Of all the things Maleena had said, one was true. I didn’t have my head on straight, and I needed to fix it fast. If I truly intended to skip my senior year and join the draft, I had to be more focused on the game than Maleena. That hurt. Stabbed at me. But it was the truth. If I wanted my dream, I had to put her out of my mind and concentrate on getting it.
I wandered around the study, trying to calm down before I rejoined the family. I was absentmindedly pulling books from the shelves when I pulled off an old spiral notebook instead. I wondered if it was a playbook from when Blake had been on the football team at Ole Miss. Before he’d given it up for the law. Giving up football felt like a sin to me.
I opened up the notebook, hoping it would help get Maleena out of my mind. I looked down and saw the word Jake and almost closed it. My chest seized up at just that one fucking word. I didn’t hate Uncle Jake—or rather—the man who would have been Uncle Jake if he hadn’t died an early death. I hated, with a passion, the never-ending comparison.
My whole life, I’d heard nothing but how I was him reincarnated or some damn thing. I looked like him. I played football like him. I was a damn good quarterback like him. My twin, Ginny, always snipped at me if I griped about it. She said our entire town had a Jake-sized hole left in it that had never healed, and I had the opportunity to mend it. But goddamn, I didn’t want to be the one responsible for healing anyone. Especially not a town. I’d never been that good of a boy, and I still wasn’t that good of a man.
Maleena understood me better than anyone. I thought she’d accepted me for the arrogant asshole I was, but she hadn’t. She’d still expected something from me, just like this family and this town had somehow expected me to be him. To be Jake.
I shoved my silent phone into my pocket and sat down in Uncle Blake’s desk chair. I flipped to the front, realizing almost immediately it was Aunt Cam’s journal of some sort. It was a huge invasion of her privacy to even have opened it, but the words on the front page dragged me in.
It happened when we were out and about, looking at apartments that we couldn’t afford. It was a failed attempt to reclaim some of our Polaroid moments of color and passion that had disappeared months ago with your kidneys. The sun streamed through a set of picture windows and highlighted you in a halo of light that captured my breath. In that moment, caught in the shimmery white, you almost looked like the football god you once were and not the weaker version of yourself you’d become.
I should have stopped. I should have stopped right there and put the notebook back on the shelf, but I couldn’t, because she was talking about Jake. She was talking about the moment when he’d become the man he didn’t want to be instead of the man he’d always been, and I needed to know what that was like. To be something different than what the world imagined you to be.
So, I kept reading.
Edie’s voice at the door startled me. “Everybody’s finally ready to do presents.”
I tried not to show my guilt when I looked up. I slowly shut the notebook, sliding it under my arm.
“What are you reading?” Edie asked, stepping closer. Older than all of us, Edie was often the one left in charge, and consequently, she could read us almost as well as our parents.
“A playbook.” I shrugged, joining her at the door.
She rolled her eyes. “Leave it to you to have football on the brain, even on Christmas. Is there anything that ever penetrates that thick skull of yours besides that sport?”
I just smirked at her. “Wait, what? There’s something that’s supposed to matter more?”
“Family,” she said instantaneously.
Which brought to mind her very absent husband, so I tossed back at her, “And where exactly is that deadbeat husband of yours?”
She flushed, forgetting the notebook, just like I’d planned, and turned away from me. “Garrett is with his grandmother. She needed him. She’s family, too.”
I’d hurt her somehow, and it made me feel like I was even more of an asshole than normal. I put the arm without the notebook tucked under it around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’m sorry he isn’t here with you.”
She pushed me away and gave me a weak smile. “It’s just one holiday.”
Her voice was confident, but there was a look in her eyes that wasn’t.
“Do I need to get some people together and burn the distillery to the ground?” I asked.
She laughed. “That would really put a kibosh on your football plans.”
“Only if we got caught.”
“Caught doing what?” Ginny asked as we rounded the corner.
“Setting fire—” I started and was cut off by Edie.
“Nothing!”
Edie punched me on the shoulder and then joined Dalton in the window seat that Ginny had vacated.
“What was that all about?” Ginny asked, frowning up at me.
I shrugged. “Not sure. Think there’s trouble in Gadie-land.”
Ginny grimaced. “Do you have to continue doing the whole ‘ship thing? It’s as if you live in a different decade than the rest of us.”
“When am I going to get to rename you?” I asked, because Ginny hadn’t had a boyfriend in a really long time. Long enough for mutterings to start behind her back about whether she was eventually going to come out of the closet. Ginny and I may not have been as close as we once were, but I was pretty damn sure I’d know if she was gay.
“About the same time you decide to turn in your bachelor card,” she teased.
But I didn’t smile back. I’d already turned in my bachelor card, happily, three years ago, to Maleena. But she’d shoved it back into my hand and run. Ginny took in my quiet nonresponse with wide eyes.
“Oh my God, I feel so bad for whomever she is.” She rolled her eyes. “Is it someone we know?”
“Not anymore,” I said, turning my back on her. “I’ll be right back, just need to run out to my car.”
I left her sputtering a nonresponse in order to put the notebook under the driver’s seat of my Roardrunner. I was determined to read it through, hoping it would help me find a way to be the man Maleena and the whole damned world seemed to want me to be.
Maleena
MERRY CHRISTMAS, DARLING
“But I can dream and in my dreams
I'm Christmasing with you.”
Performed by Carpenters
Written by Pooler / Carpenter
Dad, Mom, and Bess were laughing in the living room. They were waiting for me to come back from getting the glass of water I’d said I needed. But really, I just needed time. Time to ignore the phone call, the message, and the text that had followed. Like I’d ignored the ten others that had come before those.
“Did you forget where the glasses were or something?” Dad hollered at me, and I opened a cabinet to shake myself out of my funk.
We were playing a card game Bess normally played with her friends when they came over, but Dad had said he wanted to try it in a vain effort to connect with my little sister. The game was about werewolves and vampires, because Bess, having found an old copy of Mom’s Twilight Saga books, had recently become a huge fan of all things paranormal. Like, vintage Buffy, the Vampire Slayer shows. I loved teasing her about it, but in truth, she had a way more diverse set of interests than I’d ever had at sixteen.