“You’re here.”
Ethan steps back from his door, his brow furrowed.
“Yeah. Can I come in?” I peer inside his apartment, but it looks almost black inside, like maybe I’d woken him from a nap. The only light is a soft flickering, probably from the television. “I mean, is Esther here or something?”
He shakes his head. “No, she’s at her parents’ house. Come in if you want. Just . . . what are you doing here?” Ethan stands aside to let me in his apartment.
I walk past him. His modest TV is the source of the flickering, and the whole place smells like stale corn chips and Febreze. “I needed to get out of the house. It was suffocating me.” I settle down onto the couch, next to a pile of laundry. I can’t tell if it’s clean or dirty.
“That’s why I moved out so fast,” Ethan says, grinning. “It’s not like I’m not thankful for our upper-middle-class upbringing, but that house is sometimes the smallest place in the world.”
He understands. My brother understands. I want to hug him. I nod instead.
“Do you want a beer or something?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Water is fine, if you have it.”
Ethan disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a bottle full of grocery store brand water, which I accept gratefully. He flops back into his recliner. It looks about ten years old, which is saying something, considering I’ve never seen it before. And I’ve even been here once, when he first moved in after college.
“I would have straightened up if I knew you were coming,” he says, twisting the top off his own beer. He pitches it in the direction of the kitchen, and I hear it clatter on the floor.
I laugh. “No, you wouldn’t have.”
He grins. “You’re right. Still, I might have pushed the clothes onto the floor or something. Besides, it’s not like you came over here in your Sunday best.” He eyes my sweats and HARTSVILLE HIGH CHEER SQUAD T-shirt.
“Hey,” I protest. “I came straight from cheerleading practice.”
“And you smell like it.”
I resist rolling my eyes. I know my ponytail is a sweaty mess that I’ve sort of pushed on my head and fastened with a hair tie, but he’s my brother. It’s written into the laws of family that unless it’s Thanksgiving, and your great-granny Beatrice who you haven’t seen in two years is visiting, you don’t have to dress to impress anybody because they’re genetically forced to love you. “Whatever.”
“Do you want to watch something on TV?” Ethan offers, trying to be a halfway decent host. He makes to throw the remote at me, but I hold up my hand.
“Whatever is good.” I don’t really watch television. I don’t have time for it, exactly, outside of a few juicy reality shows that you don’t exactly have to keep up with to understand.
I am preoccupied with more important things.
My brother has a basketball game on, and we watch, together, in silence, for a few minutes in his strange-smelling apartment. He’s just happy. Like fully got-it-together, all-the-time happy. It’s not like his job pays him well, or that he’s even figured out how the hell he’s going to help raise another man’s baby, but he loves Esther and Esther loves him back and he’s pretty content with that.
He doesn’t need anything else.
It’s not like he hasn’t screwed up a million times. He has. He’s been in trouble with school, his grades, my parents, the police, but here he is, in his little apartment, with his secondhand (or maybe thirdhand) furniture . . . and he’s completely got it together.
More than I do.
And if you’re going by the book, I’ve got it together. Of course I do.
“Are you okay?”
“What?” I ask.
Ethan’s not watching the basketball game. “You just . . . you look sort of . . . tense, Riley. Is there something going on?”
“I’m fine.” I smooth down my already smooth hair.
“That,” Ethan says, pausing to take a sip of his beer, “is a dead giveaway.”
“Of what?” I demand, forcing my hand back into my lap. I am not fidgeting. I am calm.
“That something is not right.”
“Everything is fine,” I snap. “It’s just, I don’t understand how you can be so happy all the goddamned time with so much stressful shit going on in your life.”
Ethan cocks his head at me. “What stressful shit?”
“A pregnant girlfriend? Not your baby? A job that doesn’t pay enough? A record? I mean, does any of this ring a bell?”
Ethan shakes his head. “Riley. First of all, why does any of that actually matter? My job pays enough to cover my bills and a little extra. I’m saving for the baby. Second of all, my girlfriend makes me happy. And third, it’s not like I was a real criminal. So honestly . . . what do I really have to be worried about, at the end of the day? What’s in my life that actually, genuinely needs fixing?”
He says this all calmly, like I haven’t just accidentally insulted his entire existence. He pauses for a moment, and the sound of the basketball game fills the room: the announcers, the cheering, and the buzzer for halftime and the traffic passing outside. The stoplights shine faintly into the living room window: red, green, yellow, and red again. It’s maddening and calming all at once, the way the lights hit the floor at the edge of the recliner.
Ethan leans forward. “Are you projecting, Riley?”
I lift a shoulder in a shrug, something I’d never dare do in a classroom.
Ethan continues, “Because I think you’re worried you need fixing. And you don’t know how to do it. And maybe you’re not happy. And maybe that’s because you’re in high school, and high school’s hard and it sucks and teenage angst and blah, blah, blah. Or maybe”—Ethan pauses, leans back in his chair, and takes a sip of beer—“you just need to practice not giving a shit for once in your entire life.”
“Um, excuse me?” I say, very quietly. For some reason, I feel strange, and a little drowsy, and completely out of place. Maybe someone’s going to pop out and shake me. No one talks to me like Ethan when we’re alone. No one.
I wouldn’t let them.
“There’s this idea that you have to plan out your life perfectly before you go to college, and it’s like this giant set of dominos: if you knock one over, you’re totally screwed and they’re all gone. But it’s not, Riley. You need to relax every once in a while. And if you let something slide, so what? You’ve got a million other shiny gold stars on your résumé that’ll back you up. They’re not going anywhere.”
I stare at my brother, in his sweats and holey T-shirt, sitting cross-legged on the old recliner. “Are you, like, moonlighting as an inspirational speaker? Or—”
“Shut your face.” He throws a smelly pillow at me. “I’m trying to be your brother.”
I grab his laundry and throw it back at him, mostly so I won’t have to sit next to it anymore. And I ask about his new video game, which is the only luxury stuff he actually spends real money on, aside from things for Esther.
But inside, I think about what he’s saying.
He basically wants me to pull a Sandy from Grease. But I can’t just do the things that everyone else just wants to do. It gives me anxiety. I can’t enjoy it the way other people can, and God, I wish I could. I wish I could just let go.
But my brother is saying it’ll be the thing that’ll make me happy.
But what if I did relax? Just the smallest bit.
“Anyway,” he says, “how’s everything else going? How’s school?”
“It’s kind of boring. Everyone’s still there. Oh, an old friend of yours is teaching.” I say this very casually, because it is, of course, a very casual conversation that I have no stake in.
“Really?” A commercial for detergent comes on, so Ethan switches to another channel. “Who?”
“Alex Belrose. He’s teaching French.”
“French?” Ethan snorts. “Really? I always thought he’d be more of the kindergarten type.” He says it with condescension. Ethan clearly doesn’t remember the Alex who threw him on old clothes because he was too drunk to function and then drove us home, and I’m not about to remind him. I don’t want to chance him remembering—other things. Hand-holding things.
Past-things-that-need-to-stay-there things.
“Nope. I’m in his class.”
Ethan chuckles. “I bet that’s a goddamned mess.”
“Um, what do you mean?” I keep my tone normal. I don’t care. I shouldn’t.
“He just doesn’t seem like the academic type, that’s all.”
“Really? I mean, I’m in his honors senior French, you know. He doesn’t completely suck. Of course, he’s not exactly the best teacher out there.” I feel a little bad saying that. Mr. Belrose is actually really good. He cares, I think, or maybe he’s just not burned-out yet. He wants everyone to learn and grow and care about the language the same way he does. No one has done anything so horrible during class that it has irrevocably scarred him. Yet. And he’s been tempted by about every girl in the school, and I don’t actually think he’s given in. He’s a good guy.
Ethan laughs. “That’s what I meant. In high school he was just a ladies’ man. He had a new girl, like, every week. And in college he was always too stoned to worry about girls. I lost touch with him. I didn’t know he graduated.” Ethan stops on an MMA channel where two huge guys are pummeling each other. One has blood in his eyeball. “Whatever, I guess. He was just kind of a weird dude.”
I want to ask more, but I stop myself. I cannot give my stake in this away. “Yeah.” I take a sip of my water. The grocery brand is always a little oily and sits on my tongue even after I swallow, but it’s better than tap.
“Side note,” he says, “Esther’s little sister says you’re dating Rob Samuels. I think I should meet him.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “That, you’re wrong about.”
“Meeting him or dating him?”
I don’t meet his eyes. “Both.”