“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 them again. 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?”
“No,” I say, sharper than I intend. “Nothing happened, Pop, it was just—it’s a dance. Everyone thinks it’s more than that, but it’s not. It’s just a dance. And it was fine.”
“I think she had a fight with Roya,” Dad whispers. “Roya went with Tall Matt.” Pop keeps glancing at me in the rearview mirror. When Dad says “Tall Matt,” Pop’s eyes get wide and his eyebrows rocket around like they’re motorized.
“Why does everyone think that?” I retort. “I didn’t have a fight with anyone, I had a good time, I don’t even care about who Roya went to prom with, it was—”
“ ‘Fine,’ we know,” Nico interrupts. He’s texting someone, probably about how he was right and I had his headphones all along. “If you didn’t have a fight with Roya, you must be on your period or something.”
“Nico,” Dad says in a warning tone. “Don’t do that.”
“What?” Nico says, not looking up from his phone. “All I said was—”
“Nope, don’t even try,” Dad interrupts, examining his stubbly chin in the pull-down mirror. He’s being the stern one this morning, since Pop is all guilt-ridden from his long work call. “You’re deliberately pushing her buttons. I know you don’t talk to Meredith that way.”
Nico’s ears turn red and he doesn’t say another word until we get to the soccer field. Meredith is his girlfriend—his first real one—and Pop’s right. Meredith would never let Nico talk to her the way he talks to me. I mean, Nico shouldn’t talk to me the same way he talks to his girlfriend. That would be weird. But I could learn a thing or two from her about silencing glares.
It’s hot outside in that threatening way late-spring mornings have, where you can tell that it’s going to be unbearable in the sun by noon. Gina Tarlucci waves at me from the bleachers. Her little brother is on the soccer team too, and she’s another senior, so it’s kind of strange that we’ve never hung out. We’ve always had classes together, although this year we only share study hall. I like her fine—but I’ve always had my friends, and
