Homewrecker

37 - 𝔀𝓪𝓲𝓽𝓻𝓮𝓼𝓼

It wasn't like I had thought much about the kind of music Jason listened to, but the soundtracks from Broadway musicals definitely wouldn't have occurred to me, but that was what came through the speakers in his Chrysler a few minutes into the drive back to Shelridge. According to the screen on the console, his taste included numbers from In The Heights, Into the Woods, and Hamilton.

I watched from the backseat as his fingers tapped against the leather-bound steering wheel to the pulsating rhythm, nodding his head, sometimes mouthing along the lyrics. It was almost like he was into it. It never really occurred to me before, but out of all the Solidays, I knew the least about Jason. I knew he was David's oldest child, that he was engaged to Kimberly and getting married next month, and not much else.

I didn't know where he worked, where he went to college or what he studied, what his hobbies or interests were, and it was like I forgot those things could exist about him. I didn't think that maybe, of all things, Broadway musical numbers were something he cared about.

Then, without my permission, my mind stumbled into thoughts of what it could've been like if I had an older brother, like a real one for my whole life, not just one awkwardly shuffling his way in after sixteen years of absence. I wondered if he would've tried to teach me how to love Broadway like he did, if he would've told me about his first dates with Kimberly, if he would've missed me when he went away to college. But none of that happened.

And somehow, it was supposed to be because of me not accepting them?

Besides the intermittent rapping of Lin Manuel Miranda through the speakers, the ride was quiet and none of us said anything along the way. Jason didn't lecture me for drinking underage, although it did look like he turned the volume up a little when the car first started, like he was punishing me with the sudden booming of a ballad.

I sipped on the water they gave me quietly in the backseat, forcing myself away from what my life could've been like and going back to Jude leaving the party. My thoughts weren't totally coherent, slipping and bumping into one another, Kingston also emerging randomly, but it still didn't make sense to me. I couldn't think of an explanation that sounded reasonable, even then when I was drunk.

He walked right past me. I knew that was probably because I was in a car he didn't recognize with tinted windows, but he didn't want to be involved with planning Mom's funeral, barely spoke to me there, sporadically answered my text messages.

He was disappearing too, but it wasn't like he had a reason to stay. His reason was gone, already buried with a temporary marker in the disturbed earth until her headstone was complete.

A moment later, Jason pulled into the driveway of the Solidays' lake-house, the curtains drawn behind the windows of the darkened and still home, and he shifted around in his seat to look over at me when I opened my door, just as headlights beamed across his dashboard then his chest from another car.

He paused, his brow furrowing until it pulled into the driveway beside his, the one belonging to the Denvers, and a car door opened a second later. "Wait," Jason said, getting out the car and going around to my opened door. "You should stay here for a second, okay? Let me go see if Mom and Dad are awake."

"I don't really care if they are," I told him, unbuckling my seatbelt and bringing my feet around to the edge of the doorframe, dragging the toes of my shoes against the flattened down pavement of their driveway. Even their driveways were different here, not misshapen and cratered with tire indentations.

He held out his hands. Over his crouched shoulders, I noticed Ethan and Taylor-Elise getting out of the car that had just been pulled into their driveway, back from the shift at Starbright I blew off. "Trust me, that's not what you want," he warned as Kimberly came around the bumper. His voice was hushed, but one of the figures in front of the Denvers' house stalled at the front door. "Do you want to get grounded and have your phone taken away for the summer?"