Page 65 of It’s All in How You Fall
Lily Jane appears, hair wet, a sundress not so different from my own draped across her frame. Over each of her shoulders stands a gape-mouthed boy: her boyfriend, Topps, and my brother.
Topps looks like he’s dodged a bullet.
Nat looks like he swallowed that bullet and it’s caught in his windpipe.
Shit.
I shoot to standing, my water glass tipping over as my knee catches the lip of the coffee table hard.
Alex scoops the laptop up safely in his arms. In the jostling, Chellsie spins back into motion, falling into an acrobatic save before some other unfortunate girl appears to be lining up a different move and a new way to almost fall. “You guys are back early,” Alex says way more coolly than I could possibly do right now.
Lily Jane’s eyes narrow, the faint scent of chlorine wafting our direction as both she and Nat run through older sibling bullshit detector protocol in tandem. Their eyes swing from us to the couch, to the crust-and-crumb-covered plates to the speakers, to the current space between us, to the laptop cradled against Alex’s chest, to the mirrored video on the big screen—a girl in what amounts to a long-sleeved swimsuit prancing across a four-inch apparatus hauled four feet off the ground.
Under their twin scrutiny, my knees soften enough that I sway. The spilled water dribbles off the edge of the table and onto my lower calf and ankle. It’s not a bucket of cold water over my head, but it might as well be as I blink at them, the ultimate picture ofdoing nothing wrong.
“We’re back at the same time we were last week,” Lily Jane says finally. Her brows thread together and the beginnings of a laugh puff past her lips. “Alex, is that ‘Agony’?”
Obviously it is. Neither of us says anything, the arrogant princes growing more blindly entitled as the vocal duel of one-upmanship goes on.
Topps’s cheeks glow astronomically red as if in pity for us. My brother, however, looks more confused than anybody, even though his presence means he was expecting some sort of gotcha-type confrontation. He was at the basketball court. He might have seen me. He clearly figured it out. And now…
“You’re watching gymnastics videos to… show tunes?” Nat tips his head at a vicious angle, as if attempting to match the lines on an impressionist painting with what the description says it should be. “Why?”
I want to glance back at Alex. To plead for him to say something, to keep me from betraying his trust about his date with Sunny. Maybe Lily Jane already knows, and if she does, I wish she’d put two and two together like right the hell now.
“Because that’s what all the cool kids do,” Alex’s mom says as she comes in from the garage. His dad trails her, both of them in navy and white like that’s the Northfield Country Club’s official trivia night uniform. And maybe it is. They sort of pause in the no-man’s-land between the eat-in portion of the kitchen—aka right smack dab in the middle between where Alex and I stand—awkward and frozen as our siblings form a wall of suspicion.
“Oscar, I need your help with something,” Mrs. Zavala says, snagging Mr. Zavala’s wrist from behind her back, dragging him toward the hall, and escaping up the stairs.
They disappear and Topps looks like he regrets ever entering the house. “LJ, maybe I should head home early tonight.”
“No, maybe you should stay and Alex should explain this very random scene.”
Topps does as he’s told but makes it a point to completely ignore us and help himself to the leftover pizza on the counter. The box shifts out of the way and I hear him ask a soft question: “A fiver?”
I step farther away from Alex, from the very obvious, very close dents we’ve left in the voluminous footprint of the sectional. Around the coffee table. There’s now at least six feet between us and I can see him in my periphery because he moves forward, almost presenting the laptop as proof.
“This is completely embarrassing—”
“Um, obviously,” Lily Jane answers, squinting at her big little brother.
Alex draws in a deep breath. “I have a date with Sunny Chavez tomorrow night.” He nods my direction. “Caroline made it happen and is giving me a crash course in gymnastics so I don’t look like a dope.”
I twist my hands in front of me and nod in both confirmation and relief, even though my cheek is still warm from his touch. I hope to God that my eyes aren’t as red as they feel and Alex’s thumb truly blotted away any trace of that tear.
“Wait. Sunny from mathletics?” Topps asks, brushing pizza crumbs out of his adult-sized beard.
“Oh my God, youstillhave a crush on her?” Lily Jane asks, eyes lighting up. “I remember you sniffing around, asking questions about her forever ago.”
“Well, he didn’t ask me,” Nat says. “And I had direct access to her. By way of Caroline, but still.” Nat’s gaze shifts to me. “Is this what you girls were being all weird about at the lake house?”
I nod. “We didn’t think you would even notice our weirdness, given what fun you were having with Artemis.” I clear my throat in hopes that others will get my drift, but all of this has zero effect on my brother, who doesn’t flinch or turn red or in any other way reveal that, yeah, he spent all day flirting with Peregrine’s older sister, who all three of them definitely know. “And, well, it’s weird now, so I guess we failed.”
“Not going to lie, gymnastics videos to show tunes classifies as weirder than ‘Hey, that girl I had a crush on two years ago? We got set up!’” Nat scoffs, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
In the background, the horrific scream at the beginning of “Stay with Me” reverberates around the room, and Alex lunges to cut the song.
“Okay, with that, I think it’s time to head home. Caroline, are you ready?”
