Page 14 of When We Were Magic
I let out a long, slow breath that would be a laugh if I wasn’t so dizzy. Of course Roya’s got jokes. She’s always got jokes.
“Well, go find them,” Dad says from the entryway, and I catch a note of exasperation in his voice. It’s always like this, trying to get Nico out the door—a thousand loose ends, everything last-minute and forgotten. Dad’s pretty type-A, and he tries hard not to expect Nico to be as organized as he is, but it definitely drives him up the wall.
“I think they’re in Alex’s room,” I hear Nico call back behind him, and then his cleats are tearing up the carpet in the front hallway, and—
“Shit,” I mutter, dropping my glass into the sink hard enough that I have to check to see if it’s cracked. It isn’t. “Shit, shit, shit.” I run for the hall. My bedroom door is ajar, and when I walk in, Nico is rummaging around my desk. No no no. The head is in here. The heart is in here.Hecan’t be in here.
“What are you doing?” I shout. I’m a caricature of a pissed-off big sister. “Get out of my room!”
“I need my headphones,” he says. “I can’t find them. Didn’t you borrow them yesterday when you were doing your hair or whatever?”
“No,” I snap. “You probably washed themagain. Take shit out of your pockets next time.”
“Don’t swear at me or I’ll tell Dad and he’ll make you do Conflict Resolution,” Nico says. I scowl because he’s right—Dad would totally sit me down to go over the rules of engagement. No swearing, no yelling, no specious allegations, no hearsay.We are not a yelling household, and other totally normal things to say during an argument.
Nico looks something less than smug but more than satisfied. He runs a hand through his hair, which he does whenever he knows he’s winning. I hope the gel leaves his hand gross and sticky. “I know you borrowed them. I just need to find them before I go, or else I won’t have anything to listen to during warm-ups.” He turns around and his eyes land on the backpack.
He reaches for it.
“No,” I say, but he’s not paying attention.
He’s holding the backpack and ignoring the hell out of me.
“Nico,” I shout, “give me the damn bag!”
“I just need my headphones. God, don’t be such a bitch.”
I snatch the bag out of his hand just as he’s reaching for the zipper. “Don’t call women bitches,” I snap. “I don’t have your headphones.”
“I wouldn’t call you a bitch if you weren’t being a bitch,” he snaps back, and we would probably devolve into a shouting match, but Pop calls from the garage.
“Are you coming to the game, Lex?”
Nico and I stare at each other hard. He smiles. I shake my head. His smile broadens, and he calls over his shoulder.
“Yeah, Pop, she’s coming! She’s just getting her shoes on now.”
I growl at Nico and push him out the door so I can change into clothes I didn’t sleep in. I shove the backpack under my bed as far as it’ll go. When I pull my arm out from under the bed, my fingertips brush across something that feels unfamiliar. I grab it and pull it out.
Nico’s tangled headphones dangle from my hand.
“Ah, shit,” I mutter.
Nico gloats for the entire drive to his game. I should have just tossed his headphones into his room and let him warm up with no music, but I’m not that cruel of a sister. Pop is on a call with his assistant for the first half hour of the forty-minute drive, but the second he hangs up, his eyes find mine in the rearview mirror.
“So!” He does the bright, excited voice that means “I’m sorry for taking a work call on the weekend, it won’t happen again, except actually it definitely will and I’ll make up for it by sending you to a nice college someday.” “Prom, huh? Was it the best night of your life?”
I swallow an incredulous laugh, and his eyebrows go up. “Uh, no,” I say. “I sure hope not. It would be a bummer to peak this early.”
He smiles, rolls his eyes. “Did you have a good time, though?”
“Yeah, it was fine.”
“Just fine?” he asks, and I realize that I’ve died and gone to a special section of hell where people won’t accept “fine” as an answer.
“It was fun,” I revise. “The music was great. I felt like a princess the whole time.”
Pop doesn’t laugh. His eyebrows come together, which isn’t hard, since they almost meet in the middle anyway.They’re the only hair on his entire head, but they kind of work overtime. When he frowns, they form one long, worried line. “Did something happen?”
