Page 41 of Lessons in Faking
So much for distraction. Looking at the fully developed picture several minutes later, I wasn’t sure how well that had worked out for me.
With McCarthy’s wet hair all messy, and his damp shirt stretched across his biceps, I felt distractedbyhim, notfromhim. The way he looked at me instead of thelens didn’t make it better. I clipped the Polaroid onto his rearview mirror and carefully watched his reaction.
“That kind of defeats the purpose of the mirror,” he commented matter-of-factly, eyes continuing to flicker to the photo.
I shrugged. “Don’t be so boring,” I teased. “You’re going to die one day, McCarthy. If it’s gonna happen this way, crashing at sixty miles an hour because ofonePolaroid in your mirror, we deserve it.”
The thought of him dying was less pleasant now than it would’ve been six months ago. It made my insides clench and tugged at my heartstrings in a way I didn’t want to interpret. Fighting the feeling, I added, “Nothing really matters.”
A laugh slipped past McCarthy’s lips, teasing and ironic and beautiful. “Except money, right?” I assumed this was another one of those instances where he forgothe’dgrown up with just as much money asIhad.
I shrugged, not giving him the satisfaction of successfully winding me up. “Money matters less when you’ve always had it,” I said. “You of all people should know that.”
He gasped, pretending to be shocked.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I quickly added, rolling my eyes before I turned in his direction, catching his gaze. “It’s great. Probably the best thing that’s happened to me. But I didn’t work for it, it’s always been there. You know?”
“How very self-aware of you,” he snickered, then shifted into a higher gear, gaining speed. “It’s heartwarming tohear you’re aware of your privilege. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Well, you didn’t work for it either, did you? We’re in the same boat, whether you like it or not.”
“Right.” He dragged the word out. “Only that I worked three summers in a row to buy this car, and the sole reason my dad is paying my tuition is so I wouldn’t take a scholarship spot away from someone who actually needs it.”
“So that makes you a better privileged rich kid than me?” I didn’t mean to sound irritated, though my ability to package my delivery into the appropriate amount of sarcasm suffered when I got annoyed.
“Arguably, yes.” He looked pleased with himself, probably noticing he’d succeeded in getting under my skin. Again. “Anyway,” he pressed on. “Speaking of the best thing that’s ever happened to you, money can’t really be on top of that list. Can it?” I was a little amazed by how swiftly he dropped the sarcasm in favor of genuine curiosity. It gave me whiplash.
“What?” I snorted. “Are you expecting to hear your name?”
“Will I?” His grin was goofy, unguarded, when he dared a glance my way.
“In your dreams, maybe.”
“Yeah, most definitely in those.” My eyes snapped back onto him. Like he didn’t just say what he’d said, he continued. “What about family, friends? Aren’t they up there?”
He’d have to have lived under a rock for the past seven years to be unaware of my family’s... fate. About the factI didn’t really have one. Sure, Henry was still there. But barely.
“Are you... trying to get to know me, McCarthy?”
“And what if I am?”
It was a good question. What if he was trying to get to know me? I didn’t have an answer to that one just yet. So I shrugged and thought about his initial question.
“Family?” I clarified. “The one that died when I was fifteen or the one that I’m currently conspiring against?” It’s not like he didn’t know. If you followed soccer the way McCarthy did, you’d probably mourned Dad’s death when it had happened. He might still remember where he’d been when he found out. Felix Pressley was enough of a legend in his field.
But there was a gravity to the words. Something McCarthy couldn’t have begun to comprehend. I only did when they’d slipped out of my mouth ten seconds ago. I’d been so busy plotting the perfect revenge, I’d completely lost sight of the bigger picture: My brother was the only family I had left. And we were not on good terms.
I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be on better terms, especially if he kept walking through life like an only child, remembering he wasn’tonlywhen I inevitably became an inconvenience. Henry cared when he saw something in my life he deemed worth fixing and then crossed all boundaries in order to do so.
My eyes closed, and I feared if I said another word, looked at the wrong person at the wrong time, it mightall come crashing down. The dark reality that I couldn’t say that “family mattered most” when it hadn’t mattered most to my family.
If it had, maybe my parents wouldn’t have decided to spend Thanksgiving in the Bahamas without us. Maybe they wouldn’t have gotten on that plane, wouldn’t have flown straight into the turbulence that made sure they never got to step off it again. Maybe I wouldn’t be dreading the day others were giving thanks.
And then maybe Henry wouldn’t have grown up trying to compensate for the lack of control he’d felt that day by focusing on nothingbutcontrol. Maybe he wouldn’t just be thinking about himself, and his career, and his future but would actually stop to consider the people he’d lost on the way. The fact that he’d probably lost a little bit of himself on that way.
“What about Wren? She’s family, isn’t she?” he asked.
During our first year of college, when my mood had gotten gloomier as Thanksgiving approached, Wren put the pieces together relatively quickly. Like most people, she’d known who my parents were and what had happened to them. And even if she hadn’t been familiar with the exact holiday they’d died on, one quick Google search would’ve told her.
