Page 68 of Anger Bang
Her hands were shaky and her nerves were jittery enough to register on the Richter scale, but she had to do this.
“Don’t act like it matters to you,” Thea said, keeping her voice as steady as she could, considering she felt like she was balancing on a plastic storage bucket lid in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—during a storm. “You never even wanted me here in the first place. I don’t fit in with your friends. Hell, I don’t even fit in with our family. I’m not exactly part of the aesthetic you and Mom are building for your brand.”
Jackie rolled her eyes and huffed out a dramatic sigh. “Are you fucking serious?”
Steadying her nerves, Thea glared at her sister. “Yeah, I am.”
“I swear, you are always like this.” She threw her hands up in the air and said with a snarl, “For a scientist, you sure do go off half-cocked instead of getting all of the information. Gah! You always have. Do you remember when Mom and I threw you a surprise Sweet Sixteen?”
“You mean when you invited all of the most popular people from high school to our house and none of them would speak to me?” There were still nights when the memory of that pity party would keep her up staring at the ceiling and going over every humiliating moment until the sun came up.
“Because you stood in the corner and would barely even look at anyone—not even Kevin Mohr.”
“Please,” Thea scoffed, “he was only there for you.”
Jackie’s entire body tensed with coiled fury. “That. Is. Bullshit.”
Nope. Not this time. Thea was not going to roll over and just agree with her sister’s version of things. “Because you knew I liked him and yet you still spent the entire party talking to him.”
“Only because I was trying to convince him that you didn’t hate him,” she yelled. “Let me tell you, it would have been a helluva lot easier to do that if you weren’t ignoring him the whole time.”
Ignore? She hadn’t done that. She’d been protecting herself. Staying in her lane. It’s what she did, had always done, and still did. It’s why she didn’t make a fuss about the promotion. It’s why she always went with what her mom and sister decided. It’s why— Thea startled, the hint of a realization almost coming into the light. The memory of Dr. Kowecki asking her if she was ready to change and grow popped into her head unbidden and unsettled her.
“Whatever.” Thea shrugged as if none of this bothered her, as if she wouldn’t be replaying this conversation at three a.m. in the near future. “It doesn’t matter.”
Glaring, Jackie shook her head in disgust. “It does when you are still jumping to conclusions without having all the facts—like about this wedding.”
There was stoking the fire of someone’s anger, and then there was throwing a tanker truck of fuel into the flames, which was exactly what Jackie had just done.
“So it’s not a fact that you didn’t want me here?” Thea hollered. “What? Are you saying you lied about that?”
“No.” Jackie’s shoulders slumped, and she dropped her gaze to the ground. “I didn’t lie.”
The acknowledgment shouldn’t have hurt. It wasn’t breaking news. But it did. It sliced through all the armor Thea thought she’d built up over the years and left a gaping hole in its wake.
Jackie’s gaze jerked over to something behind Thea’s shoulder. No doubt she was keeping aware of the camera. Then, she pulled her phone out of a pocket hidden in her massive skirt and swiped on the screen until a steady stream of screaming guitars, pounding drums, and the voice of a woman who sang like an angel as the music went at demon speed behind her came pouring out of its speakers.
Jackie turned her flinty-eyed attention back to Thea, her expression unflinching. “Do you want to know why I didn’t want you here?”
Thea nodded, the first seeds of regret blooming in her now-shifty stomach.
“Because this whole wedding is a farce and I wanted to protect you from that,” Jackie said, her chin trembling. “I am surrounded every day, all day, by people who fling bullshit and pretend it’s the truth—except for you.” She grabbed Thea’s hands, holding them in her own like they were a lifeline. “You are theoneperson who doesn’t do that. Mom does it. She does it because she wants to support me, but I know she still tells me all sorts of stuff that isn’t quite the truth. But you don’t. You give it to me straight. And how do I repay that? By acting—yes, acting—like the biggest bitch in the known universe in the wedding of my nightmares in front of the one person whose opinion I value the most. I didn’t want you here because I was embarrassed.” Her grip tightened until they were both white-knuckled and the intensity in her eyes went from a million on to a billion. “I don’t want you to see me like this, and I sure as hell don’t want to be married like this.”
Thea blinked.
Then she blinked again and again as her brain buffered.
What in the hell was happening?
She couldn’t breathe. Her heart was speeding. Her thoughts were bouncing around in her head like a pinball.
It was too much for her to process, so she grabbed onto the last thing her sister said as a sort of starting point to unwinding it all. “You don’twantto get married?”
“That’s the awful part,” Jackie said, her shoulders slumping as she let go of Thea’s hands and dropped her head so she was looking at the ground. “Idowant to get married.”
Now it was Thea’s turn to give her sister a reassuring touch. She wrapped an arm around Jackie’s shoulders but didn’t lean in close because if she did she’d lose an eye to the puffed sleeves. “But to someone other than Dex?”
When her sister looked up, her eyes were filled with tears and the tip of her nose had gone cherry red. “No. To him. Only ever to him.”
