19
There was one time when we were younger—not long before they sent me away, actually—when Oliver and this boy from our school, Louis Janson, ran away for the weekend together.
Neither of them were out of the closet, but they had a weird cover story and everything in case they got caught. And here’s the sort of weird world that we live in: instead of telling our parents that they needed to go away for something to do with a school project, they decided to skip town without telling anyone (except me), and if they got caught (which they would and they did), then they’d lie and say they drove to Atlanta to meet up with a couple of girls they met online.
I got home from the library that Saturday evening, and you know how sometimes you walk into a place and you can just feel it? I walked into the house and it hit me in a single second…this weird tension.
My dad was away, I don’t know where—that wasn’t crazy unusual—but there was a man standing in our kitchen. Louis Janson’s father. He had a dark look about him.
Oliver had told me bits and pieces about how hard it was for Louis. Louis’s dad was the school’s football coach. Louis was on the wrestling squad for school, and rumors always swirled that there was a reason he played a sport where he rolled around with other guys. I remember Oliver saying that however weird our dad was about Oliver, Mr. Janson was a million times worse. As though his son’s (unconfirmed) sexuality threatened his own. But isn’t that just always the way?
As soon as I walked in, my mom and Mr. Janson stood up from the table.
“Where are they?” my mom asked, folding her arms over her chest.
I know better now, but at the time, my mouth would have pulled down a little and tightened as I swallowed nervously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Where is Oliver?” my mom demanded, walking over to me.
“How would I know?” I shrugged, and Maryanne and Beckett appeared at the doorway, observing.
“You always know,” my mother tells me.
“You’re his mother.” I pushed past her to open the fridge. “Isn’t that your job?”
She slammed it shut. “Tell me, right now.”
I turned to look at her slowly. “I. Do not. Know,” I overenunciate.
Of course I knew. I always knew. Oliver told me everything, every single thing.
And then Mr. Janson rushed me—grabbed me by the arms and held me tight enough that I’d bruise the next day.
“Where are they?” he growled.
And here’s something that would fuck me up for a real long time after this: I looked at Becks, not my mom—who, by the way, was frozen still with nerves or fear or horror, I don’t know—because she was no help. So with my eyebrows low with worry, my breath quickening, feeling a little bit in danger, I found myself looking to Beckett Lane. I didn’t know why at the time, but that wasn’t even the part that fucked me up the most. The part that really pulled a number on me was Beckett’s face, staring at Mr. Janson’s hands gripping my arm.
And I didn’t have to know how to read faces back then to know what Becks was feeling. Beck’s eyes were so dark and angry; his jaw was tight and his brow was set. He wanted to kill that man.
“You listen to me,” Mr. Janson yelled, shaking me back to his attention.
“Hey, let her go,” Beckett called over to him, but Mr. Janson kept going.
“Your piece o’ shit brother has taken my boy to some sinful hellhole, and I want you to tell me where, right now, or so help me God—”
I stared him square in the eyes and conjured up the most convincing face I knew how to make at the time. “I don’t know!” I cried, lying. “I swear it—I have no idea! I haven’t seen Oliver since yesterday morning!”
He was still gripping me, and no one was helping me, and I was worried no one would, so I remember thinking I needed to focus on the pain—think about how he was hurting my arm, and that maybe then my eyes would get teary and he’d feel bad and drop it—
And for a second, it worked. Mr. Janson’s face softened, his grip loosened, and his jaw unclenched.
“She’s lying.” Maryanne yawned from the doorway.
Beckett’s head snapped over in her direction, eyes all wide, maybe a little bit appalled, definitely a bit angry—but Maryanne didn’t even clock him, just stared over at me, holding my gaze.
“She’s lying, Mama.” She walked all the way into the kitchen, arms folded over her chest, eyebrows cocked. “I saw her last night—she was talking to Oliver in the driveway. He had a weekend bag and she hugged him goodbye.”
And then the grip was tighter again, and Mr. Janson was angrier than he was a minute ago, and he slammed me backwards into the fridge.
“Whoa—” Beckett sort of barreled toward us, but Maryanne grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt, stopping him in his tracks. I saw them exchange looks—
“Tell me where my son is, you lyin’ little bitch,” Mr. Janson spat.
“Go to hell,” I spat right back.
“Okay,” my mom says, peeling Mr. Janson’s arms off of me. “It’s time you leave—”
“Your”—here he said that word that starts with an F that bigots like him like to use sometimes—“kid’s got my boy and she knows where—”
“Get out,” my mom told him, pointing to the door. “Get out, right now. Or I swear to God himself, Nolan—I will light you up and make damn sure the whole town knows about it.”
Mr. Janson let go of me, and my mother marched him to the door, slamming it behind him. She walked back into the kitchen, and I was flooded with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for her, which was both rare and unnerving for me.
“Mom, I—” I started, but she interrupted me.
“Go to your room.”
I blinked, confused. “What?”
“Go to your room and do not even think about leaving it until your brother comes back.”
“But I—”
“You don’t think I know when you’re lying to me?” she yelled, frantic. “I always know! You think you’re so clever, Georgia, but you’re not; you’re just lyin’. Always lyin’! To cover your behind…to protect a boy who at the minute is probably going to hell anyway. You wanna protect him, you start praying for his soul to straighten out.” She pointed up the stairs. “Now go!”
Oliver and Louis didn’t come back until late Sunday night, and my mother was staunch with her threat. I wasn’t allowed to leave the room. Every time I tried, I was sent straight back.
It was the longest weekend of my life. Beckett visited a lot.
By the time Oliver got home, sporting his story of an internet romance with some girl online (a lie that was readily swallowed by our desperate mother), he was presented with his consequences, and then he came and fell face down on my bed.
He glanced up at me, tired, ready to say something, but took one look at me and frowned. “What happened?”
I didn’t have the words.
I couldn’t tell him, none of it.
Telling him about Louis’s dad was only the tip of the iceberg, and that alone would have destroyed him with guilt anyway. Telling him about Becks—it was too late and it was too far in and it had happened so many times by then. I was too confused by what it meant that I looked at him for help and why he looked angry when someone hurt me, and what it meant that he tried to stop it when someone was hurting me. Those are questions you never should have to ponder about your sexual assailant, least of all when you’re fifteen, and yet there I was, marooned in a despair I felt like I was drowning in and gagged into a self-imposed silence because I was too little to know how to deal with any of it.
And then I started to cry.
“Gige.” My brother’s face crumbled in concern.
And his concern made me cry more, loud and ugly and anguished, and he hugged me and asked me what was wrong a thousand times, but all I did was cry until I was asleep.
When I woke up a few hours later, Oliver hadn’t moved; he was just watching me, frowning, staring at me like I was a crooked picture on the wall he couldn’t quite get straight.
I swore nothing happened, that it was my period and that I was fine.
He didn’t believe me; he knew me too well to believe that.
If he was more like me, he would have pushed. The truth, no matter the cost. But all our lives, Oliver has loved me in a way where he’d never hurt me; even if hurting me meant loving me the most, he couldn’t. You might argue that means he doesn’t love me that much, but you’d be wrong.
There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time. The way love was delivered to Oliver, full of conditions and hoops to jump through and lies to abide by, being loved and being hurt were two sides of the same coin. How that translated in the way he loved me was this: He would never force me to tell him something; he’d never push me; he’d never challenge me in a serious way; he would never do anything to ostracize me or make me uncomfortable. He loved me a dysfunctional amount, and love and dysfunction are a peculiar pairing that flavor everything with a specific brand of contradiction. See, Oliver loved me so much—too much, you might even say—that he’d rather leave me hurting if it meant it hurt me less at the time.
***
After maybe an hour or so on the SS Avoidance with Sam, we head back into the house and find Oliver there, sitting on the couch, looking bored.
Sam grins at him when he spots him and grabs Oliver affectionately by the shoulders, and my brother’s face lights up. His eyes go a little wider, a little smile emerges, and I wonder if I see some pink spring to his cheeks.
“Where the fuck have you two been?” my brother huffs.
Sam thumbs toward the dock and I’m already cringing before he says it. “Georgia took me on the boat.”
Oliver tenses up, swallows once. He nods coolly. “Oh.”
Sam flicks his eyes in my direction, confused.
I purse my lips, a little guilty.
Sam catches the vibe and drums on Oliver’s shoulders, which he’s still holding. “What’d you get up to today, man? Where’ve you been?”
Oliver shifts his body to block me completely from the conversation, so I sit down next to him to reinclude myself.
“Vi and I had such a good morning.” He’s only talking to Sam. “We chatted about life, and love and death, and it was so good for the soul—I can’t wait for you to get to know her better; she’s really the best, most authentic, loyal”—I think that was a jab at me—“person you’ll ever meet—we could grab dinner with her now?” Oliver offers, hopeful.
“Yeah.” Sam nods as his eyes trail over to me—that’s definitely not lost on Oliver. The yeah is open-ended, as though Sam’s asking me a question—his eyes hold mine and he swallows once. He’s getting really bad at concealing his faces. “Georgia, what are y—”
“She’s busy,” Oliver tells him.
Sam’s mouth goes a little tight, and he bangs his clenched fist on Oliver’s shoulder twice. Gestural slips. Something’s bothered him.
“…Yes.” I nod once. “I’m…busy.” It’s my worst lie in about nine hundred years, but I’m shitty at Oliver for excluding me and I want to make him look stupid to Sam.
Sam Penny’s mouth twitches how it does when his eyes are on me, like we’re up to our necks in secrets. “I’ve got to run to the bathroom,” he says, holding my eyes intentionally, full of concern. He wants to know whether I’m okay.
I give him a tiny, singular nod to tell him I am, and then he jogs upstairs.
Oliver turns to me immediately, eyes wild. “You took him on our boat!” he yells. “You’re unbelievable!”
“Oliver,” I start, but he shakes his head, angry.
“You’ll do anything for a guy.”
That feels like a slap. It also doesn’t feel like my brother at all.
“Whoa.” I blink as I take shallow breaths. “I—what?”
“We swore, Georgia!” he says loudly. “We swore we’d never bring anyone onto our boat except us!”
I let out an exasperated laugh, looking at him like he’s crazy. “Yeah! I know!” I nod, emphatically. “I know what we promised! I know what we said our deal was. But don’t you come at me like you’re the fucking high emperor of maritime law when I know for a fact that on at least two occasions you have fucked randoms atop our innermost secrets and adolescent memories—”
Oliver freezes. “I—”
“Seriously?” I give him a look and shake my head with a shrug. “I saw you, Oliver. I saw you with the exchange student—a few times, actually! And then once with some guy I didn’t recognize.” I give him a so fuck you look. “And shut the fuck up. If I want to take Sam on the boat, I’ll take him on the fucking boat.”
Oliver glares over at me. “He’s not here for you, Georgia; he’s here for me.”
And now, the way he said that—I don’t know—it sounds like Oliver resents me.
Which is ironic, actually. Because I know for certain that there’s at least a part of me that resents him.
I shouldn’t, but I think I do. Nothing that happened was his fault. He didn’t make what happened to me with Beckett happen. He didn’t make our parents like my sister more than me. He didn’t make me pick him over the rest of my family. He didn’t ask me to give him half of my inheritance. And I’d do it again and again because it was unjust how they treated him and what they did to him. How they excluded him burns me up inside. But watching him piss away what I lost my family to give him—that stung.
And I’m sure the hypothetical life I’d have if I hadn’t given him the money looks better in my imagination than what it would have actually been in reality… In no world are Maryanne and I best friends, or even friends. In no world does my mom like me more than her. But I think what I did fractured me and Oliver.
Him with the pressure of what our relationship cost me, and me with the weight of what I lost. And how, no matter what I’d do or how hard I’d try, I couldn’t repair the damage our family caused my brother.
So Oliver and I might be the Adjectives, but our personal adjective is broken.
“Yeah, fine, Ol.” I shrug, annoyed and tired. “So who’s here for me?”
Oliver gives me the meanest look he’s maybe ever given me. “Beckett?”
I pull my head back, mouth ajar.
What the fuck.
“Okay!” Vi says, walking into the room. “Let’s you and me”—she points between her and me—“let’s go, right now.”
She grabs me by the hand and pulls me away.
“And you.” She points at Oliver, eyeing him. She shakes her head. “Dick move.”