Page 4 of Flagrant Foul
While Sev thinking I was neat in some ways was life-affirming, it did cement the fact that it wasn’t my imagination. It was Nathan who didn’t want me around, not Sev.
It killed me.
It upset me and annoyed me and woke something fiercely determined in me. I made it my business to follow them everywhere to teach Nate a lesson. At least, that’s what I did when my mom said I could. Sometimes she’d stop me, but fortunately, by that stage of the summer, I’d been underfoot a lot, so when Nathan made a move to do something that involved leaving thehouse, my mom would often call out a firm, “Don’t forget about Teddy, Nate.”
That was all I needed. I tagged along and didn’t care that Nathan gave Sev a quick, hard-to-decipher look whenever my mom said it.
Okay, fine, I did care. Desperately. I found it insulting and hurtful that my formerly perfect brother had to be forced to spend time with me, but not nearly enough to put me off going with them. By then, one thing dominated my thoughts. One thing only. It was a voracious, ravenous thing. A carnivorous plant with its jaws open wide. A hunger. An aching desire to be one of them. To be big enough for them to talk to. Good enough for them to play with.
It was all I wanted, and I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything.
On nights when my dream seemed lofty and out of reach, I’d sit on a stool and sniff loudly in the kitchen while my mom cleaned up.
“It’s not fair,” I’d say, bottom lip trembling with self-pity.
“It’s not unfair, Teddy, it’s just the way it is. They’re a lot older than you, and they’re at a different stage. They’re not being unkind. They just want to hang out on their own sometimes.”
“Butthat’sunfair.”
My mother sighed heavily and muttered something that sounded like, “Give me strength,” under her breath. She put her hands on my shoulders firmly. “Look, sweetie, they’re teenagers and you aren’t. This is probably just a phase. There’s no point in getting worked up about it. Nathan used to have Zack, Levi, and Jed around all the time, and now look, things have changed. We’ve hardly seen them this summer. The Sev situation will likely change too.”
“It won’t.”
I knew I was right, even then. I knew Sev wasn’t the kind of friend who drifted into our lives and then out again. I knew it for an absolute fact because I knew Nathan wouldn’t let him. He liked Sev more than he’d ever liked any of his other friends, I could tell. Until then, Nathan had always been the boss of his friends. Not in a bad way. He just was. He was the one who decided where they’d hang out and what they’d do. He’d always been like that. He did the same thing with Sev, but not in the same way.
With Sev, he’d say, “You hungry?” and pause for a second, waiting for a sluggish nod of his head that let him know Sev was on board with the plan before getting to his feet.
That had never happened before. Before Sev, Nate would’ve said, “I could murder fries and a shake,” and he’d have gotten up and headed for the door without looking back to see how anyone felt. He hadn’t needed to. He knew they’d follow. It’s just how it was.
The change he brought out in Nate made Sev an enigma to me. A paradox. A puzzle. Something I couldn’t understand or stop thinking about. On the one hand, he was like Nathan. Same height. Same build. Same interests. He was the same but different. He had a black leather jacket that hadWhen freedom is outlawed, only outlaws are freeembroidered on the back of it. He wore it whenever he left the house, no matter the weather, and he looked good in it. It hung heroically from his shoulders, slouching just the right amount to make it look like it was made for him. Much as I idolized Nathan, even I had to admit I didn’t think he could pull off a jacket like that.
There was a wildness about Sev that Nate didn’t have. Something in his eyes and his larynx. A dark glint that was usually benevolent but carried an echo of a threat I couldn’t quite explain. A slight harshness spun in his chest when he laughed. It was a bark, almost. A rough, explosive sound that attacked the silence and left the space around it altered.
While my early memories of the initial insertion of Sev into our lives are disjointed and unclear, the rest of them aren’t. The rest are set in stone. Carved into my memory like a chisel taken to marble.
One day of that summer stands out above all others.
It was a Tuesday. The weather was warm, the sky cloudless. Sev was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt with an iron-on print that had mostly come off. Afternoon sun streamed into the living room through the window facing the street, lighting a square on our old rug. The rug was worn, threadbare in places. My dad said it gave the place character. There was a semi-permanent dip in the seat of our couch that all but had Sev’s name stamped on it. The couch was U-shaped, ugly and brown, but comfortable as hell. Sev sat on the side that ran parallel to the TV and Nathan occupied the corner and chaise. Sev used to half lie, half sit on his side of the couch. One leg bent at the knee and splayed out on the seat, the other planted on the floor.
I was relegated to the armchair.
It meant I had to crane my neck to see the TV, but I didn’t mind all that much because if I sank down in my seat, Nate and Sev would largely forget I was there. And if I sat still for long enough, sometimes they’d starttalking about the really good stuff without censoring themselves.
On the day in question, Nathan and Sev had eaten two big bowls of spaghetti each and had finished all the Pepsi and milk in the fridge. They’d been indoors for a while and were growing restless.
I could always tell when they were getting bored because they’d start grunting at each other instead of speaking and swiping playfully at each other. Sometimes, it ended in a cacophony of limbs that crashed around on the floor until they fell apart, rolling onto their backs, chests heaving with laughter as they caught their breath.
That didn’t happen that Tuesday. All that happened was that Nate grunted twice, and Sev grunted back once. In their own primitive language, a plan had been made. One that didn’t involve me. I burrowed a little deeper into the armchair and watched them get up. I tried to look uninterested in what they were doing, but I burned with longing to be included.
They got to their feet, and Sev scooped up a baseball bat from the basket near the TV. He swung it in a broad arc a couple of times, testing its weight, before bringing it to rest on his shoulder.
Nate was at the door, back to me, ready to head out, when Sev turned and looked back at me.
His hair was shorter then than it is now, but it was long enough to fall into his eyes. It was shiny, inky black, and thick. I’d been studying it closely for weeks, trying to work out what I could do to make mine look more like his, but it was a mystery I’d yet to solve.
Sev looked back at me, bat still resting on his shoulder, and smiled easily. “You coming, or what?”
For reasons I can’t quite explain, something shifted that afternoon. Permission was granted. I was in. I hadn’t realized it was what I’d been waiting for, but it was. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I’d been waiting for it as it was that Nathan had been.
