Those are some big words coming from my brother, and for a minute I feel like I’m sitting at the table with a stranger making somebody else’s argument. “Jeffrey, come on. How can you—”
He holds up his hand. “Don’t give me the religious talk, okay? I’m fine with the way things are. I am currently avoiding all large bodies of water, so my vision won’t be a problem. We’re supposed to be talking about you now, remember?”
I bite my lip. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Are you dating Christian, now that you’re—” He stops himself again.
“Now that I’m broken up with Tucker?” I finish for him. “No. We hang out. We’re friends. And beyond that, we’re figuring stuff out.”
We’re more than friends, of course, but I don’t know what more really means.
“You should date him,” Jeffrey says. “He’s your soul mate. What is there to figure out?”
I almost choke on my orange juice. “My soul mate?”
“Yeah. Your other half, your destiny, the person who completes you.”
“Look, I’m a complete person,” I say with a laugh. “I don’t need Christian to complete me.”
“But there’s something about you two, when you’re together. It’s like you fit.” He grins. Shrugs. “He’s your soul mate.”
“Whoa, you have got to stop saying that.” I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my sixteen-year-old brother. “Where’d you even hear that term, anyway—soul mate?”
“Oh, come on….You know, people say that sort of thing.”
My eyes widen as I feel the flutter of embarrassment from him, the image of a girl with long, dark hair, ruby red lips, smiling. “Oh my God. You have a girlfriend.”
His face goes a charming shade of fuchsia. “She’s not my girlfriend….”
“Right, she’s your soul mate,” I croon. “How’d you meet her?”
“I knew her before we moved to Wyoming, actually. She went to school with us.”
My mouth drops open. “Get out! So I probably know her, then. What’s her name?”
He glares at me. “It’s no big deal. We’re not dating. You don’t know her.”
“What’s her name?” I insist. “What’s her name, what’s her name? I could go on like this all day.”
He looks mad, but he wants to tell me. “Lucy. Lucy Wick.”
He’s right; I don’t know her. I sit back in the booth. “Lucy. Your soul mate.”
He points a warning finger at me. “Clara, I swear….”
“That’s great,” I say. Maybe this will turn him around, give him something positive to think about. “I’m glad you like someone. I felt bad when—”
Now it’s my turn to stop myself. I don’t want to dredge up his ex or that horrifying scene in the cafeteria last year when he dumped her in front of the entire school. Kimber was clearly not his soul mate. She was a cute girl, though. Nice, I always thought.
“Kimber was the one who called the police on me, I think,” he says. “I guess I shouldn’t have told her I started the fire.” I open my mouth to bombard him with questions, but he doesn’t let me get them out. “No, I didn’t tell her what I am. What we are. I only told her about the fire.” He scoffs. “I thought she would think it was badass or something.”
“Oh, she did. She really did.”
We’re quiet for a minute, and then we both start laughing quietly.
“I was kind of an idiot,” he admits.
“Yeah, well, when it comes to the opposite sex, it’s hard to keep your head on straight. But maybe that’s just me.”
He nods, takes another drink of OJ. Looks at me hard.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Tucker,” Jeffrey says then, which catches me off guard. “It’s not fair to him, what happened. I’ve been putting some money aside. It won’t be a lot. But something. I was kind of hoping you’d give it to him, once I get it together.”
I don’t fully understand. “Jeffrey, I—”
“It’s to help buy a new truck, or put a down payment on one. A new trailer, a saddle, trees to plant on his land.” He shrugs. “I don’t know what he needs. I just want to give him something. To make up for what I did.”
“Okay,” I say, although I don’t know if it will work for me to be the one who gives it to him. Last night between Tucker and me did not go well. But Tucker has a right, I remind myself, to be mad at me. And I never even apologized for what I did. I never tried to make it right. “I think that’s a great idea,” I tell Jeffrey.
“Thanks,” he says, and I can see in his eyes how he knows it isn’t enough, given all he’s taken from Tucker, all we’ve taken, but he’s trying to make amends.
Maybe my brother’s going to turn out okay, after all.
After breakfast I head back to Stanford, full of carbs and deep thoughts. I plan to have a nice, low-key kind of day, maybe take a nap, get started writing a paper I’ve been procrastinating on all week. But I run into Amy as I pass by the Roble game lounge, and she ropes me into a game of table hockey. She rants about how the administration has canceled the Full Moon on the Quad—which is where students meet up around midnight on the night of the full moon and kiss each other while a local band plays romantic music in the background, basically a ritualized-and-thereby-socially-acceptable, well-lit make-out session—because they’re afraid we’re going to spread mono all over campus.
“I don’t see how they can stop us, though,” she’s saying. “I mean, there’s still going to be a full moon and the quad’s still going to be there and we’re still going to have our lips.”
I nod and grumble agreeably about how unfair it is, but I could care less. I’m still ruminating on the conversation at breakfast: Jeffrey with a new set of opinions and a new love interest and a new vision.
“Well, I think it’s kind of gross,” Amy says. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s so much older than she is.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Wait, who’s older?”
“You know. The guy Angela’s hooking up with.”
I stare at her. The puck clatters into my goal. “What? What guy?”