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Heavy silence wraps us up.
It’s no secret that my dads have had enough of Jesse’s shit.
My big brother’s always been on the reckless side—losing his license, ditching school, sleeping with girls he has no intention of calling—but his plowing into the back of my car at the end of my junior year was the last straw.
Jesse likes to say that, if they could, our dads would travel back in time and leave him in foster care, in the dirt-cheap home where Jess and I had wound up when they found us.
Get a refund on his rebellious ass—his words.
I don’t remember my life pre-adoption, but I think my being an infant at the time gives me a pass. Everything I know, my dads told me. Story has it, Jesse and I lived in a shitty foster home, with an even shittier foster family.
How did I end up there in the first place, you ask?
Cue the tragic backstory.
My biological mother died giving birth to me, she didn’t have any relatives to take care of a baby, and my father was a no-show. The end.
I don’t know how old she was when she had me, or where she was from, but my parents told me she was a kind soul trapped in a life she didn’t deserve. Someone chasing a second chance she could never catch.
I only have one thing of hers.
A Radiohead T-shirt.
And a letter, scribbled on the tag inside the collar.
B.
“It’s fine, I swear. I don’t mind walking,” I assure them.
What I do mind is the possibility of Jesse seeing Finn when he drops me off and telling my dads I live with a boy.
“See? She doesn’t mind,” Jesse pleads.
“Doesn’t matter.” Dave won’t budge.
“Seriously? You can’t make me drive her on my one day of freedom.”
“You will if you want to live under my roof rent-free until you find a new place.” Dave dangles my brother’s messed-up living situation in his face.
Jesse got kicked out of his old apartment by his landlord for failure to pay the rent a month back. Suffice to say, my dads weren’t too happy about their twenty-nine-year-old son moving back home.
Granted, they were always harder on him than they were on Cat and me. Probably because Jesse’s the oldest. Every decision my brother makes, my dads dissect carefully. They have an opinion on everything he does, including the people Jess chooses to surround himself with.
He and Finn’s older brother, Brody Richards, were buddies for a while when Brody was still in high school and Jesse was in college. My dads thought Jesse having younger friends meant he wasn’t ready for adulthood.
In his defense, Jesse never really got to be a kid.
He had to look out for himself for almost thirteen years, constantly bouncing from foster home to foster home before we ended up in the same place and found our forever family.
“Sorry, kid, it’s not up for discussion. You trashed your sister’s car, you drive her,” Dave asserts.
Jesse sags into his chair, defeat written all over his face.
It’s official…
I’m screwed.
* * *
