Every Other Weekend(5)

My eyes stung and the air in my lungs swelled painfully, but outwardly I didn’t react at all. Shelly closed the sliding door behind her without looking back. It took me two tries, but I managed to light another cigarette. I focused on the thin line of smoke that trailed up in front of me. Adam was staring after Shelly with a slightly agape mouth and wide eyes. “Just wait until you get yours,” I told him.

He blinked, then snapped out of his semi-horrified stupor. “Get my what?”

“Your Shelly. Or does your dad already have a girlfriend?”

“What? No. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. My parents are just separated. They aren’t even talking about divorce.”

“Since when does that matter? Shelly was in the picture long before the paperwork went through.” Christmas had been a hoot that year. Everybody knew that everybody knew, but since my mom hadn’t officially pulled the trigger yet, the holidays were in full swing at my house. This year, they were in an all-out war over who would get to celebrate the birth of our Savior with me.

“No,” Adam was saying. “It’s not like that with my parents. There weren’t any affairs or anything. I can’t imagine my dad having a girlfriend.”

“But you haven’t seen the way he looks at Shelly. Unlike you, he doesn’t back away when she tries to hug him.” Based on Adam’s expression, I was guessing he’d witnessed such an event earlier in the hall. “Or I could be wrong.” I wasn’t.

Adam was still frowning, but this time at me and not just the unpleasant idea I’d forced on him. “He’s not—you have no idea what’s going on with my family. Clearly yours is seriously messed up. Mine is...” he hesitated “...normal messed up. My dad isn’t going to start dating, and my mom isn’t some—”

“Oh, I hope you finish that sentence. Considering your entire opinion of my mother will have been formed by Shelly’s, you must have a ton of insight.” I rested my chin on my hands and blinked at him with wide, waiting eyes.

The blush that stained his neck and cheeks wasn’t nearly as cute this time. He rotated his jaw like he was physically forcing himself to say something other than what he wanted to. “Our parents aren’t the same, okay? That’s all I was trying to say.”

“Then spill. You say no one strayed, but maybe they were just good at hiding it.”

Adam looked at me like I was something he’d stepped in. It wasn’t a new experience for me, so I let it go. “What’s wrong with you? You’re messed up, you know that?”

My cigarette had burned low by then, and I was reaching my suffer-in-order-to-piss-Dad-off-via-Shelly threshold in terms of temperature. My skin was covered in goose bumps, and I was rethinking all kinds of things about Adam. The movie in my head suddenly had an ominous, horror-themed score to it. “Fine, whatever. I’m going to slink into my room, but stay, smoke the rest of my cigarettes if you want.” I nodded toward the mostly full pack. “Maybe it’ll piss off your dad, too.”

“I’ll pass. I don’t need to resort to anything so petty to punish my dad.”

I grinned in all my gap-toothed glory. “Enlighten me, oh mature one—how grown-up do you have to be to call Mommy two seconds after you get here?”

He didn’t say anything, just walked to the wall and started to scale back over to his balcony.

“Oh no. Leaving so soon? I have all these other petty things we could do together.”

Adam’s head popped back over as soon as he was in his own balcony. “Look, are you going to be around a lot?”

“Every other weekend.”

He hung his head. “Me, too.”

I didn’t bother with the fake smile. “Yippee.”





   ADAM

What. The. Holy. Hell.

I glanced down at my calloused palms, scraped raw on one side from my hasty and nearly fatal climb back to my own balcony. The railing was rough from rust along the bottom and slick from a recent rainfall on the top. Nausea, cold and stinging, had flooded me during that split second that my foot slipped and I nearly plummeted six stories to my death.

I was chilled and sweaty and my heart was more than a little jumpy, which I wanted to blame on almost falling or maybe the cigarette but couldn’t. It was all her. Jolene. The things she’d said. Back in my room—the room I was staying in—I dropped onto the foot of my—the—bed and let my head fall into my hands. I felt kind of like a jerk, but at the same time I couldn’t bring myself to care, not with the sound of Dad and Jeremy laughing in the next room.

Dad hadn’t left Mom because he wanted someone else. His reasons made him a coward, not a cheat.

I grabbed my earbuds and phone, and turned up the volume to just shy of painful so that I couldn’t hear them or myself.

I don’t know how long I lay on the bed before Jeremy came in and yanked out my earbuds. “Dad wants to know if you’re going to eat.”

I started to close my eyes again, but Jeremy dead-legged me. I launched myself at him, tackling him into the dresser. We hit the ground, and the next instant I was bodily lifted and flung onto the lumpy mattress.

“Enough!” Dad was between us, hands outstretched toward each son. “Since when do you guys fight like animals?”

I looked at Jeremy and saw a tiny trickle of blood on his mouth. I must have elbowed him when we went down. We were both breathing hard, and he wouldn’t meet my eye. When I refused to answer, Dad turned to Jeremy.