Chapter 13
Tyler
June, Eleven Years Ago
Long Island
It was the last night before Mikey left for baseball camp, and he was two hours late getting home from saying goodbye to Ingrid.
I’d already raided the fridge, joined Paul for three infuriating innings of watching the New York Mets forget the infield
fly rule twice, and even unloaded the dishwasher for Carolyn while she packed Mikey an entire Costco’s worth of trail mix
for his eight weeks away.
When all that failed to keep me engaged, I wandered outside to read a few chapters of my book on the patio. Just like last
Sunday, the sky was fading, and—imagine that—Katie was lying in that green-and-white-striped hammock, head buried in a book.
Her phone, a flashlight.
I chucked a banana peel at her.
She yanked out a single headphone. “Literally what, Tyler?”
“What are you doing?”
“Reading. Obviously. Why’d you throw fruit at me?”
I closed the distance between us. The grass, damp and familiar beneath my feet. “Because I’m bored.”
She sat up, removed her second headphone, and eyed the book in my hand. “What, your current novella where everyone is miserable isn’t holding your interest?”
“You’ve read Nathanael West?”
“No. I just assumed it was miserable because you’re holding it.”
I snickered, cupping my hand around the top of the hammock’s frame. Giving it a little shake. “What are you reading?”
She turned her book over so the cover was face down. “Like you care.”
“I care! Why wouldn’t I care? I asked you all about your weird plot wall, didn’t I? I come and talk to you every night when
I get home, don’t I?”
At that, she wrinkled her nose. Clicked her pen twice.
“Katie,” I repeated, giving the hammock another shake. “Just show me what you’re reading.”
“No. You’re going to think it’s stupid. Just like you think my wall’s stupid and my clothes are stupid and everything I do
is stupid.”
“I mean, you think my book’s stupid. You think I’m stupid. And yet, here I am, engaging in this conversation. Why can’t . . .”
She was clutching the book now, and tightly. Obviously, I pried it out of her hands, ignored her piercing screams, and—using
my own phone to illuminate the back cover—skimmed the synopsis. When I glanced up, her cheeks were beet red in the glow of
her flashlight, and her arms were crossed over her chest.
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s not—It doesn’t mean anything. They’re all like this.”
“Really?” I thumbed through a few more pages. “Every book available to you is about sixteen-year-old girls who spend a magical
and forbidden summer with their older brother’s best friend?”
She made a tiny squeak and glanced up at me. I grinned, then took a step closer so I was standing between her knees. She gulped, and then said, “No. I mean, yes. I mean—”
“YO! TYLER! THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? I GOT MY DAD’S KEYS! LET’S GO!”
I turned around. Mikey was standing on the patio, still in his gym clothes, and with a single hand gripping the open slider
off the too-bright kitchen. His hair, mussed. His stance, loose. He and Ingrid had just discovered sex, and with Mikey’s departure
imminent, were officially screwing like rabbits every chance they could get.
I tossed the novel at a still-stammering Katie and, before I headed inside, gave that hammock one last shake.
And then, an hour later, when Mikey had driven us out to the docks, when we were both stoned out of our minds, listening to
the last few minutes of the ballgame, listening to Mikey whine about how he was ever going to make it two whole months without
sex or Ingrid or shitty Long Island weed, he turned to me.
“The hell was that, by the way?”
“Huh?”
“You and my sister.”
“What? Katie? No way. I was just—”
He took another hit and then started the car. “I’m not a fucking moron, Tyler. Stay away from her. I mean it.”