Chapter 19 A Combination of Brayden and Brody #2
“Then I’ll act out because I’ll know he’s unhappy. He won’t say it—he’ll never say it—but I’ll feel every little moment when I disappoint him, and I’ll hurt him. Because that’s how I am, right?” She faced me, her eyes wild and frenzied.
“Stop it, Laurel,” I choked out. The tears burned behind my eyes. I hated watching her crumble like this.
“Charley knows. I’m selfish, right? I’m selfish and dramatic, and not built to be with another person. Not for forever. Not someone like Petey.”
Ethan’s eyes were darting between his view of us in the mirror and the road. “Charley doesn’t think that, Lo. I promise she doesn’t.”
“Well, then she’s as delusional as our mother.”
I fell deeper into my seat, debilitated by her jab and mortified that Ethan was here to witness it.
This was the problem with having sisters. They’d been there from the beginning. They knew your strengths, your weaknesses, and they knew how to deliver the fatal blow before you could even spot it coming.
“Enough, Laurel,” Ethan told her in the voice he used for rowdy tweens at the Donut Barn. “You’re drunk. You’re going to regret saying all of this tomorrow.”
But she wasn’t interested in his words of caution. “You’ve met our parents, right? Their marriage is a joke. We’d’ve been better off if they’d never pretended they were capable of doing anything besides disappointing each other. Now we’re cursed.”
“We’re not cursed,” I butted in, because now I was pissed. “Mom loves trying to make a bad thing work and so do you apparently. If you would actually date someone who makes sense for you—”
“Like you and that Owen guy?” Laurel hiccupped. “You’ll find a way to ruin it. It’s what we do. We’re ruiners.”
“That’s sweet, Lo,” Ethan spat, putting the van into park in front of my dormitory.
Every part of my body was clenched. My jaw.
My toes. My hands were fisted so tightly, my fingernails had pressed half-moons into my palms. I wanted Laurel to stop saying these things, but even more than that, I wanted them not to be true.
Was I going to ruin things with Perfectly Nice Owen simply by being a Beekman woman?
Doomed to be deserted or to disappear into an unequal relationship?
Ethan slid open Laurel’s door, and I wanted to say something that would halt time. Turn it backward. Undo all the things we’d done and said that had placed us in this exact spot in front of the sidewalk where a nineteen-year-old stranger was vomiting into a bush.
“I’m not being mean. I’m being honest,” Laurel said, digging through her purse for the pack of American Spirits she only smoked when she rode this particular level of intoxication.
Ethan unbuckled Laurel and pulled her out of her seat. “Said every mean person ever. You’re lucky you’re basically a sister to me, because I’m tempted to drive off with Charley and leave you on the curb to fend for yourself.”
She fumbled with her Zippo lighter. “Someone needs to look after her once you’re gone, and it’s not going to be Owen.”
I would’ve assumed her words were the ramblings of a drunken fool if not for the way Ethan’s face crumpled.
“What’s she talking about?” I asked, climbing out onto the sidewalk.
She rubbed her bare arms in an attempt to ward off the inevitable shiver. “The tour thingy,” she muttered, cigarette flapping between her lips.
Apprehension slithered up my neck. My body knew something was happening, but it didn’t know what.
Ethan grabbed my hand. “I was gonna tell you,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Shit. Did I fuck up?” Laurel asked, chastened.
“Yes,” he scolded, just as I said, “No, you’re fine.”
“I’m gonna smoke this where it’s warm,” Laurel interjected, looking between us and backing away in the direction of the heated bus shelter fifteen feet away.
“I wanted to tell you when we could talk. In private. I told my parents about the tour, like you said. It turns out, they’ve been thinking about closing the shop for a while.
They knew it wasn’t my dream, but they didn’t want to sell it out from under me if I didn’t have another plan.
” His eyes darted all over my face like he was desperate to decipher my expression.
I didn’t even know what I was thinking, so I couldn’t imagine what my face was doing.
So much for being a clock.
I kept my voice light when I said, “I’m so happy for you.”
His face changed, like I’d said something unexpected, disappointing even, but I couldn’t tell how. He let go of my hand, stuffing his into his pockets. “Yeah?”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.” And it was true. I loved Ethan enough to want more for him than Lewellen. “When do you leave?”
“Thursday.”
“That’s soon. Not as bad as that time I skipped town the next day, but…” I forced my mouth to smile as a tear fell on my cheek. “We’re always dramatically leaving each other, huh?”
“I guess we are. Will you email me? Like before?” He rocked on his heels, waiting for my response.
“All the time,” I said. “I might call you occasionally, if you’re lucky.”
I looked over my shoulder at Laurel and opened my mouth to make any excuse to leave this conversation, which was turning me inside out, but without warning, Ethan grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Come with me,” he said.
I blinked. “What?”
His eyes were wide and wild. He looked thirteen again. “Come on the road with me. You finished your last final yesterday. It’s perfect.”
“I have that LSAT course over break and then the spring semester starts—”
He grabbed my face in his hands. His whole body shook with a feverish energy. “Take a semester off. It’ll be like studying abroad.” His smile was so big and intoxicatingly frenetic, I wanted nothing more than to smile back.
“You usually get credits when you’re studying abroad.” I forced a laugh into my voice, an attempt to inject some sense of casualness into this increasingly uncasual conversation. What was he doing?
“Who cares about credits or LSATs? You’re an incredible photographer. Be a photographer! With me. Come with me.”
His words were the yank of a plug in a warm bath. I could feel the blood draining from my face. “What am I supposed to say to that?” I asked, my voice unsteady.
His eyes on me were too much. Too alight. Too pleading. “Say yes,” he whispered.
I’d had countless fantasies of a man holding my cheeks and begging me to “say yes.” Now it was happening with my best friend, and it sounded like more like “give up your dreams and lose yourself in mine.” My heart was splitting, soaring and sinking all at once, leaving me mangled on the sidewalk.
His smile wavered. “Please,” he begged soundlessly.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t give up my life to follow him around as he lived out his wildest dreams. I couldn’t be the woman he wanted. I didn’t want to disappear. Not with him. The only right answer echoed through my empty chest like a gong. “No.”
I ripped his hands from my cheeks, and in an instant, he backed away from me.
“What?”
Tears bit at the corners of my eyes. Mortification and shame were breathing against my neck like a monster perched on my shoulder.
I took a shallow breath, hoping my face didn’t betray how shattered I felt.
“I’m not giving up my life to follow you around like some hopeless loser until you get bored of me. ”
“It wouldn’t be like that,” he pleaded, voice cracking.
“Fuck.” He grabbed at the back of his neck, looking up at the stars as though the universe were pressing in on him, and just as I was certain he was going to explode in every direction but mine, he dropped his hands to his sides.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve…That was dumb. I’m sorry I suggested it.”
I wrapped my arms around my chest. “It’s fine.”
He swallowed hard, still looking up at the sky, then faced me again to ask, “Can we forget I said all of that? Please?”
“Of course.” I took a step forward to show him I really meant it. “Forgotten.”
His hand cradled my elbow again. It made my heart do a sad little flutter. “Will you call me? Please.”
I didn’t answer, swallowing down the lump in my throat.
“I’ll call you , then,” he said. “You don’t have to answer, but—”
“I’ll answer,” I promised.
“Good.” He nodded as though convincing himself that we really were good. “Are you going to be okay with Laurel tonight? Do you need help getting her up to your room?”
“I’ve got it from here. Thanks.”
He hesitated but then turned away from my dorm in the direction of his minivan. I tried not to watch Ethan walk away. Something told me I’d always remember it if I did, and I really didn’t want to remember that.
I plopped down next to my sister on the bus bench, gutted.
“Full disclosure,” Laurel told me through a hiccup. “I overheard the whole thing.”
“Wonderful.” I plucked her cigarette out of her mouth and threw it. “Those will kill you.”
She reached into her pack for a replacement. “Die young, leave a pretty corpse.”
“No,” I scolded her, throwing that one too. “You’re all I’ve got. You don’t get to leave me.”
She let out a sigh and pressed her head onto my shoulder. “That’s why we’re like this. So we’ll always be around for each other.”
“So you’re always going to be this big a pain in my ass?”
“Probably.” Her laugh was warm. Mollifying.
“You know nothing happens when you graduate, right? You don’t suddenly know what you’re doing or who you are.
You don’t become an adult or anything. You’re just the same shitty person, one year later, with more responsibilities and problems. My students look at me like I’m so mature, but I’m, what, five years older than they are?
I have this recurring nightmare that one of them is bagging my groceries at Cub and sees that I subsist on Welch’s Fruit Snacks and French bread pizza Lean Cuisines.
And then, suddenly, I’m a French bread pizza Lean Cuisine, and they’re, like, stuffing me in a microwave…
” She trailed off sleepily and dug her head deeper into my neck.
Then, out of nowhere, she whispered, “I think I need to talk to someone.”
“About your teenage boy diet?” I asked.
“About my brain, you idiot.”
“Like a therapist?”
“Yeah,” she hummed. She was falling asleep. “Or an astrologer.”
I pulled my head back to look at her. She was so small curled up next to me, and it was as though I was sitting with every version of my sister all at once, even the youngest Laurel I could remember.
We sat there like that until a change in the wind shifted the stench of vomit in our direction. I grunted and heaved my sister up to carry her to my dorm.
“I’m sorry he’s leaving,” Laurel murmured.
My heart panged. “Me too.”
“I’m sorry I called you a bitch back in his van.”
“I don’t think you did.”
“Oh. That’s good.” She yawned. “I love you, Char Char.”
“I love you too,” I told her, because I did, and it felt good to have someone stick around long enough to let me love them close up.