“You just got here.”
“It’s all right. There’s a reception I told my mom I couldn’t go to because I was going to the concert. I can at least make her happy.”
“I’m not saying you can’t go to the concert.”
“You want me to go there and act like nothing happened? Or, what, I’m supposed to put a blanket over my head again?”
He filled his fists with his hair and pulled on it.
“It’s almost like you’re ashamed of me,” she said.
“No, no, no. This is just—”
“I know, a bad night. I was really looking forward to it, but now— I’m not.”
Before he could stop her, she jumped out of the bus. Leaving the door hanging open, she narrowed her eyes against the stinging snow and ran up the alley behind the bookstore, where the bus couldn’t follow her. She could only hope that she was disappointing him as much as he’d disappointed her. She’d felt so certain of how their date was going to go: a delicious resumption of their kissing, followed by testimonials of amazement that they’d found their way to each other, followed by lengthier kissing, followed by her triumphal entry into the church with him. Now even the snow was unromantic, a painful hindrance. Everything had gone to shit.
She could feel wetness creeping into her only decent boots, which she was probably damaging irreparably, as she trudged the long blocks home in slanting snow. It was getting too dark to see well, and the physical effort of not slipping and falling kept her tears at bay until she reached the parsonage. She’d held out hope that Tanner might be waiting in his bus there, waiting to apologize and beg her to come to the concert with him, the consequences be damned. But except for a forlorn distant scraping of a shovel and a pair of unrecent tire tracks, nearly refilled with snow, her block of Highland Street was desolate. The only light in the parsonage was in Perry and Judson’s room.
Inside, there was no sign of her mother. Was she still not back from her exercise class? Becky now felt ashamed of having been so unforthcoming with her, so certain she knew better how to handle Tanner. Her mother seemed to her the one person with whom she might safely share her disappointment. She brushed snow out of her hair and hurried upstairs, past the closed door of her brothers’ room. At the sight of her bed, where just a few hours earlier she’d innocently dreamed of going to the concert, her disappointment came bursting out.
As she lay on the bed and wallowed in her conviction that Tanner was still in love with Laura, that he cared more about Laura’s feelings than he did about hers, she thought she was crying not too loudly. But after some minutes there came a gentle knocking on her door. She went rigid.
“Becky?” Perry said.
“Go away.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Leave me alone.”
“You sure?”
She wasn’t all right. An anguished sound came out of her, the disappointment erupting again. It must have been audible to Perry, because he entered her room and shut the door behind him. Her irritation stopped her tears.
“Go away,” she said. “I didn’t say you could come in.”
Increasing her irritation, he sat down beside her. Skin-crawling repugnance was probably a normal response to a pubescent brother’s proximity, the abnormal thing her lack of a similar response to Clem, but the badness she sensed in Perry made the repugnance especially intense. She scooched away from him and wiped her face on her pillowcase.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Nothing you would understand.”
“I see. You think I lack empathy.”
She did suspect that he lacked empathy, but this wasn’t the point. “I’m upset,” she said, “about something that has nothing to do with you.”
“I’m sensing a barrier to our getting to know each other better.”
“Get out of my room!”
“Joke, sister. That was a joke.”
“I got the joke. Okay? Now please get out of my room.”
“There’s something I need to say to you. But I have the distinct impression that you’ve been trying to stay away from me.”
It was true that she’d been avoiding him, even more than usual, since the night he’d drawn her as his partner in a Crossroads dyad exercise. During the exercise, she’d felt proud of confronting him with his selfishness and self-involvement; excited to think that Crossroads was empowering her to become the family truth-teller. She’d guessed that she was hurting him, to the extent that an amoral brainiac was capable of being hurt, but she’d hoped that her honest witnessing might foster his own personal growth. Ever since that night, though, the sight of him had troubled her. No matter how on-target her assessment of his faults had been, no matter how much the truth had needed airing, she felt that somehow she, not he, had done a wrong thing.