures Petey had made the week prior did not go to plan.
Their flickering bulb of a relationship was off at the moment, so Laurel was falling into old patterns.
“I’m single!” she yelled into the mouth of Theta Delta’s shot luge.
We were on a fraternity porch precariously close to an indoor couch that’d been left in the rain since the Clinton administration.
A poorly mixed mashup of “Hotline Bling” poured out the windows and onto the lawn of shivering women in bandage dresses and cold-shoulder tops.
Laurel swallowed her vodka shot and let out a woo.
“Charley, take a shot! Shot. Shot. Shot,” she chanted, pumping her arm in a way that inspired the surrounding randoms to chant too.
I shook my head. “I’m not having a Christmas Story moment on a frozen liquor trough tonight.”
“Boo.” She threw her thumbs down with gusto, and, dear god, people were following.
I tugged on her puffer jacket sleeve and dragged her to the edge of the porch. “Stop that. We’re at a fraternity. These people are very susceptible to chants. They’ll repeat anything.”
“I’m single, and you’re ruining it,” she said, pouting.
“How? By not being blackout at nine p.m.?”
“By being judgy. You’re always so judgy.”
“I’m not…” I didn’t finish, because I was judging her right then and instantly felt guilty for it. “Let me find our ride back to the dorms. I made brownies.”
“Magic?”
“No. Caramel.”
She pumped her fist and murmured approvingly.
Just then, Ethan appeared on the trampled lawn.
“I don’t know what a ‘frat emergency’ is,” he said, jumping up the front steps two at a time and sidling up next to me with a gentle cup of my elbow, “but I didn’t like the sound of it. I broke at least four traffic laws to get here. Also, I’m parked in a fire lane, so we gotta move.”
“Of course she called you,” my sister mumbled. “She always calls you. God forbid she be alone with me for two minutes.”
I pressed my eyes shut. “Laurel, you’re drunk.”
“Let me get my bag, Mom . Then you can ground me for as long as you want.” She ambled back into the debauchery while the base of my skull buzzed with irritation and dread.
“My god,” I moaned.
Ethan’s elbow knocked mine. “Hey, can we talk?”
“Uh, sure.” I nodded, not sure what to make of a surprise can we talk? “Let’s get Laurel home. Then maybe we can go somewhere?”
“Good. Yeah.” His eyebrows curled into this worried-Labrador-retriever expression.
We waited on the porch as coeds spilled in and out of the door with the sounds of a booming bass line. Ethan wasn’t saying anything. He looked nervous. Was he nervous?
I pulled out my phone, a reflex to feeling any social discomfort. Mixed in with the H&M promotional emails and unopened daily digests from the New York Times I’d resolved to start reading at the beginning of 2015 was an email notification from a name I saw biannually.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Norway album
Charley girl—
Surprise! We moved to Norway! We’re with a research team following humpback whales. Absolutely incredible. Album attached. Can you ask your sister if it would kill her to respond to a message now and again?
—Mom and Dad
I typed up a quick response, sidestepping all talk of Laurel in favor of a school update she didn’t ask for.
Before I hit send, I opened the attachments.
There were a handful of stills my dad clearly had taken—action shots of whales flopping into the dark ocean, spraying water all around them like an explosion of stars—but the rest were photos from my mom’s iPhone.
Derek laughing with some man in coveralls, one hand clapping the man’s shoulder and the other clutching a tall glass of beer.
Derek wearing a camera on his shoulder, balancing over the edge of a fishing boat, his eyes slits as he concentrated on his mammoth subject.
Derek with his crew, pointing into the middle distance with an expression so self-important he gave candids of James Cameron a run for their money.
My mom wasn’t in the pictures, and I couldn’t help but pick apart the way she’d disappeared into my dad’s life after he’d failed to be a part of ours. It was the only way for them to be together: someone had to recede.
I pressed send and closed out the window, feeling that particular brand of anxiety that swirled in my gut when I tugged on that thin piece of thread that still connected me to them, despite the way our entirely separate lives hardly ever crossed anymore.
With my parents, I’d always be loose change at the bottom of their pockets: valuable enough to keep carrying but never prized enough to account for.
“You good?” Ethan asked.
I nodded without registering the question as I leaned my head through the front door in search of my sister. My eyes snagged on her chatting up some random dude who was lying on a stained sectional with two missing cushions. “One sec,” I told Ethan before torpedoing down the hall.
I grabbed Laurel by the elbow. Her coat was nowhere to be found. It looked as though she’d wandered in to stay awhile with Fratty McFratterson. The hulking dude was wearing shorts with embroidered lobsters in the middle of December for chrissakes.
“Laurel, we’re going. Come on.” I didn’t realize how drunk Laurel was until I watched her stand up. She was wobblier than a baby giraffe finding its legs.
“I’m Broden.” Lobster Man extended his hand to me.
I sighed out a breath, because apparently I was about to exchange words with the man Laurel had targeted specifically to piss me off. “Broden. What an original name—”
“It’s a combination of Brayden and Brody,” he explained.
“Cool.” My smile was more a presentation of teeth than a display of genuine kindness.
I gave him a once-over, checking for distinctive scars I could use to describe him in a future police report.
Broden was doughy and bloated in a fairly unremarkable way, but he had the full, pouty lips of a man who would open a credit card in your name, which, apart from Petey, was exactly Laurel’s type. “Laur, shall we?”
She didn’t respond. All of her faculties were dedicated to removing the baseball cap from Broden’s head and putting it on her own, a drunk-girl pre-mating ritual I knew well.
When she finally responded, the sentence flowed out in cursive, each letter curling right into the next.
“Broden was telling me about his intramural Frisbee team.”
I boxed the guy out to face Laurel and Laurel alone. “Can you not do the thing you always do, for once in our lives, please?”
“What the hell does that mean?” She dropped her hand from his chest like I’d struck her.
My remorseful eyes shot up to the ceiling. “Sorry, it’s just…you said you’d leave, so let’s leave.”
She muttered something under her breath but still followed me out the door.
We piled into the back of the minivan, Ethan in the front seat flashing his hazards, the don’t-ask-for-permission-ask-for-forgiveness of parking maneuvers.
“Charley, stop,” she whined, fighting me off as I shoved her into the back seat. “I can’t find my phone, and I won’t leave without it.” She tapped her screen with one eye pinched shut. “I’ll call Broden so he can bring it out to me.”
“Your phone is in your hand, Lo,” Ethan said, checking his blind spot on his way out of the fire lane. “Whose hat is that? Brenden’s?”
“ Bro den’s,” Laurel and I said simultaneously, even though it filled me with an irrational fury that I knew the proper pronunciation of the name of a guy who was dressed like a Massachusetts Easter brunch.
“Where’s your coat?” he asked.
“She’s fine,” I answered for her. “She’s got her liquor jacket on.” I fastened her seat belt with a sharp click.
“Edith!” She shot up, meeting the resistance of the seat belt strap. “We have to go back! That coat was a perfect Goodwill find. Irreplaceable!”
I pressed her down by the shoulder, but she bounced right back up like a toddler on a trampoline. “Once we find my coat, we can stop by the other party,” she shouted through the van. Despite her valiant attempts at speaking at a reasonable volume, Laurel was drunkenly overshooting it.
“He’s not here this weekend,” Ethan cut in from the driver’s seat.
“Who’s not here?” she asked innocently, but, suddenly, the whole night—floating from sports bar to sports bar, pounding shots all the way to Greek Row, always scanning the room over my shoulder—was coming into perfect clarity.
“Pete’s been in Edmonton since Wednesday,” he told her, his voice sympathetic. “What happened with him, Lo? He wants to make it work.”
“ I wanted to make the best of the time we have left. He’s the one who wanted to cut it off now.”
“Couldn’t you try long distance?” he asked her.
“He doesn’t actually want to be in a long-distance relationship with me. He just thinks he does.”
“You don’t know what he wants,” I argued, not because I felt defensive of Petey but because I was sick of Laurel blazing into my life and upending it like the Cat in the Hat with a bleached-blond shag (her current hairstyle of choice).
“So he can be handcuffed to his phone every second he’s not on the ice in case I’m available for mutually unsatisfying FaceTime sex?
Or so I can feel trapped in my room in the apartment I share with three other broke teachers?
And then he can grow to resent me for never having time off to travel to his games? ”
Her voice was a hard, bitter thing, but the words kept tumbling out of her. Boulders down a hill.