I glanced down at where he’d slapped me before turning to face him. “You’re a tool,” I told him in a calm voice.
“Whatever, man.”
“No, not whatever.” I twisted and the seat belt pulled against me. “I don’t care that you’re with Erica. In fact, great. Good for you.” I felt a weird twinge that she could be into him after being into me, but my feelings for Erica had been nothing like my feelings for Jolene, so that was my pride bugging me more than anything else. “I care that you set out to screw me over, and you didn’t care that you were hurting Jolene and Erica in the process.”
Jeremy pulled his mouth to the side and quickly frowned. “So now you care about hurting Erica? I was the one who was with her every day at rehearsal. You don’t even know the number you pulled on her.”
My neck heated. “Yeah, I was a jerk, but I didn’t mean to hurt her. You didn’t tell me who your date was, and I’m betting Erica had no idea she was about to be trapped in a car with me and the girl she thought I cheated on her with.”
“Oh, she knew.” When I stayed silent, Jeremy actually looked offended. “You really thought I’d do that? To a girl I liked?”
Yeah, actually, I had. My brother’s emotional range was pretty stunted, in my experience. “Erica knew?”
“Fair’s fair. You didn’t exactly prepare her before you let half the school catch you making out with Jolene in the parking lot.”
“We weren’t—” I ground my teeth. What people thought they’d seen me doing with Jolene wasn’t the point anymore. “Erica isn’t vindictive. She wouldn’t have done that.”
“Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think.”
I frowned at that, and Jeremy shook his head.
“You were at her house all the time. What’d you guys do if you weren’t talk—” His jaw twisted and he closed his mouth with an audible click. I watched his fingers clench around the steering wheel, and I let him squirm for a good minute, imagining all the many non-talking things we might have done. When his face started to turn purple, I figured he’d had enough.
“I only kissed her a few times, and never for long because her dad kept coming to check on us.” That and my thoughts had kept straying to Jolene, and I hadn’t wanted to use Erica like that, but I wasn’t about to confess that to Jeremy.
Jeremy shot me a sideways glance as though he was trying to ascertain if I was lying, before his head jerked in a quick nod. He still seemed a little skeptical, and if our situations were reversed and he’d gone out with Jolene before me—the thought alone made me want rip his throat out—I’d have had a hard time believing he’d been able to resist her.
“We worked on our project and we...”
“What? You what?” Jeremy kept veering into the lane next to us as he shot looks at me.
“We talked about Greg,” I finally said.
The tension didn’t leave Jeremy’s body, but it shifted so that I was no longer concerned he’d run us off the road.
I rolled my shoulder to try to alleviate some of the discomfort I suddenly felt weighing on me. “She remembered some things about him from when we were kids, him saving cats and stuff.” Shifting again, I remembered that each one of our kisses had been prompted by me talking about Greg, reaching that breaking point of grief where I wanted to feel anything else, even if that meant kissing a girl who wasn’t the one I really wanted. More than that, I realized that talking to Erica about Greg had been entirely different than talking to Jolene.
With Erica, I talked about Greg, but not about what it’d been like to lose him, not about what I felt. And whenever I’d reached that point where it hurt too much to go on, I’d stopped. With Jolene, I hadn’t wanted to hold back. I’d wanted her to see and feel and know not just who my brother was, but who I’d become since he died. I felt the pain of losing Greg, but with her I hadn’t wanted to hide it.
With one, I’d talked; with the other, I’d shared.
The difference felt huge.
“I’m glad she knew him,” Jeremy said after a while. “I mean, it’s not—” He rolled his eyes. “We’re not together yet. We had fun at the dance, and not just because we got to stick it to you. I like her and if something more happens between us... I’m glad I won’t have to deal with trying to tell her about him.”
“Yeah,” I said, my throat squeezing the word so that it barely came out. “It’s hard.”
“But you did?” he went on. “Tell Jolene?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it was after we...we actually ran into Daniel.” I hadn’t intentionally withheld that fact from my brother; it was just that we didn’t talk, except to fight. I lowered my head though, because, intended or not, I should have said something.
I made sure not to look at Jeremy when he spoke, but I heard the break when he did.
“You did? When? Where? Is he...okay?”
I told him the details, feeling worse with every word. Daniel had been more than Greg’s friend, he’d been ours, too—both of ours.
“He’s still got the Jeep.”
Jeremy’s mouth lifted. “Does it still smell like every animal in the state has pissed in it?”
I laughed. “Every animal in the state did piss in it. Do you remember when he and Greg got the badger in the back seat?”
“No, the time they had the two swans...”
And that was how it went for the rest of the drive. My abs hurt from laughing, and for the first time since Greg died, the tears in my eyes weren’t from crying.
Jolene
It was late when I heard the front door open, but not as late as I was expecting. I was normally dead asleep by the time Mom got home from a date with Tom, but they’d been gone only a couple hours. I was still finishing the last few bites of the early individual-size birthday cake—pineapple upside-down—that Mrs. Cho had left me along with her thoughts on the most recent films I’d suggested to her—she’d gotten the bittersweet coming-of-age brilliance of The Way, Way Back but couldn’t get past that scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles where Steve Martin lays into the lady from the car rental place. The cake was supposed to be for tomorrow, but I hadn’t been able to wait. And Mom’s unexpected appearance meant I didn’t have time to wash the caramel off the plate. It didn’t matter that I could shove the rest of the cake in my mouth. She’d know. I decided to enjoy my cake, because I was going to pay for it one way or another.
I was lifting a bite to my mouth when Mom entered the kitchen. She froze like she’d walked in on me snorting a line of cocaine off the countertop, which I guess, in her mind, might have been the less grievous action. If I was on drugs, she could send me to rehab. The same couldn’t be said about consuming processed sugar.