Page 49 of The Rebound
“Up studying?” I try again. “You’re doing a physiotherapy course, right?”
“Year two of two. It’s an accelerated MSc one so…”
“A lot,” I finish. “Did you do it for your undergrad as well? I’m being polite,” I add before he can ignore me again. “I’m making an effort and I’m being polite.”
His lips twitch in the barest hint of a smile but I’ll take it.
“I did science,” he says. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it until a few years ago.” He knocks back an espresso shot and starts making another. “We don’t all have it figured out at seventeen, I guess.”
“Do you want to open your own practice?”
“Maybe.” He hesitates, as if trying to decide how much to tell me. Luckily for me, with a mother like Susan, the man was trained to be polite. “I’ve been looking at sports medicine as well.”
“Really? That’s cool. I don’t remember you playing sports when we were younger.”
“That’s because I didn’t. It wasn’t until I got to college.”
“I’m a runner. Not competitively or anything but Tyler and I used to—”
Ah, crap.
Luke’s jaw tightens at Tyler’s name but before I can rescue the situation, Beth dips back under the tent. “Sorry! Line for the toilets wasmanic. That juice they’re giving out must be going through everyone. I think I saw your sister,” she adds to me. “She was yelling at an old woman?”
“That sounds like Louise.” I shrug out of my apron, handing it back to her.
Luke passes her the tongs as she bounds up next to him and I watch as he pulls playfully on her apron strap. They fall instantly into easy movements around each other, used to working closely, and I realize once again I’ve become the third wheel.
“Do you want something?” Beth asks, gesturing to the machine.
I shake my head. “I should get back to my sister. Before all the cetaceans die out.”
“The what?”
“Thanks for stepping in,” Luke says shortly as a customer approaches.
Beth glances between us, starting to frown, but I squeeze back around the counter before she can say anything more.
“Have a busy day,” I call, my voice unnaturally bright even to my ears.
In a determinedly worse mood, I drop off the remaining leaflets at some stalls near the front, procrastinating before I make my way back to my sister.
I find her sitting alone in the tent, not even bothering to try and win over visitors as she scrolls dejectedly through her phone. Tomasz isn’t there, probably off to get more juice shots and I pause beside a stall selling pasta sauce and sock puppets as I watch her. She looks as tense as she always does, as if furious at everyone else for not seeing how the world is collapsing around them. Or for just not caring when she cares so much.
You could help her.
Tomasz’s words come back to me and with it the familiar guilt I’ve felt over the past few weeks. Maybe we’re just too alike. Too stubborn for our own good.
But I also know I never tried with her, using the excuse that she never tried with me. If anything, I enjoyed riling her up. Going in the opposite direction just to annoy her. Which is fine when you’re six years old and fighting over the television, but not so much when you’re both adults and you’re all each other has.
And that’s it, isn’t it? She’s my sister. My only sister. And if I didn’t have her to turn to right now, I don’t know where I’d be.
She puts her phone down, standing with an expectant look as she grabs her clipboard. Break over. But I turn on my heel before she can see me, almost tripping into the pasta sauce display as I head back to the forest where Andrew still stands, overseeing his kingdom.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I say, depositing ten euro in coins on the table. “I’d like to enter the Easter egg hunt.”
“We’ve closed entrants.”
Oh.
