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“Or you could have made something everyone could eat,” Brittany shot back.
“You don’t hate coconut, sweetheart. I’ve seen you eat shavings right from a bag,” my father said.
I snickered, burying a chuckle as my sister shot me a death stare.
“It’s not all about her, you know,” Brittany said.
I furrowed my brow at her before I looked over at Olivia. She continued sipping her water, as if she wasn’t hearing anything that was going on. She handled the tension like a champion, but Brittany’s words kept bouncing around in my mind.
Was that really her issue? That everything seemed to be about Olivia? It hadn’t been about Olivia in years because the woman hadn’t been around! The hell was my sister pissed about?
Lunch passed by very well otherwise. We cleaned up the dishes from lunch before taking our dessert in the sitting room. And when I picked up Olivia’s legs and put them over my lap, she didn’t fight me on it. My parents kept glancing down at our connection before looking over at each other, trying to be sneaky even though they never could be. My brother kept rattling on about the video game he and Olivia never got to finish, and soon the two of them were venturing up to his room to play a little bit. Brittany finished her ice cream and stalked off. Probably to go yell into her pillow or whatever it was spoiled little bratty girls did.
And me? Well, I hugged my mother and my father tightly before going and finding Olivia and my brother. I stood in the doorway of his room, my arms folded over my chest as I watched the two of them play. Olivia kept knocking into him—into my little brother with the serious germ problem. And not once did he push her away. They played the racing game the two of them started up as if things had never stopped. As if she had been here all these years, frequenting the house and bonding with my family.
I watched Olivia and my brother laugh together. Play together. Create memories together.
And I found myself wishing it would never end.
17
Olivia
I sat at my desk on my lunch break the next day poking around at my salad. The day with Brett’s family had been amazing. It felt as if I hadn’t even left. Like I hadn’t just dropped off the face of the planet. I smiled at the memory of it all. His brother getting so excited to play that game. His father, picking me up and swinging me around. His mother kissing the side of my head and practically talking my ear off at lunch. Oh, it had been so good to talk with her again. I loved my mother, but there were things I could talk with that woman about things I’d never take to my own mother. Ever. Lunch had been fantastic, and the two of us stayed at his parents’ house until it was time for dinner.
They tried to get us to stay for dinner, and I almost stepped in and said it was okay. I had missed them greatly, and I didn’t understand until that moment just how much. But that sister of his could really put a damper on things.
I stabbed at my salad and took a bite, sighing. I still didn’t know what Brittany’s problem was. I tried sitting down with her after playing video games and talking with her about it. Trying to figure out what the hell it was about me she didn’t like. She was only nineteen, but damn she could really crack an attitude with someone. If she wasn’t ignoring me the entire time, she was yelling at me to get out of her room and slamming the door in my face. Brett held my hand on the car ride back to his place, reassuring me that it was nothing personal. That his sister had her own issues she was working through, and that the residual anger and tension she threw at me during the day was her problem, not anyone else’s.
But I wasn’t so sure. I had heard about some of the nasty things she had said about me back in college, and that was five years ago.
I think she had a grudge. I just didn’t know over what.
Either way, I didn’t care. If Brett reassured me things were okay, then I believed him. But that didn’t stop me from thinking about it. From picking it apart and wondering what I could have done to make things easier on her, to make her like me. Back during my college years, she’d been nothing but a teenager. Some of the rumors she’d started about me were probably the product of something as simple as puberty—that being addicted to drugs was the reason for losing all that weight during my spell with mono. It was exactly the kind of thing an angry teenage girl would come up with. Maybe she had been jealous of the time I spent with her brother. Maybe jealous of the fact that I saw him more.
