“So it’s a secret engagement that’s so secret, even Wulfric doesn’t know,” Kelsey observes.
Lola grins. “Exactly.”
I nod, thinking about Hugo’s pineapple secret. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
ChapterFifty-Six
Stella
I meetCharlie under the bright red awning that stretches out in front of our building.
He’s clearly nervous, and I wasn’t really in the frame of mind to talk to him, but he texted, asking to see me. Kelsey and I were still in our pajamas, rearranging our living room for the tenth time, and I wasn’t ready to go for an eleventh.
And of course, I can be a bit of a softie.
“Come on,” I say, leading him around the mob of people at the bus stop. “We can walk down to the park, and if we’re really ambitious, loop over to the High Line.”
“You sound like a real New Yorker already,” he observes.
“Hardly,” I say. We walk past Gourmet Goose and he’s outraged when I tell him about Greta refusing to sell me a cheeseball. He really wants to go in there and yell at her and maybe even sue her. It makes me remember how much I love him.
“Stella,” he says, sounding really serious.
My heart pounds. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to navigate through my ugly mixture of emotions, and also my general avoidance of difficult conversations where I might cry.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“Definitely nothing is fine,” Charlie says. “I have no excuses—I was an asshole, Stella. I was a runaway train of assholeyness—not just last week, but growing up—”
I stiffen. “You don’t have to say that. You weren’t an asshole.”
“Let me say my thing, Stella. I wasn’t always a good brother to you.”
“Charlie—”
“Hear me out. I should have been helping you and cheering you on. Instead, what did I do? I was so fucking insecure, I would tear you down.”
We come up on a DON’T WALK sign and I turn to him, blown away. “You were insecure? You were the brilliant one who took after them.”
“No, Hugo was the brilliant one. I was never good enough. Don’t you remember how they were constantly praising Hugo? Constantly comparing us?”
“But they were proud of you,” I say. “You know they love you, Charlie.”
The light turns green and we walk.
“Maybe it was their way of inspiring me to reach higher, who knows, withholding their praise and lavishing it on Hugo, but it sucked,” he says.
“They did praise him a lot. No, I get it, Charlie. It never crossed my mind that you’d feel bad.”
“Well, I did, but that’s no excuse to turn around and make you feel excluded. You brought the family feeling to the house,” he continues. “Every time you came home from cheerleading, every time you clomped down the stairs yelling things or had a fit about homework, that’s when Mom and Dad came alive. I felt like the three of us were waiting around for the next thing you’d do.”
“I always felt like I was too extra.”
“Not at all.”
We’ve hit the river park. My mind is spinning. I’m thinking about what Hugo said about game night.
“If our family was a math class,” Charlie continues, “you were the adorable one, Hugo was the star, and I was the nobody. And I have a lot of anger towards them that I need to address with them, but what I need to address with you is what a shitty brother I was, always acting like you were this worthless screwup. You were a happy, well-adjusted girl. You were great at making friends and sports and dancing, and they never gave you any props for that, and I piled on, and I wanted to apologize.”