Jules is here. Funny, quick Jules who loves me and understands me––as much as I’ve let her.
I can do this with her here. I can get through this.
“I actually did my math homework right through there,” I tell her, taking her shoulders and turning her to face another hallway, one that leads to the kitchen. “And I didn’t eat Oreos at all because Ruby had a thing about junk food. As for tits on the internet…”
Keeping my hands on her shoulders, I turn her to face me, bending my knees slightly so that we’re eye to eye. “These eyes never saw any tits at all until you took pity on me in the backseat of my car behind Senor Pollo’s.”
Her sputtering laughter chases away some of the shadows, just like I’d hoped it would, and that tightness in my chest fades as I pull her close, her body a soft, familiar shape against mine.
I’d always thought there was something about this house that poisoned everyone in it eventually. Turned the good to rot. But there’s too much sunshine in Jules for that to happen to her, and I need to remember that.
“Hope I’m not interrupting something!” a voice calls out, and that slight lift of happiness I’d been feeling slides away as quickly as it came.
I drop my arms from around Jules and turn around.
“Ben,” I say, and, sure enough, there he stands on the stairs.
It had been a shock to see that Libby was no longer a teenager, but Ben, strangely, looks almost exactly the same.
His hair is sandy blond, a few shades lighter than mine, and he’s just as tan as his sister, his teeth blindingly white as he smiles down at us. Ben’s dad, Howell, always wore polo shirts and khakis, his feet forever shoved into Docksiders, but Ben is in jeans and a fitted gray T-shirt, and as he makes his way down the stairs, I see he’s wearing a spotless pair of those expensive sneakers he’s always been addicted to.
I’ve got on a beat-up pair of leather ankle boots, but other than that, we’re dressed almost exactly the same, and there’s that dizzying sense of vertigo again because, as I sense Jules look back and forth between us, I know what she must be thinking.
Ben is two years older, and I’m maybe an inch taller than he is. He’s a little less lanky than I am, chest and arms thicker, and his hair is shorter. North Carolina still drips from his voice in a way that it doesn’t from mine, but, yeah, we look enough alike to be brothers. People used to assume we were, actually, an idea that horrified both of us.
Me in another life, I think now, looking at him as he offers his hand to shake. Me if I stayed here.
“Glad you made it,” Ben says, his glance brushing off of me, but fixing on Jules in a way that has my hands clenched into fists before I even realize it.
“The Prodigal Son returns,” he continues even though he’s staring at Jules. She’s smiling back at him, polite, but her toe nudges mine just the littlest bit.
A reminder, probably, that I owe her five dollars. Somewhere around Nashville, she had bet me someone in my family would say those exact words and I, stupidly, had thought that even Ben wasn’t that much of a cliché.
“And even better, he brings a new Mrs. McTavish,” Ben goes on, gesturing at one of the photographs on the table with the Tiffany lamp. “This house is named after the last McTavish bride, you know. Anna. My great-grandmother. Her maiden name was Ashby.”
He swings back to Jules. “What’s yours?”
I should’ve warned her about this, the family’s obsession with genealogy and who birthed who, like a dead relative you never met can tell someone everything they need to know about you.
Jules waves one hand. “Technically, I don’t have one. I mean, I kept my last name when I married Cam, so it’s actually Ms. Brewster. Jules Brewster.”
She offers her hand for him to shake, and Ben stares at it for a beat, thrown off his game. “Ms. Brewster,” he says, and, finally, he shakes her hand. “Okay, cool. I mean, it’s the twenty-first century, why not?”
His free hand forms a fist, snakes out, and I brace myself out of old habit. The thump on my arm doesn’t land as hard as it once did, though, and I wonder if he got weaker or if I got stronger. Maybe he has the same thought, because I see the way his eyes widen for a second, how he clenches and unclenches his fingers at his sides.
I’m not some skinny seventh grader anymore, Ben, I think, remembering the purple bruises I’d study as I lay in the massive bathtub upstairs. Violet splotches on my biceps, my thighs. Never out of anger, no, Ben would never. Always just “messing around,” just “guy shit,” just “Cam gets it, dontcha, Cam?”