You Before Anyone Else

by Julie Cross

  I move closer, debating waking him up. Sweat trickles from his forehead down the side of his face. His breathing shifts to a more uneven rhythm. In his sleep, he lifts a hand to his shirt collar, tugging at it. “I can’t…I just…I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  I glance from Connor to Braden—they’re still out cold—then back to Eddie. He’s shaking his head, protesting something. Suddenly, without warning, he jolts upright, tilting the bed. I dive forward, placing a hand on Connor’s side, making sure the movement doesn’t knock him off the bed. Eddie slides to the end of the bed, and I immediately shift Connor into a safer spot near the middle.

  At the end of the bed, with his feet now resting on the carpet, maybe preparing to stand, Eddie appears to be gasping for air. I kneel in front of him, trying to figure out if he’s awake or asleep. “We shouldn’t have—we can’t… I can’t…” he mumbles.

  I grip both his shoulders and give them a gentle shake. “Eddie…hey…you’re okay.”

  He scrubs a hand over his face and then looks at me. I wait, watching him slowly come back to life and figure out where he is. He closes his eyes for a moment, and then they’re wide open again. He glances over one shoulder, checking out the bed, and then pats Connor’s ankle. His breathing is still ragged, like he’s on the verge of hyperventilating. I shake him again, getting him to face me. “Relax, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He nods, looking half-confused, half-embarrassed. “Sorry. I should go.”

  I keep studying him—I’m still not a hundred percent sure he’s awake—while he attempts to stand, loses his balances, and grips the dresser. He pats along the wall all the way to the door and heads out into the hallway. I grab the blanket from the end of the bed, toss it over the boys, then flip the lights off before following Eddie.

  He stops again on the way to the front door, when he reaches the couch. Spots appear on the back of his T-shirt from sweat. I jump in front of him, holding a hand to his chest. “Maybe you should sit for a few minutes?”

  Eddie shakes his head but sinks down on the couch anyway. His face drops into his hands like it’s too heavy to hold up. “It’s so weird… I feel like—like I’m—”

  “Sick?” I suggest. I perch myself on the edge of the coffee table, not wanting to give him room to exit.

  “Strung out. High.” Eddie lifts his head and looks at me. “I feel like I’m high.”

  “Maybe you have a fever.” I rest a hand to his forehead. It’s cold and clammy but not warm.

  “Feel this.” Eddie grabs my hand and places it over his heart. It’s racing. He pulls in another ragged breath. “It’s like I can’t catch my breath.”

  He’s sounding more coherent now, and already, some color is returning to his cheeks. I don’t know how to reason with him except to do just that, reason. “You didn’t take anything to make you high, right?” He shakes his head—thank God—and I lean in to get a good look at his eyes. “You’re not strung out or whatever. Try to breathe more slowly.”

  I leave my hand over his heart, waiting for the rhythm to slow.

  CHAPTER 25

  Eddie

  The here and now is slowly returning with each much more controlled breath I take in. And shit. Why did that feel so real?

  Finley’s palm stays pressed to my chest, and the more my heart slows back to normal, the more my limbs resemble Jell-O. I lift an arm to wipe sweat from my forehead. It’s a pointless endeavor, considering my entire shirt is soaked.

  This is exactly how I woke up that morning. Heart racing, sweat-covered, dizzy, disoriented. A girl leaning over me, asking if I was all right. I look at Finley, and all I can see on her face is concern. But the second she decides I’m okay, she’s gonna want answers. She’s gonna want to know for sure that I didn’t take care of her little brothers while under the influence. She might want to know why I’m familiar with the feeling in the first place. For a moment, I debate not telling her anything. She’s kind and accepting. But then I remember her dad—also kind and accepting but more skeptical when it came to me being around his daughter.

  I lift Finley’s hand from my chest and return it to her lap. “I’m not high,” I assure her.

  “Yeah, I know,” she says, but there’s a hint of worry in her voice.

  “Last year…last winter…” I blow out a breath. “I partied a little too hard. It went really bad.”

  “Define ‘really bad.’”

  No way can I define all of it, but she deserves some information about this guy she’s invited into her life. “A bunch of kids—friends of mine—got caught. It was a big deal. Lots of influential families involved.”

  “So lots of rich kids?” Finley asks. “Is that why you changed your name? If I Google Eddie Wellington IV, am I gonna find a drug bust story about you?”

  She’s way more calm than I expected, but I have a feeling this is the before reaction, not the after. “If you Google me, you won’t find anything about it. My father made sure of that.” I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “He threw some of my friends and their families under the bus just to get my name out of anything. I’m not so popular among my old crowd anymore.”

  “But you were there?” Finley prompts. “And high?”

  I stare up at the ceiling, unable to look at her. “Yep.”

  Not just high but out of control. Reckless. Not much different from the idiots I’m now forced to live with. Karma, I think.

  “And now you’re not running away from things while running away from Princeton and your family,” Finley rattles off.

  I’d forgotten that I said that to her before. That tidbit of information makes it more difficult to explain the stuff tonight without all the pieces. “I mean, I’m being real about me and who I am. I don’t fit in with my family. Before all that shit went down, I felt like that too. I’ve always felt like that. I secretly hated my life, but I couldn’t admit it. Most of my friends party because they can. They can get away with it. They have enough connections to keep them in all the right schools—it’s a power trip. But for me, it was always about getting out of my own head.”

  “I bet you’re not the only one from your crowd screwed up by their family,” Finley points out. She hesitates before asking, “So you’re an addict? A recovering addict?”

  “No.” I sit up quickly, getting a look at her face. She’s still pretty calm. Careful. “I mean, I don’t think so. I just made some poor choices.” Understatement of the century.

  “I’m not judging. Just wanted to know.” She crosses one leg over the other, causing her white dress to slide higher up her thigh. “You were drinking the night we—”

  “Hooked up,” I finish for her after her face flushes. I can’t believe she’s still blushing about that. “Yeah.”

  She flashes me a smile. “It would be weird if you were breaking sobriety or something.”

  There’s a small ounce of truth in that. I pick at a thread on my jeans. “Actually, that night was the first time I did anything that resembled partying since…but it was a good thing. The last thing I want is to go from one extreme to the other. It felt normal. Controlled.”

  She lifts an eyebrow at the word controlled, and I’m wondering if she’s replaying the same mental images as I am—clothes being flung around her bedroom, hands roaming all over each other, mouths roaming all over each other…

  I laugh and shake my head. “Okay, maybe it was a little wild. But good wild.”

  “Definitely good.”

  We stare at each other for a moment, heat building in the space between us. “Thanks for listening.”

  “You’re welcome,” she whispers.

  I lean in an inch closer. “I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”

  “It’s fine,” she says in a way that also says stop talking and kiss me.

  My mouth hovers a millimeter from hers when the dead bolt turns on the front
door. We jump apart, and seconds later, Elana and French Mama are walking through the door. One of them flips on the main light, illuminating the whole apartment. I grip the arm of the couch, bracing myself for more French swearwords and possibly a spatula, but French Mama just glares.

  Finley turns bright red, of course, and stands up quickly. “Well, thanks for watching my brothers, Eddie. I really appreciate it.”

  Elana turns to her mom and translates this, then she points to Finley’s room, where her brothers are clearly visible from the light that’s just been turned on. French Mama studies the boys from doorway and then speaks in French to Elana.

  I try not to laugh after hearing what she says, but I can’t help it. Finley gives me a questioning look, so I whisper what I heard to her. “She said this is what happens when you talk to boys.”

  “You speak French?” Finley asks, keeping her voice low. “And what happens? Twins?”

  “Apparently.” I listen for another moment and hear Elana explain that Connor and Braden are Finley’s younger brothers. They both gush about how cute they are and how they’re too skinny and need to be fattened up. “She thinks they’re cute.”

  “You speak French.” Finley shakes her head. “Of course you do.”

  I stand up and head for the door. I’ve been lucky so far, avoided the spatula, but I don’t want to get overconfident. Finley follows me, and we both stand there for a second, not knowing what to say.

  “So…” I glance at the boys asleep in the bedroom again and then back at Fin. “I kind of told Connor and Braden I’d go to their swim meet tomorrow. If that’s okay with you? And your dad?”

  “You’re coming to my brothers’ swim meet,” Finley repeats. “In Connecticut.”

  “If that’s okay?” I say again.

  She looks like she’s not sure what to think, but eventually, she nods. “I’m sure they’ll love it if you come.”

  “And you?” I rest my fingers on her waist and gently tug until she’s right in front of me. “You won’t mind if I’m there?”

  “No, I won’t mind.” There are a million words inside her words, like I hate that I want you there, I hate that we’re supposed to be done with this, whatever this is. But none of those words escape her lips.

  I’m about to kiss her. For real this time. But Elana’s mom bangs a pot against the stove a little too loudly to be accidental. Finley drops her forehead to my shoulder and laughs. “You should go. Before it gets ugly.”

  No one needs to tell me twice. I’m out the door and down the hall in no time. But I can’t bring myself to go back to the apartment yet. It’s too early. Especially after what I relived tonight. I need to walk. Think. Move. One foot in front of the other.

  I need to see Caroline. Maybe it’s time to come clean with her too.

  After I’m outside in the warm summer night air, I shoot her a text.

  ME: Where r u?

  CAROLINE: Jail (a.k.a. my bedroom).

  ME: Can I sneak in?

  CAROLINE: No, too risky.

  Disappointment washes over me. I try to relieve it by walking past all the buildings I named off for Connor and Braden tonight. When I walk past the side of my building, a small part of me wants to go home. Hang out in my room and blast music, ignoring the rest of the house. It’s possible no one is home.

  Instead of going in, I sit inside the deli across the street, staring up at a bedroom that is currently holding a girl prisoner.

  ME: U can wave at me if you want…

  CAROLINE: What?? Why aren’t u at Princeton??

  ME: Relax. I’m just home for the weekend.

  I sigh and push away from my table, then toss my untouched sandwich into the garbage.

  Yeah, so much for coming clean.

  CHAPTER 26

  Finley

  “So…” I nudge Eddie in the side with my elbow while spreading a thick coat of sunblock across my nose. “What’s this about too many TVs on in the building causing an explosion?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Eddie snatches the bottle of sunblock from me and squirts a good amount into his palm. “Think we’ll be able to see the race from all the way over here?” He points to an open spot near lane eight. “What about there? The video will turn out better.”

  My dad is still getting over his cold, so I ordered him to stay home this afternoon. Which means it’s up to me and Eddie to play the part of sports parents. He seems to be taking this way more seriously than I am.

  I follow him while he makes his way to the open spot. “Back to the exploding TVs…”

  “Right.” He keeps his eyes on the starting blocks instead of looking at me. “Just figured I’d keep them busy without the TV, so they don’t, you know, become hyperactive or whatever.”

  I work hard not to smile. It’s like the second I’d walked out the door yesterday, he Googled child care and then followed whatever recipe he found online. “You’re the youngest, right?”

  Eddie glances at me. “Why?”

  “No reason.” I pass him a bottle of water from the cooler on his shoulder and then take one for myself. “Just that I can tell you haven’t had any opportunity to take care of kids before.”

  Eddie, who has just brought the water to his lips, nearly chokes on his first gulp. He coughs a few times before speaking. “Uh…well, my older sister is just as clueless about kids. She never would have been asked to take care of me.” He flashes me a sheepish grin. “Too many nannies doing everything.”

  I roll my eyes. “Where is your sister?”

  “She’s at Brown.” He turns his attention back to the pool, where a girls’ backstroke race has just begun. “She takes classes year-round.”

  “Like you,” I can’t help saying, because he is, according to his family, currently at Princeton summer school. This earns me a nonthreatening glare from Eddie. “But what is she like? And Brown…I mean, it’s not Princeton. How did she get away with that?”

  “Ruby actually earned her college admission,” Eddie says, dry and without emotion. “She got into Princeton and about a dozen other schools on her own. And she was allowed to go to college wherever the hell she wanted, because she doesn’t have, as you put it, a number after her name.”

  “You mean because she’s a girl?” I work to keep the shock out of my voice. It’s all so archaic.

  Eddie nods and stares out at the pool in front of us. “If my dad actually paid attention, he’d realize she’s the son he always wanted.”

  The conversation halts temporarily, because a large group of parents have jumped up from their seats to cheer. One middle-aged guy appears to be following his daughter while she swims her four lengths of backstroke. He’s whistling with his fingers in his mouth. “Pick it up! You’re way behind!”

  He’s too busy yelling at his kid to notice that he’s about to run into us. Eddie grabs the back of my tank top and yanks me back a couple feet to avoid getting plowed over.

  “So she’s not nice, I take it?” I ask, getting back to Eddie’s sister.

  “Ruby?” he asks, still distracted by the sideline dad. “I wouldn’t use the word nice to describe her, but she’s not a screwup. She doesn’t get in trouble. Ever. She always does the right thing. But she’s not obedient. She’s outspoken and liberal, which is infuriating to both my parents.”

  “Huh,” I say. “She sounds pretty cool.”

  Eddie just shrugs as if to say he wouldn’t know. I get it. They aren’t close. Maybe they’re just too different. Maybe their house is too cold and unforgiving to cultivate any kind of relationships.

  “What race are we waiting for again?”

  “The eight-and-under fifty-meter freestyle relay.” I pull the schedule out of my pocket and unfold it. “After this backstroke race, then the girls’ relay, then the boys.”

  Yelling Dad heads back our way, jogging to keep
up with his daughter, who’s now on the last lap.

  “I might trip that dude if he doesn’t watch where he’s going,” Eddie says. Then he elbows me like I’d done to him several minutes ago. “So…I saw your business plan.”

  I snap around to face him, keeping my voice low. “How? When?”

  “After the TV turned off, there was some running around, digging for stuff to do. I caught a glimpse of some of your paperwork when I saved it from a glass of water.” He doesn’t look even a little bit ashamed of his snooping. “You’re really doing it, then? The studio, rebuilding it?”

  I kick at a piece of gravel on the pool deck with my toe. “I want to, but there’s a lot to figure out. I’ve gotten somewhere the past couple weeks though.”

  “Somewhere?” Eddie prompts.

  Even though I’m trying to be annoyed, I can feel a smile working its way onto my face.

  “Well, I definitely have enough saved up for start-up costs, according to an assessment I got last week. So really, all I need is a solid business plan—I’m working on that now—and some evidence of potential students, staff. That kind of stuff.”

  “That’s awesome,” Eddie says. “Since this Princeton thing isn’t working out, I might need another job. So if you’re looking for a piano player…”

  “I know where to find you,” I say, smiling. But then I can’t help thinking, will I know where to find him? Like, in six months? His presence always seems so temporary, like he’s a guy on his way to somewhere else.

  “There they are.” Eddie points a finger at my brothers.

  They’re hopping around in their little knee-length Speedos with the other two boys in the relay. We worm closer so that I can get it on video. The first little boy steps up on the starting block and holds his position. “God, it’s so high up. Why did it not look that high when everyone else was going? Do you think they’ll hit their heads on the bottom of the pool?”