Every Other Weekend(55)

My weeks hadn’t been any more fun. Between dodging my mom and her edginess over Tom’s increasingly less frequent appearances at the house, I’d been staying up late to work on the idea I’d finally gotten for the footage I’d captured of Adam and me, one that I wanted to finish while it still seemed good. I’d also been at Cherry and Gabe’s filming the music video.

I’d been hoping to see Cherry and that her latest reunion with Meneik would have run its course, but no such luck. We’d said hi and everything, but otherwise she’d been out with Meneik as much as her parents allowed and on the phone with him every second they didn’t.

Those whole two weeks between seeing Adam had sucked, and because we’d talked so little, I had no idea what kind of headspace he was in. It wasn’t like I could be mad at him for not opening up about his brother. I couldn’t imagine what losing Greg had been like, what it still was like, but I wanted to. I wanted to know about the person he loved so much that, even years later, mentioning Greg’s name or running into one of his friends physically affected Adam.

He and his brother weren’t talking when they entered the empty lobby, and Jeremy’s shoulders slumped as he saw me sitting on the second-floor landing.

“Give him a break, would you? He’ll come find you when he wants you.”

“Now,” Adam said, shoving his bag at Jeremy as he took the steps—two at a time—to reach me. “Now’s good.”

I tried to disguise how happy that made me by shrugging at Jeremy. “Why don’t you go on up? He’ll come find you when he wants you.” Then I caught Adam’s arm and we sped not down the stairs but up. In the past, we’d encountered a few too many neighbors on lower levels, but the last flight didn’t see a lot of traffic even when there wasn’t a blizzard outside to detract people from the roof.

“I feel like we need to hurry,” I told him.

“Hurry with what?”

“Anything. Everything.” He was acting like Adam again, there and present with me instead of lost in thoughts he couldn’t share. “What is the most awesome thing we could possibly do in this stairwell?”

“You’re looking at me like there’s an obvious answer to that question.” And then he half frowned, half smiled at me. “Are we going to make out?”

It was a teasing, throwaway comment, and it made me grin even as my heart thumped. “Better.” I pulled a deck of cards from my jacket pocket and dropped it on the stair between us.

He looked at the cards, then back at me. “So we’re not even going to talk about my idea?”

We didn’t end up talking about his idea, but we did talk about a lot of other stuff, mostly movies, because with me it’s always movies.

I growled when he told me he’d never seen The Godfather. “We’ll both be dead before I can show you all the awesome movies you haven’t seen.” Then I leaned against the wall and drew one knee up, my cards forgotten. “Doesn’t that depress you? If we watched one movie every night for the rest of our lives, we’d never see them all before we die. And I’m not even talking about all the new movies they make every year. It drives me nuts. I’m doomed to ignorance about so much of something I love.”

“Would you really want to do that?”

“Maybe I don’t want to see every movie ever made, but even half, the good ones, would take more years than I have left.”

“You’re talking about a medium that’s only a century old. Think about all the books you’ll never read or the songs you’ll never hear.”

“You’re not helping me,” I said.

“You brought up the movie thing. I’m pointing out that there are a lot of other things you won’t get to experience. No one will.”

“That’s my point. Doesn’t it bother you?”

He shrugged. “Not really.” He leaned toward me. “Look, if you only see the world as a list of things you’ll never get to do, then you’ll never enjoy any of the things you do get to do. You’ll always be thinking of something else, wanting more, when maybe what you have, what you’ve seen or read or heard or whatever, is pretty great. You’ll never appreciate anything.” He sat back against the opposite wall. “Now that’s depressing.”

“You sounded really wise just now.” I tilted my head at him. “You figure all that out on your own?”

“I had some help.”

“Who?”

“My brother... Greg.”

I picked up my cards again, casually shifting them in my hands so he wouldn’t see how much I wanted him to keep talking.

Sometimes I could tell it surprised him when he brought up his brother. He’d go all tense afterward, like he was bracing for pain that I couldn’t see, much less imagine. But it wasn’t there that time.

“You could tell me about him if you felt like it. I know you loved him a lot. And don’t let it go to your head when I say this, but there’s no way he didn’t love you.”

I lowered my gaze when he stood, both because I didn’t want him looking at me while I basically told him that everyone loved him, including me, and because I didn’t want him to think I was trying to force him into doing something he might not ever want to do.