Page 58 of The Summer of ’98

“For getting us kicked out,” he continued, mumbling as fast as he could. “I got heated when I saw Cass talking to that dude. Pissed me off. I didn’t mean to wig out, though.”

“You should know that she’s not shady, dude.”

“Yeah, I do,” he said and leaned back in his seat, hands behind his head. It was the first time that I’d had a good look at his face.

“Your eye okay?” I asked. There was a shade of bruising around his socket and a graze on his lip. It could have been worse, though.

“It’s fine.”

A thought came to me and I pointed at him, failing to hide my amusement. “That’s your karma for Nadia. I took the beating that night. What goes around, comes around.”

A quick breath of laughter came from his nose and he nodded. “I’ll take that.”

Our coffee and bacon breakfast was delivered, so we ordered the same for the girls and asked for it to go. We dug in and I thought about how to approach the next topic with Noah. So far, the conversation had been peaceful but all it took was the wrong tone to light a match under the ticking time bomb seated across from me.

“Can we talk about what else you said last night?” I asked. He stiffened and I worried that I’d screwed it. “Dude, Mom and Dad are proud of you, man. You don’t need to compete with me for that.”

His leg was bouncing under the table.

“I just don’t get it,” I said when he wouldn’t answer me. “Why do you think like that?”

“You have way more in common with them than I do,” he stabbed his fork into his food and inhaled a deep breath. “You always did. Football with Dad. Cooking and shit with Mom. I decided that I didn’t want to continue football and Dad stopped bothering. You and he practiced together all the time. Watched games and shit. If Mom was making dinner, she’d call for you to help her. You know, I asked her once why she never asked me and she said, ‘Leroy enjoys it, darling,’ as if I didn’t? She never even gave me the chance.”

I kept my mouth shut—this was clearly something that had been weighing on him, and if he needed to let it out, I didn’t want to interrupt. But I did need to tell him that he was wrong.

“I don’t think Mom meant to leave you out, but you preferred playing with your toys when we were little. Or reading picture books and that sort of thing. I think she wanted us to do what made us happy, and those things were different. And when we got older, you kept your interests private. You didn’t share them with Mom and Dad.”

“Because they weren’t the interests that they wanted me to have.”

I shook my head. “No, dude. That’s not it. You put a barrier up because you assumed they wouldn’t care if it wasn’t about football or whatever else. But that’s not true. Come on, Dad is always telling people how smart you are. Mom misses being close to you. I can tell.”

His jaw twitched as he stared at the tabletop.

“I miss you too, man,” I said. He was restless and shifting but he didn’t tell me to piss off, so I took that as a positive sign. “We’re different. We’re really different but we don’t have to fight so much. It’s dumb. Just chill out and stop being so hostile all the time.”

He looked up at me and frowned. “Stop being so self-righteous all the time.”

“Maturity is self-righteous now, is it?”

He rolled his eyes. “Get over yourself. If you want me to do better, you do better too. Stop treating me like I’m beneath you because I like to sleep around, and you don’t.”

“That has literally nothing to do with anything. I don’t care who you sleep with. You act like a dipshit and make stupid comments all the time.”

“I’m funny.”

“I guess we’ll agree to disagree.”

We glared at each other, chewing on our food, and then, slowly, our frowns turned into smiles and then laughter. It was a relief, that was for sure. The tension was lifted, and even though who we were as individuals would never change, this felt like a step forward. One thing that I internally swore to work on was not putting him down. If that was what he felt I was doing, I couldn’t tell him he was wrong. His feelings were valid, and I needed to remember that.

When we got back to the room, Cass and Ellie were cross-legged on their own beds, facing each other. Their conversation stopped immediately, and the room fell into silence. The girls stared at us, and Cass wore a shit-eating grin.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, and I looked at Ellie. Her gaze was moving over me while she chewed on the tip of her thumb. I was obviously missing something here and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it was.

Noah closed the door behind him and walked past me with the bag of breakfast. He dropped it on the table and headed for the bathroom. “I’m showering. Breakfast is in the bag.”

Cass watched him until he was gone and then she looked at me. “Where did you guys go?” I pointed at the food in explanation. “We thought you might have gone to dump Noah’s body somewhere.”

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