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“I met Case Michaels today.”
Her eyes widen. “The bull rider?”
Garrett might not care about horses, but she knows her rodeo. Some of the events, anyway. She’s intrigued by the mechanics of bull riding. Or is it the physics? I don’t know.
“Yeah, I think he was in trouble or something and his dad made him do chores.”
My sister’s eyes are little half-moons of humor. “Did he have to clean up the manure?”
This makes me laugh, and it feels nice. “As a matter of fact, he did.”
“Did he hate it? I would hate it.”
I think back to this morning. I wasn’t around him long, but it didn’t seem like he was bothered by the stalls. “I don’t think he hated it. He doesn’t seem to like early mornings much, but he worked hard to charm Queen Mab with some apple slices.”
And maybe it charmed me a little, too. Unfortunately. I stuff down the feeling.
“Is he a horse boy?” Garrett asks, her tone singsong.
“Maybe,” I offer, refusing to take the bait. “Or more likely, he just likes the adrenaline rush. Mab’ll bite your hand off.”
“Did she bite him?”
“Not today,” I say in a tone that implies,But there’s always next time!
I take a bite of my burger, and Garrett watches me with that thoughtful expression on her face.
“Hmm.”
I raise a single brow at her. She shakes her head. “Do you have to go to the grocery store tonight?”
I sigh. “I should. It’s either tonight or early tomorrow before work.”
“I’ll come with and help if you’ll let me braid your hair and watchDownton Abbeywith me after.”
I pretend to consider this. I don’t need the help and don’t loveDownton Abbey, but I can see the offer for what it is—a chance for sisterly bonding—and accept it.
“Finish your nuggets,” I tell her, “and I’ll grab my coupons.”
“Can I add the totals in my head as we go?”
“Can I have the last sip of your chocolate shake?”
“You have a deal.”
“And you’re easy to love, kid.”
FiveCASE
I never tried to be popular in high school. It always just happened that way. I’ve never had any misconceptions about my appeal; it’s absolutely rooted in my family’s wealth and grown out of rodeo celebrity. I’m not saying I didn’t use it to my benefit, but I didn’t actively seek it out. Another thing Walker used to give me endless shit about.
What we couldn’t know, or at least what I never imagined, is being the best friend of the dead kid is a whole new level of notoriety. The ladies love a sad boy. And a sad boy who drunkenly climbed a corn silo in the middle of the night is especially interesting, if the multitudes of texts lighting up my phone are any indication. (One very persnickety stable hand notwithstanding.)
I don’t know how to react to the recent influx of attention for something so humiliating and stupid, so when Pax waves me into his hot, overcrowded kitchen and whispers that he stocked the lesser-known downstairs fridge with a six-pack of Lone Star beer, I waste no time. The door to the basement is familiar aftera thousand games of hide-and-seek when we were kids, and I don’t bother to let my eyes adjust to the darkness before scrambling down the stairs. The change is glaring. Down here, it’s cool, quiet, and musty. It smells like uncomplicated memories, and I’m mightily tempted to stay down here and drink my beers alone. Suddenly, my reasons for coming tonight feel hollow: the dangling carrot of an uncomplicated hookup and another item from Walker’s list (jumping into a pool, at a party, naked—yeah, I know). Even if I’m starting to wonder if he made this stuff up to fuck with me. Like one day I’ll get to heaven and he’ll be like, “Oh shit, man, I thought you knew I was kidding!”
It’s not like we talked about this stuff when he was alive. He was always sick, but not. Chronic, but living with it, you know? Until he wasn’t. When the entire world went to hell, it was as if there was this cosmic fuckup with management and Walker’s papers were misfiled. If he’d gotten sick two years earlier, or maybe a year later, he’d have gotten his transplant and his uneventful hospital stay, and it would have been okay. He could have lived the rest of his life like everyone else.
Instead, his lungs decided they’d had enough, right in the midst of a fucking pandemic. He didn’t have a chance in hell.
