“I-I’ll go talk to her,” Molly stammers, moving past me toward the stairs. I want to reach out for her, to make sure she’s okay, to make her talk about what happened back there on the couch the way she got me to talk about leaning on alcohol. But instead I just watch her bound up the stairs to go talk to my sister, who underwent a personality transplant somewhere between now and this morning when she kissed me on the cheek and told me she loved me when we parted ways in the hall.
Yeah. There’s definitely been a gas leak.
Part Four
??
Look After
YOU
41
Secrets and Spies
Niall
November, 2007
“TELL ME.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“I need you to tell me. I’ll literally die if I don’t find out. Or kill somebody. Do you want me to go to jail Molly Lockhart?”
“I told you already,” Molly says, leveling a glare at me that could crack glass as she packs away the little bag she keeps her makeup—mascara and strawberry flavoured lip stuff—in the front pouch of her backpack. “You have to ask JJ. Or your sister. I’m not your informant, Niall.”
The windows of the car are slightly fogged up, despite my best efforts with the defroster. Rain has been threatening all day, and the sky overhead is a thick blanket of grey that makes it feel later in the evening than it actually is.
I groan, letting my head fall forward until my forehead connects with the cold plastic of the steering wheel. The horn gives a pathetic little toot at the impact, startling Molly.
“Sorry,” I mumble into the wheel, not lifting my head. “This is just killing me is all.”
For the past two weeks, Molly has known exactly what got JJ and Claire to start fighting and she won’t tell me. She’s sworn to secrecy by Claire.
“Pinky promises are sacred, Niall. You know this.”
“Sacred my arse,” I groan, sitting back up and running a hand through my hair. “They’re my best mate and my sister. That trumps pinky promises. I have a right to know, don’t I? At least a partial right?”
I have some ideas of what could’ve happened between them, but none of them are particularly appealing to me. I don’t know if I really want to broach the topic with the two of them, but the possibilities have been running through my head on a loop for weeks.
Maybe JJ said something stupid—pretty likely.
Maybe Claire finally got fed up with JJ’s constant, annoying flirting
Maybe—and this is the one that keeps me up at night—maybe one of them tried to make a move and the other wasn’t having it.
JJ was trying to avoid me in the days after their big fight, but it didn’t feel right being parted with my best mate. So I told him that whatever was going on between him and Claire needed to stay between them and not come between us. And so I got my best mate back.
Sort of.
In the last couple weeks the two of them have been a bit too normal. Everything seems normal about them except for two things.
1). They’re not talking to each other.
2). Claireistalking to Stephen Rafferty. Really talking. In fact, they’re on a date right now.
“I still think we should go in with them,” I tell Molly again, probably for the hundredth time. Stephen had asked Claire tothe cinema, and Claire asked Ma at dinner last night if she could go. Ma said it was alright if I would drive them, and I wanted to be the good big brother and say yes. So, I did, and Claire was ecstatic.
