The Falling (Brightest Stars, #1)(10)
I started to feel like a hypocrite for judging her, so I clicked back to my main feed. My dad had posted a picture of himself holding a fish in one hand and a beer in the other. He wore a smile that I had never seen in person. He always loved to hunt and fish; my brother and I couldn’t stomach it. Austin could handle the gore a bit more than I could; he would go on hunting trips with Dad until we got to high school and girls became his favorite pastime. My brother, whom I had talked to nearly every day up until a few months ago but now could barely get on the phone, had already liked my dad’s post. So did someone with a golden retriever as their profile picture. The golden-retriever friend had commented that my dad was “looking happier than ever.”
It stung. It really stung. Probably because it was true. I had been hearing that phrase since he got remarried two years ago after a whirlwind romance of less than a year. We had barely unpacked our boxes from our move to Fort Benning when my dad met Estelle on Facebook, of all places. He commented on a mutual friend’s picture and their romance took off from there. From the neighbors to the cashiers at the PX, everyone thought it was okay to congratulate my dad on how happy he was. No one thought about me . . . that I was in earshot, that telling him how happy he seemed now implied that he had been really unhappy before. No one considered my feelings. Not him, not Estelle, not the strangers. That’s when I started clinging to people—boys, mostly. Some at my high school, some older. I was searching for something I wasn’t getting at home, but I couldn’t tell you what it was because I still haven’t found it.
Most of all, I clung to Austin. Maybe it was the twin thing, or maybe it was the fact that our parents were never around when we needed them, when their guidance would have mattered. Staying close to my six-minutes-younger brother seemed to help for a while, but once we were out of high school, I started to consider that maybe Austin wasn’t the person I had built him up to be. One of the weirdest parts of growing up was the way memories changed once the veil of na?ve innocence disappeared.
Austin had once taken me to that party in Chesapeake Manor, where all the officers’ kids were partying. He told me that everyone our age was drinking, that I should just relax. Then he passed out in one of the bedrooms with some girl from a high school across town and I was forced to sleep there, surrounded by loud, rowdy, belligerent boys. That’s when one of them, the one who called me “Austin’s sister” and had too deep a voice for a high school kid, swore I had a crush on him and shoved his tongue down my throat—repeatedly. Until I started crying and he got “weirded out.”
Funny how my telling him to stop, my constant “No, no, no, please no!” didn’t do it. Nope, it was the salty, hot tears streaming down my face that finally got him to go away. I guess he didn’t like the way they tasted. Eventually I fell asleep on a couch listening to some war video game being played in the other room. Austin never apologized the next morning. He never asked how I had slept or where. He just kissed that random girl on the cheek and made a joke that she and I both laughed at, and then we Ubered home like nothing ever happened. Our dad yelled at me, not at him, and we both got grounded for a week, but three days in, Austin got to hang out with his friends, and since I didn’t have any, I was stuck there.
I clicked on Austin’s profile and thought about calling him again, but then Elodie opened the front door and surprised me. I hadn’t even realized I was on my front porch.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My house is small: when you go through the front door, you’re already in the living room. That’s one of the things I like about it, the way it’s all cozy and warm, everything there waiting for me. No surprises, except the faulty electrical work that I still haven’t been able to fix correctly. The lights and TV were on when I got home that night, the room filled with the voice of Olivia Pope. And there was Elodie, standing at the door, greeting me with a nervous smile. Something was up.
I hadn’t known Elodie that long, but I felt I knew her better than I knew the father who I’d lived with for a lifetime. We met at work on her first day hired. I found her in the cleaning supplies closet, crying because a client had yelled at her when the massage oil she used was too hot. We didn’t have much in common, other than being the same age. And even that, well, I felt older somehow. I looked older, too. Elodie had this youthful air around her, a forever teenager, especially when she smiled. And when she was nervous or sad, she looked about sixteen. Maybe younger? That brought out the protector in me. I didn’t have a choice but to grow up fast. Even at twenty, I barely remember a time when I was free of adult thoughts and worries.
Elodie tried her best to be the perfect young Army wife, but she was already at the center of so many petty rumors. The wives in Phillip’s platoon made little jokes about her accent and called her a “mail-order bride,” despite the reality that tons of soldiers met their wives online. I’m sure my client Stewart had some stats on that, too—about how many members of the military met their spouses on social media.
That didn’t seem to matter to these women who entertained themselves by belittling Elodie. That’s how a lot of military installations were—everyone bickering and jostling for position. Elodie’s neighbors were snarky assholes who spent their days selling pyramid schemes on Facebook and bullying her over her grass being an inch too long. That’s not an exaggeration. I was with her once when the “mayor” of her housing department pulled up, tires screeching, and scolded Elodie for letting her grass grow half an inch too long.