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I had a superstar brother of my own, a can-do-no-wrong-in-anyone’s-eyes pretty boy who was praised for his performance on the pitch and rewarded with free rein of it. Joey, as good as he was to me, was also a total manwhore who had left a trail of broken hearts from Ballylaggin to Cork city. He’d been seeing his girlfriend, Aoife, exclusively for about eight months, and he seemed completely devoted to her, but the jury was still out on whether he was fully reformed from his old ways or not.
Experience told me that boys were dogs.
And fathers. Fathers were bastards and men couldn’t be trusted.
Not all men, I begrudgingly admitted, but most were.
Especially the athletic ones.
Being the sister of one, I had insight into the minds of these teenage athletes and knew that it was safest to be related to them, platonic friends, or just avoid them like the plague. They had big egos, larger-than-life attitudes, and highly charged sex drives. Loyal to their families, their team, and not a lot else.
Trust my stubborn teenage hormones to go wild at the sight of one.
Acknowledging it as the safest option, I decided I would move forward from tonight’s events by blocking out everything I had learned about Johnny Kavanagh and by avoiding him.
I was young but I wasn’t stupid, and I knew that harboring any sort of feelings, harmless crush or not, for a boy like Johnny Kavanagh would do me no favors in the long run. Because in all honesty, since the day he knocked me out, I’d been harboring a lot of conflicting emotions toward him. But the horrible way Johnny handled his discomfort tonight, along with the talk from Joey, was the cool hard dose of reality that I needed to kick myself back into touch.
I needed to forget about him.
And I would.
I hoped.
20Mother Knows Best—Only in the Movies
SHANNON
When I woke up for school on Wednesday morning, my mother was waiting for me. In my rush to get out of the house—and away from my father—I almost didn’t see her. It was only when I stopped in the hall to retrieve my coat that I noticed her sitting at the kitchen table, clasping a mug of coffee between her hands.
“Mam?” I frowned at the sight of her.
She looked exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes, complexion pale and gaunt. She was wrapped up in her old frayed polka-dot dressing gown—the last Christmas present Darren had given her before he left.
Abandoning my coat on the baluster, I wandered into the kitchen. “What are you doing up?”
“Shannon,” she acknowledged, forcing a weak smile. “Come and sit with me for a bit.”
I did because it was so unusual to see her at this time of morning, and I knew something was wrong.
I checked my watch, making sure that I hadn’t accidently slept in or something. Five forty-five. Nope, I was early and something was definitely wrong.
Scraping a chair back, I lowered myself into the seat opposite her and asked, “What’s going on, Mam?”
“Can’t I get up to see you off to school?”
No. Not really.
Not at all.
My silent response must have spoken volumes because Mam set her mug down and reached for my hand.
“Shannon.” She finally got on with it and said, “I know you feel like we don’t… That sometimes your father isn’t very… I just want you to know that I love all my children equally, but you’re my special one.”
That was a lie. I wasn’t her special anything.
Darren was her favorite, and after he left, Mam was never the same.
In truth, between shifts at work and taking care of the younger kids, she barely noticed me.
