“I promise your cat isn’t normal,” I tell him, still watching Beast watch me. “She has a hidden nest of rubber bands.”
“I should find her new one,” Wyatt muses, taking a long drink of root beer. “I found a bunch a month or two ago and cleaned it out, so she’s probably got another stash by now.”
Dolly, alone among her family, is a completely normal cat. Beast, her mother, likes to lick the shower curtain while it’s wet. Zorro, her brother, is obsessed with knocking things off the counter. Barry has a rubber band problem. All Dolly has ever done is enter into a long-standing psychological cold war with my little brother, which is perfectly acceptable cat behavior.
“You shouldn’t feed her people food,” I tell Silas, who’s fussing over something at the counter in his kitchen.
“I don’t feed her people food,” he says over his shoulder. “Sometimes she takes people food. Also, Kat’s still a little too nervous to admonish her properly, so she gets away with a lot.”
“Tell Kat to take a firm disciplinary hand,” I say, and Wyatt snickers. Silas turns and throws something at him—a mushroom stem, turns out—and Wyatt yelps when it hits him in the face.
“What if I were allergic?” he says. He bends down to pick it up, but has to wait until Beast is finished sniffing it.
“You’re not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You ate mushroom pizza last week. Yes, I do.”
“Adults can develop allergies,” Wyatt says as Beast decides the mushroom isn’t for her and goes back to watching me. “It happened to my sister. She’s allergic to cantaloupe now.”
There’s the sound of Silas’s front door shutting, and a few moments later, Javier brings the cold air into the kitchen with him.
“Cantaloupe? Bummer,” he says, putting a box on the counter. “Though it turns out I’m allergic to pineapple? I just thought it made everyone’s mouth itchy.”
I give him a long, slightly disbelieving look as he shrugs off his coat and I dip another chip into the guacamole.
“You thought all people routinely ate a food that made them itch,” I say, just to confirm. Javier shrugs and then grins at me, bright and easy, his dark hair down around his shoulders.
“People like spicy food and that makes you hurt,” he points out. “Honestly, the itching seems less weird.”
We all think about that for a moment, and Silas upends a cutting board into a pot on the stove, scraping it with a kitchen knife that’s slightly too large for my personal comfort. Then he checks some things, wipes his hands on a towel, and comes over to the island with the rest of us.
“Okay, Javi’s here, finally,” he says, and Javier rolls his eyes, mouthing five minutes. It was fifteen, but Javier will be Javier. “Gideon, tell us this boat story you’ve been teasing.”
When I finish, we’re in Silas’s living room. Wyatt and Javier are sharing the couch, Silas is in one armchair, and I’m in another, Beast sprawled on my lap. It’ll give Dolly something to think about later.
“Your family’s buckwild,” Wyatt finally says. He has no fucking idea.
“James is still alive, right?” Silas asks. “Someone’s checked in on him? Gotten visual confirmation?”
“He’s fine,” I say.
“I thought my family was a lot,” Javier says.
“Different kinds of a lot,” Wyatt says. “Though if I were banging your sister, I wouldn’t get on a boat with your dad.”
There’s a beat of silence. I’ve only told them about Sadie’s problems and the resulting talk I had to have with my idiot brother Zach. It’s funny, sort of. From a certain angle. My brain keeps making the shape of I made my parents stop speaking to me but it never comes out of my mouth.
“Not that I’d bang your sister,” Wyatt goes on. “I mean. Thalia’s great, she’s just not really my type?”
“Thanks,” Javier says dryly. “Even if you were, I wouldn’t take you out onto a boat and make oblique threats about what might happen if you don’t marry her.”
The three of us look at each other, then all look over at Silas, who’s frowning, one elbow propped on the arm of his chair.
“What,” he says. “I didn’t take him on a boat. That’s fucked up. We hugged it out, like men.”
“Not what I heard,” I say. “I heard there was a black eye.”
Silas sighs and rubs his face in his hands.
“Look, getting woken up at four-thirty in the morning by my best friend telling me he was banging my sister was not my finest moment,” he admits, like we don’t all know the story. “But that’s way different from taking someone out on a boat to tell him that if he doesn’t marry your sister her virtue is ruined, or whatever. I promise I don’t give a shit about June’s virtue.”
“I assume Georgia’s virtue is no longer with us,” Wyatt says, looking both thoughtful and unhappy to be having this thought. “But I’ve never made it my business.”
I scratch Beast between the ears and try very hard not to reflect on my own recent ruination. I might be blushing anyway.
“Did Zach say anything when you talked to him?” Javier asks, leaning back on the couch, hands laced atop his head. “I mean, I assume you had to talk to him.”
“He promised not to do it again,” I tell them. “But he also claimed it wasn’t that big of a deal and James was being ‘a total baby’ about it, so we’ll see.”
I have no idea if my younger brother actually feels remorse about it or not, but he did get furious when I suggested that taking someone onto a boat and then issuing an ultimatum constituted a threat. Talking to Beth had approximately the same effect—that is, not much—and I’ve got a feeling that when she backs down, her twin will, too. But so far, I think Beth’s too mad to back down.
“What about your parents?” Silas asks. My head snaps up and I stare at him, silent, Beast flopped over in my lap. He knows, God, somehow the rumor mill has already been at work and they all know—
“What about them?” I ask, forcing my mouth to start up again.
“They mad at Sadie?” he asks. “Or just disappointed?”
Right. Yeah. Of course. If these guys knew they wouldn’t fuck around for an hour first, they’d have texted or called, they’d have come over. I know they would. I know it and I still can’t say actually, something else happened because—well. Because.
“They’re pissed,” I say. Beast shoves her face into my knuckles. “And self-righteous about it. Especially since Sadie won’t break up with James and re-take a purity pledge, or whatever the fuck it was they wanted her to do in the first place. And of course, Sadie and Ariel both think I can fix it, somehow.”
There’s silence in the room, the kind that whispers we know all about your parents and we don’t like them because no one’s going to say that out loud. I wish they would. I wish I would.
“At least when my dad kicked me out, my mom left him,” Javier finally says, as if the events of that single sentence didn’t earn him years of therapy.