9
Childish.
I know. So, so childish.
But there’s something about being around your siblings that makes you regress.
I had to push past Sam to get up the stairs to get away from them and I wish I didn’t. I wish he wasn’t in my way, but he just stood there, watching.
He’s watching too much. Seeing too much. I hate it, even if I don’t necessarily really hate it. I am scared of it, though.
You should have heard my mom and sister hollering after me once I spilled her coffee.
Sometimes it’s easier to play the characters we’ve been assigned.
Maryanne is the Madonna. I am the whore. These two characters can be and have been fleshed out in a multitude of ways.
Maryanne went to Bible school. She got married when she was twenty-six to a good Christian boy from their church. She “didn’t have sex till she was married,” apparently. (Though, TBC as far as I’m concerned.)
She waited. She wore a purity ring.
She only wears boat necks and high-collared shirts.
She always sides with our parents, especially our mom.
She’s never questioned a thing a day in her life.
None of those things are bad if they’re true. Nothing about my sister is wrong if it’s authentic but, as I told you at the beginning, my sister has narcissistic personality disorder. No part of her is authentic except for that part.
Whereas I, the whore, did everything wrong. And by wrong, I mean wrong according to them.
I didn’t “wait.” I went to Cambridge. I studied science. I believe in science. I never side with anyone in my family except Oliver, which is problematic for my family in and of itself. I only question things.
And I don’t think any of the above makes me inherently good or inherently bad either. The same way I don’t think studying science and believing in it precludes me from believing in God if I want to, but my mom says you can’t serve two masters.
I take a shower after the coffee incident to wash off my sister, Beckett, my mom, and perhaps most pressingly, the smell of Sam Penny, which seems to have latched itself to me and dug in under the skin of my mind.
I fold up Sam’s sweater and leave it outside the door of the room he’s staying in, which is Oliver’s old room right across from mine. (Oliver’s in Tenny’s room. Tenny lives out of home now and certainly not with Savannah, except it’s worth noting that it’s one hundred percent with Savannah.)
I go back downstairs, bracing myself for some sort of verbal onslaught from my mother or sister, but neither are to be found.
Sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, however, is Sam Penny.
He’s reading—probably Jack Kerouac or J. D. Salinger, because his hair makes me feel like he’s the kind of person who thinks reading books like that makes you cool even though everybody’s read them.
Poor Kerouac and Salinger. They’ve been Kurt Cobain-ed. None of those people would have liked to be what they’ve become, yet they’ve become it anyway. Icons for a generation thirsty to be both defined as individuals but wholly and utterly accepted and palatable to their peers.
Sam looks up at me, lowers his book. Make Something Up by Chuck Palaniuk.
Fuck. I hate being wrong.
He puts his book down, resting it on the arm of the chair, and stands, stares at me.
We’re a few yards apart and it feels strange and tense. I feel exposed by the weight of his eyes. He nods his chin toward me.
“What happened?”
I keep my face calm, no reaction, no emotion—not that he can see, anyway. I bend my brows on purpose, hoping that it looks like this conversation is inconvenient for me. “Nothing.”
He crosses his arms. “What actually happened?”
I rush toward him and glare up. “Nothing!”
He gives me a look. “You’re lying.”
I scoff. “So what, you’re the expert now?”
“No.” He shakes his head apologetically, looking for my eyes. “I just—” He gestures vaguely toward my face. “You’re sad.”
“No.” I give him a curt look. “I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are,” he tells me like he knows me. Like he’s known me longer than—what?—the fucking twenty-one hours he actually has.
I feel hot and clammy both on the outside and on the inside, and I don’t know what it is about him that gets me so riled up.
The only person I’ve ever felt transparent to in my whole life was my second-year psychology professor. She called me out on a bunch of my shit and then set me on this path of reading people, though that itself wasn’t her specialty—psychoanalyzing people was. And it was as unnerving as hell freezing over. She looked at me like I was completely see-through. Read me like a road map. Guessed my entire life, my whole backstory, explained to me why I was in her class and why I was learning what I was learning. I hated her at first. Sometimes I still do.
We have lunch once a fortnight.
Sam Penny’s watching me, not like I watch people, but how people who care about people watch people. Like he’s noticed a crack. Not in the construct of who I let the world think I am, but in who I actually am, and he’s not staring at me to open it up wider to see what’s inside like I would… I think he’s staring at me like that so he can work out how to fix it.
“You are sad,” he tells me with a small nod—he’s decided—and he steps toward me.
“So what if I am!” I yell at Sam. “My dad just died.”
He gives me a long look again and then shakes his head. “That’s not why you’re sad.”
I bellow, “Who the fuck asked you!”
He shrugs gently. “I don’t know, Georgia—I think maybe the more important question is, who didn’t ask you?”
I feel like someone dropped a piano on me.
I don’t want him to see that or see me how he seems to, so I glare at him.
“Do not”—I place the tips of my fingers on his chest—“speak to me again.” And I shove him away.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t even sway.
He swallows heavily once and looks at me. His eyes are weighed down. I’ve hurt him for some reason.
“Everything all right here?” says one of my favorite voices in the universe, and I turn on my heel and spring myself across the room and into her arms—bury myself in her neck probably more than I should, but I want to hide in her, not feel the strange sort of naked and afraid that Sam makes me feel.
Violet pulls herself away from me to look down and inspect me, her face contorted in unconcealed concern. She can’t do what I do with faces, but she does know me.
“You okay, baby?” She glances at me and back up to Sam.
I missed her Southern twang. Everyone else’s accent around here annoys me, but not hers.
Her eyes are rimmed red, and she looks like the first person I’ve seen who’s really grieving my dad. She puts an arm around me and pushes a hand through her long, strawberry-blond hair. She’s upregulating as she approaches Sam, extending her hand to him. “I’m Violet, who are you?”
He gives her a warm smile and shakes her hand. “I’m Sam.”
“He’s—” I start.
“My sponsor,” Oliver says from behind us. He looks tired, like he’s just woken up.
Violet gives Sam an appreciative look—that won him some points—then glances over at Oliver. She gives him a pained smile as she walks over to him, dragging me with her, and squeezes us both together.
“My two favorites! Back home.” She offers us a sad smile, puts a hand on each of our cheeks. “How are y’all doing? Are you okay?”
I flick my eyes over at Oliver, and in my peripheral, I catch Sam leaving the room. I don’t know how to answer this question, and the lagginess of both my and Oliver’s answers is bad.
Violet is my dad’s sister, and they had a complicated relationship, namely because she doesn’t like my mom. She’s never really liked my mom, and I get it, so I can’t hold it against her—but I guess it made things difficult for her and my dad. But Violet loved him and he loved her.
She knows Oliver and I didn’t have ideal experiences with either of our parents, and I think in a lot of ways, she and her husband Clay stepped in and filled the gap whenever they could, even though my mom tried her best to hedge them out.
I can’t tell Violet I don’t think I care that my dad’s dead. I can’t. She won’t get it. And it’s a sad thing to say. It doesn’t feel real yet. But right now, any offerings of grief I have are false.
“I’m okay,” I tell her, plastering a manufactured look of strain onto my face.
Violet glances at Oliver, who mimics me. “Me too.”
“You guys.” She sniffs. “You don’t have to be—”
“How are you doing?” I interrupt.
A rueful smile flashes across her face. The smile is for us; she’s trying to be strong but it loses its validity in the way it pinches at the end and how she has to steady her breathing.
“It was a surprise, you know?” She wipes her nose. “I just—I wasn’t—” She shakes her head. “God, I haven’t cried since Friday until now, and then I see you two and just—” She lets out a tiny sob. “He loved you two so much—”
Oliver peers over at me with cautious confusion.
I look at Violet carefully, tilt my head down to catch her crying eyes. “Are you drunk?”
She snorts a laugh and gives me a playful glare. “He did,” she tells me, I don’t know why really. I guess it’s just what you say to kids when their parent died, even when you know it’s a lie.
And I give her a look. “We don’t have to do this right now—”
She nods quickly, pushing her emotions down and away, folding them neatly up in a drawer to take them out and wear them at a more appropriate time, say, in front of the children he actually did love.
Tenny walks in behind Violet and gives her a hug.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Hidin’ out.” Violet shrugs. “Thinkin’…”
Tenny looks at me. “Heard you were in a mood this morning.” He has a tray of fresh coffees and a smug expression.
I flash him a dark smile. “Bite me.”
Oliver looks between us. “What’d I miss?”
“Oh, nothing much.” My sister flaps her hands as she walks into the room. “Just Gigi being Gigi.” She gives me a curt smile.
Violet licks her lips and eyes my sister, one brow raised, top lip curling a little—definitely contempt. Vi’s never liked Maryanne, not a day in her life, and Maryanne knows it. Actually, she obsessed over it for a long time, but all the things Maryanne could have done to warm Violet to her, Maryanne’s incapable of.
“And what, pray tell”—Violet folds her arms over her chest—“does that mean?”
“Oh, you know.” Maryanne swats a hand and flicks her eyes over at me with the hint of a smirk. “Running around town before sunup with Oliver’s sobriety coach, turnin’ up at Beckett Lane’s coffee store, throwing coffees in people’s faces—”
Anger flashes across Vi’s face. but she gets a hold of it real quick.
“Oh, Maryanne!” She steps toward her, touching her arm. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—” Violet looks over her shoulder at me and catches my eye with a clear message: Go ! “Where are you getting your hair done for the funeral?”
I grab Oliver by the hand and pull him out the back of the house, running down the steps.
“This is not a drill!” I tell him. “I repeat, this is not a drill!”