by Hughes, Maya
There was nothing I’d ever do to break Colm’s trust…again.
2
Liv
“It’s a death trap and you know it.” Colm slipped into his dad voice like a well-worn coat with leather elbow patches.
If he had been standing in front of me, I’d have rolled my eyes, something he hated. “Anything less than 3000 square feet that doesn’t get yearly renovations is hardly a death trap. You’ve been in my place. It’s fine.” I massaged the cramp in my foot with the phone resting on my shoulder. The blistering cold outside melted away as people of all shapes and sizes rushed through the halls. I smiled at his noise of disapproval. “I swear it’s fine. I’ve made friends with the rats.”
“Rats?” His voice boomed on the other end.
I jerked my head away from the bellowing in my ear. “It was a joke. They’re barely mice.” Flexing my still-freezing fingers, I stood outside the classroom door. The volume increased as people stood in the hallway waiting for the doors to open.
“You’re such a brat.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“And what about your grades, Olivia?”
I dragged my fingers through my hair. “Do not full name me, Colm. Would you stop it? My grades are fine.” Organic chemistry had made me want to scream, but I’d gotten through it with an A minus.
“Are you retaking the MCAT?”
“I scored in the ninety-second percentile.”
“There’s always room for improvement. You’ve only got a semester left before applications are due.”
I gritted my teeth. That ninety-second percentile had taken an entire summer of eight a.m. to eight p.m. studying. There had been days on end I hadn’t left my apartment. My neck had had a kink in it for weeks, and my shoulders had been like stone. After that I’d picked up more dance classes because some days it was the only thing keeping me sane.
“How could I forget? You started this med school application countdown when I was thirteen.” Medical school was the end game. That was the goal that had been set out for me from the day I’d told my parents I wanted to become a doctor when I was eleven. Studying medicine almost felt like I was keeping a part of them alive, which was why I put up with Colm’s constant badgering.
“It’s what you’ve always wanted. I’m making sure you don’t miss out on your dream.” His voice wove his expectations into every word.
For a while he’d pulled back and seemed more focused on his own life. Things had been going so well with Felicity and he was so happy, really happy for the first time ever. When he showed me the ring for her, I couldn’t wait to have a big sister of sorts. She’d taken me shopping once before the beginning of the school year. I hadn’t really needed anything, but I’d wanted to get to know the woman my brother wanted to marry. I was the only one who’d met her and Colm had sworn me to secrecy, so I’d felt like he finally trusted me with something important.
Yeah, I was a little starved for family, so sue me—and then she was just gone. He even went into my phone and erased her number when I told him I’d call her to get answers. She was gone, and no one even talked about her. She’d been deleted completely.
I’d almost worked up the nerve to bring up maybe holding off on med school for a bit, but then his post-Felicity spiral had begun. I’d tried to get him to open up to me, and he’d ordered me never to ask about her again. That had shut me up for sure. Then his focus had shifted back to me completely, like a spotlight in a prison yard. He’d clung to that dream for me so tightly and I hadn’t wanted to kill it for him, so plans had moved ahead as normal.
He was all I had left. “How long are you gone for?”
“A month or so. This knee issue is annoying as hell. The team wants me to be ready for the playoffs. Eloise is coming with me, so it won’t be all bad.”
Bleh. Eloise was his new girlfriend with the perpetual duck lips. They’d all been like that since Felicity. Well, even she’d done her Daisy Duck impersonation on occasion.
“Why can’t you stay here for rehab? It’s not even broken.” Not that I didn’t mind having a little space from him. Ever since he’d been traded down to Philly a few months earlier, he’d been putting any helicopter parent to shame.
Holding the phone against my ear, I bent at the waist, folding in half and pressing one hand against the wooden floor. My back cracked in five places. Almost five hours at my desk and I’d only gotten through half the material. Unfortunately I’d unlocked the key to my success in college: beating the material into my head repeatedly for hours on end until it sank in. No other studying tricks or tips worked. School consumed every waking hour I didn’t use to make room for anything else, like dance. Now everyone around me was in various states of contortion, warming up.
“There’s a specialist at a clinic in LA they want me to see for rehab and some precautionary stuff.”
“Can’t say I’ll miss you making me come over for family dinner while you’re away.” The blood rushed to my head, and I breathed deeper into the stretch.
“Like you’ve come to any of them anyway. You sound funny—what are you doing? And where are you? Why is it so loud?” A boarding announcement filtered through the phone, breaking up the barrage of questions.
“I’m waiting for class to start.” It just wasn’t the kind of class he thought it was. “I’ve got a big biochem exam at the end of next week.”
“Study hard, Olive. Make Mom and Dad proud.” He said it like it wasn’t something I carried with me every day, like I didn’t think about it every time I got a test back with less than an A or couldn’t get the problems to click no matter how long I sat at my desk. The dance studio had become my refuge from the overwhelming expectations that slowly threatened to drown me. Dancing came naturally. There wasn’t any second-guessing or studying for hours on end, it might not have been saving lives, but sometimes it felt like it was saving mine.
My chest tightened. When I was little, I’d walked around the house in a little lab coat with a stethoscope wrapped around my neck. Dad had been a cardiologist and Mom a neurosurgeon. They’d indulged my interest in their work, actually made time to show me basic things. Mom showed me how to suture on the Thanksgiving turkey one year before she’d been called away to surgery.
I’d soaked up that attention like any little kid would, and they’d found someone to follow in their footsteps since Colm was on the ice every second he could spare. Lifting my leg, I went into an almost full split against the wall. “I know.”
“My plane’s boarding. I’ll send you a message when I land. The guys might check in on you while I’m away.”
I groaned. “Seriously, Colm? I’m not thirteen anymore. I’m twenty, almost twenty-one, and you know what that means?” At least he hadn’t said Ford. Please not Ford. My hands got clammy, sliding on the painted concrete wall.
“God help us all. You’re my baby sister. Sue me if I want to make sure you’re not dead on the side of the road somewhere. It’s the two of us against the world, remember?” Our childhood mantra, usually said in the backyard wearing pirate costumes, had taken on a different meaning when our parents died.
“I know. Get better and we’ll talk soon.”
“Be good, Olive.”
“You too.” I ended the call and dropped the phone into my bag. The doors opened, and thumping music filled the hallway.
I dropped my bag along the wall with everyone else’s and found my spot at the front of the room. Pushing the rest of the world away, I rolled my shoulders and closed my eyes. This was my place, where I didn’t feel less than, where I had some control. I was home inside these walls, in this forty-foot-by-forty-foot room. Our one-hour sweat session was about to begin. The moves had been running through my head nonstop since the last class.
Standing and staring at myself in the mirror, I shook out my body, releasing the tension of the day. Colm would kill me if he knew I was at the dance studio four nights a week, but after chaining myself to my desk all day, the movement w
as the only thing keeping me sane. He’d let me dance while I was younger, but now the expectations were a hell of a lot different. It was time for a “serious” career, not tutus and tights, according to him.
I shook out my arms, loosening the knots in my shoulders from hours stuck in the library. The heat in the room increased as more bodies filled the space, their energy building in anticipation of what was to come.
Cranking up the music, I swept my hair up into a high ponytail and went over the choreography in my head. It was all so clear in my mind, every bend and twist of my body perfectly executed.
Clapping my hands together, I spun around. “Everybody ready to go?” I shouted over the din of chatter from the new arrivals. People scurried into the room to grab their spots. “I’ll show you the routine once, break it down by four counts, and then you better be ready to sweat.” Everyone looked back at me with expressions ranging from pure terror to marked excitement.
“Let’s go!”
* * *
After an hour I rested with my hands on my knees, bent over at the waist. Sweat dripped off the tip of my nose and splattered to the soft wood under me.
“That was awesome! I’ll see you all next week for another round of torture.” I threw myself backward onto the floor, collapsing into a heap. Everyone in the class did the same, laughter, cheers, and groans bubbling up from the thoroughly drenched attendees.
My chest heaved up and down as a small smile curved my lips. I lived for the blissful exhaustion that came from leaving it all on the dance floor. People eventually picked themselves up, and the room emptied. I gathered my stuff, bundled myself into my coat, gloves, hat, and boots to brave the below-freezing temperatures outside.
The building cleared out as people ran home to get showered and head into the cold for a night on the town. I had much better plans in mind for the evening. I’d avoided my phone as much as possible, so the score wasn’t spoiled. Even with everything that had happened, I’d never stopped watching the games. They were a part of me. Getting out on the ice had never been my thing, but growing up surrounded by the sport made it something I couldn’t just switch off. There were other things I wished I could switch off, like my feelings for Ford, but those were determined to kick my ass every chance they got.
Just go, Olive. He’d used that childhood name on me after finally calling me Liv right before we’d kissed. It had been like a slap in the face. The date I’d agreed to with Grant in the heat of the moment had been a major screw up. So distracted by what was going on with Ford, I hadn’t even been paying attention. I’d just wanted Grant to stop talking so I could think.
When he’d shown up at my house with flowers, I’d known it wasn’t a group date. It hadn’t been a “hey, let’s go grab some crab fries and hang out” situation. It had been an actual date. It had only been two dates and one kiss, but Grant had always had a crush on me. I shouldn’t have said yes, but the look in Ford’s eyes when he’d told me to leave the garden so he could be alone with that woman… That hurt ran deep with a wave that crested higher than any others before or after.
Those memories rushing back into my mind made my stomach drop and the tips of my ears burn. His words still rang in my head, right along with the image of his arms around another woman.
Once I’d figured out it was a date date Grant was after, I’d actually hoped I’d feel something more than friendship for him, hoped maybe I’d been hung up on the wrong brother all this time, but our kiss had produced no toe-curling spark. It had been…nice. I’d gone the easy route and used my premed studying as a cover for why I couldn’t go on any more dates. I supposed that was better than “I’m secretly in love with your brother who wants nothing to do with me, so I think being with you might make the holidays a bit awkward.” Kill me now.
Every crosswalk threw me right into the devil’s alley of a swirling vortex of air that seemed to come straight from Antarctica. Tugging my hat down farther onto my head, I crossed the street to my apartment. My legs cried uncle as I made it to the fourth-floor landing. A walk-up wasn’t my first choice, but it meant I could split the rent with my roommate, Marisa, who absolutely refused to let me pay more than half even though it might have eased some of the financial pressure of the situation with her and her dad. She hated that he could hold paying for college over her head.
It wasn’t like I needed the money.
It had been that way since we met freshman year when we’d split some appetizers at a restaurant. She refused to ever let me pay more than my share, and even though it frustrated the hell out of me sometimes, she was a real friend, one of the few I’d ever had. That was the hazard of having a famous brother and a trust fund—people inevitably tried to take advantage.
The music from the surrounding apartments thumped as I hit the landing for our floor. Colm’s overreaction at the “squalor” I lived in told me I had been right to choose to live off campus this year. Jamming my key into the lock, I jiggled it twice and lifted up on the knob at the same time before the click, then I turned it.
Pushing the door open, I yelped when a sock hit me in the middle of my forehead.
“Shit. Sorry, Liv. I was doing a little laundry.” Marisa jumped up from the couch. LJ, her “best friend, definitely not boyfriend” as she’d said about a hundred times, lounged on the dark gray cushions.
I closed the door and spotted the laundry basket. “Sock shoot-out?”
“It’s the only way to get her to do anything as boring as laundry.” LJ hopped up and headed into the kitchen. The gray Henley stretching tight across his chest matched his eyes. Marisa’s gaze followed him the entire way. Just friends, sure…
I dropped my bag beside the door. Our hodgepodge of furniture filled the living room; posters and art prints graced the walls. We’d really pulled the place together over the past few months. “I’m watching the game in twenty.”
They both groaned. “Do you have to watch every. Single. Game?” Marisa pushed LJ out of the way to grab a drink from the fridge.
“Says the girl who watches every one of his games.” I jerked my thumb at him, standing in front of the open fridge drinking directly out of a carton of my orange juice.
Her cheeks turned bright red, and she chugged her beer, avoiding eye contact with him.
“This is why I posted the schedule.” I pointed to the wall calendar with every home game clearly marked in red and all of LJ’s games in barely readable pencil.
“Aww, Risa, you watch all my games?” He chased after Marisa, who dodged his grip and jumped over the coffee table to get away from him.
“Thanks a lot, Liv. Now he’ll never let me live it down.”
I grabbed a handful of Twizzlers from the cookie jar on the breakfast bar. “Just trying to make sure everyone’s being open and honest. Pop some popcorn.” My drenched clothes clung to me. I headed to my room to peel them off.
The white string lights around my room lit it up with a soft glow. Rows of string lined my walls with clothespins holding up pictures from the previous summer. Almost every available surface was covered in a memory, and these were just from the last year. The collection of shoeboxes filled with pictures under my bed had grown, a box for every few years.
I’d stolen every picture I could from our old house before Colm cleared the place out. I’d always loved photographs. There was something about holding the physical photos in my hands. While reading my mom’s words on the back, I’d trace my fingers over her terrible doctor’s handwriting, usually scribbled when I’d cornered her after getting the pictures printed.
Opening my nightstand drawer, I spotted a picture in the small gap between my bed and the nightstand. With pincer-like finger power, I grabbed the edge, slipped it out, and flipped it over.
It was from Mak and Declan’s wedding two summers ago. I’d been a bridesmaid on the arm of Ford. He and Colm were usually joined at the hip, but things had been off at the wedding. They’d been off for a while with those two, but it wasn’t like I’d been
around either of them much to find out what had happened. But that night wasn’t about questions circling Ford and my brother.
I’d looped my arm through Ford’s as the doors to the ceremony opened. His smile had been big and wide as he’d stared into my eyes. For a split second I’d been able to pretend we hadn’t been assigned to be together for the ceremony and reception, had pretended he’d picked me—and then our incredible kiss had ruined everything.
For so many major moments in my life, he’d been there for me, and now he was gone. Standing in that same spot, I’d blinked back my tears as he’d made it clear in no uncertain terms that there was nothing more than friendship between us, and now I didn’t even have that. I dropped the picture on the bed and wrapped my arms around my waist.
The horrified look on his face when Colm had almost spotted us should have been my first clue. Ford had been trying to cheer me up, and I’d thrown myself at him. His text had probably been sent to let me down gently, to make sure I hadn’t gotten the wrong idea. Stupid! I smacked my palm against my forehead. Why was the brain always so good at replaying embarrassing moments in high-definition detail? Maybe I’d study it in medical school.
Hockey season was the only justifiable, consistent time I got to see Ford. I was starting to feel like a psycho, puck-bunny stalker. I knew his stats for the season, which was shaping up to be his best ever. Watching Philly play wasn’t really a choice when Declan, Heath, and Emmett also played for the team. At least that’s what I kept telling myself when my gaze drifted to the masked man standing in the center of the goal during every game. Shaking my head, I picked up my towel rushed into the bathroom and jumped into the shower.
Wiping away the steam on the mirror, I stared at my reflection. Why did I do this? Why was I torturing myself by watching every one of his games? I could pretend it was just to watch Colm and I hadn’t been doing it since Ford joined the Philly team, but my eyes sought him out in the net, piled with pads, every second he was on screen.