“Brad admitted that he was a worm for treating her like shit, so now you’re good with it?”
“Boyd, but yes. Kind of,” I modified. “He said that he couldn’t go see her right after the accident because his parents wouldn’t let him, and I said he had years after that to make it up. He agreed but Willow let him off the hook for it. Of course.” I realized that I was rubbing my head again and I stopped.
“She was young when that happened. How old was he?”
“Sixteen, like I was. We were in the same grade. He should have come to see her and he should have apologized for breaking up with her. He also should have apologized for acting like she was whacko, when she was only trying to show him that he was wrong about breaking up with her.”
Everett shook his head. “When I was sixteen—”
“I know that you said you were involved in a lot of assholery at that age, but not everyone was like that. I wasn’t,” I stated. “I was the one who was at the hospital with Willow, because my mom said she had to work and Dad got so drunk that the neighbor found him lying on the sidewalk, and then he took off and left us. Boyd could have stepped up like I did,” I said. “And he had years to explain and say sorry, but he didn’t.”
“Why did he have to say that he was sorry for breaking up with her? If he didn’t want to be with her, then that’s his prerogative. There’s nothing to apologize for.”
I thought of how Everett had been face down on the floor of the storage room at Woodsmen Stadium. He had probably thought that he deserved an apology from Eris for that, but bringing itup just felt mean. I was oblique. “You know how people can be nasty during a breakup? Well, Boyd was. They got into a fight at the Homecoming dance and he dumped her in front of all their friends.”
“Very teenage,” he commented. “So he was a worm but now he’s sorry, and you don’t want to forgive him.”
“You don’t know how bad it was for Willow after the accident. It was like watching someone be tortured, and my mom ignored it and my dad drank himself blind. My sister and I needed help. Boyd turned his back.”
“Yeah.” He had put down his second sandwich. “Remember how I said that I helped my friend drive a car onto another guy’s roof?”
I nodded. Who could have forgotten it?
“My friend blamed me for that prank. He said it was my idea, that I had told him to do it and egged him on. He said that it was my fault.”
“What? Wasn’t it his car? Even if it was your idea, he could have told you no!”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t my idea anyway. His parents blamed me too, publicly in a way that could have hurt my chances of playing in college, but my grandma paid them off to shut up and she paid the guy whose roof was damaged, too. My friend rebounded well and I heard he’s running a company now. He’s very successful now and thanks to my grandma, his record is clear. He and I really were idiots, both of us, which was why she also yelled at me for about two days and then said how disappointed shewas. That was worse than the yelling, but I went along with that asshole so I deserved what she said.”
I thought about it and then sighed. I understood what he was trying to say, also obliquely: there was plenty of blame to go around regarding my sister’s situation. “Before her accident, I had told her not to act so crazy about Boyd. She was texting him all the time and telling people that they were going to get married. At first, he was all in, but then his friends started getting on him about it. I think he broke up with her because they were teasing him.”
“Sixteen, so an idiot. Not everyone is, but he was. I was.”
“Then she got so much worse, like, she wouldn’t leave him alone. She was texting all the time, skipping class to wait for him, getting rides over to his house in the middle of the night. His parents got involved,” I admitted. “They tried to talk to my mom and dad about stopping her but my parents…they weren’t great about parenting, not even with easy stuff and this was hard. I did my best to make her stop but she wouldn’t listen to me at all.” I looked at the waves, thinking back on the day that Willow’s friends had called me, hysterically screaming that she had dived into the water and died. “She only wanted him to talk to her again. It really was an accident.”
“It looks like he forgives her for whatever she did, and she forgives him, too.”
But for all these years, she hadn’t spoken up when I had blamed him. How many times had I said that it was Boyd’s fault? My sister had never argued with that, but she hadn’t agreed, either.
“I don’t want to be so mad at him,” I heard myself say. “It just pushes her away from me and I don’t have anyone else. I’m pretty much a leper.”
“The people who got sent to live on islands,” Everett stated, and I nodded.
“I only have Willow. But I’m trying not to hang on to her, like some pest or a weight around her neck. If she wants to be with Boyd, if he’s not going to be a worm and he really does make her happy, then I’m glad. I’ll stop hating him.”
“Why do you think that you’re a leper?”
“I don’t really have a communicable disease,” I assured him. “Anyway, it’s very hard to catch leprosy. It takes a lot more than one sneeze or a cough.”
“Good, but I wasn’t worried too much about that.”
“I just meant that I’m pretty much alone. People have ended up leaving me for various reasons so now, I’m down to one person. I’ll talk to her later and straighten it out. I’ll have to apologize.” But if she had really been acting out of concern for me (although it was misguided), then she deserved an apology. I had been rude and had purposefully excluded her from this picnic, and I hadn’t listened when she’d expressed her (erroneous) opinion. I knew how it could drive you whacko when you were trying to help someone and she ignored it.
I sighed again, wishing that I could make my problems disappear somehow. Instead, I opted for a temporary escape. “I’m going to get in the lake.”
Everett also stood up. “When you said that you might look like you were drowning, you weren’t kidding.”
“I know. Sometimes I think that I should have done sports as well as music.”
