Chapter 13 #5
Middle school had been particularly rough for Rowan.
Some of the nastier boys had found out about his touch aversion and would sneak up on him and grab his arm, ruffle his hair, or poke the back of his neck.
To most of the teachers, it looked harmless, but it would leave Rowan shaking for the rest of the day.
He had tried to hide it for a while. He felt like he’d caused his moms enough trouble in elementary school, when he’d needed near constant interventions.
As he’d gotten older, he’d learned how to avoid the other kids, and though it meant he spent a lot of his childhood alone, it had seemed worth it at the time.
None of his tricks worked against outright bullying, though.
Things kept getting worse and worse until one day, Ruben found him crying in the locker room during gym class.
At first, Rowan thought Ruben was just going to pretend he hadn’t seen anything.
He left the locker room to return to his large group of friends, and they didn’t speak about it on the bus ride home.
The next day, however, Rowan spotted him sneaking into the showers while everyone else was running laps.
Again, they said nothing to their sisters or moms about it, but the next day, when the bullies showed up with horribly dyed black hair, Ruben confronted them with his wall of friends behind him.
They teased and taunted the boys for their horrible dye jobs, and they never messed with Rowan again.
“No, there’s no need to get hair dye. Or stink bombs. Or laxative chocolate chip cookies.”
Ruben laughed, a short, surprised thing. The memory was so ridiculous, Rowan couldn’t keep a small smile off his face, either. When Ruben saw it, he hopped off the couch and joined Rowan at the island.
“For the last time, I told you not to eat those cookies! They were a gift.”
“And for the last time, gifts are supposed to be good things, and they weren’t on the plate, so I thought they were extras.”
Ruben shrugged one shoulder and swiped a strawberry out of the carton.
“I made too many, and it was a gift. That jackass ditched you at homecoming for one of my piece of shit friends. Seeing the two of them have to leave their finals to go shit their brains out would’ve been a great gift for you, but then you had to go and tell our moms.”
“I thought I was dying!”
“You did have a pretty strong reaction… I guess it was good that I didn’t give them the plate. If they’d eaten as many as I made, they may have ended up in the hospital, which, despite them being two-timing asshats, I guess they wouldn’t have deserved.”
“Wow,” Rowan said, avoiding looking at his brother by bringing the strawberries to the sink to wash. “I think that might be the first time I’ve ever heard you show remorse over one of your old pranks”
“Pranks? Justice? Who can say?” Ruben followed Rowan and ran his strawberry under the tap. “But I do show remorse sometimes. I apologized for last night.”
Rowan had to consciously keep his fingers from clenching around the strawberry carton. “You did.”
The words were right on the tip of his tongue.
He wanted to ask if Ruben was sorry for jumping the gun with their family.
He wanted to ask if he was sorry for once again stealing the spotlight away from what should have been one of the rare, momentous moments in Rowan’s life but was now just going to be an afterthought in Ruben’s story.
And he knew—truly, he did—that it was beyond childish, but part of him wanted to know if Ruben was sorry for the distance that had grown between them after everything went down in high school.
He wasn’t even mad about the competition anymore.
It had been an accident, no matter how poorly timed.
He just wished that he’d had his brother to turn to afterwards.
Was the same thing going to happen again? He’d been so worried about Ray and Milo, but what was going to happen if things didn’t work out with Ray and Ruben, but Rowan stayed with Milo?
How was it that he was now dreading having to watch his family once again flock to Ruben’s side, while Rowan merely stood on the sidelines, but he also desperately didn’t want to lose his brother?
He didn’t expect Ruben to be able to answer these questions any more than Rowan could, so he said nothing. He simply nodded when Ruben asked if he could have a donut.
When Ruben broke it in half and gave Rowan the bigger piece, he did manage another small smile.
Growing up, the rule had been whoever cut the dessert didn’t get to pick the first piece, so they would often compete to see how evenly they could cut things.
In high school, Ruben had gotten lazy with his cuts, but Rowan would always let him have the bigger piece.
When had things changed yet again?
Ruben leaned back against the counter, keeping the perfect amount of distance between them so Rowan could lay the strawberries out on a paper towel without risking bumping into him.
When he dropped a few donut crumbs on the floor, he stooped over and pressed his index finger against each individual crumb until they were all cleaned up.
It seemed like a lot had changed since they were kids, and a lot more was still to come.