“What are you going to do when he really stops trying?”
I sipped my coffee.
“Yeah, you’re so cool. I keep forgetting.” He threw off his blanket, and his back cracked when he stood up from the couch.
“Sleep well?” It was a rhetorical question. The couch was more of a love seat.
Jeremy lumbered past me to the bathroom. He never bothered to shut the door even at home, but this bathroom’s proximity to the kitchen made it especially grating. I kicked the door shut when he started to piss.
“So are you really not coming today?” Jeremy asked when he came out.
“I have plans.”
“I heard. That girl again. Jolene. She’s cute,” he went on. “I’ll give you that, but Erica Porter.” Jeremy shook his head. “You’re either the biggest moron on the planet or... No, you’re pretty much the biggest moron on the planet.”
I almost told him it wasn’t like that with Jolene and me, but that smacked too much of having an actual conversation and we weren’t having a ton of those lately.
“Oh, so you’re not talking to me either now?”
“I’m talking. I asked how you slept.”
Jeremy muttered something and poured himself a bowl of Apple Jacks. “Tell me about your girl,” he said between bites. “I already know you ditched Erica for her.” He shook his head at that one.
“I didn’t ditch anybody for anybody. We broke up, that’s all. Besides, I was barely with Erica.”
“Half the school saw her slap you.”
I said nothing.
“Oh, come on.” Jeremy lowered his spoon. “You’ve wanted to be with her since forever. You get her, and then you screw it up in less than two months?” He took another bite. “That’s a waste.”
“Not to me.” And it wasn’t. I worried that I might feel a little regret the next time I thought about Erica, but the only thing I regretted was how we broke up, not why. Even if Jolene had seemed nervous instead of happy when I told her I wasn’t with Erica anymore. I wasn’t expecting her to leap on me and start kissing me—well, she had leaped on me, but the kissing part hadn’t happened yet. I was really hoping it would though. I just needed to show Jolene that being more than friends was a good idea, and I couldn’t do that if I kept wasting what little time we had every other weekend talking with my brother.
“You hear Mark Phillips asked her to the winter formal yesterday? She said no. Like, wait two seconds, you psycho.”
“She can go out with whoever. Ask her yourself if you want.” The idea bothered me a little, but much less than I would have thought possible a few months ago.
Jeremy snorted, then paused like he was considering how serious I was. “You really like this girl.” He sounded impressed. I guess he would be. Jeremy had had a couple girlfriends, but he would have pushed either of them from a moving car for the chance I’d had. I knew this, because he’d told me in those exact words when I’d first started hanging out with Erica.
“Your biggest mistake—well, your second-biggest mistake—was telling Mom. She’s going to be all over you. She’s already been pumping me for info. Like I don’t have better things to do than watch you over here.”
“You don’t.”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t know that. I keep telling her about all this stuff we’re doing with Dad and—”
“Wait, you’re what?”
“Telling her about all this stuff we’re doing, which, you know, we’re not, but she doesn’t need to know that.”
I dropped both hands on the counter and leaned toward my brother, who was still shoveling cereal into his mouth like someone might take the bowl from him at any second. “Yes, she does.”
Jeremy paused between bites.
“She’s...she’s...” It took me a minute to find the words. “She’s so afraid that she’s losing us. That we’re not going to come home one day. She lost Greg, then Dad. She panics every second we’re away. How do you not know that?”
When Jeremy just stared at his bowl, I knocked it away into the sink. “You’d know that if you talked to her, if you called her or sent or a text or something while we’re over here. And you’ve been rubbing it in her face that it’s awesome over here with Dad?” I pushed away from the counter in disgust. “Have fun playing hockey.”
I grabbed my coat and let the door slam when I left.
Jolene
“Curse this winter.” I shook my fist at the flurry-filled sky. At least three inches of snow crunched under my boots.
“You could walk on the sidewalk,” Adam said. He was wearing sneakers, and they looked mostly dry because he’d taken his own advice while I preferred to trudge alongside him in the snow-covered grass, or what would be grass when spring came. If spring ever came.
“Not because of the snow. Who doesn’t like snow?”
“The entire driving population.”
“So not you then?” I grinned, and Adam kicked a spray of snow at me. “Oh, come on.” I stretched up to sling my arm over his shoulder, loving the fact that I could touch him without feeling guilty about it. “I promise to drive you anywhere you want when I get my license. You won’t have to worry your pretty little head about anything.”
Adam was a whole two weeks younger than me. In less than a month, I’d be sixteen and free, relatively. Those weeks ate at him incessantly.
“So why are you cursing the winter again?” he asked.
I knew he was trying to pull the conversation away from his driver’s license-challenged state, and since I didn’t want him to get all moody, I let him. “Duh, because of your hat.”
Adam had this expression where he would curl one side of his mouth up and frown whenever something made no sense to him, as if he were questioning the intelligence of whoever had said it. He could be arrogant like that sometimes. I knew he was still chafing over the driving thing, so for once, I didn’t call him on it. I did, however, explain myself to him in a super patronizing way.
“When it’s cold out, your nose and cheeks turn red.” I tapped his nose. “But your ears are hidden under your knit cap.” I lifted it and lightly pinched his ear. “See? Nice and toasty.”
Adam leaned away and pulled his hat back down over his ear. “Right. ’Cause it’s cold.”
“But I can’t see your ears. How am I supposed to know when you’re embarrassed? The rest of your exposed skin is all rosy and—don’t scowl, Adam, it’s very fetching—but I feel like I can’t read you. It’s frustrating, hence the winter cursing.”