Page 72 of The Casualty of Us
He looks down, shifting on his feet a little, and I track the move, immediately picking up on the mannerism because it’s similar to someone else’s. A nervous habit.
One they share.
“Wait.” I narrow my eyes at him. “What do you mean?”
“Not like…” He heaves a sigh. “She’s like really fucking smart, dude.”
“Like how smart?”
“Like when we started school, they wanted to pull her out and send her to some special school for geniuses or something, but she refused to leave me.”
His gaze finally lifts back to mine and I just stare at him for a beat before muttering dumbly. “No shit?”
“No shit.” He nods. “Her IQ is like one-sixty or something.” A scowl fills his face, and he shakes his head quickly. “I don’t know, she got mad the last time I asked for the exact number.”
“No,” I start to argue, even knowing he wouldn’t lie to me but…it can’t be that. I can’t have missed something that should have been so obvious. “But she’s always complaining about math and how she has a B—”
“Exactly.” He cuts me off with a short laugh. “Do you know what grade Ophelia has gotten in math ever since we started school? On every test? On every piece of homework she’s ever turned in?”
He lifts his brows at me when I just continue to stand there, mouth hanging open in shock as what he’s saying slowly starts to sink in.
“It’s a B,” he scoffs, scowling at me all over again. “I tried to tell you, man, you have no idea how smart my sister is.”
“Holy shit,” I finally manage, swallowing hard. “But that’s…”
“Yeah,” he agrees, pausing long enough for some of the warning in his eyes to bleed across his face. “She can get a little lost up there sometimes.” The words are an uneasy admission and one that I can tell he’s not used to making. “It can fuck with her head, I guess, make her closed off.” He shrugs. “It’s worse when she feels threatened.” Another shrug leaves him more tensely than the last, and he rolls his shoulders with it. “But you know O, she’s good, just needs a little upkeep is all.”
I stare at him as silence falls again, finally placing a name to the thing that’s hiding behind the warning written all over him. The thing that’s riding the tension in the air between us. It actually is fear.
He’s scared. Maybe of my reaction, but my gut says it’s mostly about her.
Then he nods at me like everything’s all good. As if he’s trying to convince himself right along with me as dozens of moments of Ophelia fly through my head, and it hits me then. What the fear is.
He’s scared of losing her to whatever the fuck she has going on up there.
He’s scared whatever the upkeep is won’t be enough.
That maybe one night not even her own twin will be enough to get her brain to shut off.
“When she feels threatened…”
She used to trust herself more.
Fuck.
“She’s amazing,” I declare softly, uncaring if he punches me again this time because it’s true. “That’s gotta be hard, though.”
A beat passes that feels a lot like judgment, and I hold his gaze until he nods slowly. “Yeah, it can suck for her sometimes.”
“How?” I push back, grasping for anything more of her.
“She sees a lot more than regular people.” He frowns at me. “Picks up on little things that most people miss, and she rarely forgets anything so you’ll never be able to fake your way through one of those books, just so you know.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” I interject.
“I think it’s harder for her because she genuinely cares about people, or like, humanity.”—he circles the bottle through the air quickly—“as a whole, but…” His words start to trail off, and I tense up. “The individuals are what can trip her up.”
Right. Like me.
