two

           “William, do not touch that sausage yet!” scolded my mother.

           I stared at the warm cylindrical piece of meat, forcing myself to not drool at the sight of it. Currently, it was ten o’clock. I had been up for almost three hours, even though I went to bed late, because I was playing Madden and thinking about that damn girl. She was absolutely not my type from a personality perspective, but there was something about her that really struck a cord in me. Maybe it was because she was hot. Regardless, I had been up since seven, and my mother had strictly cockblocked me from eating. We were having brunch (which was practically a sac2red tradition to my family in the summer), and nobody ate until everything was perfect and set and ready. Like, I couldn’t even sneak an apple without my mom being on my case. This must’ve been close to what prison was like.

            “Mom,” I groused, “I’ve up since seven, and I haven’t eaten! When are we going to eat?”

           “When everybody’s here,” replied my mother.

           I glanced around the table. My dad was at one end. My mom was at the other. Because Charlie was away with his boys, drinking beer on some yacht somewhere, I was stuck in the middle, facing no one due to temporary-only-child syndrome. If my parents thought that Charlie was miraculously going to waltz through the front door with a hangover and some girl he met on the way over just for a few pieces of bacon, they were sadly mistaken. Though, there were five extra place settings out, which was really strange, unless they thought that Charlie would bring back his friends and/or a horde of prostitutes for Brunch with the Brooks Family. “Who could we possibly be missing, Mom?”

           And then as if fate heard my pleas of hunger, the doorbell rang. My mother sent me a satisfied smile before going off to answer it. I sighed, standing up as my dad did the same, because that was just what you did when someone entered the room—you stood up. It was kind of a weird thing, but it had to do with respect and etiquette and all that crap that my family cared about. Some families valued NASCAR and monster trucks. My family valued table manners and decorum.

           A minute later, my mom returned to the screened-in porch with five familiar faces following behind. She was in a lull of easy conversation with the matriarch of the group, Eden Green. The two had always gotten along well, despite the age gap of about fifteen years, though my mom swore it was only ten. Behind Eden was her husband, Asher. When he came in, he nodded politely to my dad, and then headed over to that side of the table to join him. The men needed to have their bonding time, after all. Close behind Eden were her two kids: Jake and Sara. Jake was a too-cool-for-school ten-year-old, and Sara was a shy seven. They were pretty good kids, except this one time Charlie and I were setting off fireworks on the lawn, and because they needed to go to sleep (it was barely nine), we had to shut down the operation. Other than things like that, they were perfectly fine neighbors. And then lagging behind the very back of the Green pack was the same girl who I attributed half of my sleep deprivation to: Lilah Tov.

           She was dressed in nothing more than sweatpants and a T-shirt, and though it was probably fifty shades of off-putting to my mom, I thought that she looked great. Lilah seemed like the type of girl who could literally make a trash bag look hot. Oh, and since it was the late morning and not early evening, I could now see her more clearly. And I happened to like what I saw a lot. She was even hotter and prettier in the full-light than she was in the half-light. There was kind of this effortless, natural beauty or some shit about her. Lilah Tov was a ten—maybe even an eleven, easy.

           “Robert, Hillary, Will—this is our niece, Lilah,” introduced Eden with a gesture towards the inappropriately dressed teenage girl. “She’s about you age, Will, and she’ll be staying with us for the summer.” I didn’t feel like explaining to Eden and my parents that I had already met the girl, so I didn’t.

           “Hi,” Lilah greeted with a small wave and wandering eyes. “It’s nice to meet you all.” Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t in the mood to share about our impromptu rendezvous, though it was really more of an ambush on my part.

           “Lilah, how about you take a seat next to Will,” suggested Eden.

           “But, Mom,” refuted Jake, “I want to sit next to Will!”

           Eden sighed and my mom smiled politely. “You can sit across from Will, sweetie.”

           “But—”

           “Jacob, listen to your mother,” Asher momentarily paused his conversation with my dad to intervene.

           Jake crossed his arms over his chest in defiance, muttered a, “Fine,” and then stomped over to the seat almost across from mine.

           Before claiming her seat, Lilah whispered a brief, “Someone’s popular,” and then she sat down.

           Beside Lilah was her aunt, and next to Eden was my mother. With Sara across from Eden, and Jake diagonal from me, it was a very gender-segregated table setup. But no one seemed to mind, so once my mom gave the okay, I sat back down and was about to start eating. But of course I couldn’t do that before Hillary Brooks properly acknowledged our guests. Because what would a Brooks Family Brunch be without the proper acknowledgements?

           “Before we start eating,” my mom began, “I’d just like to say how happy I am that the Greens and Lilah were able to join us for this lovely meal! Bon appétit!”

           I wasn’t going to second guess that invitation, so I quickly speared that sausage I had been eyeing with my fork, and it didn’t even make it to my plate before I shoved it into my mouth. Like, I didn’t even take the time to cut it up. Which, in retrospect, was probably a horrendous idea, for after my mom finished placing a scone on her plate, she glanced over to me and saw how I was eating.

           “William Henry Brooks!” she disciplined sharply. “You’re eating like a savage! How many times must we go over this? Cut the sausage up first and then eat it! For goodness sake, Will! Show some manners, please.”

           “Mom,” I said evenly, placing what remained of the sausage down on my plate, “I’m sorry, but I’m hungry. Next time, maybe if you’d let me eat something before ten, then I wouldn’t feel the need to shove food down my throat.”

           “William!” barked my dad. “Don’t talk to your mother that way!”

           I sighed, and then to pacify my parents, I began to cut my freaking sausage into suitable-sized segments. Even the new dimensions of my sausage, however, couldn’t stop the rate at which I shoveled the food into my mouth. I was a growing boy, and I was hungry as heck, because of my parents’ inane rules surrounding consumption. My mom didn’t comment again on my eating techniques. She was far too busy gossiping about the new member of some book club with Eden.

           “Will,” said Jake.

           “Yeah?” I replied, pausing my intake for a moment.

           “Do you want to go swimming with me later?” asked the kid.

           “Uh, when?”

           “I don’t know. Tomorrow?” he guessed. “We got this really cool new floatie. It’s a shark. But it’s also a chair that goes in the water.”

           “Sounds awesome,” I said, even though it didn’t actually sound all too awesome. But then something hit me. I turned to the girl on my right. “Will you be joining us and the shark-chair at the pool, Lilah?”

           Lilah bit into a piece of toast just as I asked the question. Once she had finished chewing, she took a sip of her orange juice, and then thought for a moment. “Only if Sara goes.”

           “Sara,” I addressed the quietest one at the table, “would you like to go swimming tomorrow with Jake, the shark-chair, Lilah, and me?”

           The girl nodded her head slowly, and then said softly, “But only if Jakey promises to not splash me like last time…”

           “Jake,” I continued to facilitate this arrangement, “do you promise to not splash Sara like last time?”

           He grumbled out a, “I promise.”

           “So it’s settled. I guess the five of us are going swimming tomorrow,” I declared in finality.

           “Five of us?” questioned Lilah.

           “You, me, Jake, Sara, and the shark-chair,” I answered.

           “Oh,” she said, “the shark-chair.”

           When my mom and Eden got bored of discussing the latest exploits of the other book club moms, they turned their attention to Lilah and me. Because as teenagers, we were clearly very interesting specimens of humanity. Everything we said was intriguing and well thought out. Eden and my mother recognized this quality in us, so they chose to infringe on our bubble of awkward silence.

           “Lilah,” began my mom, “where are you from?”

           “New York,” replied Lilah.

           “Oh, how lovely.” It wasn’t actually that lovely. “What part, dear?”

           “Upstate.”

           “I think my other son, Charles, has some friends there.” He probably did. Charlie had a lot of friends everywhere. “We’re from Connecticut, but William goes to school right outside of Boston.” I didn’t, actually. I went to a fancy prep school in Massachusetts. It wasn’t anywhere near Boston, but since both places happened to be in the same state, that automatically meant that it was right outside of Boston.

           “Lilah goes to private, too,” Eden shared, “though, it’s parochial.”

           “How nice,” said my mom. It definitely earned Lilah at least five points in my mother’s book, thus negating her ill choice of attire—aka, the sweats. “What landed you here, Lilah?”

           Lilah shot a glance over to her aunt, before carefully articulating a clear and agreed upon fabrication: “Well, when my Aunt Eden invited me to spend the summer with her family and she, I couldn’t really pass up the offer. Besides, who wouldn’t want to spend a summer here in this beautiful town?” The last part was forced. I was sure of it.

           My mother nodded, satisfied with her answer.

           “Will,” began Eden, “how are your sports going?”

           “Oh, I want hear about this, too,” Asher suddenly piped up, upon getting wind of a buzzword—that being “sports,” obviously. Everyone always wanted to hear about “my sports.” It was a bragging point for my parents, and somehow of interest to everyone else who wasn’t my parents. “How many seasons did you play, Will?”

           “All three,” I replied, trying to not make it into a bigger deal than it was.

           “But he actually played four sports this year,” boasted my dad. “Tell them, Will.”

           “Well, in the fall I played soccer, in the winter I fenced, and this past spring I juggled my time between tennis and lacrosse.”

           “You would play lacrosse,” Lilah murmured so that only I could hear. And she was right. I would play lacrosse—mainly because I did play lacrosse.

           “Tennis and lacrosse?” Eden questioned.

           “Yeah, I couldn’t pick one,” I replied sheepishly, rubbing the back of my neck with my hand. “But tennis was kind of a warm up, because it’s not a contact sport, and since I was doing so much running in lacrosse already, my tennis coaches let me miss a few practices here and there.”

           “How do you like fencing, Will?” inquired Asher.

           “It’s okay,” I shrugged. “Not my favorite, but as we learned years ago, I wasn’t meant to play basketball.”

           My mother laughed at my misfortunes in the areas of dribbling and shooting and not being tall enough. Back in middle school, I played basketball, but then my parents made Charlie break the news to me that I was never going to be the next Michael Jordan or Lebron. It was a hard pill to swallow, but my dad assured me that we could find another winter sport for me to play. Because fencing was the type of thing parents loved to namedrop at dinners, my parents introduced me to the foreign sport and got me a private tutor and everything. It was definitely a workout and sometimes it was fun to stab people, but there was always that small part of me that wished I could’ve had the basketball gene. Charlie played basketball. He wasn’t great, but he didn’t suck, either. But then again, Charlie also played baseball instead of tennis. He always was the better athlete in our house.

           “I play soccer,” Jake shared proudly.

           “Do you?” my mother humored him for a moment. “How has that been, Jacob?”

           “I like it a lot, Mrs. B,” he said more quietly, looking down at his plate.

           “How many varsities did you make?” Asher probed.

           “Four,” I gulped.

           “Very impressive, Will,” he nodded approvingly. “What’s your favorite sport that you play?”

           “Lacrosse,” I answered without an ounce of hesitation. I was a teenage boy who had enough Vineyard Vines in his closet to clothe a small nation. If my favorite sport weren’t lacrosse, then there would’ve been something seriously wrong.

           “You know,” Eden started, “back in the day Asher and I were quite the tennis pros.”

           “Were you?” I said, trying my hardest to sound fascinated. “Well, maybe once Charlie gets back the four of us can play doubles.”

           “Why wait for Charlie? Lilah plays.” Eden grinned, looking over to her niece for a corroboration of the fact.

           “Well, I played,” Lilah corrected hastily. “Just for a little while.”

           “Lilah, don’t be modest,” Eden laughed. “This girl took lessons for years! Your parents sunk all that money into the sport, so Lilah, don’t underplay it, dear.”

           “I quit, Aunt Eden,” Lilah sighed.

           “Really?” said my mother. “So then are you playing any sports now?” If Lilah’s answer were anything but field hockey, soccer, lacrosse, track, golf, horseback riding, shopping, or swimming, then it would indisputably be the wrong answer.

           “Basketball,” answered the girl. It was the wrong answer.

           “Oh,” my mother took an uneasy sip of her morning coffee, “that’s nice.” But it wasn’t. Well, not to my mom, at least.

           “Lilah made varsity this year,” Asher added, as if it would soften the blow.

           “That’s great,” my dad said, not as repelled as my mom. “What about school, Lilah?” I knew this trick. My dad would try to change the topic fast, just so that my mom wouldn’t get too worked up over something that was completely out of her control.

           “I’m really into math and science,” Lilah said. And if there had been the absolute worst thing to say, then it was that. My parents liked well-read (and well-bred) people. We were a family that gravitated towards linguistics, rather than mathematics and sciences. By saying that she was a math and science kid, not only did it upset gender norms (my parents were big on gender norms—I never really understood it), but it also implied that Lilah thought in numbers, not words. I didn’t really buy it, but that was how my parents definitely perceived it, thus dubbing Lilah “practically illiterate.”

           “Huh,” said my dad.

           Eden caught wind of the unease, so quickly said, “Lilah, I thought that your favorite class was English?”

           “I like all my classes,” Lilah stated simply.

           Asher turned to me, propelling what his wife had started and shifting the attention off of Lilah’s intentional faux pas. “What about you, Will? What’s your favorite subject in school?”

           “Uh, history, I guess. But English is a close second,” I said, because it was true and it would also appease my parents.

           “That’ll come in handy one day when he runs for office,” my dad joked, but it wasn’t really a joke. If my parents (and grandparents) had it their way, the second I got my law degree from some Ivy League, I would start my campaign for a house seat in Washington. A few years later, once I got myself a trophy wife and two kids and a dog, I would run for senate. They hadn’t planned further than that…yet.

           My grandpa had been involved in the government for years. He lived for politics and argument, and obviously wasn’t too keen on the current president. It was nothing personal about Obama—it was just the fact that he was a democrat. My family happened to be filled to the brim with diehard republicans (no surprise there). If someone in the family possessed even a whiff of a liberal notion, then they would be disowned from the Brooks family faster than a bullet train. We took our politics very seriously. Well, the adults did. Charlie and I tried to steer clear of spontaneous debates about why deportation was grand and how abortion totally sucked because the fetuses needed to live or whatever radical view was being discussed. We had our own views. Over the years, we learned to keep them to ourselves if we didn’t want to get our Xboxes taken away for an undetermined period of time. We lived with it.

           I finished off my second sausage and then just smiled politely at no one in particular. My dad and Asher started up a new conversation about the stock market maybe and my mom and Eden were about to delve into the worlds of gardening, when Eden had a wonderful idea.

           “William,” she said, using my full name, “would you mind taking Lilah into town after brunch? She doesn’t know the area, and I think it would be good for someone to show her around.”

           “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” my mother affirmed, even though she probably wasn’t fully in favor of it. “But of course, after William changes in something more suitable.”

           My eyes shot down to my outfit. The only thing more suitable would be if I was wearing an actual suit. “Mom, I think I’m dressed fine.”

           “You’re wearing a T-shirt, William,” she said, probably just projecting on me what she couldn’t say to Lilah, “at least have the decency to put on a button down.”

           I didn’t want to bring up how my T-shirt was probably more expensive that most people’s button downs, so I just sighed and told her that I would change after brunch. Eden then told Lilah that she ought to do the same. Lilah agreed, and then Jake asked if he could go with us because he wanted to get some candy. Sara then said that if Jake got candy, then she wanted to get candy, too. Eden asked if I minded if they tagged along. I told her it was perfectly okay, and that I loved spending time with Jake and Sara—they made me feel young again. She laughed and then everyone continued on with brunch.

           When I was finally done eating (though, I probably could’ve eaten a whole other cow), I stood up from the table, about to take my plate to the kitchen, but my mom stopped me and said that she would clean up. Lilah also rose, attempting to do the same move with the piece of porcelain, but my mom again assured her that she would do everything at once, later. Eden said that the two of us better go change, and then when we got back, we could go take a tour of the town with Jake and Sara as our shadows. This seemed to please everyone, so Lilah and I excused ourselves from the porch, and entered back into the corridor that led to a staircase, the front entrance, the kitchen, and everywhere else in the house.

           “Uh, see you soon, I guess,” I bid the girl.

           “I don’t actually like math and science,” responded Lilah.

           “What?”

           “I hate math and science,” she continued. “I just had a hunch that I could get a rise out of your mom.”

           “It got more than a rise out of her.”

           “Is she always that tense?”

           “You don’t even know the half of it.”

           “Well, my favorite subject’s actually English, in case you were wondering.”

           “Oh.”

           And with my totally lame monosyllable, Lilah took her leave, and I was left in a puddle of my absolute loserdome.