“My sister and I bicker, too.”
“No, not bickering.” He shook his head carefully. “We used to fight. Physical, bloody fistfights. He beat the living crap out of me, weekly if not daily.”
“If you were in high school when he was twenty-four—”
“Jasper is seven years older,” he said. “My sister is in the middle of us, but she’s only thirteen months younger than he is.”
“With a seven-year age gap between you and your brother, you got whaled on and your parents didn’t do anything about it?” Even I, who struggled so much with classroom management and student behavior, could never have let that go.
“It wasn’t that bad. I toughened up enough to play football,” he told me. “You just said that you and your sister fight.”
“We bicker,” I reminded him. “I may have wanted to slap her sometimes and I’ve realized that she probably felt the same way toward me, but we’ve never laid hands on each other.”
“How did she get hurt?”
I shook my head. “I never—”
“No, I mean that you told me that she was injured somehow, and that’s why she limps.”
I nodded. “It was Boyd’s fault.”
“He did something to her?”
“Not directly,” I answered, “but she got hurt because of the whole situation, which was all his fault. She was really in love with him and he pretended to love her, too.” I sighed, remembering how she’d practically floated around the halls at school. “She was telling everyone that he was it. She thought that they were going to get married and be together forever.”
“That sounds like a little kid talking.”
“She was,” I agreed. “Willow was fifteen and Boyd was a year older. But I agreed that it was so romantic.” I had also been sixteen and apparently, just as dumb.
“My big relationship at that age lasted two days. How about them?”
“A few months. They broke up at Homecoming.” I thought about her pink dress and how beautiful she’d looked, how I’d watched her and her friends do their hair and makeup and I’d thought that they were all like princesses. Queens. “She was very upset. I mean, not just crying and eating a lot of ice cream, but totally broken up. She tried to get him back but the more she pushed for it, the more he ran away. And his friends were all making fun of her. It felt like the whole school was, even my bandmates. She was so upset that it caused her accident.”
“And you blame him for that.”
“Yes, because it was his fault. And now, I’m supposed to sit in the bleachers and pretend that it’s all fine when obviously, it’s not. Willow had to drop out of school for the rest of the year, and after that, she refused to go back. I didn’t blame her because it was hard enough there for me, just being her sister. But she did graduate. The district has some alternative programs which I can describe for you in detail, if you want that for your custody case.”
He shook his head. “What happened to her? Did she drive too fast and wreck her car?”
“No.” I swallowed. “She went to the end of a dock and said that she was going to swim out into the lake until she sank. But she dove in and the water was too shallow.”
“Damn. Jesus!” Everett stared at me. “She did that on purpose?”
“She was distraught. I don’t think she was really trying to hurt herself,” I explained. “She only wanted to get his attention and nothing was working. Boyd acted like she didn’t exist.” I didn’t really want to get into all the other things that my sister had done to try to lure him back (the hundreds of messages, the campouts in his driveway, the pursuit of his friends). Nothing had worked—it had only pushed him further away. “He could have talked to her and tried to be decent about it,” I said.
Everett just looked at me, but his expression was exactly the same as when Mrs. Pauker had tried to convince one of her first graders that his heart, the organ in his chest, didn’t look like a red, two-humped cartoon that ended in a point. He hadn’t believed her in the least.
“It was emotional and it’s hard to understand now, so many years later,” I told him. “She ended up getting very lucky to only have the injuries that she did, but it was still awful. She was in the hospital and then a rehab center, and my mom was furious and Dad was freaking out, and everyone at school was making a huge thing about it. Now you can understand why I think that it’s a bad idea for her to be with Boyd.”
“Yeah, I get it. Damn,” he said. “I never dealt with anything like that mess. I thought that I had it was bad when Eris sent me the video of her with…I think it was the assistant director.”
“Having sex?”
“No, just the two of them riding bikes together,” he answered, but then shook his head and grimaced at the movement. “Yeah, they were having sex.”
“But that’s good for your custody case. If you’re still pursuing it,” I added.
“I am. Why wouldn’t I?”
