He shrugged. “He needed a reality check.”
“You didn’t have to do it like that.”
“I think you’re the one who hurt Jeremiah’s feelings.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. If I asked him what he meant by that, he’d tel me. And I didn’t want him to. So I drank my beer and said, “What now?”
Conrad didn’t let me off the hook that easy. He said, “What now with you and Jeremiah or with you and me?”
He was teasing me and I hated him for it. I could feel my cheeks burning as I said, “What now with this house, was what I meant.”
He leaned back against the counter. “There’s nothing to do, real y. I mean, I could get a lawyer. I’m eighteen now. I could try and stal . But I doubt it would do anything. My dad’s stubborn. And he’s greedy.”
Hesitantly, I said, “I don’t know that he’s doing it out of—out of greed, Conrad.”
Conrad’s face sort of closed off. “Trust me. He is.”
I couldn’t help but ask, “What about summer school?”
“I couldn’t care less about school right now.”
“But—”
“Just leave it, Bel y.” Then he walked out of the kitchen, opened the sliding door, and went outside.
Conversation over.
chapter twenty-six
JEREMIAH
My whole life I’ve looked up to Conrad. He’s always been smarter, faster— just better. The thing is, I never real y begrudged him that. He was just Conrad. He couldn’t help being good at things. He couldn’t help that he never lost in Uno or races or grades. Maybe part of me needed that, someone to look up to. My big brother, the guy who couldn’t lose.
But there was this time, when I was thirteen. We were wrestling around in the living room, had been for half an hour. My dad was always trying to get us to wrestle. He’d been on the wrestling team in col ege, and he liked teaching us new techniques. We were wrestling, and my mom was in the kitchen, cooking bacon-wrapped scal ops because we were having people over that night and they were my dad’s favorite.
“Lock him in, Con,” my dad was saying.
We were real y getting into it. We’d already knocked over one of my mom’s silver candlesticks. Conrad was breathing hard; he’d expected to beat me easily.
But I was getting good; I wasn’t giving up. He had my head locked under his arm and then I locked his knee and we were both on the ground. I could feel something shift; I almost had him. I was going to win. My dad was gonna be so proud.
When I had him pinned, my dad said, “Connie, I told you to keep your knees bent.”
I looked up at my dad, and I saw the look on his face. He had that look he got sometimes when Conrad wasn’t doing something right, al tight around the eyes and irritated. He never looked at me like that.
He didn’t say, “Good job, Jere.” He just started criticizing Conrad, tel ing him al the things he could’ve done better. And Conrad took it. He was
nodding, his face red, sweat pouring down his forehead. Then he nodded at me and said, in a way that I knew he real y meant it, “Good job, Jere.”
That’s when my dad chimed in and said, “Yeah, good job, Jere.”
Al of a sudden, I wanted to cry. I didn’t want to beat Conrad ever again. It wasn’t worth it.
After al that stuff back at the house, I got in my car and I just started driving. I didn’t know where I was going and part of me didn’t even want to go back. Part of me wanted to leave Conrad to deal with this shitstorm by himself, the way he’d wanted it in the first place. Let Bel y deal with him.
Let them have at it. I drove for half an hour.
But even as I was doing it, I knew that, eventual y, I would turn back around. I couldn’t just leave. That was Con’s style, not mine. And it was low, what I said about him not being there for our mom. It wasn’t like he knew she was gonna die.
He was at col ege. It wasn’t his fault. But he wasn’t the one who was there when everything got bad again. It al happened so fast. He couldn’t have known. If he had known, he would have stayed home. I know he would have.
Our dad was never gonna win a Father of the Year award. He was flawed, that was for sure. But when it counted, there at the end, he came home. He said al the right things. He made our mom happy. Conrad just couldn’t see it. He didn’t want to.
I didn’t go back to the house right away.
First I stopped at the pizza place. It was dinnertime, and there wasn’t any food at the house. A kid I knew, Mikey, was working the register. I ordered
