First & Then(3)

“Did moron club get out early?” I said.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, “I see what you did there. I said ‘college’ for your club, and you said ‘moron’ for my club. Clever.”

I looked out at the field, partially to avoid having to reply to that, and partially because practice was just starting and this was my favorite part. All the players would circle up on the field to do calisthenics. I liked the jumping jacks best, the way they’d chant each count aloud together. It was hard to see faces when everyone had their equipment on, but I could spot Cas Kincaid from anywhere. His jumping jacks were always half-assed.

Foster didn’t like Cas, but I didn’t like Foster. I probably should’ve felt bad for him, but Foster had this inability to do or say anything remotely human. Sometimes I thought the earth could rip open and swallow our house up whole and he would just stand there on the sidewalk changing tracks on his iPod.

“What’d you learn in college club?”

“Stop calling it college club.”

Like “Road-to-College Club” was so much cooler.

“Stop calling it moron club,” Foster countered.

Ironically enough, if any club was “college club,” it was his. At freshman orientation, Foster signed up for the Future Science Revolutionaries of America Club. It was a biweekly meeting of those genius kids who like to build robots and memorize the digits of pi. Most of them could probably get into more colleges as freshmen than I could as a senior.

The chanting stopped as the guys moved on to a new exercise. Foster followed my gaze to the field, more particularly, to Cas.

“Don’t you feel dumb always following him around?”

I didn’t answer, but I wasn’t really listening.

“Don’t you feel dumb hanging around and waiting for him?” he repeated as he bounced up and down a little in his seat, a rubber band perpetually wound too tight.

“Why would I feel dumb?”

“Because he doesn’t hang around and wait for you. Don’t you want a boyfriend who waits for you?”

“He’s not my boyfriend. We’re friends.”

“So how come you close the door to your room whenever he comes over?”

“So you won’t come in.”

“You don’t have sex in there?”

“No!” I looked over at Foster. I was fairly confident he was the scrawniest, most immature fourteen-year-old in all of Florida, quite possibly in the entire world. “No. No one’s having sex anywhere.”

“I’m sure there are people having sex right now. All the way around the world. I’m sure there are millions of people having sex right now. It’s nighttime in Europe. People have more sex at night, don’t they?”

“Stop talking about sex, Foster.”

“Why? Does it make you uncomfortable? Does Cas make you uncomfortable? I could punch him, you know. I know how to punch.”

“No punching. No talking. Let’s just be quiet, okay? Let’s play Zip Lip.”

“Okay.” Foster liked to think he was best at this game. I was old enough to know that my mom only invented it to keep me quiet when I was little. He should’ve been old enough to realize that, too.

“But wait. Is your dad picking us up? Because I’m not driving with Cas. He smells.”

“You smell.”

A pause. “I see what you did there.”

I sighed. “Zip your lips, Foster.”

“Do yours first.”

I drew my fingers across my lips. Foster did his, and there was temporary peace.

The peace lasted through the drive home, even after I greeted my dad, effectively losing Zip Lip.

“How was school?” My mom asked that evening, with one hand resting on her hip and the other one stirring a wooden spoon in a pot of pasta sauce. Foster was tucked away in front of the television, and my dad was in his office. The house was quiet, aside from the gentle bursting of bubbles in the sauce and the dull hum of Foster’s TV.

“It was fine.” I took to setting the table, because I knew she was going to ask me to do it anyway.

“How was Foster?”

I hated questions like that. What can you possibly say? It made him sound like a weather system. Foster was cloudy with an 80 percent chance of precipitation.

“He seemed fine,” I said as I grabbed some napkins out of the cupboard. I still wasn’t quite used to getting four instead of three.

“Do you…” She was trying so hard to sound casual. “Do you think he’s fitting in well?”

“It’s only the third day.”

“But do you think he’s making friends?”

“I don’t know.” That was a lie. “I haven’t seen much of him.” That was a lie, too. I knew he couldn’t have been making friends, or else he wouldn’t be trying to hang around me so much.

“What about gym class?”

Physical education wasn’t a freshman requirement until my sophomore year, so after having put it off for so long, I was dutifully bound to two semesters as the only senior in a class of hormone-ridden freshmen. A class that happened to include my cousin Foster. I hated sports and I wasn’t too fond of freshmen, so gym class was a blight on my otherwise seamless senior schedule.