What I Thought Was True(67)

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Cass asks if I know about ducking my head under the boom when the boat comes about, and I do. He shows me by exam-ple how to hook my shoes and lean back.

The water is thick with boats of all kinds, huge showy Chris-Crafts and Sailfishes skimming along the water. Far away there’s some sort of ferry headed somewhere and what looks like a tanker far out on the horizon.

“Do we have a destination?” I ask.

“Here,” Cass says, as though we aren’t whizzing through the water, as though we were just in one spot. “Unless you’d like to go somewhere else. Another direction.”

The wind is whipping now, blowing my hair into my eyes, across my lips. I pull it back, twist and knot it at the back of my neck. Cass looks at me, riveted, as though I’ve performed some rabbit out of the hat trick. But all he says is, “Ready about.” One turn, and we’re flying along. It’s like being one of Nic’s stones skimming over the surface of the ocean without ever landing hard enough to sink. Out here, the water is a deep bottle green, foamed by whitecaps, and I want to reach out and touch it, dive in, even. This is better than jumping . . . more exhilarating, more breath-stealing, more of a release, just . . . more.

I’m smiling so hard my cheeks are starting to hurt. I check Cass’s face. He’s intent on the water, the tiller, all focus and game face. I need to tone it down. He was so weird before. And he’s still not talking.

But then, he clears his throat and says, “Thanks. For com-ing. Sorry I was”—he nods back in the direction of shore—“a douche on land.”

“Yeah,” I say, “what was going on there?” Then add hur-231

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riedly, “If it’s about the lessons, you don’t have to do them.

We’ll understand. I mean, even just that one was great and it’ll probably come more easily now. He just needed to get over being afraid.”

“It takes longer than an hour to get over being afraid. It’s not that at all. I was just . . . thinking about stuff. Nothing about you two. A family thing.”

I remember him using that same phrase after The Great Hideout Save.

“Should I ask if you want to talk about it?”

The jib flaps a little and he tightens the line, almost unconsciously, without even having to look, then clenches and unclenches his hand, looking down for a second before quickly returning his attention to the crowded waters around us. “That conversation with my brother you, uh—”

“Eavesdropped on?”

He flashes me a smile. “Yeah, just like I did with ol’ Alex at the rehearsal dinner. But yeah, that talk is one I get a lot at home.”

“I got that impression. You going to tell me what your Big Sin was now?”

He moves the tiller to the left, getting us out of the line of fire of a Boston Whaler with a bunch of girls in bikinis in it. “I got a million of them.”

“Mostly alongside Spence?” I say, then regret it, expecting him to snap something about us having that in common, those Spence sins, or just shut down completely.

But he says, “Yeah. We started together at Hodges in kinder-garten. It wasn’t so bad then, but the older you get, the more 232

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it su—the worse it is. I mean—the rules, and what they think is important and just all this—shi—garbage. He hates that as much as I do and cares less about pretending he doesn’t. So we started messing around—” He hesitates.

“Define messing around.”

Cass shoots me a smile. “Not like that, obviously. Just stuff— like—there’s this big statue of the guy who founded Hodges— marble, in a toga, with a wreath—”

“Hodges was founded in Ancient Rome?”

“Asinine, right? So, sophomore year, Spence and I would, you know, put a bra on it or a beer in its hand or whatever. We did that for a few weeks, and then they caught us.”

“Don’t tell me they kicked you out for that. You’d have to do way worse to get booted from SBH. The last kid who was expelled set all the choir robes on fire while sneaking a ciga-rette in the chorus closet.”

“Yeah, and from what I hear about that one, he was smashed and it wasn’t exactly a Marlboro he was smoking. That guy managed to pull off all three strikes and you’re out in one day.

Chan and me . . . not that efficient. So, yeah, disrespecting our illustrious founder”—he makes air quotes around those two words—“strike one. Then we borrowed the groundskeeper’s golf cart and almost drove it into this little pond they had.”

“Small-time, Somers.” I lean back, folding my arms across my chest. Until I realize how stupid that probably looks with a life jacket on. And that I’m totally borrowing his gesture. Isn’t mirroring a mating signal in the animal kingdom? Soon I’ll be rolling over and exposing my soft underbelly.

“Now I’m supposed to impress you with How Bad I Am, 233

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Gwen? Is that what it takes? Okay, so the dining hall looks like . . .” He drags on his earlobe, searching for words. “Hog-warts. No, worse, like where Henry VIII would go to eat a whole deer leg or whatever. Or Nottingham Castle. So, Spence and I figured we ought to up the authenticity of the whole medie-val thing. We borrowed a key from the custodian—snuck in at night with a couple bales of hay and these big wolfhounds that Spence’s dad had. And a chicken or two. This pot-bellied pig.