Chaos

by Jamie Shaw

  In a quiet, broken voice, he says, “I don’t know.”

  “It better be for waiting so long to tell us, and not for anything else,” Mason warns, and a tiny gasp leaves my mouth. He is furious—furious with Kale for not telling us and for hiding who he is. For nothing else.

  Kale looks up again, his eyes trained on our brother until the tears start to slip down his cheeks. When I lift my fingers to my own, I realize they’re just as wet.

  Mason curses and stands up, yanking Kale off the couch and breaking his back in a hug. “I fucking love you, Kale. Stop being a baby.”

  Kale laughs through quiet tears, and my dad is the next to stand. He pulls Kale in for another bone-crushing hug, and one by one, my family accepts him. They forget about me until a sob bubbles out of my chest and all eyes turn my way.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kit,” Mason says. “Get over here.”

  It’s corny. It’s the corniest family hug in the history of family hugs everywhere. But it heals some broken part inside Kale, or at least I hope it does. Ten years of fearing this moment, and the only thing anyone is upset about is the fact that he spent ten years fearing this moment.

  “So . . . Leti, huh?” my dad asks, and Kale blushes as red as Bryce’s sneakers.

  “I knew there was something going on with you two,” Bryce chimes in, but Mason laughs and elbows him in the arm.

  “Did not.”

  “Did too!”

  I’m smiling when my mom’s hand lands on my shoulder. “Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you,” she warns.

  My heart sinks, and the quietness between us spreads throughout the room. Kale’s moment is up, and now it’s mine. And mine isn’t going to be nearly as Hallmark, because I’m pretty sure my family’s introduction to it involved me shouting the word fuck—a lot.

  “Can we talk about it tomorrow?” I ask, taking a step backward, toward the doorway of the room.

  “Sit down,” my dad orders, and I do as I’m told. “Now, the rest of you, out.”

  My brothers begin to protest, but when his gaze is just as hard and stony as theirs, they groan and follow his orders. Even Kale has to leave, closing the door behind him and leaving only my mom and my dad sitting on the couch cushion next to me.

  I swallow thickly.

  “I’m not going to yell at you about what happened at dinner,” my dad says, and my brain takes a minute to process and then reprocess his words.

  “You’re not?”

  He shakes his head. My mom is holding his hands on her lap, in silent support of everything he’s saying. “Nope. I’m going to keep you in here for five minutes so your brothers think we handled it, and then I’m going to let you go.”

  My mom stares at him over her shoulder, a soft smile touching her face. Then she turns back toward me and says, “Do you want to talk to us about anything though? Or just me . . . I can kick your dad out.”

  I can’t help laughing a little despite the vise-grip squeezing my heart. “I don’t think so.”

  “You sure, honey?”

  I take a deep breath and nod. “I’m sure.”

  “Okay. Well, then I’m just going to tell you this one thing, and then you can go.” I wait, and she pats my knee. “That Shawn boy is a fucking tool if he doesn’t see how special you are.”

  I gape at my mom and the curse word she just blatantly said, and she nods to emphasize her point, absolutely serious.

  “A motherfucking tool.”

  And oh God, I can’t help it—I start laughing. Hard. And both she and my dad smile at the sound.

  “Any boy who wants to keep you a secret isn’t one worth getting angry over,” she adds. “Kick his ass to the curb. But I will tell you this . . . ” She squeezes my knee before letting go. “I saw the way he looked at you tonight, and when you stormed away from the table, he didn’t seem to want to keep you a secret then. He was out of his chair even before your brothers, and do you know what he did? He chased after you. He didn’t hesitate.”

  I chew on the inside of my cheek, the lightness gone from my broken heart. It’s heavy again—jagged, confused, bleeding.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened between you two in high school,” she continues.

  “Don’t want to know,” my dad tosses in.

  “But . . . I just saw him, okay? I just . . . I saw how fast he ran.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing. And when my dad checks his watch and says I can go, I go.

  MY BEDROOM DOOR is locked that night when someone knocks on it for the thirty-millionth time. First, it was Mason. Then Bryce. Then Mason. Then Ryan. Then Mason. Then Mason again. Now . . .

  “What’s the password?” I yell to the closed door, and Kale yells back, “Bangarang!”

  I can’t help cracking a weak smile as I drag myself off my bed to let him in. I have no idea why he yelled “bangarang,” but I kind of love him for it. The password thing is a game we’ve played since we were little—there never is a password and never has been, but for years, we had my brothers convinced that I made up a new one every day, and that Kale was the only one who ever knew what it was.

  When I swing open the door, he slips inside before any of my brothers can careen down the hallway to barge their way in. I’ll talk to them eventually. Just . . . not tonight. Tonight, I don’t need their personal brand of psychosis. I have enough of my own.

  “Hey,” Kale says as I engage the thirty-dollar lock I bought with the money I got for my eleventh birthday. When you have four brothers and are starting to wear training bras, you have priorities.

  “Hey.” I plop down next to him when he makes himself at home on my bed.

  “So tonight was pretty epic.”

  I force a fragile smile. For him, tonight will always be the night his heart became whole. For me . . . tonight will be the night I threw mine outside. “Have you told Leti yet?” I ask.

  “Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “About what?” I ask a dumb question, and he gives me a dumb answer.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Did you hear the Patriots beat the Packers last week?”

  He meets my flat stare with a flat stare of his own, and I sigh.

  “What did Mom and Dad say?” he asks, and a little chuckle escapes me.

  “Mom called Shawn a tool.”

  “She did not.”

  I nod with a breakable smile on my face. “She totally did.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Her exact words were, ‘motherfucking tool.’ ”

  Kale gapes at me a moment before barking out a loud laugh that simmers into belly chuckles. “Oh my God, that’s perfect,” he says, and I force a half smile that makes him lose half of his. “What else did she say?”

  “You know Mom,” I say as I rub my finger across a worn part of my blue comforter. “Always trying to get me a boyfriend.”

  Kale places his hand over the worn spot to reclaim my attention. “What did she say?”

  “She said Shawn didn’t seem like he wanted to keep me a secret tonight . . . She said . . . ” Kale waits patiently when I trail off, and I let out a bone-weary sigh before I continue. “She said she saw how fast he ran to catch me.”

  Kale’s dark eyes hold mine for a long moment before dropping to that worn-down spot on my bedspread. His fingers follow, fidgeting with the same threads he pushed mine from seconds earlier. “Everyone saw it. I did too.”

  We sit like that for a while, both lost in some imaginary place, when Kale says, “Kit, I need to tell you something.”

  I look up at him first; he looks up at me second.

  “I know why Shawn never called you.” My nose wrinkles with confusion, and he gnaws on his lip before rattling off the last part. “I told him not to.”

  I hear him, but I can’t understand a word coming out of his mouth. He told him not to? He told him not to call me?

  Kale starts pacing my room. “I couldn’t believe he took you upstairs and just
. . . that he used you liked that. He was a senior, for God’s sake, and some kind of rock star, and you . . . you’re my sister, and you’d always had such a crush on him, and he just . . . ” When Kale glances at me, guilt eclipses the blacks of his eyes. I see a flash of it just before he drops his gaze back to the floor. “I only let a day pass before I found out where he lived. I went over there, and . . . ”

  Kale trails off on an exhausted breath, and I scoot farther toward the edge of my bed. “And what?”

  My twin’s eyes are full of more regret than I’ve ever seen in them when he says, “I told him to stay away from you. I told him if he ever tried talking to you after what he did . . . that Mason Larson was our older brother, and he’d break every one of Shawn’s fingers. I told Shawn he’d never play the guitar again.”

  I stare at him. And stare. And stare. Something in the pit of my stomach is simmering to a boil, and I can feel it in the way my blood starts to sizzle under my skin.

  “I thought I was helping. I thought—”

  “You thought you were helping?” I hiss, and Kale cracks.

  “I didn’t think he cared about you . . . But, Kit, I saw how he was with you tonight, and—”

  “Get out,” I order, my voice a cold chill that punches through the room.

  “Kit—” Kale pleads.

  “Get out!”

  My anger knocks him back a step. “Please. Just let me—”

  “GET OUT!” I launch off my bed and fly straight at him. “GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT!” I’m all up in his face, forcing him toward the far side of my room and reaching behind him to unlock my door. It hits him in the side as I swing it open, and I shove at him until he’s in the hall, screaming at him to get out, over and over and over again, until the door is slamming between us. I throw the lock and glare where I’m sure Kale’s face is probably still staring at the other side, knowing the rest of the house is probably already on their way upstairs to demand that I open up and explain. But then I’m at my window, throwing it open and climbing over the sill.

  I don’t think. I just jump. And on the ground, my socked feet race desperately across the lawn—into the dark, past houses, past trees, past borders I’ve never crossed.

  I run until I can’t run anymore. Until I can’t breathe or think or feel. I run until I’m lost.

  And then, I fall apart.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I WAKE WITH a gnat trying to crawl up my nose, a rock burrowing into my spleen, and Leti . . . flicking an ant off of the log he’s sitting on, looking entirely out of place in the middle of wherever-the-hell I fell asleep last night.

  “This is really not in my job description as third-best friend,” he informs me, his golden eyes utterly serious when they swing to mine. “In case you couldn’t tell”—he gestures at his vintage Thundercats T-shirt, his faded jeans, his hot pink Chuck Taylors—“I’m not exactly cut out for this ‘being one with nature’ stuff.”

  I groan and rub my crooked back as I sit up. My face is stiff with sun-dried tears, and my mess of black-and-purple hair is a literal nest, complete with dried leaves and what I don’t doubt is an army’s worth of creepy crawlies. I turn my head upside down and do my best to finger-comb the heebie-jeebies from my scalp. “What are you doing here?” I ask with my nose still pointed at the ground. My voice is hoarse from crying all night, and I hear Leti sigh.

  “Coming to your rescue?” he suggests. “I’m pulling a Robin Hood or something.”

  My eyebrow is raised even before I turn my head upright. “Robin Hood?”

  “Well, I’d love to be your Prince Charming”—an amused smirk sneaks onto his face—“but I believe that ship sailed over the rainbow, Sleeping Hot Mess.”

  “Sleeping Hot Mess?”

  Leti chuckles as I wipe a smudge of dirt from my cheek. “You’re certainly no Sleeping Beauty.”

  I glare at him, and he shrugs.

  “Just telling it like it is, Kitterbug. And apparently, I’m the only one who does.”

  “What are you talking about?” I grumble. I’m sore, I’m exhausted, and my head is throbbing with each shift in the breeze. I have no idea why Leti is here—or how Leti is here—but trying to figure that out would require thinking, and thinking is the last thing I want to do right now. Last night feels like it was five minutes ago, and even though I try to forget the details, they ambush me one by one.

  The way I screamed at Shawn at the table. The way I pushed him out the door. The way everyone just stared at me.

  The way my mom said, I saw how fast he ran.

  The way Kale said, I told him to stay away from you.

  Leti stretches his long legs out, crossing them at the ankles. “I’m talking about all the lies you and everyone else in the world has been telling. I’ve spent all night hearing about the absolute chaos that went down here last night.”

  “From who?”

  He flutters a hand in the air. “From everyone. Rowan, Dee, Adam, Joel. Mostly from your brother.”

  “Did he tell you about the other secrets that came out last night?” I ask, and Leti’s grin answers me even before the contentment in his voice does.

  “He did.”

  “So you guys are good?”

  He nods with that bright smile on his face, and I almost feel happy for them. But my voice sounds of resentment when I mutter, “Glad Kale got his happy ending.”

  Especially after he ruined mine.

  “Which brings me to why I’m here,” Leti says, his smile slipping away, and I finally bother asking—

  “Why are you here? How’d you even find me?”

  “Kale found you.” He dismisses me with another swat at a gnat in the air. “But he thought it would be better if he wasn’t here when you woke up.”

  I snort, because all that proves is that my twin has half a brain in his head. “So you’re here to get me to go back home? Hate to break it to you, Leti, but I would’ve had to go back anyway. I don’t have my Jeep.”

  “If surgeons dissected your head,” he counters as he picks at the log he’s sitting on with a well-manicured fingernail, “do you think they’d discover your skull is missing-link thick? Or full-on cavewoman thick?”

  When I glare at him, he smiles.

  “I’m here to talk sense into you.”

  “And what kind of sense is that?” I’m practically growling as I struggle to get comfortable against the trunk of a thick-barked tree. That rock I slept on seriously might have poked a hole in something vital, because all of my muscles feel battered and bruised—maybe from the rock, or maybe from the way my body racked with heartbreaking sobs as I cried myself to sleep on top of it.

  Leti runs his hand through the sunlit hair on top of his head. “Where should we even start? Kale or Shawn?” When my expression hardens on his last word, he nods to himself and says, “Kale it is. You’re mad at him for telling Shawn to stay away from you in high school, right?”

  I stare back at him, refusing to answer such an idiotic question.

  “You realize you were fifteen, right? And Shawn was eighteen? An eighteen-year-old hot musician who’d slept with more girls than most guys twice his age? And you were a virgin? And he was moving away anyway? And you had an unhealthy obsession with him?”

  I cut in when he gets to the only part I can argue with. “I was not obsessed.”

  “Love, obsession . . . ” Leti flicks his fingers in the air. “When you’re fifteen, it’s all the same thing. What do you think would have happened if Kale hadn’t told Shawn not to call you? Do you really think he would have called?”

  “I’ll never know,” I answer angrily.

  “Okay, let me ask you this then. Do you really think Shawn—Shawn—would have stayed away from you just because your macho-man brothers wanted him to? If he really wanted to be with you, like your little-girl heart wanted to believe, do you think he would have let them stand in his way? For six years?”

  A sharp stinging surges against the back of my eyes, and
I blame it on the even-worse stinging in my chest. It feels like my heart is a twisted, gnarled mess, like it’s been thrown into a food processer and then run over with a Mac truck. “I get it, Leti. Shawn never wanted me. Is that your point?”

  “My point is that Kale was just trying to protect you. He’s an idiot, but he’s an idiot who loves you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Leti sighs and watches me wipe the heel of my palm over my eye. “You are lucky. Extremely lucky. Which brings us to Shawn.”

  “If you say I’m lucky to have Shawn,” I warn, “you’re getting a rock chucked at your head.”

  “Baby steps, she-devil,” Leti replies, like I didn’t just threaten to murder him where no one would find his body. “I’m not going to tell you Shawn cares about you or anything.” He fakes a cough that sounds an awful lot like, “He does,” and then he wipes a self-satisfied grin from his face and continues. “But I am going to point out that you are a giant—and I’m talking giant, massive, enormous, colossal—”

  “Get to the fucking point,” I order.

  “Hypocrite.” Leti matches my hard stare with one of his own, not backing down from the darkness in my eyes or fearing the way I weigh that promised rock in my palm. “All you’ve done since the moment you walked back into Shawn’s life is lie.”

  “I’m not the liar,” I argue, letting the rock fall back to the ground.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “But he—”

  “Did exactly the same thing as you.” In my silence, Leti emphasizes, “Exactly the same thing. You pretended not to know him. He pretended not to know you. How are you going to be mad at him for something you did?”

  “I did it to protect myself,” I insist, but the argument sounds weak even to my own ears.

  “And you just assume he did it for a different reason? Like just to hurt you or something? This is Shawn we’re talking about. Since when have you known him to go around trying to hurt people?”

  Shawn puts honey in Adam’s whiskey before shows. He goes on coffee runs for the roadies. He brings earplugs for girls who steal them.

  I feel my anger waning with the absolute sense Leti is making, so I narrow my eyes even farther and continue protesting. “He wanted to keep me a secret.”