“You okay?” Warren asked from his seat at the table, looking up from his book at me.
“Just half-drowned,” I said, taking the seat across from him. It was the two of us on the porch. My parents were inside reading, and Gelsey, who always denied emphatically that she was afraid of thunderstorms, had nevertheless left for her bedroom at the first crack of thunder and was apparently in for the night, wearing my dad’s noise-canceling headphones that were much too big for her.
Warren went back to his book and I pulled my knees up, hugging them as I looked at the rain coming down in sheets. I’d never minded thunderstorms, and had always liked watching them from the screened-in porch—you were inside but also outside, able to see each flash of lightning and hear each crack of thunder, but were also dry and covered. As I listened to the rain on the roof, I suddenly worried about the dog, who I hadn’t seen in a few days. I hoped that he was back where he belonged, and if not, that he’d had the sense to take shelter from the rain. Somehow I doubted it. I’d gotten used to the little dog, and I didn’t like to think about him caught out in a storm.
“Mom said that the Crosbys are living next door,” Warren said, carefully highlighting a passage and looking up at me. “Henry and Derek.”
“Davy,” I corrected automatically.
“You didn’t mention that,” Warren said, his tone of voice singsong, designed, I knew, to bait me. I was suddenly very envious of Gelsey and her noise-canceling headphones.
“So?” I said, as I crossed and then uncrossed my legs, wondering why we were even talking about this.
“Have you seen him yet?” Warren was continuing to highlight, and if you didn’t know him, you’d think he had no idea that he was torturing me, and enjoying it, which he absolutely was.
“A couple times,” I said, raking my fingers through my wet hair. “I don’t know. It’s been weird,” I said, thinking of all our encounters, not one of them suited for a real conversation or an apology.
“Weird?” Warren repeated. “Because you two dated when you were… twelve?” He smirked, shaking his head.
“Because—” I started. A huge crash of thunder sounded, making both of us jump. Warren dropped his highlighter, and as it rolled across the table, I reached out and grabbed it, twirling it between my fingers.
“Because?” Warren prompted, glancing over at me. He motioned for me to give him his highlighter back, and I pretended not to see.
“I don’t know,” I said, a little irritably. I didn’t want to talk about this. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about it with my brother. “Why do you even care?” I finally asked. “And since when do we talk about stuff like this?”
“We don’t,” Warren said. He shrugged, and in a patronizing voice, he continued, “It’s just obviously an issue for you, so I was giving you an opening. That’s all.”
I knew that there was probably no point to this. I should just walk away and let it go. But there was something in my brother’s expression that seemed to indicate that he knew so much more than me. And about some—if not most—things, this was true. But not everything. Warren had never had much of a social life, preferring to spend weekends studying and working on his various projects. He’d never had a girlfriend, that I had been aware of. He had gone to his senior prom, but with his study partner, who was pretty much the female version of Warren. They’d said they wanted to examine the ritual as a cultural experiment. After the prom, they had had cowritten a paper on it for their A.P. Psychology class that had won a national award.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My brother’s head swiveled over to me, probably because this was a sentence he was so unused to hearing. I knew I should stop, but even as I recognized this, I heard myself keep going, my voice with a snide edge to it that I hated. “You have to have been in a relationship to have a breakup.”
Even in the dim lighting of the screened-in porch, I could see my brother’s face flush a little, and, like I knew I would, I regretted saying it.
“I’ll have you know,” Warren said stiffly, flipping the pages in his textbook much faster than he could read them, “that I have been putting most of my focus into my academics.”
“I know,” I said quickly, trying to smooth this over, wishing I hadn’t said anything.
“There’s no need to get involved with people who aren’t going to turn out to matter,” he continued in the same tone of voice.
I had been about to agree and head inside, but something that Warren had just said was bothering me. “But how do you know?” I asked.
He looked up at me and frowned. “Know what?”