12
I take a pill that night so I’ll sleep a little better and longer. I wake up a little after 8:30 and spend the next twenty minutes opening the stupid, old brass doorhandles in the house at a glacial pace so no one knows I’m awake so I can get quarter-ready before I head downstairs.
You know “quarter-ready”? The kind of ready that requires you to slink out of bed and silently ballerina-leap across the loud floorboard that would otherwise creak, so that the beautiful boy across the hall thinks you just wake up looking fresh as a daisy and bright as a button?
When I walk into the kitchen, Oliver’s already dressed. Tenny’s here too. Sam looks up from the breakfast counter and gives me a crooked smile, but looks back down when my brothers notice me.
I lean on the counter. “And where are we off to this morning?”
“We’re all going to the cemetery,” Oliver says, folding his arms over his chest. His chest is puffed up a little, feet are squared. Head level and tall when often he’d naturally tilt it.
This is Oliver around Tennyson, all our lives. Tennyson never gave Oli the time of day even before he came out, but never ever in a million years after the fact. Even still, any chance Oliver gets to be around his big brother, he’s trying to prove himself to him. Like, going to a cemetery? Oliver hates cemeteries. He and I watched that old Pet Sematary movie when we were like twelve—scared the shit out of him. Scarred him. When my dad’s aunt died a year later, Oliver wouldn’t step in the cemetery.
So him going today? Huge deal.
“Wanna come?” Tenny asks, turning around.
I scrunch up my face. I don’t really want to come, to be honest. And Ten’s only asking me because he feels uncomfortable about being with our brother alone. And I was really hoping to be alone with Sam, because right now my funeral priorities are really in order like that. “Who’s ‘we all’?”
Oliver gestures to himself, Sam, and Tennyson at the same time Tenny says, “Maryanne’s not coming, don’t worry.”
That’s weird—I think to myself. He’s never said anything like that to me before.
I purse my lips, thinking, then shrug. “Sure.”
Tenny nods, pleased. “We’re leaving in five. Hustle.”
Hustle ? I frown at him for being unfathomably lame as I trot back up the stairs. “Whatever you say, Captain America.”
A few minutes later I come back dressed in just some loose-fitting jeans and a plain white tank, which sounds boring, but honestly, I do look really good when I’m dressed down.
And it works. Sam’s pupils dilate and he bites down on his lip, and then he looks away from me because I know he’s in his head about me knowing he thinks I’m attractive.
Tenny catches it (somehow?) and he’s smirking at me, but Oliver misses it all because he’s got the fabric of my top between his fingers and his thumb. “Is this cotton or wool?”
“Cotton.”
“Love.” Oliver nods approvingly then walks ahead. “Shotgun.”
I climb into the back seat, and Sam climbs in next to me. Tenny looks back at us through the rearview mirror. He wiggles his eyebrows and I kick his chair.
“What are you doing?” Oliver turns around.
“Nothing.” I shrug. “I just like to kick Tennyson sometimes because he’s…a jack-off.”
“Well.” Oliver nods somewhat sympathetically, but not too much so. “Maybe you should rein in your crazy in front of company.”
“Yeah, Georgia.” Tenny catches my eye again in the mirror, smirking again, that prick.
“Who wants to stop and grab a coffee?” Oliver asks brightly, trying to change the subject.
“No!” Sam and I say in unison and, without a doubt, pitched in a frequency that begs for questions to be asked.
Oliver glances back at us, frowning, then says specifically to Sam, “You don’t want a coffee?”
Sam doesn’t know it, but a microexpression of contempt flashes across his face, and then he scratches the back of his neck in a manipulator. “Nah.”
Oliver frowns, confused. “You always want coffee.”
“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. No one does good coffee here,” I tell him, trying to sound bored.
“Hey,” growls Tens.
“Yeah, that V60 yesterday was pretty good!” Oliver looks between the boys for backup.
“I don’t know—” Sam shrugs as though he’s indifferent. “Thought it was kind of bitter.”
“I bet you did.” Tennyson smirks from the front, and I flick him in the back of the neck.
Oliver looks at Tenny, confused. “What?”
And somehow, in an unforeseeable turn of events, I find myself actually quite grateful that Tenny’s here, because normally Oliver is so tuned in with me, he’d be able to sniff out my weirdness, but when he has an in with Tenny, he’s all in, so he doesn’t have any brain space to focus on me.
“Because it’s—um—bitter,” Tennyson—surprisingly—tells him. “Shit coffee, they’re right.”
Which, I mean, first things first—that was some pretty terrible lying. But also—I don’t know why he did that, covering for me. Not that there’s anything to cover, but you know what I mean. He’s not really like that. Not to me, anyway.
“So.” Sam leans forward, propping his arms up on both my brothers’ seats. I like how he fills in spaces. “What are you doing, anyway?”
Tenny glances back at him. “We’re picking Dad’s coffin and then his gravestone…” He pauses. “Gotta tell ’em what to write on it.”
I scrunch my nose because I don’t like the sound of any of that. It sounds way too high-pressure and far too hands-on. “And what am I doing?” I ask in a tall voice.
“I don’t know.” Tenny clocks me in the mirror. “Standing there, looking pretty?”
I scoff as I sit back in my seat, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m literally the smartest person in this car.”
Tennyson snorts a laugh. “I went to University of Georgia.”
I roll my eyes. “That’s a party school.”
“I graduated with honors in an econ degree!” he tells me.
I slow-clap for him. Sam snorts a laugh then looks out the window to cover it.
“Hey, queen.” Oliver turns around, giving me a pointed look. “Don’t be a B.”
“Hey, Oliver.” And he looks back at me again. “Don’t—” And then I make a sucking off gesture, and he reaches around and smacks me in the leg.
“You’re so immature sometimes.” He rolls his eyes.
Tennyson scowls at me. “That’s disgusting, Georgia.”
I blink at him a lot, and I feel like being annoying. “You’re honestly going to sit here and tell me that you don’t like blow jobs?”
“No one said that,” Oliver says at the same time as Tenny says, “Not from him!” which is the same time Sam says, “I like them.”
I clock Sam—amused, because no one’s talking to him and what a fucking time to chime in—and he just gives me a dumb smile. That happens all within the space of a second and a half before I whack Tennyson over the head.
“Gross! Who said anything about Oliver giving you a blow job?”
“You!” Tenny yells at the same time Oliver yells, “Stop talking!”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Yes, you did! You made the—” Oliver reenacts me.
“Ugh!” I roll my eyes. “I just meant, like—you’re kissing his ass!”
“Then why didn’t you do that?” Tenny asks, wide-eyed.
“I—I don’t know.” I shrug. “That’s so—like, how would I even mime that?”
Tennyson rolls his eyes. “Why do you need to mime anything?”
“Because it’s a lost art?” I shrug again, and I know I’m being petulant now. “Maybe I was just trying to bring some culture into the car.”
Sam’s gone still, but he’s staring at the floor of the car, the faintest hint of a smile. I don’t even realize that we’ve stopped driving until Oliver gets out of the car and slams the door super extra loud and glares at me, arms folded, pouting like crazy through the window.
He’s twenty-six. I just want to remind you that he’s twenty-six.
Tenny climbs out of the car and opens my door, puts his hands on the roof, and leans down. “You’re being an asshole.”
I frown up at him. “Fuck you.”
He gives me a tight smile, kind of smug, like I’ve just proved his point. “Why don’t you just wait out here?”
“Dad’s been dead for like a day and a half, Tennyson… Don’t have to pick up the mantle just yet.”
Contempt flashes across his face, and he glares at me as he slams the car door. “You know, you don’t have to be a bitch all the time,” he says as he walks away.
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” I call after him.
My eldest brother flips me off without turning around.
And I sit back in my seat, arms folded across my chest, frowning.
Sam shifts uncomfortably next to me, still nearly smiling but not quite.
To be honest—and until now I’d have thought it impossible—I sort of forgot he was there, and now that I’ve become reaware of his presence, I’m conscious that I perhaps wasn’t presenting as my absolute best self.
Sam gets out of the car and walks around to my side, waiting for me to climb out.
We walk wordlessly toward the graveyard, away from the offices my brothers just went into—Sam’s call, not mine. Probably a good one. He glances over at me, and he touches his mouth absentmindedly. A self-hushing emblem. He has something to say, doesn’t know whether he should say it.
We walk a few seconds more in silence, him pressing his mouth together, and I wonder for a second what it would be like to have it pressed against me, but he’s not thinking about kissing me—he’s thinking about saying something.
I look up at him. “Spit it out, then…”
He lets out a single laugh and stares at me, a bit bemused. I widen my eyes, impatient.
“You’re funny around your brothers,” he tells me with a nod.
I frown a little. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. You’re obviously their little sister.” The way he says “obviously” makes me feel like I was obviously just an idiot. He doesn’t seem to mind, though—his countenance is open and warm still, even though he shakes his head. “It’s funny. You’re so—I don’t know… You analyze the way faces twitch and pull the truth out of people in these crazy ways, but—” He laughs again. “You just called your brother a jack-off in the car.”
I frown again. “He is a jack-off.”
He smirks, like I’ve played into his hand. “I’m the same with my sister. You think you’d be different because you’re grown-ups, but—” He shrugs. “You just fall back into old patterns.”
I squint up at him, thinking. “Until this week, I haven’t been in the same room as all my siblings since I was…sixteen?”
He blinks, surprised. “Whoa.”
“We didn’t actually grow up together.” I shake my head. “Our relationships never really evolved past the ages we left each other behind.”
Sam gives me a subtle wink as he pokes me in the arm. “There she is.”
“So.” I take a breath. “How old’s your sister?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Do you like her?”
“Yep.” He nods once. “One of my best friends.”
I feel a twinge of jealousy and wonder what that might feel like, but I don’t want him to see that feeling on my face, so I cover it by quickly thinking of a baby duck going down a slide into a pond, which lights my face up a little.
“She’s one of the main reasons I’m sober,” he says to me even though I didn’t ask, and it makes me feel floaty. It also really makes me like his sister. “You’d like her—you’d like my niece too.” He smiles—Duchenne—his niece is special to him.
“How old’s your niece?”
“Four. She’s so fucking cute and funny and smart and—” Then he suddenly stops talking and stares at me for a second before he pokes his finger into the corner of my big, dumb, smiling mouth. “That’s a real big smile you’ve got there.”
I drop it and turn my head away from him, straight to the ground—fuck! “No, it’s not.” I start walking ahead quickly.
“It’s pretty big!” he calls after me.
“I’ll call you a jack-off too!” I yell back.
He laughs as he catches up to me. “I’m sure you will.”
“Come on.” I give him a look. “I made a promise to my dad I need to keep.”
I find the gravestone and stand in front of it, frowning.
“Is this your grandfather’s?” Sam asks, looking at the name.
Brick Carter.
I nod.
“‘Loving father, grandfather, patriot, and friend,’” Sam reads with a respectful nod. “He sounds like a good man.”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Which do you think sends a stronger message—spitting on a grave or dancing upon it?”
“Uh—I—” Sam’s face falters. “What?”
“Spitting or dancing?” I repeat.
He gives me a cautious shake of his altogether too-perfect head. “I don’t—understand the question?”
I nod to myself. “Dancing on it probably.”
“I mean—” Sam grimaces. “Yeah, probably?”
Then he looks for my eyes, finds them, and holds them as he waits for an answer.
“I promised my dad.” I nod. “I told him that if I was ever back at this cemetery again, I’d dance on his father’s grave.”
“That’s a…” Sam trails off before he blows some air out of this mouth. “Fucking weird promise, Carter.”
“No.” I shake my head. “He was an asshole.”
“Your dad or your grandpa?”
“Both.” I purse my lips. “My grandpa more, though.”
Sam looks at me carefully. “What did your dad say when you said that?”
I purse my lips; my eyes flick up and to the left, which is what happens when you recall a memory.
I look up at Sam. “Nothing.”
He didn’t say a thing.
In fact, if I were to pull apart the memory how I remember it, I think, if I’m recalling it correctly, my dad’s mouth was pulled tight, and there was the slightest hint of a nod before he said nothing, and that’s when I walked away from him and everyone else besides Oliver and Vi and Clay until now.
It was the last time I saw my dad, actually, the day they read my grandfather’s will. It was the last nail in the coffin for me.
I can feel Sam trying to peek through my memories, and I’m so glad that I’m me and he’s not because I don’t want him to see right through me, but I’m also glad that he’s trying to. I don’t think I can remember the last time someone tried to.
Sam takes a step closer to me and his head tilts a little as he looks at the gravestone. “What’d he do?”
I sigh.
“When he died, he left all his grandchildren three-point-six million each.”
Sam pulls a face, mock-horror. “…What a fucking monster.”
“Yeah—everyone except Oliver,” I say, and Sam breathes loudly out his mouth, jaw going tight. I lick my bottom lip. “They didn’t invite Oliver to the funeral, actually. They didn’t even tell him he died.” I shake my head. “I didn’t know till I got there. They said Ol’s lifestyle and choices would disturb my grandfather, and I said, ‘But he’s dead,’ and they said, ‘All the more reason to respect his wishes…’ And then I looked at my dad and asked him if this is what Grandpa really would have wanted, and he said yes.”
I think my dad looked kind of sad as he said that though, which, you know, I guess is the appropriate paternal response when one of your children is being grossly mistreated, but my father’s possible hypothetical displeasure in the situation never actioned beyond that. It’s hard to be sure of emotions in retrospect unless you catch them on camera. The slightest shift in my memory of how a muscle twitches could rewrite everything I think I see. So was my dad actually sad? I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted him to be.
Sam sniffs a shallow laugh and gives his head a little shake. His jaw’s gone tight thinking about Oliver being treated that way. Then he nods once. “Right.”
He takes a step away from me and onto the flat burial stone—it feels like he looks at me in slow motion—and then he offers me his hand and I take it and he pulls me in toward him and spins me.
Then he pauses and glances down at me, each of us still frozen in our dance stances, and I hope the universes freezes and I’m forever stuck in the arms of the world’s hottest alcoholic, dancing on the grave of a bigot.