Chapter 11
Eleven
NIX
The butter foams and crackles in the pan, turning from pale yellow to that perfect golden brown that smells like Saturday mornings and being a kid again.
I’m currently on pancake number fourteen.
The stack on the plate beside the stove is getting ridiculous—the Leaning Tower of Pancake—but I keep going.
This smell is certified Bea and Baylor crack, the one thing that always got us up and out of bed on a Saturday, no matter how late we’d been out the night before or how determined we were to sleep our way through whatever “forced family fun” our parents were insisting on that weekend.
One whiff of banana pancake and we’d rise like zombies from our teenage beds to stumble downstairs for the feed.
I pour another circle of batter onto the griddle, watching it slowly begin to bubble in the center, proving I haven’t lost my touch. I took over pancake duty my senior year of high school, when Dad broke his wrist in a beer league hockey game.
But before that…
Inhaling the banana-and-vanilla scent, I’m suddenly seventeen again, back in my childhood bedroom in Nashville, wrenched from the depths of a hard teenage sleep by the smell of browning butter and banana.
I’d roll out of bed with a groan, smacking my dry lips as I staggered to the bathroom to ditch my retainer before tugging on pajama pants and heading for the door. And I swear, the second I pulled it open, there was Bea, coming out of her room across the hall at the same time.
Bea, fourteen to my seventeen, all scrawny legs and a mouthful of braces, wearing one of the oversized “Zombie Unicorn Showdown” gaming shirts she collected from comic book conventions before the goth music scene got ahold of her.
The moment our eyes met, she’d lift her clawed hands above her head, emit a screech like a pissed-off velociraptor, and take off for the stairs, running as fast as her stick legs could carry her.
Which was pretty fucking fast.
By the time Bea hit her teens, I had to work to get ahead of her. No amount of extra conditioning after hockey practice could make me as naturally fast as the little maniac who lived to give me shit.
“No! Cheater!” she’d screech as I grabbed her around the waist, spinning her back into the hall behind me as I took the stairs two at a time.
“It’s not cheating when there aren’t any rules,” I’d say, swaying my backside wildly from side to side, blocking her attempts to squeeze past me.
“There are rules!” she’d screech. “Velociraptor gets a five-second head start, and the dinosaur hunter can’t use his big hairy butt as a weapon.”
“My butt isn’t hairy,” I’d say, laughing and wincing as she leapt onto my back, emitting another raptor screech directly into my ear.
By the time we made it to the kitchen, both of us were usually laughing so hard it hurt, and we’d knocked at least one picture off the wall.
But Mom had given up on glass in the frames years ago, back when we were still little kids who ran wild through the house, playing tag or a basketball-bowling-hide-and-seek hybrid game we invented ourselves.
Mom grew up in a house that was more like a museum, where absolutely no fun was allowed indoors.
As so often happens, she swung in the opposite direction, kid-proofing our house as best she could before turning us loose to be the wild hooligans that nature intended.
Without fail, she’d be beaming as we careened into the room, angling to be the first to touch the kitchen table—“base” for dinosaur hunt.
“You two are going to break your necks one of these days,” Dad would warn from the stove, but he was usually smiling, too. Assuming work hadn’t been too shitty that week.
Dad’s a family law attorney. Probably not the best job for a man with a big, squishy heart, who can’t stand to see kids suffering or former lovers doing their best to rip each other apart in court, but he takes pride in his work.
And in being the kind of husband and father his family can be proud of.
“Dad, I told you, modern velociraptors don’t have bones,” Bea would say, dancing over to steal a piece of bacon from the serving plate on the island. “We’re made of rubber. And fueled by a thirst for vengeance and bacon. Mmm, is this the good stuff from the farmer’s market?”
“Would I feed my baby velociraptor anything less? Now, how many pancakes? Two or three?” Dad would ask, catching my gaze over Bea’s head with a smile. “And how about you, dinosaur hunter? Is it a three-pancake morning?”
“Four, please, I have a game,” I’d say, reaching around Bea to snatch my own bacon appetizer, blissfully unaware of how numbered our happy Saturday mornings were.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I only came home from university during semester breaks. Soon, those windows would close as well. Once I was drafted, between the NHL and finishing my degree online, there wasn’t much time to make it home.
The last pancake morning I remember was when I was twenty-one, fresh from my first training camp.
For the first time, I made it downstairs first.
When I stepped into the kitchen, it was just Mom and Dad, suddenly looking so much older than I remembered, though it had only been nine months since I’d been home for Christmas. Their smiles were strained, and Dad had overslept and hadn’t made it to the farmer’s market for the good bacon.
I was about to ask where Bea was when she trudged up the stairs from the basement, where I would later learn she’d relocated, claiming the guest room down there was better for an “actual adult.”
She wasn’t an adult, though. She was a newly graduated senior, a suddenly angsty teen who circled her eyes in rings of eyeliner, dressed exclusively in black, and “wasn’t hungry” for pancakes.
“What?” I asked, laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding. The velociraptor’s always hungry for pancakes.”
Bea winced in second-hand embarrassment before glancing my way. “Stop, dude. Your jokes are even more cringe than Dad’s.”
“I wasn’t joking,” I countered, sobering. “I was serious. You love pancakes, and you’re always hungry.”
Bea shrugged, emitting a weary sigh as she rolled her eyes. “I’m not always anything, Baylor. Not everyone is so pathologically…consistent, you know?”
I glanced to where Mom stood at the counter, pouring coffee. As our eyes met, she shrugged and gave a sad, little shake of her head as if to say I’m not sure where our baby dinosaur went either.
“Anyway, I have to go,” Bea said, snagging her purse—also black—from the hook by the side door. “Kai’s picking me up in five, and we have to hurry if we’re going to have time to grab coffee before sound check.”
“Will you be home for dinner?” Dad flipped a pancake with a sharp flick of his wrist.
“I can’t,” Bea said, already drifting toward the door. “I told you, we don’t know what time we go on for our second set.”
“Your brother’s only home for the weekend,” Mom piped up, a pleading note in her voice. “We’d really love to have a family meal while he’s here.”
“Yeah, sure, tomorrow,” Bea said, slamming outside before any of us could reply.
A moment later, Kai pulled up in his van, a piece of shit Ford Econoline with rusted-out wheel wells, covered in bumper stickers. I watched through the window as Bea climbed into the passenger’s seat, a big grin stretching across her face.
It’s the only time I saw her smile the entire weekend.
And by the time that “family dinner” rolled around, she was so exhausted from staying up all night the night before, it was like trying to have “quality family time” with a cranky dust bunny we’d fished out from under the bed in the basement.
I wanted to tell her that she was headed down a bad road.
That any relationship that turned her into a jerk who treated the people who loved her like crap was a crap relationship.
But then it was time for me to go back to my own, very busy life, and concerns about my angsty little sister faded to the back of my mind.
Besides, I was only twenty-one and barely had time to date. What the fuck did I know about toxic relationships at that point?
Nothing, honestly.
By the time I realized that Kai was a narcissistic piece of shit who’d “love bombed” Beatrice just long enough to get her out on the road, isolated in a shitty tour bus, where he could treat her like shit at his leisure, it was years later.
Still, I nearly convinced Bea to leave two years ago, right before Violet Widow’s second studio album blew up, and my sister’s haunting voice was suddenly all over indie radio.
I was happy for her success, I really was.
I just wished it had happened in a way that didn’t tie her even more tightly to Kai and the two other male band members, old friends of his who seem to blame Bea for the volatility in the group. She’s the “Yoko” in their minds, apparently.
But Beatrice was never “volatile” before she hooked up with Kai. She was fun, high-energy, creative, and passionate, but rarely angry and never mean. My parents seem to think that becoming a professional artist changed Bea. I think it’s him, and I will never forgive him for it.
I stack the last pancake on the tower, which is now genuinely absurd. Eighteen pancakes. Even considering I plan to eat leftovers all week, it’s excessive.
I’ve been cooking for at least forty minutes. The smell is everywhere—saturating the kitchen, drifting into the living room, probably seeping under Bea’s door. The whole apartment smells like a diner on a Sunday morning.
But the guest room is still locked tight.
The apartment is silent.
My chest tightens.
Something’s wrong with her, I can just…feel it.
Last night, she was too upbeat. Too breezy. That manic smile, the way she couldn’t hold my gaze for more than a few seconds at a time, the speed with which she insisted on heading to bed, even when I offered to make whiskey sours with extra cherries.