“Yeah, she was pretty tired,” I say. “We had lunch at Mick’s.”
“For real?” Rhyson glances up, a slight quirk to his lips. “How’s Jim?”
“Still feeling you.” I roll my eyes but have to laugh. She’s been into Rhyson since tenth grade, but he’s never given her the time of day.
“Not gonna happen.” He shakes his head for emphasis. “We’re such good friends. Why does she want to spoil it with fucking?”
“I usually like it when girls ‘spoil’ things with fucking.” We both laugh at my half-joke. “But in Jimmi’s case, I know what you mean. Just friends.”
“Right, and that isn’t changing.” Rhyson runs his hands through his already-disheveled hair. “How is she? My sister, I mean?”
“Go see for yourself,” I say. “When was the last time you saw her?” “Four, five years,” Rhyson mumbles, sliding his glance to the side, not so much, it seems, to avoid my eyes as to avoid something inside himself.
“Man, how’d you go that long without seeing your twin sister?” “You know how things went down with my parents after I emancipated.” Defensiveness stiffens his voice and his back.
“Your parents, Rhys, not your sister.”
“Same thing.” Rhyson’s shrug is supposed to look careless, but it doesn’t. He cares. “She’s been under their roof all this time. She’s probably just like my mother.”
The girl I spent the day with is nothing like the she-dragon Rhyson described his mother to be.
“Maybe she isn’t,” I say. “Or maybe you never spent enough time with her to know her in the first place.”
“Is that what she told you?” Rhyson narrows his eyes. “If we didn’t spend time together, it wasn’t my fault. She got to go to school and parties and shop and have friends. Be normal. Do whatever the hell she wanted while my parents tracked my every step, dragging me all over the world like a show pony.”
“I just can’t imagine not seeing my family for that long, at least not my sister, if I had one, much less my twin sister.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got your mom and Jade and your aunts. You have a normal family. I’ve got the Borgias.”
“Normal?” A snort of disbelieving air whooshes past my lips. “I’m pretty sure my Uncle Jamal was a real life pimp at some point.”
“Dude, you may be right.” Humor lightens his expression for the first time since he came through the garage door.
“Seriously! You’d get arrested doing half the stuff he tells you to do to girls.”
We laugh, recalling all the slightly disturbing advice my uncle often dispenses about women.
“Okay, so maybe your family isn’t completely normal,” he concedes. “But you have to admit, mine is the freak show that everyone had tickets to.”
Even before I met Rhyson, I’d seen the news about the courtroom battle he endured to emancipate from his parents. The sensationalized details were inescapable, plastered on the front page of every tabloid for weeks.
“I just don’t know what she wants from me,” Rhyson says softly, his eyes unfocused as if he’s asking himself.
“I think she wants her brother back.”
I straighten from the wall and walk over to join him at the counter so I can talk softer in case she wakes up and hears.
“Seems like she’s missed you,” I say in a low tone, looking at him intently. “She seems hurt that you let it go this long and haven’t been really responsive when she reached out before.”
“I just didn’t know where she stood,” Rhyson says. “Battle lines were drawn, and I thought she took my parents’ side. To survive, I had to distance myself from everything associated with them.”
Rhyson looks haunted for a moment, like he’s seen a ghost. I know the ghost is actually himself when he first left home, addicted to prescription drugs and barely able to function.
“Maybe you should just tell her that,” I say. “Maybe that’s the quickest way to a fresh start.”
“Maybe.” Rhyson rolls his shoulders and sighs. “So, what’s she look like?”
Beautiful.