Chapter 11 five years in second place #2
“Huh,” I said. “Doesn’t sound like my cousin.”
She fixed me with a hard stare, then turned to her friends. “You’re right, Lace,” she said. “Let’s move over there. Some people don’t know when to mind their own business.”
They moved seats, and people turned to look.
I just glared back at them, daring them to look at me wrong so I’d have an excuse to punch their faces in.
Dolly was sweet, but she wasn’t a pushover.
She wasn’t rude to people, but she wouldn’t sit there and let someone be rude to her.
I’d disrespected her, and she was showing me she wouldn’t stand for that.
I sat there seething until the end of the class.
It seemed she and Devlin would never break up.
All the other couples from middle school and junior high had broken up.
Even in high school, other couples kept breaking up and forming new couples every few months.
Everyone but Dolly and Devlin. They’d been official for two years now, getting more serious all the time.
They’d left me behind.
Now they were about to sleep together, and I’d never even kissed a girl besides Dolly. One kiss. That’s all I would ever get.
For two years, I’d been waiting for them to break up so I could ask her out.
I wanted a chance to show her how much better I’d treat her, how much better we’d be together.
Now I never would. It felt like the end of something, like I was losing the chance I’d been waiting for all these years.
She was sleeping with Devlin. She’d already decided to marry him.
It was over before I even got to throw my hat in the ring.
And the fucked up part was, Devlin didn’t deserve her, and Dolly didn’t even see it.
It wasn’t that he treated her badly. He would make her first time special.
But it was because girls like her expected it and deserved it, not because he thought she was special.
He would respect her, but he would never treasure her, never worship her the way I would.
He just didn’t care quite as much, didn’t know her quite as well.
If he loved her, it was in some obligated way.
If he fucked her, it was because he was a horny sixteen-year-old with a hot, willing girlfriend.
It wasn’t because he saw her for who she really was, loved her for it, and wanted her for it.
He did a hundred little things that proved he loved himself more, but she never even noticed them.
She only seemed to love him harder for it.
All afternoon, I stewed in it—the fury, the helplessness that consumed me.
She loved Devlin, was already destined to be his wife through the maneuvering of my grandfather and her father.
Our fates were decided, just like our fathers’ before us.
My parents spoke disdainfully of Devlin’s and Colt’s parents, who hadn’t followed the plan set out by my grandfather.
They’d made a mess of their lives and become a small-town scandal.
My parents would never do such a thing. A flawless veneer was the cornerstone of our lives—Joseph Darling, the ambitious lawyer who would be judge one day, married to Blaise, the Delacroix jewel, a doting mother and devoted wife.
It had been Dad’s proudest moment when his father chose me as successor to the Darling estate, the next generation’s most cunning mind, the one who would inherit the law practice one day.
The evening Dolly revealed her plan to sleep with Devlin, I was sullen all through dinner, until Dad snapped at me to sit up straight and address him with respect.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said when Mom asked what had gotten into me.
“You’re excused,” Dad said, even though I hadn’t finished eating.
I was too pissed to care. I shoved my chair back and stomped out, ignoring his order to push my chair in, ignoring my sister’s pleading eyes that begged me to keep the peace, my mother’s placating words to him.
I was tired of keeping the peace, even though at some point, it became my job.
Lindsey never got in trouble. She was good at being small, at disappearing, at being seen and not heard at home.
Anything to avoid Dad’s attention, his wrath.
I was the one who could stir him to anger, an anger we all had to endure.
It wasn’t just in the blows. It seeped through the walls we weren’t allowed to touch because we might leave smudges on the fancy paint, through the picture windows in the living room.
It dripped from the crystal chandelier in the foyer, trickled from the stone fountain out front.
We tensed, holding our breath, when his heavy footsteps sounded in the hall.
It gave everyone in the house an irregular heartbeat—the stilling beat as the wait began.
I went outside instead of getting ready for the game.
I walked past the pool, now covered to keep out the fall leaves, and into the small garden my mother had someone put in one year after a Garden Club member said it was a shame we didn’t have a flower garden.
Each spring, Mom had someone come out and decide what to plant, and then come over weekly to take care of it.
I’d never seen her set foot in it except when she was showing it off to visitors.
I liked to come out for a moment of quiet now and then. A garden was somehow more honest in its affectations, the tangible representation of our house. Under all the pretty flowers with their delicate petals, there was the raw earth, the rot and dirt where the roots dug in deep.
On a more surface level, I liked it because besides the gardener, I was the only person who came out here.
There was no being alone in my house. Someone always came to check, whether I went to my room or somewhere else.
It was chilly out now that the sun had gone down, so the dead garden seemed like a good place to hide, to be alone a few minutes longer.
I dug the toe of my shoe into the dirt. The solitude wouldn’t last. One of them would find me.
Maybe my sister, who would sit in the bench seat under the arbor, wrap her arms around her knees, and shiver while she told me that I shouldn’t provoke Dad, as if that were my intention.
I’d feel too guilty about her sitting in the cold to stay out longer.
Or it could be my mother, who would tell me we all had our duties, and that she knew it was hard on a boy to have so many expectations resting on his shoulders, but that I was strong and she knew I could handle it.
I’d feel too guilty about the tremble in her pleading voice to withhold my apology.
I’d go in and say I was sorry for disrespecting Dad, would face my punishment like a man.
But it was Dad who came to find me that night. He sat on the bench and asked what was bothering me. Then he lit a cigar and just waited. I didn’t want to tell him, but after a long silence, I couldn’t hold it in.
“It’s not fair,” I said. “If I’m the most important Darling cousin, if I’m the favorite to take over the practice, why don’t I get Dolly?”
“Dolly Beckett?” he asked, as if there were any other. “The girl you were playing doctor with five years ago?”
“She’s the mayor’s daughter,” I pointed out. “She’s the best girl in town. Why didn’t you choose her for me? Devlin’s only going to be mayor because of her. I’m going to be something on my own, not because of my wife.”
“Your grandfather chose that,” Dad said slowly. “You like your cousin’s girl? That’s what this is about?”
“She’s going to sleep with him,” I said. “On her sixteenth birthday.”
“She told you that?” Dad asked.
“She told everyone.”
Dad puffed on his cigar for a minute. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked at last. “You going to let Devlin push you around and take what you want again, like you did five years ago?”
“What can I do about it?” I demanded. “She loves him.”
“You can cry like a pussy boy,” he said. “Or you can do something about it. Take the initiative. Take what you want, like a man. Women like that.”
I wasn’t sure Dad knew what women liked. I thought of my cousins coming to stay over when I was a kid, camping out on the floor of my room. After Colt and Gideon fell asleep, in a long stretch of darkness, Devlin asked why my mother was crying.
As if he expected me to know, expected me to ask my mother such a question.
It was her private moment, one she surely didn’t know I could overhear or she’d have gone somewhere else to do it.
I knew I was overhearing something that wasn’t meant for my ears, and I kept my mouth shut about it for her sake, to protect her dignity, though I couldn’t have articulated that’s what I was doing back then.
It was just something that happened, a stretch of tension that held me gripped in its teeth every night until she went back to bed, and I could finally sleep, too.
Or maybe Dad knew what he was talking about, after all, because the next morning Mom was all smiles as usual when she made us fresh waffles with strawberries and whipped cream.
I took note of the way Devlin watched her, like he was looking for cracks in her glass smile.
It struck me that I’d never really wondered about the crying or the smiling before he noticed.
That’s just how it was in my house.
My mother’s secret sadness was her own, something that wasn’t for us to know.
As I got older, it had become almost obscene, like an addiction or a sex toy tucked under her lingerie.
I was ashamed of it, of her, and when people stayed over, we slept downstairs in the living room, or we went to Grampa Darling’s and stayed in the treehouse instead.
But on the evening in the garden, Dad was the only one I had to talk to, the only advice I got.
What are you going to do about it?
Take what you want, like a man.
“I don’t know how,” I admitted to Dad, so quiet I wasn’t sure he heard me for a minute.
“You have a phone,” he said at last. “I’m sure you’ve gotten curious before.”
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled, too embarrassed to say anything else.
Of course I’d watched porn. I knew where everything went, but to actually do it… I’d never even touched a girl’s boob. In Sunday school, they said we should wait if we could. I wasn’t big on waiting until marriage, but I could wait for Dolly.
Now, I’d run out of time.
“I’ll get you a little present,” Dad said.
“Someone to show you the ropes, set you up for success. No one wants to be second best. I’ve been meaning to set it up for a few months already, now that you’re in high school.
It’s a rite of passage in our family. My father got me one when I was around your age.
Fourteen is a good time to start working it out of your system, so you’ll be ready to settle down when you get married.
Just tell her you’re eighteen. And don’t say anything about this to your mother. ”
With that, he left me in the garden, where Mom found me a bit later and told me we’d be late for the game if I didn’t hurry.
I didn’t care about the game. There, I would sit on the bench for all but a few minutes at the end and watch Devlin shine like a fucking star who got everything he ever wanted without having to work a single minute in his life for it.
Everything fell into his lap, one lucky break after another, since the day he was born, as if fate herself had chosen him as her favorite.
As if there were only enough luck for one Darling in any generation, and he happened to be born first, so he got it all—perfect, loving parents; the quarterback’s injury that gave him the game where he won a starting spot; Grampa Darling choosing Dolly for his wife.
It was all handed to him on a silver platter, so he never appreciated any of it.
He never had to fight for anything, to struggle or suffer or rage at fate.
I hated him for it. He didn’t deserve it.
I deserved it.
I had waited long enough, suffered enough, been patient enough.
I thought of what Dad said earlier that night, and what he’d said years ago, when Walker caught us playing house. I had to take what I wanted, like a man. Devlin was only my teammate until the field was narrowed, until there was only one prize, and then he was my competition.
I’d let him claim first prize for five years while I stayed in second place—which was just another way to say ‘loser,’ according to my father. I wasn’t going to let Devlin make me look like a loser in my father’s eyes again.
This was my chance to prove myself. To prove I was smarter, more clever, more cunning than my cousin.
That I was worthy of being chosen to take over the practice.
I would find a way to get what I wanted, even if I had to trick fate herself into giving me what I desired.
I was tired of watching Devlin shine. It was my turn to win, to take something from him that he could never get back.