Zack holds his hand over the blower on the ball return, his eyes flitting up to the scoreboard then back to the pins lined up in front of him. I can envision his brain working the math. If he bowls a strike, he can make things pretty tough.
I might not be able to help Hollis with her tenth frame, but I can do something to tilt this environment in her favor. While my cousin brings his ball into his hands, I reach forward and hook my finger in the belt loop of Hollis’s jeans. She yelps with surprise, but lets me tug her toward me until she falls into my lap. I catch Zack’s glare, so I push Hollis’s hair over her shoulder and kiss the curve of her neck.
Most people would chalk up the look on his face to jealousy, but I know better. He feels betrayed. I picked her over him. He never thought I would sell him out like that, but then, I never imagined he’d assault a girl and demoralize her in front of two other teammates, so I guess touché. We ain’t even, though. Not by a long shot.
That little wedge I drove into Zack’s head works. His shoulders scrunch while he lines up his ball, and his footwork is sloppy from the start. When he ends up only knocking down four, he lets his emotions boil over, screaming, “Fuck!” so loud that families turn to look from several lanes away.
He’s already blown it; he knows he has. He doesn’t even wait for his ball to return but grabs the first one available and chucks it down the lane before the pins are reset. Hollis doesn’t even need her turn, but she takes it, maybe a little to make my cousin watch and suffer while she finishes with a one-sixty-three, bettering him by twenty.
Zack pretends not to care while he pulls a slice of pizza from the box, tipping his head back and biting off the end. Hollis brushes her hands together, gloating because she earned it, and she stops on the other side of the high top that Zack is sitting at, pretending as if he isn’t there.
“I like the hard lemonade shit,” she says, peeking in the box but scrunching her nose at the pizza inside. My cousin doesn’t react to her. He takes large bites of his slice, chewing methodically, his eyes focused on some commercial playing on the TV mounted on the wall. After a full minute of being ignored, Hollis slaps her hand down on the table. That gets his attention.
“I said I like hard lemonade,” she repeats.
My cousin tosses his crust on top of the box, then brushes the grease from his fingers with a crumpled napkin. I expect him to walk away without responding. He doesn’t necessarily need the last word in things, he just needs to leave a mark. I’ve been in enough arguments with the guy to know how he fights, and sometimes it’s his refusal to engage, period, that drives me to my maddest. He’s doing that to Hollis.
I’m not ready for his next move. Nobody is. That’s why he makes it, casually flipping the full pitcher over so the bulk of the liquid splashes on Hollis’s pants and onto her feet. I want to blacken his other eye so badly that I lunge at him. The only thing stopping me is the touch of my girl’s wet, sticky hand gripping my forearm.
“Ooops,” Zack says, no sign of the cousin I used to make future plans with in his dead eyes. He’s let this animosity take over his soul. I mourn him.
He leaves his mess for us, backing away until he turns and pushes through the double doors that lead out into the lot. In about thirty seconds, he’s going to see the smashed back end of his car. About a minute after that, he’ll realize he can’t open that trunk. And when he drives away from this place, he’s going to see a whole lot of white paint on my massive rear bumper. Thing is, though, as spontaneous as it all was, I knew what I was doing.
Between my father and me, we’ve backed into some pretty heinous things, including a horse trailer in Santa Fe and a cactus somewhere outside Albuquerque. There are so many colors, dents and dings on the back of my truck that it looks like a painter’s palette. The hitch also gives me a solid steel buffer that I’m sure punched a hole right through his sedan.
Deep down, my cousin will know it was me who rammed his car. He won’t be able to prove it, and that will make him mad. That part is almost more satisfying than the impact was itself.
No matter, though, because by the time I’m done telling Uncle Joel about the moral and ethical lines his son has crossed, a hit and run at a bowling alley is going to feel like tee ball.
I’m the first to breakfast this morning. I’m never first on Saturdays, and already that has suspicions raised. I scared my Aunt Meg when I slid the stool across the tile floor, and she ended up turning around and throwing her spatula at me. She’s used to about twenty more minutes of alone time in here, something I just realized she cherishes. She always hums when she cooks, and hearing it this morning while sipping on coffee that’s mostly cream leaves me at peace with my decision.
I’ve already finished a plate of pancakes by the time my cousin careens down the stairs. I stare at him over the steaming mug in my hands, but he doesn’t give me a single glance. I know I’m not transparent. It’s killing him to keep his anger bottled inside and to avoid gaslighting me in front of his mom. He’ll wait for Uncle Joel to join us. I’m waiting for Uncle Joel, too.
“Have you heard from your parents yet?” Meg takes
