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AUGUST 30, 1999
My brother didn’t answer. “Dar?” He didn’t turn back to look at me, either. “Darren?” Instead, he pulled his hood up and kept walking away from me.
“You kept walking.” I nodded like a fool. “I did.” “Don’t do that again.” Fuck me. “I won’t.”
“Does it matter?” I countered, needing to regain some ground I had lost to this powerhouse of a girl. “We both know that you’ll be calling me ‘baby’ by the end of the day.”
“Okay, that was seriously smooth.” I smirked. “Thanks.”
“You’re a twin?” She nodded. “For my sins.”
“Apparently, I have a wild streak in me, with a penchant for the male form that no amount of prayer can eliminate.”
“No, it’s my way of telling you that I will have a boyfriend once you ask me.”
My brows rose up. “Did you just mark me with your bag?” “I sure did,”
“Now, let’s go, baby.”
I had no doubt that he was, in fact, hurting her again.
I, on the other hand, had been ten years old when I learned the meaning of the word rape.
Make sense of what that animal had forced her to take into her unwilling body. Repeatedly.
Because her screams meant she was still breathing. Her silence could have meant that she was dead.
I would spring out of bed and stand guard outside my sister’s bedroom, terrified that she possessed something an animal like our father would eventually come looking for.
that when Shane Holland, a lad a few years above me at BCS, offered me my first hit from a joint in fifth class, I took it.
“Come on,” she demanded. “Do it. I dare you.” “You have nice legs,” I offered flatly. “There, happy now?”
Hearing Paul Rice tell half of the lads in our P.E. class about how Tony’s daughter was so tight he could barely get a finger inside her had caused me to flip the fuck out on him in the changing rooms. I did it for Tony because he wasn’t there to do it himself. At least, that’s what I continued to tell myself.
Of course I fucking liked her. She was the first thing my eyes had landed on when I walked through the entrance of Ballylaggin Community School last September, and the only face I consistently sought out since.
Well, shit.
Dick move. Take it back.
“I’m not coming…” My words broke off when my brain registered what she had said. “Coco Pops?” She nodded. “The good kind.” Well, shit.
“Yeah, yeah,” I drawled, humored by his pathetic attempt to shield himself from my irresistible charm. “Whatever you say, Joey Lynch.”
To say that I felt drawn to him would be a major understatement.
Like a runner. Or someone hungry…
“Don’t you love yourself? Don’t you love me?”
“Him? Is that what you were going to say? I remind you of him?” Please say no. Please say no. Please say no. “Yes,”
“You remind me of your father.”
“You are,” she said before leaving the room. “In every way.”
And with those words, my mother cut me deeper and more viciously than my father ever had. Ever could.
The switch I had been so desperate not to flip these past few years had finally tripped. And I felt nothing.
“No,” I agreed wholeheartedly, only half-mad because the truth was I only half cared.
“Not so much as your pinkie finger will get anywhere near my knickers again.”
but those lips were almost too pretty to belong to a boy. And so damn tempting…
On one hand, I had a boyfriend, who, aside from suffering from a rare case of loose lips, treated me well enough. But on the other hand, I found myself drawn to this boy much more than was good for me.
“Is that so?”
“I just don’t like you anymore, okay?” “‘Anymore’ suggests that you once did.”
“Where’s the killer instinct, boy?” Saved up for when I’ll need it against you.
He had cold, dead eyes that felt nothing and only came to life when he was inflicting harm on someone.
“Nice game.” “Nice legs.”
“You’ll take your meat whatever way I give it to you,”
“We’re not friends, Molloy. And stop snuggling me.” “Friends snuggle.” “Friends do not fucking snuggle.”
“I’m here like you want, I’m staying for the fucking film like you want, but I draw the line at snuggling.” “Snuggle me.”
“I was hoping for something more along the lines of ‘Aoife, you’re my dearest, sexiest, most lovable, bestest friend in the whole wide world’.”
“You’re my favorite friend, with my favorite legs.”
“You’re my favorite friend, with my favorite everything.”
I turned my head just enough to see none other than Molloy’s boyfriend, Paul Rice.
“Don’t misconstrue my tolerance of your presence as an invitation to speak to me about anything other than hurling.”
“Bull-true,”
“He’s not worth it, Joe.” No, but she is.
