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twenty-two

Sebastian’s hand was out, slamming on the door before I even had time to process what was going on inside. Dean and Lavender. Of course, I suspected something was going on between them after the way she asked about him when I went by their house, but still— this ?

Lavender broke away from Dean, rubbing her lip like he had bitten her, and her eyes widened as she saw Sebastian standing outside the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled through the glass.

Lavender held up a finger like she was saying “one second,” then moved to sit up better and rolled down her window. She used one hand to fix her hair because Dean had been running his hands through it as he kissed her (ew ) as she gave Sebastian a shaky smile.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I was driving by and saw your car. I thought you had a flat tire or something.” His gaze turned to Dean and his face hardened, which I thought was a bit of an overreaction since we had just been doing the same thing ourselves, but I chose not to comment.

I wasn’t getting in the middle of this. “Maybe if I realized you were on a date with my best friend, I wouldn’t have bothered to pull over. ”

“We’re not on a date!” Lavender said quickly, even though it was very obvious that they were. I wasn’t sure why she would bother trying to deny it. “Dean was just helping me out with something.”

Sebastian raised his eyebrows. “What, teaching you how to kiss?”

Lavender groaned and threw her head back against the headrest. “This is exactly why I didn’t tell you.”

“Well, you should have,” Sebastian said, crossing his arms. Dean leaned forward, so he was practically lying across Lavender and he opened his mouth to say something, but froze when he saw me standing there. I guess I’d been standing far enough back that he couldn’t see me from the passenger seat.

“Like you should have told me you were out with my sister?” Dean asked flatly. Sebastian’s gaze slid over to me like he’d completely forgotten I was here.

“We were out driving,” Sebastian said, as if that answered anything. “You know, since you’re too busy to ever pick up your sister’s calls.”

He wasn’t wrong that I’d started calling him more and more because Dean never answered, but I hoped he didn’t think that was the only reason I’d called him tonight. Even if my other options had been available, I still would have called him. He was safe for me.

Dean got out of the car, slamming the door behind him and came around to our side. He looked at my dress, still visible under the unbuttoned letterman jacket, and his lip curled in disgust. “What happened to you?”

I picked at the front of the dress. It had mostly dried now, but it was visibly stained and looked disgusting. “My waitress spilled Coke all over me.”

Dean’s eyes darted to Sebastian as if it was somehow his fault, but he didn’t comment on it because Lavender chose that moment to get out of the car, almost hitting Dean with the door in the process.

He immediately went to stand in front of her as if she needed protection from Sebastian, and if Sebastian’s clouded face was anything to go off of, he noticed the move too and wasn’t happy with it.

Knowing how protective Sebastian was over his sisters, I couldn’t blame him.

“I wanted to tell you, Seb,” Lavender said. She grabbed Dean’s arm, pushing it down a little so that she could see over him. “I promise I wanted to tell you, but?—”

“But what? What could be so important that you couldn’t tell me about this?”

“That,” Lavender said, waving a hand at him. “You’ve been so angry and distant ever since Dad left. How was I supposed to tell you anything?”

“Well, excuse me for trying to keep our family together! Something you haven’t bothered trying to do at all.”

Lavender recoiled. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe we should talk about this at home,” I suggested, looking down the dark stretch of highway we were standing on.

Nobody was around, but that didn’t stop my instincts of feeling like we shouldn’t have this argument in public.

I felt like my mom, making sure that nobody saw the dark side of what was going on in our family.

And since I knew how Sebastian felt about Lavender confronting their Dad about his cheating, I had a feeling this conversation was going to get very ugly.

“No,” Lavender said, crossing her arms, with her glare trained on Sebastian. “Let’s talk about it now. If you think for one second that I don’t care about our family as much as you do?—”

“Well, you clearly don’t!” Sebastian yelled.

I’d never seen him get angry like this before.

It was the kind of angry you only got when something was piling up for weeks and weeks, until you finally exploded.

He’d been holding himself together remarkably well for the last month and a half, taking care of his sisters and making sure his family could hold itself together, but all those emotions had to come to the surface at some point.

And unfortunately, I had a feeling that bottling up all his feelings about Lavender for the last month and a half meant that now they were all going to explode.

“You tore it all apart! After everything I did, after all the work I put in to make sure that you guys would grow up with a father, then you just turn around and?—”

“The work you did?” Lavender snapped. “You think this is all about you, Sebastian? You think you were the one holding them together? It was Mum who was fighting to keep them together. It was her marriage that she had to keep, not yours!”

“And why do you think she could do that? Why do you think she could focus on Dad and keeping it together and making sure that none of you knew?” Sebastian’s face had turned red.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to be the one kid who knows it all? Who knows all the secrets and has to keep it from everyone else? You have no idea how hard I worked to make sure you three didn’t see it! ”

He stepped back, breathing hard and clenching and unclenching his fists.

We all stared at him in shock. Even though he’d talked about it with me on the field last night, I hadn’t realized just how much of a toll the information had taken on him.

He told me he didn’t understand how the others couldn’t see it, but he’d neglected to mention the part where he did everything he could to make sure they didn’t.

But it made sense, didn’t it? Being the oldest child is like being the third parent .

He had to step up and be everything—the marriage counsellor between his mom and dad, and the protector for his younger siblings.

Living with the weight of the world on his shoulders, making sure the family was held in perfect equilibrium so nothing would go toppling off.

Then Lavender found out the truth and threw the whole board over.

Lavender’s face went slack. “You knew?” Her voice was quiet—not angry anymore, but just shocked. Like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You knew the whole time and you didn’t say anything?”

“Of course I knew,” Sebastian said. He backed away another step, running his hands over his face, and I glanced down the road nervously, hoping no other cars would come by where they might not notice him on the road.

But we were in a pretty deserted part of town and the road was empty.

The only sign of civilization around us was on the other side of the guardrail, where houses were lit down below.

I stared at the collection of lights and wondered what was going on in all of their houses.

Were any of them like me, having the silent treatment between family members, all existing in the same space with no words spoken?

Were there some like Lavender and Sebastian, fighting and airing truths that should have been shared over a month ago?

I bet there were a number of parties going on now too, just like the one I’d gone to with Sebastian and Dean a week ago now.

How bewildering it was, to see them all from up here and have no idea what was happening inside.

Just like I’d had no idea what was going on in the Novak’s house and they’d had no idea what was going on in mine.

“But how could you not say anything?” Lavender asked Sebastian.

Her voice was a cross between pleading and disbelieving, like she wasn’t even sure how to feel about the situation.

I wondered if that was how Sebastian had been feeling since the moment he found out the truth about his Dad.

He’d probably been at war with himself for weeks, wondering if he should confront him or if it was better to sweep it all under the rug, to put on a smile and pretend to be the happy family everyone thought they were.

“Because we needed the family to stay together! Because you and Ainsley and Imogen needed your dad—your family.”

“Family?” Lavender echoed incredulously. “You think that was a family? Everybody hiding around and keeping secrets for each other, nobody saying what they actually mean? That wasn’t a family. It was a prison.”

The words, even though they were directed at Sebastian, were a shot in the heart for me, because I wasn’t sure there had ever been a more apt description of my own family.

She wasn’t wrong that it felt like a prison.

I looked at Dean, wondering if he heard it the same way I did, if he recognized the way that Lavender was talking about what their family had felt like.

His face was pale, even in the glow of her yellow-toned headlights, and I had a feeling he felt the same as I did.

“Nobody’s family is perfect,” Sebastian said. “But it doesn’t matter how you and I felt about it—Ainsley and Imogen need their dad. They deserve to have him there. Have you talked to Ainsley lately? Have you seen the way his leaving hurt her?”

“She’ll be better off for it in the end,” Lavender said, though she sounded a little unsure. “Better to grow up knowing who her father really is than to live in a family full of lies and find out later that none of the happy facade was real.”

“I wish you’d never gone out that night,” Sebastian said. “I wish you never saw him and ruined it all.”

“Oh, for the love of everything, just stop!” Dean yelled suddenly. “I can’t take this anymore, I can’t!”

Lavender and Sebastian both went quiet. I didn’t dare make a sound as I watched my brother, waiting for his next words.

I wasn’t sure why he was choosing to get in the middle of this when I thought it was best to leave it alone and stay back.

Sibling fights, as we knew from experience, were generally pretty ugly and better to stay far away from.

Dean looked at Lavender over his shoulder and though he didn’t say anything, her reaction was clear as her eyes widened and she shook her head like she was telling him not to do something.

But Dean just sighed and looked at Sebastian again.

Lavender grabbed his wrist in a tight grip, but Dean ignored her.

“Lavender wasn’t the one who confronted your dad,” he said. “I was.”