“Goddammit,” I mutter.
“You fall asleep in the sun?” she asks, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“…yes,” I lie.
“Where?”
“Outside.”
“Can I come in?” she asks, tilting her head to one side.
I don’t want her to come in. I want her to give me the stupid bags and then leave and I want to crawl back into my bed in my swimsuit and feel bad for the rest of time.
Instead, Elizabeth pushes the door open.
“Let me rephrase that,” she says. “I’m coming in.”She sits me down at the kitchen table and makes me coffee. She finds a comfy t-shirt in a pile — probably the clean pile but I’m not 100% sure — and puts it on me. She raids my fridge and makes us breakfast, and she doesn’t even comment on how much of the stuff in my fridge is past its expiration date.
“I fucked it up,” I say, shoving away a half-eaten plate of eggs and toast, my other hand locked around a mug of half-drunk coffee. “God, I fucked it up so bad.”
I take a deep breath and push the heels of my hands against my eyes again, like I can stave off tears, but all I can think about is how easy it would have been not to fuck it up and how I didn’t do that.
Across the table, Elizabeth sets her coffee mug down with a light clonk.
“You’re supposed to say no, you didn’t, Charlie,” I tell her. “Maybe also he won’t be mad forever, he’ll forgive you, love will conquer all, shit like that.”
“How bad was the break?” she asks instead.
“Not what I asked for.”
“Sorry,” she says.
“It was just a hairline fracture,” I say, still rubbing my eyes. “She put her hand out and it got sort of stuck between two rocks for a second and jerked the wrong way.”
Elizabeth sucks in a breath, and I think about Rusty’s scream, the way it felt like an icicle to my heart.
“That’s how I sprained my ankle,” she says, matter-of-factly.
“It got stuck?”
“At the sliding rocks,” she says. “I was kinda sliding off-track, so I kicked a rock, only my foot got stuck and got yanked the wrong way. Mom just about had a heart attack, made the doctors do about fifty x-rays because she was convinced it was broken, but it wasn’t.”
“You called Mom?” I ask, feeling like I’m one step behind.
“I was five,” Elizabeth says. “She’s the one who took us. You don’t remember that?”
Slowly, I shake my head.
“I guess you were only two,” she muses. “You gave me your stuffed bunny Arthur, so he could make me feel better, but I was really grumpy and told you that bunnies were stupid and ate their own poop and we got in a big fight about it.”
“That doesn’t sound like us,” I say sarcastically, and Elizabeth laughs.
“Come on,” she says, standing up and taking my half-eaten plate. “Finish that and go put some real clothes on. Also sunscreen.”
“Why?” I ask, taking a gulp of coffee.
“Because we’re gonna go do some fun shit, dumbass,” she says. “Come on.”
“Bossy,” I mutter under my breath as I put the empty coffee mug into the sink and she turns on the water.
“Call me whatever you want, just go change out of the swimsuit you’ve apparently been wearing for twenty-four hours,” she says.
I do it.
Big sisters, man.“How is this not stupid?” I ask, staring at the enormous tire, perched at the top of a grassy hill.
Elizabeth rolls her eyes.
“Just get in, loser,” she laughs.
“How did you even find out about this?”
“Jeff’s students,” she says, a trifle evasively. “Come on, it’s fun.”
“How do you know?”
Elizabeth shrugs, grinning, and I narrow my eyes. Her husband Jeff is also a teacher who teaches English at Sprucevale High.
“Which students?” I demand. “The college-prep class or the remedial class?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes,” I say, looking at the old tractor tire that Elizabeth’s standing on its side, its diameter about six inches less than my height.
“Listen, Chuck,” she says, sighing. “The remedial English kids do know how to have fun.”
I cannot believe my sister, a teacher, is saying this to me.
“You’re the worst role model,” I tell her.
“Oh, the college prep kids will be having a much better time four years from now,” she says. “But they’re not the ones rolling down a hill in a tractor tire.”
“But you think I should.”
“I think you should take your mind off the fact that your boyfriend is being kind of an uptight dick right now,” she says.
My stomach squeezes. I press my lips together, look away, and the voice in my head says he’s not being a dick, he’s being right because you can never be what he needs.
“Chuck,” Elizabeth says. “Shit, Chuck, I’m sorry. C’mere.”
She ducks through the middle of the giant tire, and it falls away from me and hits the ground with a whump.