CHAPTER TEN
I was starting to hate Facebook. Every single time I opened the app, there was a newborn baby, a proposal, or a death. If it wasn’t that, it was politics, with everyone shouting so loudly they couldn’t hear what everyone else was saying. The whole thing was exhausting and I had barely posted in months. I never felt like I did anything important enough to share with people I hardly knew. And unlike Sarah Chessman, who had moved away my senior year at Spencer High, I didn’t feel like every Crockpot meal or selfie was social-media-worthy.
But out of slightly bitchy curiosity, and a tiny bit of envy I’d never admit to, and because I had another few minutes to waste on my walk home, I went to Sarah Chessman’s page to scroll through her boring life. Maybe it was the fact that I was walking home through the back alley and my feet hurt like hell, or that I’d be knocking on my dad’s door in an hour, but Sarah’s life actually looked legitimately eventful. She had a husband—a newly minted soldier stationed in Texas—and she was pregnant. I watched a ten-second video of her opening a box full of pink balloons, revealing the gender of her soon-to-arrive baby. Gender-reveal parties were starting to piss me off. What was the point? Why did people spend money on them? If I ever had one, who would even come?
I started to feel like a hypocrite for judging her, so I clicked back to my main feed. My dad had posted a picture of himself holding a fish in one hand and a beer in the other. He wore a smile that I had never seen in person. He always loved to hunt and fish; my brother and I couldn’t stomach it. Austin could handle the gore a bit more than I could; he would go on hunting trips with Dad until we got to high school and girls became his favorite pastime. My brother, whom I had talked to nearly every day up until a few months ago but now could barely get on the phone, had already liked my dad’s post. So did someone with a golden retriever as their profile picture. The golden-retriever friend had commented that my dad was “looking happier than ever.”
It stung. It really stung. Probably because it was true. I had been hearing that phrase since he got remarried two years ago after a whirlwind romance of less than a year. We had barely unpacked our boxes from our move to Fort Benning when my dad met Estelle on Facebook, of all places. He commented on a mutual friend’s picture and their romance took off from there. From the neighbors to the cashiers at the PX, everyone thought it was okay to congratulate my dad on how happy he was. No one thought about me . . . that I was in earshot, that telling him how happy he seemednowimplied that he had been really unhappy before. No one considered my feelings. Not him, not Estelle, not the strangers. That’s when I started clinging to people—boys, mostly. Some at my high school, some older. I was searching for something I wasn’t getting at home, but I couldn’t tell you what it was because I still haven’t found it.
Most of all, I clung to Austin. Maybe it was the twin thing, or maybe it was the fact that our parents were never around when we needed them, when their guidance would have mattered. Staying close to my six-minutes-younger brother seemed to help for a while, but once we were out of high school, I started to consider that maybe Austin wasn’t the person I had built him up to be. One of the weirdest parts of growing up was the way memories changed once the veil of naïve innocence disappeared.
Austin had once taken me to that party in Chesapeake Manor, where all the officers’ kids were partying. He told me that everyone our age was drinking, that I should just relax. Then he passed out in one of the bedrooms with some girl from a high school across town and I was forced to sleep there, surrounded by loud, rowdy, belligerent boys. That’s when one of them, the one who called me “Austin’s sister” and had too deep a voice for a high school kid, swore I had a crush on him and shoved his tongue down my throat—repeatedly. Until I started crying and he got “weirded out.”
Funny how my telling him to stop, my constant “No, no, no, please no!” didn’t do it. Nope, it was the salty, hot tears streaming down my face that finally got him to go away. I guess he didn’t like the way they tasted. Eventually I fell asleep on a couch listening to some war video game being played in the other room. Austin never apologized the next morning. He never asked how I had slept or where. He just kissed that random girl on the cheek and made a joke that she and I both laughed at, and then we Ubered home like nothing ever happened. Our dad yelled at me, not at him, and we both got grounded for a week, but three days in, Austin got to hang out with his friends, and since I didn’t have any, I was stuck there.
I clicked on Austin’s profile and thought about calling him again, but then Elodie opened the front door and surprised me. I hadn’t even realized I was on my front porch.