Page 28 of Second Alarm
"Oh god." I pick up my whiskey. "Do I want to do this."
"Yes," Derek says. "You do. Come sit."
I sit. Ty gets up from his stool and moves too, because Ty is going to follow the center of the crew toward the booth and it would be weirder for him to stay at the bar than to come. He sits at the far end of the booth. I sit at the near end. Cal, who's been in the bathroom, comes out and inserts himself in the middlebetween us, which is Cal's preferred seating arrangement in all situations in life, and we all eat nachos.
"Okay," Derek says. "Ty was telling us about the time he got pulled over for doing six in a school zone."
"It was a school zone at nine p.m. There were no children."
"The law doesn't care about children," Derek says.
"The law cares about children, Derek, that's literally the entire point of a school zone."
"The law doesn't care whether children are physically present — "
"We know, Derek — "
"Point being," Derek says, "we were talking about how Ty is a stickler, and that got me thinking about how Ty has always been a stickler, and that got me thinking about the academy, and — "
"No," Ty says.
"Yes," I say.
"No, Derek."
"Who wants to hear the Brennan academy story," Derek says, swinging toward the booth with the grin of a man who's found a new audience for a bit he's been running for a decade.
"Nobody," Ty says.
"Everybody wants to hear the Brennan academy story. Larsen — " Derek turns to me. " — do you remember the sprinkler incident?"
Oh.
Oh, no.
"Which one," I say.
"Which one," Derek says, looking around the table with delight. "She said which one! Which one!"
"Derek — "
"No, this — this is good, Larsen, you know everybody's got one of these. Ty had the biggest one of anyone in his class. Therewas a sprinkler malfunction in the locker room, the whole thing went off mid-drill, half the class came out looking like — "
"Derek, I've heard this story."
"You haven't heard this version — "
"Derek, my sister hasn't been in Copper Ridge for ten years, she doesn't want to — "
"Cal, I'm absolutely going to tell her," Derek says.
And he tells it.
I can't look at Ty. I can't not look at Ty. I split the difference by staring at the neon beer sign above his head — face aimed his direction, eyes elsewhere. The kind of thing the old me would've been smoother about.
Derek has absorbed every academy story ever told at this bar and sharpened each one into a bit. He tells it like he was there, though he wasn't — the sprinklers, the darkened locker room, half the cadets in turnout gear and the other half in their skivvies, instructors furious, twelve people drying boots with hand towels in the corridor. One of those academy nights that becomes myth.
He doesn't tell it like it was the night I pushed Ty Brennan into a supply closet because we'd both been soaked to the bone and I had a stupid idea about body heat that turned into something else. Three months of something else. Because I'm the one who kissed him first — Ty Brennan would never have made that move, and we both knew it — and neither of us would ever admit this out loud to another human being as long as we lived.
