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“I am not a drug dealer,” Owen answers. “For one, if I were a drug dealer, I’d have a lot more money. And I’d have a stash of drugs that you would’ve found by now!”
Owen, I think, needs to shut up.
“Josh Wolf was the drug dealer,” I volunteer. “Not Owen.”
“So what was your brother doing—buying from him?”
Maybe, I think, I’m the one who needs to shut up.
“Our fight had nothing to do with drugs,” Owen says. “They just found them on him afterward.”
“Then what were you and Josh fighting about?” our mother asks, as if the fact that these two boyhood chums fought is the most unbelievable thing that’s occurred.
“A girl,” Owen says. “We were fighting about a girl.”
I wonder if Owen thought this one out ahead of time, or whether it’s come to him spontaneously. Whatever the case, it’s probably the only thing he could have possibly said that would have made our parents momentarily … happy might be overstating it. But less angry. They don’t want their son to be buying or selling drugs, being bullied or bullying anyone else. But fighting over a girl? Perfectly acceptable. Especially since, I’m guessing, it’s not like Owen’s ever mentioned a girl to them before.
Owen sees he’s gained ground. He pushes further. “If she found out—oh God, she can’t find out. I know some girls like it when you fight over them, but she definitely doesn’t.”
Mom nods her approval.
“What’s her name?” Dad asks.
“Do I have to tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Natasha. Natasha Lee.”
Wow, he’s even made her Chinese. Amazing.
“Do you know this girl?” Dad asks me.
“Yes,” I say. “She’s awesome.” Then I turn to Owen and shoot him fake daggers. “But Romeo over here never told me he was into her. Although now that he says it, it’s starting to make sense. He has been acting very weird lately.”
Mom nods again. “He has.”
Eyes bloodshot, I want to say. Eating a lot of Cheetos. Staring into space. Eating more Cheetos. It must be love. What else could it possibly be?
What was threatening to be an all-out war becomes a war council, with our parents strategizing what the principal can be told, especially about the running away. I hope for Owen’s sake that Natasha Lee is, in fact, a student at the high school, whether he has a crush on her or not. I can’t access any memory of her. If the name rings a bell, the bell’s in a vacuum.
Now that our father can see a way of saving face, he’s almost amiable. Owen’s big punishment is that he has to go clean up his room before dinner.
I can’t imagine I would have gotten the same reaction if I’d beaten up another girl over a boy.
I follow Owen up to his room. When we’re safely inside, door closed, no parents around, I tell him, “That was kinda brilliant.”
He looks at me with unconcealed annoyance and says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of my room.”
This is why I prefer to be an only child.
I have a sense that Leslie would let it go. So I should let it go. That’s the law I’ve set down for myself—don’t disrupt the life you’re living in. Leave it as close to the same as you can.
But I’m pissed. So I diverge a little from the law. I think, perversely, that Rhiannon would want me to. Even though she has no idea who Owen and Leslie are. Or who I am.
“Look,” I say, “you lying little pothead bitch. You are going to be nice to me, okay? Not only because I am covering your butt, but because I am the one person in the world right now who is being decent to you. Is that understood?”
Shocked, and maybe a little contrite, Owen mumbles his assent.
