“I was actin’ like a woman, wanted to make sure I went far enough away that you couldn’t hear me pissin’. Shouldn’t have gone so far.”
“You realize I’ve heard you fart?” I replied, snorting.
“No you haven’t!” He sounded outraged.
“Oh, yes I have!”
“Bullshit.”
“My hearing is really good,” I said with a shrug.
“Well, hell,” he muttered, making me giggle.
He shifted on the bench and I leaned away, but his arm tightened around my shoulders until I was pressed up against his side.
“That douche is probably regrettin’ not picking you up tonight,” he said, leaning back against the table.
“I know, right?” I replied, nodding. “What a fucker.”
“Better off knowin’ what the guy’s like now, before you spent all night alone with him.”
“Alone and surrounded by the entire junior and senior classes?” I joked.
“There’s a lot you can get up to surrounded by people who aren’t payin’ attention,” he replied.
“True.” I sighed. “I just wanted to do the whole prom thing with Rose.”
“Still got next year, kid.”
“Yeah, and next year I won’t say yes to any dude that asks me. Hey, didn’t you take Ceecee to prom?”
Leo stiffened slightly. “Yeah. Junior prom. We didn’t stay long, though. Cut out early and went to a party.”
“Sounds like Ceecee.”
“Your sister’s… wild. No other way to explain her. She wants what she wants the minute she wants it, and to hell with anyone in her way. Always been like that.”
“Spoiled, you mean.”
“Nah,” he said, his knee started bouncing a little, just barely. “Your parents raised all you kids the same, yeah? You, Cam, Cecilia and now Charlie. Ceecee’s the only one who’s self-centered. It ain’t cause she’s spoiled.”
“Are you guys still together? I can never tell.” I hated that I’d brought my sister up. I hated that he was trying to be nice when we both knew she was a bitch to him. I hated that his arm was around my shoulders and that was the closest we’d ever be because she’d seen him first. They were closer in age. They had a history that I was too young to be a part of.
“You serious? Haven’t been together in a long ass time, Dandelion,” he replied, his head jerking back in surprise. “Years.”
“Oh.” I knew my face was screwed up in confusion, but his revelation was news to me. My sister talked about Leo all the damn time. As far as I knew, they still hung out regularly. I was pretty sure even my parents thought they were still a thing. “But don’t you guys hang out all the time?”
“Sure, in groups,” he said. “All us kids hang out. My sister and Cam, the Hawthorne boys and their women, Rocky and Mel, Ceecee.”
“That wasn’t the impression I had,” I mumbled.
What the hell was Cecilia playing at? At least once a week, she was coming home late, saying she’d been out with Leo. It was always Leo—never the group. My parents were past the point of caring when she came in, as long as she let someone know she’d be late. No one in our family was comfortable hearing the front door open in the middle of the night.
I hadn’t asked Ceecee about Leo in a long time. When I was younger, I’d craved news of him and what they were up to. Somewhere along the way, though, I’d realized that my older sister’s comments had gotten more and more nasty until I finally didn’t mention him at all. It was almost as if she’d been jealous, which made zero sense since I was so much younger than they were. We’d never hung out with the same crowd. Mick had been the only kid that could swing between the two groups of older and younger kids because he’d been right in the middle.
“She still givin’ you shit all the time?” Leo asked, pulling his arm from around my shoulders as he reached for something in his pocket. A few seconds later, I heard the snick of his lighter and could smell that first scent of a lit cigarette.
“Not really,” I replied, leaning back and crossing my feet at the ankles. “We get along pretty well, usually. I pretty much stay out of her way, though.”
“Probably smart.” He knocked his knee against mine.
“She’s just…” I thought for a second about how to describe my sister. “Restless. It’s like she doesn’t know what she wants, and if she does know, she doesn’t know how to get it.”
“Ceecee in a nutshell,” Leo joked.
“She loves me. I know she does. She’d walk through fire for me.”
“True.”
“But I don’t think she likes me very much.”
“She’s jealous,” Leo said seriously. “She’s been burnin’ bridges since she was fourteen years old. Goin’ through friendships and boyfriends like steppin’ stones across a creek. At this point, there ain’t much for her here, and she knows it.”
“What does that have to do with me?”