Tease(30)

I sit down next to him at the counter and take a deep breath, steadying my nerves before looking over at his game. He’s not playing very enthusiastically, and I know from one look that his score is really low. Kinda matches his mood, I’m guessing.

“You excited about school next week?” I ask more quietly. “Junior high already. You’re such a grown-up.”

He shrugs, still focused on the little screen.

“Do you have an outfit picked out?” I ask, trying to draw him out.

“Ew, gross,” he says. I knew that would get him—picking out clothes is something girls do, according to my brothers. Not manly enough for them.

“Right, I forgot,” I say. “Well, are you and Daniel in the same class?” Daniel was his best friend last year, though I’m suddenly pretty sure I haven’t seen him in a while. I don’t even know if they’re still tight—things like that change a lot between elementary school and junior high. And Tommy’s been busy with camps half the summer.

Sure enough, Tommy flinches when he hears Daniel’s name. “Yeah,” he says, but he sounds anything but happy about it.

“Do you guys still hang out?”

Another shrug.

“That’s okay, you know,” I say, pulling out my well-worn Big Sister Wisdom Card. “I made a lot of new friends in junior high, and only kept a couple people from grade school. Like Brielle—that’s when we started being friends. Well, eighth grade. But still. You get older, you meet people more like you, people you have more in common with.”

“Brielle isn’t like you,” Tommy says in a low voice. I’m almost not sure I heard him right, but then he adds, “She’s a bitch.”

“Tom!” I say, stunned. “That’s not a nice thing to say!”

Finally he looks up at me. “But it’s true,” he says. “She got you in all this trouble. She’s the reason nothing’s good anymore.”

I open my mouth and hesitate, totally lost for words. Usually, Tommy and Alex are the two boys I can always talk to. But I guess this one is growing up, already learning how to stump me, even before he officially starts seventh grade. Suddenly I remember that day in Dylan’s car, when he said the same thing. I didn’t know what to say then, either. I never thought Brielle was a bitch. I thought she was strong. She stood up to people; she fixed things. Like my life.

Tommy and I look at each other for a long minute, and I think about everything he just said. Finally I ask, “What’s not good? I mean, I know things are messed up right now, but it’s my mess, right?”

He looks back at his DS, then sets it down on the kitchen counter and puts his hands in his lap. “It’s my problem too,” he says. His voice is almost a whisper.

I think about yesterday, with our dad, how Tommy wouldn’t look any of us in the eye. “Is this about Dad?” I ask, still struggling to understand.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” he yells. “It’s not about Dad! God!”

“Okay, okay!” I throw up my hands, trying to call a truce, calm him back down. “I just thought—I mean, you didn’t seem that happy to see him.”

“Like you were?”

This is true. But I try to not show the boys how I really feel. He’s their dad, too, and they don’t deserve to hate him. At least, not until they’re older. And he’s usually good to them, aside from the fact that he’s almost never around. Like yesterday, coming over with ice cream and then spending a few hours playing ball with them both before Mom got home. Of course, then he yelled at her for a while and left. Like usual. But the ice cream and game of catch—those were pretty nice, weren’t they?

Maybe pretty nice isn’t enough for Tommy anymore, like it stopped being enough for me.

“Everyone at camp knew about—you know,” Tommy says. “Emma. I tried to tell them that it wasn’t your fault, but some of them were saying that you and Brielle and them, like, beat her up, which you didn’t, and that you made her . . . you know. Really sad. So no one would believe me. They said I was a bully too. No one would talk to me.”

I feel like I can’t breathe. I put a hand on Tommy’s shoulder and give him a little rub, but inside I feel like I’m dying.

“That’s . . . that’s really unfair,” I say. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve never bullied anyone.”

“Neither did you!” he insists. Then he pauses, and looks me right in the eye. “Right?”

In that instant, tears pop into my eyes. It stings like hell and it happens so fast I nearly choke. All I can do to answer Tommy is shrug a little. I keep my hand on his bony little shoulder blade, holding his gaze. His big brown eyes look at me steadily, but even through my tears I can see them change. Like, one instant he trusts me, he’s a kid—and then a second later, I’m looking at older eyes, harder ones. He looks so much like our dad. And suddenly it’s like our dad’s eyes are looking out of Tommy’s face now.

He picks up his game and slides off the kitchen stool without a word. I watch him go, and that’s when I see that Carmichael is standing in the doorway, looking at me. The tears have started falling now, so I can’t see what his eyes look like. Which is good. I don’t want to know.

But when I put my head down on the counter and start to sob, I hear Carmichael walk across the kitchen and sit down next to me. After a minute, he puts his hand on my back, just like I did for Tommy.