“What’s the password?” I yell to the closed door, and Kale yells back, “Bangarang!”
I can’t help cracking a weak smile as I drag myself off my bed to let him in. I have no idea why he yelled “bangarang,” but I kind of love him for it. The password thing is a game we’ve played since we were little—there never is a password and never has been, but for years, we had my brothers convinced that I made up a new one every day, and that Kale was the only one who ever knew what it was.
When I swing open the door, he slips inside before any of my brothers can careen down the hallway to barge their way in. I’ll talk to them eventually. Just . . . not tonight. Tonight, I don’t need their personal brand of psychosis. I have enough of my own.
“Hey,” Kale says as I engage the thirty-dollar lock I bought with the money I got for my eleventh birthday. When you have four brothers and are starting to wear training bras, you have priorities.
“Hey.” I plop down next to him when he makes himself at home on my bed.
“So tonight was pretty epic.”
I force a fragile smile. For him, tonight will always be the night his heart became whole. For me . . . tonight will be the night I threw mine outside. “Have you told Leti yet?” I ask.
“Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“About what?” I ask a dumb question, and he gives me a dumb answer.
“Oh, I don’t know. Did you hear the Patriots beat the Packers last week?”
He meets my flat stare with a flat stare of his own, and I sigh.
“What did Mom and Dad say?” he asks, and a little chuckle escapes me.
“Mom called Shawn a tool.”
“She did not.”
I nod with a breakable smile on my face. “She totally did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Her exact words were, ‘motherfucking tool.’ ”
Kale gapes at me a moment before barking out a loud laugh that simmers into belly chuckles. “Oh my God, that’s perfect,” he says, and I force a half smile that makes him lose half of his. “What else did she say?”
“You know Mom,” I say as I rub my finger across a worn part of my blue comforter. “Always trying to get me a boyfriend.”
Kale places his hand over the worn spot to reclaim my attention. “What did she say?”
“She said Shawn didn’t seem like he wanted to keep me a secret tonight . . . She said . . . ” Kale waits patiently when I trail off, and I let out a bone-weary sigh before I continue. “She said she saw how fast he ran to catch me.”
Kale’s dark eyes hold mine for a long moment before dropping to that worn-down spot on my bedspread. His fingers follow, fidgeting with the same threads he pushed mine from seconds earlier. “Everyone saw it. I did too.”
We sit like that for a while, both lost in some imaginary place, when Kale says, “Kit, I need to tell you something.”
I look up at him first; he looks up at me second.
“I know why Shawn never called you.” My nose wrinkles with confusion, and he gnaws on his lip before rattling off the last part. “I told him not to.”
I hear him, but I can’t understand a word coming out of his mouth. He told him not to? He told him not to call me?
Kale starts pacing my room. “I couldn’t believe he took you upstairs and just . . . that he used you liked that. He was a senior, for God’s sake, and some kind of rock star, and you . . . you’re my sister, and you’d always had such a crush on him, and he just . . . ” When Kale glances at me, guilt eclipses the blacks of his eyes. I see a flash of it just before he drops his gaze back to the floor. “I only let a day pass before I found out where he lived. I went over there, and . . . ”
Kale trails off on an exhausted breath, and I scoot farther toward the edge of my bed. “And what?”
My twin’s eyes are full of more regret than I’ve ever seen in them when he says, “I told him to stay away from you. I told him if he ever tried talking to you after what he did . . . that Mason Larson was our older brother, and he’d break every one of Shawn’s fingers. I told Shawn he’d never play the guitar again.”
I stare at him. And stare. And stare. Something in the pit of my stomach is simmering to a boil, and I can feel it in the way my blood starts to sizzle under my skin.
“I thought I was helping. I thought—”
“You thought you were helping?” I hiss, and Kale cracks.
“I didn’t think he cared about you . . . But, Kit, I saw how he was with you tonight, and—”
“Get out,” I order, my voice a cold chill that punches through the room.
“Kit—” Kale pleads.
“Get out!”