But as dissimilar as our outward appearances were, since I was neither pierced nor tattooed, where we really differed was our personalities. I had always been more outgoing and friendly, and Chase had always been quiet and serious, but he also had an intensely sarcastic side that would come out from time to time. His sense of humor was so dry that most of the time our family didn’t get it when he made a joke. He was usually the only one lazily laughing at what he’d said, most likely because he was high when he’d made the joke. Chase smoked more weed than anyone I knew, but he also had a 4.0 GPA and barely had to crack a book. It was a strange combination, but for some reason, smoking had never hindered his academic abilities, and he’d been doing it since high school.
“What do you want?” I repeated, slower this time in case he hadn’t heard me. Maybe the weed was finally affecting his brain.
Chase smirked and ran a hand through his hair, as he leaned against the door jam. “I need your window,” he said dryly, as he surveyed the piles of clothes on my bed.
“You could ask,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest, “instead of just demanding.”
I could see Chase fighting the urge to roll his eyes. “Oh, Great Princess Emily, would you do me the immense honor of allowing me to borrow your window, so I can humbly smoke a joint?”
“What’s wrong with yours?” I asked, annoyed that he was encroaching on my territory, knowing that he was doing so, so he could smoke weed, but enraged that he’d found it humorous to mock me in the process.
“Mom and Dad are on the back porch. They’ll smell it from my window,” he said, dropping the affected voice he’d used when attempting to insult me.
I wanted to laugh. Chase had been sneaking his bad habits all summer because my parents still didn’t know he smoked – weed or cigarettes. Unfortunately for him, his room had a view of the backyard and looked out over the porch where my parents liked to relax. My room had a view of the front yard and the street. It was far enough away from the backyard that they wouldn’t smell the vile stench of his pot.
“So don’t smoke,” I said in my nastiest tone, thinking it was probably the third time that day he’d gotten high.
“Bite me,” was his charming and oh-so-mature response.
I glared at him. “Fine, whatever,” I said through gritted teeth. “Just take the screen out and blow out, not in. I don’t want to smell that stuff.”
Chase was one of the few people who had always been able to bring out the worst in me. He had a way of getting under my skin that drove me crazy. Since I’d been home, and was already on edge most of the time anyway, his attitude toward me made my moods worse, which in turn made me feel crabbier, and resulted in a viscous circle of bitchiness that I couldn’t escape.
“Thanks, sis,” he said, his voice full of sarcasm. “I’m so glad we can have these little bonding moments. They just mean so much to me.”
As he passed by me, he gave me a look that told me he thought I was being stuck-up, judgmental and close-minded. It was a look he often tossed my way. I returned his look with a sarcastic smirk of my own which only made him chuckle lightly as he settled onto the windowsill and worked to pop the screen out. He completely ignored Keely as he walked by her.
I glared at his back as I got off the bed and turned to her. “I’m getting a drink. Do you want to come with me?”
She shrugged, put the CDs she was browsing back on my desk, and got up from the chair. “Sure,” she said, stealing a glance a Chase who was rolling a joint on my windowsill.
I couldn’t help thinking that if I was really a bitch, I would have told him no. It was funny that I’d never even considered that as an option. Maybe there was hope for me yet.
“Why do you let him get to you?” Keely asked, eyeing me cautiously as we closed my bedroom door behind us and headed downstairs.
“What?” I asked, turning to face her.
Her question was thoroughly confusing, given our history. We often complained about Chase to each other, as he bugged us both equally. It was the first time she’d ever questioned my reaction to him being a jerk. She usually agreed with my opinions of him.
“Why do you get so worked up over him?”
“I’m not worked up,” I said, automatically defending myself. I hated that my little sister seemed to have more clarity than me all of a sudden.
“You are too.”
“He’s a jerk,” I said simply. “He’s a stoner loser who walks around here like he owns the place. It’s irritating.”
She took a deep breath as we made our way through the house. Through the sliding glass door, I could see our parents sitting on the porch enjoying some afternoon cocktails. My mother was laughing at something my dad had said. I started to wonder what had kept her infatuation with him all of these years since they still seemed to be just as in love with each other as they’d always been. It made me think of Ben and our history together and what it meant to me. Maybe breaking up wasn’t such a good idea.
“He’s not that bad,” Keely said then, breaking my concentration.
I stopped completely and turned to face her from the doorway to the kitchen. Her comment had thrown me for a complete loop. She was looking at me speculatively, as if to gauge what I was thinking. I raised my eyebrows and just looked at her. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Chase was that bad. There were no two ways about it.
“Keely, seriously?” I finally asked after a few minutes of deadlocked eye contact with my sister. “He just marched into my room, assumed he could take it over and didn’t say two words to you. How can you defend him?”
She shrugged, but she looked like she wanted to say something, so I probed.
“What are you not telling me?” I asked, stepping closer to her.
“Nothing,” she said, her eyes drifting away from where I held her gaze, my eyes locked on hers.
I crossed my arms in front of me and stared at her so she was forced to turn her head and face me. “Keels, what is going on? You hate Chase.”
“Nothing’s going on, and I never said I hated him. You said that.” I could see the defiance cross her face. “You’ve always assumed that it was me and you against Chase, but I’m sort of sick of it. I want to be friends with both of you. It’s bullshit that we can’t get along.”
I was sort of taken aback by her statement. “Well, maybe if he wasn’t such a loser jerk, I’d want to hang out with him more,” I snapped.
“Well,” Keely said, and I could tell she was trying not to start an argument with me, “he might not be such a jerk if you were a little nicer to him.” I watched her cringe slightly as she said it, most likely anticipating how it might set me off.
Seeing this, I tried to maintain my composure. “Keely, he’s stoned most of the time, he’s rude, he makes fun of everything I do, and oh, right, we have nothing in common! How am I supposed to be friends with someone like that? He’s an asshole. Everyone knows that.”
She shrugged. “Not everyone. Rachel was talking to him the other night at that concert I went to. She didn’t seem to be repulsed by him. She was even laughing with him. Maybe if you were nice to him, like she was, he’d be nice to you.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, completely ignoring the last part of her statement. “Rachel? My Rachel?” She nodded. “My best friend Rachel was talking and laughing with Chase?”
I was having a hard time imagining that. Worse, why hadn’t she told me? The concert was been three nights ago. It was some electronic band Rachel had to cover for the magazine. I wasn’t a big fan, so I’d opted to hang out with Ben instead. I didn’t even know Chase had gone to the show.
“She watched the whole show with him and Davis. I talked to them for a few minutes. They seemed to be having fun.”
I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t see Rachel, who disliked Chase as much as I did, because he was equally mean to her, actually hanging out and laughing with him and his best friend, who was an even bigger loser than Chase was. It didn’t make any sense.
“Just try not to be so judgmental of him, Em,” she said. “I mean, he does smoke a lot, but he’s really smart, and it doesn’t make him all stupid like it does some people. He says it relaxes him and helps him concentrate.”
I put my hand up in protest. “Okay, how do you know all of this? And, better yet, why are you defending his habits?”
She shrugged. “I sort of hung out with him last night, and he was telling me about it. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Lots of people I know smoke.” She shrugged again.
“Okay, Keels, for the record, it’s illegal, so it is a big deal.”
“So is underage drinking, but you did that for years.”
Oops, she’d caught me there. I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I diverted the conversation.
“When did you hang out with him?”
“Last night when he got home. I heard a noise in the hall and thought it was you and Ben, so I came out. Chase asked me if I wanted to come outside with him, so I did. Emily, he never invites me to hang out, so I figured I needed to capitalize on the opportunity.”
“And,” I prompted, knowing there was more to the story.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking down. “We went out on the back porch, and he didn’t really say much. I asked him what he did that night, and he told me about how he’d been over at Davis’s house with some friends. He said they hung out, smoked and played video games. It wasn’t that exciting. Then I told him about how Barrett, Paige and I had gone to Lauren’s party for a little while before we had to be home for curfew.”
I didn’t say anything in response, because honestly I was a little dumbstruck. I just let her continue.
“He asked me about stuff,” she said, “like he was really interested in my life.”
“Like what?”
I couldn’t fathom what Chase would want to ask Keely. They had less in common than he and I did.
“I don’t know, like who I was dating. When I told him I was sort of seeing three guys, he acted all big brotherly, telling me that I should let him know if any of them don’t treat me right. It’s was honestly kind of cool.”
My jaw dropped. Chase had never done that for me – ever. I don’t think he even knew Ben’s name for the first six months we’d been dating. Chase tended not to care about anyone but himself. Why he was suddenly being protective of Keely was beyond me.
“That’s so not Chase,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.
“I don’t know, maybe it is him. You don’t even know him anymore. He’s grown up a lot. I think you need to give him a chance to show you who he really is. He was nice to me, because I don’t judge him, and I was nice to him.”
I suddenly felt a pang of jealousy that I couldn’t define. I didn’t like my brother. Why was I all of a sudden feeling bad that he wanted to hang out with Keely and not me? It wasn’t like I had any desire to sit on the back porch and talk to him about what he did with his idiot friends while he got high.
“I guess,” I said, going for aloof. I couldn’t let her know I was borderline upset. “Did you hang out with him for a while?”
“Um, sure,” she said vaguely, and I realized she wasn’t telling me everything. She was holding back, and I suddenly figured out why.
“You smoked with him!” I accused, pointing my finger and catching her off-guard so much so that her head snapped up. Her eyes gave her away. I knew in an instant that she’d gotten high with Chase. “Keely!”
“What?!” she said, sounding both defensive and a little hurt at the same time.
“What do you mean, what?! You said you would never do that! You’re too good to become like Chase and his loser friends. What were you thinking?”
Keely looked down again. “I’m sorry, Emily, but I wanted to see what it was like. Plus he was being nice to me,” she mumbled. “I told him I couldn’t sleep, so he offered. I didn’t want him to think I was a baby, so I took a few hits. It was sort of fun. I was really relaxed and calm.”
“You took a few hits! It was fun! Unbelievable,” I hissed, trying to keep my voice down, so our parents wouldn’t hear. As much as I disliked Chase, I didn’t want him, or Keely, to get in trouble.
As if on cue, Chase, baked to a crisp, chose that moment to appear in the kitchen. His eyes were heavy and a lazy smile played on his lips. It soon turned to a look of amused confusion when he saw me looking up at Keely, since she had a good four inches on me, hands on my hips. He could tell we’d been arguing.
“Told you she’d freak out,” he said to her, in that slow way he talked whenever he was freshly high, a lazy smirk creeping onto his face. He knew instantly what we were talking about. Hell, he could have heard our whole exchange.
Keely shot him a look, pleading for him to shut up.
“It’s cool, Keels,” he said, chuckling to himself as Keely shrunk back against the wall.
Chase walked past us to the refrigerator, grabbed a two-liter of Coke and took a big swig right from the bottle before putting it back. I reached over and smacked him on the back of the head just as he set the bottle down, sending him lurching forward slightly, as his reaction time was slowed just a bit.
“What the fuck, Emily?” he said, slowly turning to face me.
I glared at him, and crossed my arms in front of me. “She’s seventeen, dumbass, that’s what. Besides, that Coke does not belong to just you. Use a glass. That’s gross.”
Chase smirked, grabbed the bottle and took another drink just to spite me. Keely’s head snapped up at that moment, an almost delayed reaction as she processed what I’d said about her.
“Hey,” she said, causing us both to turn in her direction, but she was looking at me. “I’m not a baby. I can make my own decisions. Last night, I decided to smoke weed with my brother. Big deal, it’s not like I killed someone. Quit being so self-righteous!”
With that, she turned and stormed out of the room. My jaw dropped slightly, as Keely rarely yelled and especially not at me. Chase recognized this fact and stared at me in mock interest before he shook his head and started to leave the room. God, he made me so mad sometimes.
“Chase,” I said curtly, as he reached doorway to the kitchen.
“Yeah,” he said, lazily turning around, not at all fazed by my tone.
“Why?” I asked simply.
“Because it’s really not that big of a deal, Em. You should try it sometime. You’ll see. Hell, it might even make you less rigid.”
I narrowed my eyes and glared at him, his words eating at me. I was not rigid.
“No thanks. I’m good,” I said firmly, standing my ground.
“You don’t know what you’re missing.” He turned away from me, then stopped, turned his head slightly and said, “She’s not a dumb kid anymore. You might want to give her some credit.”
With that, he headed back upstairs. Within a few minutes, I could hear his music pulsing through the ceiling. Standing there in the kitchen, I realized I was beyond fuming. I was furious at Keely for being so stupid, and I hated that she was mad at me. If only she realized what a big deal smoking weed was. I didn’t need her following suit on Chase’s bad habits.
I should have been more upset with Chase for our interaction, but with him, well, that was a par for the course conversation. He was a jerk, and I’d challenged him blow for blow. I wasn’t sure we’d had a conversation that didn’t involve digs, glares, and smirks since we were in middle school. Sadly enough that was as good as it got with me and my brother.
Chapter Five
“Babe,” Ben said, taking my hand. “I really want to see it, and so does everyone else. Come on.”
I was being stubborn, because Ben was being annoying. Ever since he’d picked me up, I’d been irritated with him. There wasn’t one specific thing he’d done that was bothering me. It was just being in close proximity to him that was aggravating.
He kept trying to hold my hand and touch me, and I just wanted to be left alone.
We were standing outside the Movietown 8 Theater with Rachel and Ben’s best friend, Eric, trying to decide on a movie. Rachel and I had talked about seeing a new romantic comedy, but once Ben and Eric had seen that Don’t Close Your Eyes had opened that day, they had decided they had to see it. Rachel said she was in, which left me as the odd man out.
Ben wouldn’t see the movie without me, but he was dying to see it. I knew that. He was a huge horror movie fanatic. He never got scared. I, on the other hand, was a huge chicken, and afraid of the dark, so the last movie I wanted to see was one about bad things happening in the dark where I would inevitably be in just a few hours.
Ben squeezed my hand and leaned over to whisper in my ear. “I promise I’ll hold your hand the whole time. I’ll be right next to you. I won’t let you get scared.” He stood back up and looked down at me, smiling slightly.
Okay, so this was why I hadn’t broken up with him. He was really sweet at times – even when I was being a total brat, which had been a regular occurrence since we’d been home for the summer. His gesture was enough for me to forget about how annoying he was being. I couldn’t be mad at him when I needed him to hold my hand.
“Okay, fine,” I said, begrudgingly cracking a small smile as I turned to face my friends. I watched Ben’s mouth break into a wide grin.
“Yes!” he said, pumping his fist into the air.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, holding his hand tighter. “No letting go, okay?”
“Never,” he said, as he leaned down and kissed me.
Suffice it to say, I screamed out loud three times. The rest of the time, I had my hand over my eyes or my head buried in Ben’s shoulder. When we got back to my house, I made him come upstairs with me, as I was afraid of everything around us. I definitely could not be alone until I calmed down and distracted myself.
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