He Must Like You

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  “So there is something. Some way you had to convince Dad.”

  “I’m not saying anything more.”

  “Something you agreed to do . . . ?”

  Jack chuckles, but shakes his head.

  “Or . . . something you can hold over him—a bit of blackmail?”

  “No,” he says a little too quickly.

  “That’s it.”

  “Let it go, Libby.”

  “But if you know something, I should know it too. I’m the one who’s had to live here, Jack, all the time. If you would just tell me—I won’t use it, I’ll only hold it in reserve.”

  “It’s not like that. Come on, I came to help, I am helping, can you just let me do it the way I need to? And trust me?”

  I don’t want to drive him away, so I back off. “Fine.”

  “Now can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure.”

  The swing goes back and forth, back and forth, and the crickets are chirping, and I hear a car door slam somewhere down the street.

  And then I say, “How come you dropped out of college?”

  And Jack says, “You said we could talk about something else.”

  “That is something else,” I say with a frown, and I’m readying a follow-up question when he gets to his feet. “Where’re you going?”

  “Are you hungry?” he asks. “Because I’m starving. Let’s go raid the fridge.”

  “There’s a ton of food left from dinner, but tell me—”

  “Nope,” he says, “no more heavy stuff tonight. I’m done talking.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fridge?”

  “Okay, okay,” I shake my head, grumbling, and get up off of the swing. “Mom just about killed herself making all that food for you so we may as well.”

  “Great,” he says with the old Jack grin. “Let’s go.”

  27

  LOW-KEY MISERABLE

  Sunday morning I wake to the smells of breakfast food, the sound of Mom singing along to the radio in the kitchen, and “You said we could talk about something else.” “That is something else” on a repeating loop in my mind.

  I roll over, desperate to get back to sleep, but then decide to check my phone, and find a text from Emma with the latest news.

  Martina’s blog piece about Perry now has over four hundred comments, most of them server nightmare stories. The conversation has been noticed and linked to by a couple of bigger news sites. And thirteen anonymous women have posted claiming Perry has sent them dick pics.

  Meanwhile, the moderator of the Crotchety Complainers has closed comments on the post about me, and taken down the video, but left up the photos from Jason. And a total of forty people have shared stories about Perry harassing them, or someone they know, on Martina’s blog. But very few have chosen to do so non-anonymously, and none of those are from the brewery, the Goat, or the Inn—no one he could fire, in other words.

  Best part of weekend so far? Emma texts. Apparently Perry showed up for karaoke at the legion last night and sang the drunkest version ever of I Will Survive and then So What by Pink.

  ???? That one about still being a rock star and having rock moves?

  Yep.

  OMG.

  With hip thrusting, and. . . . then supposedly he thrust so hard one time that he fell right over.

  NOOOOO.

  Probably traumatized the seniors.

  !!!!!!

  He’s cracking, Lib.

  We lock our doors don’t worry.

  Conversation about sexual assault and harassment in restaurants and bars is blowing up. People are talking about the tipping system and wages and everything. But besides that I think Perry goes down.

  And if he does? And the brewery and inn go out of business?

  We’ll be gone from here.

  Ooh. Cold.

  YOU ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE WHOLE TOWN LIBBY.

  So loud Em.

  You’re not.

  Five minutes later I’m perched on a chair beside Jack’s bed, a steaming coffee in hand, and another on a coaster on the new bedside table.

  “Hey, Jack,” I say in a soft voice, “wake up.”

  He moans, then rolls over onto his back.

  “Jack.”

  “Whoa,” he says groggily, eyes opening to slits. “Jeez, Libby.”

  “I brought coffee,” I say, gesturing toward it. “I figured you might want to fortify yourself with caffeine before having to face Mom and Dad. You still drink coffee?”

  “Of course,” he says. “Coffee is a serious thing in Greece.”

  We sit, each drinking our coffee in the dim light, and I try to calculate what might be the optimum number of sips for him to have before I ask my question. I have this idea emerging, of taking the best from each of my parents and making a new me. This me will not be a batshit reactionary, or a frozen coward, and is not submerged in numbness. She is deliberate, wily, and calm-seeming like Mom, and singularly determined like Dad. She is smart, patient, relentless, and brave, and she can also cut to the chase just like Jack does when needed.

  Plus Jack is the perfect person to practice on, and I have the perfect subject to practice on him with.

  “So Dad’s the reason you quit school,” I say, a little scared, but pouncing when the moment feels right.

  “Y-no, what?” Jack sputters, nearly spilling his coffee. “I never said that.”

  “‘How come you dropped out of college?’ ‘You said we could talk about something else,’” I say, putting one hand up with quotation marks. “I’ve been thinking about that part of our conversation. That was intended as something else. It was a change of subject. Except apparently in your mind it wasn’t.”

  “Whoa, Sherlock,” he says, squinting warily at me. “You’re way off.”

  “Okay, then why did you drop out of college?”

  “I didn’t want to be a doctor, okay? I get faint at the sight of blood.”

  “Seriously?” I do a quick inventory of my memories, looking for one in which Jack faints at the sight of blood, but all I’ve got are images of him groaning over this or that injury, or wincing as Mom or Dad bandage him. But I was young, and in my own world.

  “Always have,” Jack says, “but my math and science grades were high and Dad badly wanted a doctor in the family. I figured I’d grow out of it. But it isn’t just the blood. I don’t want to look inside bodies, cut things open, any of it.”

  “You could have switched majors. You didn’t have to take off to another continent.”

  “Maybe I just needed some space, Lib.”

  “From what?” I say, keeping my gaze trained on him and my purpose steady. “And what do you mean, ‘maybe’?”

  “I just mean . . . I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to just . . . switch majors randomly and waste more money. I’d been kind of low-key miserable for I don’t know how long. I needed to get away and take some time to figure out what I wanted.”

  “So you ran off to ‘find yourself.’”

  He chuckles, then shrugs.

  “And have you?”

  “Found myself?”

  “And figured out what you want to do?”

  “For now I just want to do what I’m doing.”

  “But that’s temporary, Jack. It’s not building toward anything.”

  “I got news for you, little sister, everything is temporary. Life is temporary.” He lifts his mug toward me as if in a toast. “This coffee . . . is temporary.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “No, really. And sometimes all you can do is build, like, one not-shitty day on top of another not-shitty day. And then maybe one good day on top of a not-shitty day, and then finally one good day on another good day. That’s building something.”

>   “Wait—are you depressed?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, but his eyes slide away from my gaze.

  “Were you?”

  “It’s not that exactly, Libby. I was unhappy, but it was situational. And of course it’s been hard to move so far away, leave everything behind, and to have such a rift with Mom and Dad. I get restless, too. I’m like Dad that way. I’m . . . trying not to be like Dad in other ways. I know you think everything is so much worse since I left, but Dad was . . . Dad before that, too.”

  “But he was crazy about you. So proud of you. There at all your practices and talking about you all the time. I tried, like, a million other things—track, soccer, tap dancing, music—hoping to find something I was that good at, so he’d be as into me as he was into you. Nothing worked.”

  “Because you weren’t good at them, or because Dad wasn’t interested?”

  “Maybe both.” I shrug.

  “If you weren’t doing it for you,” Jack points out, “that might be why nothing stuck. But all that attention from Dad wasn’t so great, Libby. He’d take it really hard when we lost, or if I didn’t play enough in a game. He’d get obnoxious with other parents, coaches, refs. Even back then, Mom was constantly having to show up with baked goods to smooth the waters. And it took me a while to disentangle from that, and recover, and understand. Now I’m trying to just be steady, and do my thing. Work hard, swim in the ocean . . .”

  “Build good days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the money, Jack?”

  “Money?”

  “You said that you didn’t want to waste money switching to a random major, but instead you spent it.”

  “I didn’t spend the money. I dropped my courses that fall just early enough to get refunded, and I sublet my place, and so, yes, I used some of that money to get to Greece. But since then I’ve been supporting myself.”

  “Where’s the rest of your education money, then?” I press on. “Mom and Dad’s goal was to have the same amount saved up for each of us when we went to college. I saw what was in mine as of last August, so if you had the same amount in yours . . .”

  “Yes, well—”

  “That was a lot of money, Jack. Plus didn’t you have scholarships? If you didn’t spend it, where is it—sitting in the bank somewhere waiting for you to decide what to do?”

  Jack is very still in the bed suddenly, watching me like I’m a wild animal he doesn’t want to scare off.

  “You know I would give you the money if I could,” he says.

  I do not know that. I’m not sure what I know anymore.

  “I’d give it to you, or I’d loan it to you,” he continues, looking pained.

  “So . . . what . . . you have it invested or something?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. It’s invested.”

  I cock my head, trying to read his expression in the dim light and trying to interpret the gut feeling that’s just overtaken me.

  “There,” I say, more to myself than to him. “‘Invested.’”

  “Huh?”

  “What you just said about the money being invested,” I say with growing conviction, “you’re lying.”

  “I am not,” he says, blustering. “You’re imagining—”

  “Do you not have it?”

  “I . . .”

  “Did Dad take it? Is that why you quit school?”

  “I already told you why I quit school.”

  “Just tell me,” I say, getting up from the chair and standing over him. “I’m in the middle of making decisions that will affect the course of my entire life, without knowing all the facts. I have a right to know.”

  He slumps forward, head in his hands.

  I’m waiting, and feeling he’s on the brink, when suddenly Mom is calling, “Brunch, darlings!” from the top of the stairs.

  “I have to get dressed,” Jack says, getting out on the far side of the bed.

  “Please, Jack . . .”

  “Okay,” he says, facing me across the unmade bed and suddenly talking in a whisper. “But you have to promise . . .”

  “Sure, sure,” I say, waving him along.

  “Dad told you he turned the whole fund over to me, right? Because I was old enough to handle the money myself?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, what if that wasn’t true? Hypothetically?”

  “That would mean . . . you never had the money?”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Then where—”

  “Brunch!” Mom calls.

  “We’ve gotta go up,” he says, then goes to his pack, pulls out a sweater, and puts it on over his T-shirt and pajama pants. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  28

  SHITSTORM

  Two minutes later my family is gathered around the table for yet another attempt at a normal family meal like the slow learners we obviously are.

  Jack, across from me, is rumpled but alert, Dad, at the far end, looks like his usual self, and Mom, opposite Dad and nearest to the kitchen, is chirpy in a way that isn’t even fake. Her insistence on pretending everything is fine is in full force, but she’s also so happy to have Jack home that it’s coming off her in waves.

  She’s even, I suspect, prepared a mental list of subjects that are suitable for conversation, and these she dishes out alongside the food—for example, the hole in the backyard fence, hurricane statistics, deep sea archeology, a bit of gossip from the Inn (only about out-of-towners—no talk about locals), fun facts about nocturnal mammals, and a recent trip to the dentist.

  Jack and I do our best to run with these conversational gambits, and, in fact, so does Dad. But each subject only lasts so long, and then we’re back to the clinking of cutlery on plates and the many subjects we cannot discuss—e.g., school, my job, Jack’s job, Dad’s lack of job, Greece, travel in general, Perry, politics (local, national, international), anyone from Pine Ridge, anything to do with relationships of any kind, anything to do with world events of any kind.

  I even jump in to regale them about the horrors of my first day of apartment searching—the fish place, Sarah the drone-shooting nudist, woebegone Trevor with the creepy, cave-like basement he thought I could have parties in. I am taking a risk mentioning anyone local, but it gets us through another few minutes.

  When Mom manages to somehow connect her teeth-cleaning story to one about her coworker’s deceased pet rabbit, I don’t know whether to scream from the tension, or stand up and applaud her virtuosity.

  To have our family together and peaceful around a table is an amazing feat. There’s something so reassuringly normal about it, and something so painful and beautiful about how everybody’s trying.

  But it’s also awful. Fake and fraught and never going to get better. Jack’s laughing at Mom’s description of the pet rabbit’s obituary, and Dad’s nodding along, and Mom is gathering herself for another anecdote, and suddenly I’m thinking about everything that’s been going on, and the secrets people are keeping, and how I’m sitting here with the people who are supposed to love me most, and we can’t talk about any of it.

  Suddenly I want to cry all over my pancakes, or throw something.

  Because this is not the goal—this is not the solution or the goal.

  And so I decide to throw a firework into the conversation.

  “Where did all the education money go?” I ask, determined to stay calm no matter what happens next.

  The effect is instantaneous. Jack stares at me wide-eyed, Mom looks like she’d retract her head into a shell like a turtle if she could, and Dad has paused, a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth.

  “I understand that there’s nothing we can do about it,” I add, fighting a panicked instinct to walk this back before it turns into a shitstorm. “B
ut I’d like to know where it went.”

  There’s a super silent silence and then Mom bursts in with, “How about another pancake, dear! I think your blood sugar is low.”

  “No, come on,” I insist. “We have to be able to talk about things as a family. Otherwise we’re going to end up not being a family. Everything is too fragile, like we’re all going to break if anybody says anything difficult.”

  Mom makes a weird, flapping/calming motion with her hands and mutters something about “keeping a lid on things.”

  “I think we need to take the lid off.”

  “Libby, no,” Mom whispers.

  “Yes,” I say, even though I feel like I might throw up and/or die. “Everything started going off the rails when Dad left the brokerage, and went all the way off when Jack quit school and moved to Greece. And now, if it’s even possible, they’re worse. My education money is gone and Dad is unemployed and unbalanced to the point that he broke over forty pieces of wood yesterday for no good reason.”

  “I am not unemployed, I’m self-employed!” Dad says, cutting a sausage with savage force. “And your mother is the one who ordered all that crap furniture. It wasn’t even real wood, it—”

  “The wood is not the point! The point is that Mom and I are doing backflips trying to manage you and work around you all the time.”

  “What are you talking about, ‘work around me’?” Dad says as Mom signals frantically at me to shut up and Jack watches it all. “That’s bullshit.”

  “It’s not,” I say, swallowing my bone-deep fear of his rising temper and pushing on. “You go into every single situation like a wrecking ball. You were so determined to write that article about Perry, even though it would make everything worse and I begged you not to, and even though it was an almost certain path to the entire town finding out you’re RicksNotRolling—maker of death threats and spreader of digital pestilence—that the only thing I could think of to do was steal your phone and rip our modem right out of the wall.”

  “Oh, excuse me if I wanted to stop you from having to go prostrate yourself in front of that bastard Perry Ackerman,” Dad says, arms crossed like he’s barely containing himself, giving me a vicious glare. “Excuse me for wanting to support my own daughter, and trying to help.”