Wrecked Read Free

the car,” I reminded him.
    “I know.” He looked at the phone in his hand. “But.”
    “Anna!” we heard my dad yell up the stairs. “Jack!” He had that edge to his voice. It meant he’d be screaming for five minutes once we got down to the dinner table.
    I stood there trying to think over the noise of my dad. I should let Jack have the car. It was a date. It was Cameron Polk. Obviously I should. It was just that I’d promised to drive to Jake Lowell’s party so that Ellen could drink, and I didn’t want Ellen to be mad….
    “Forget it,” Jack said, and he had that expression I hate. That one where it’s obvious he thinks I’m a disgusting human being. “Get out of my room.”
    “Anna!” my father shouted. “Jack!”
    “Get. Out.” When I didn’t move, he stabbed a key on his keyboard, stood up, and brushed by me into the hallway.
    “All right,” I said to his back. “Fine. You can have the car on Saturday.”
    “Jack!”
    “You know what?” my brother said, stopping at the top of the stairs. “Sometimes you are so small.”
    So now I get it. “Is that how you know who I am?” I ask Sleev-eth. He’s holding out the whiskey, and I take it.
    “Are you really going to drink tonight?” Ellen asks me.
    I ignore her and keep talking to Seth. “Because you know who Jack is because everyone knows who Cameron is?” Then I take a huge, and I mean huge, swallow. And nearly choke to death. Jason kindly pounds me on the back for a while.
    Ellen says, “Take a smaller swallow and go slower.”
    While I do, Seth goes, “No. I’m always seeing your hair in the hall.” Thrum, thrum .
    I have copper-colored corkscrew hair. No joke. Coils and coils of the stuff. It would be bad enough to have just the color.And bad enough to have the corkscrews. Having both is the worst. Ellen and my mother say it’s “adorable” and “striking.” Right. Try freakish .
    “I’ve been dying to pull it all year,” Seth says. Then he reaches out, grabs a curl, stretches it down straight, lets it go, and watches it bounce right back.
    “Supreme,” he says.
    “If we were in third grade,” I inform him, “you’d so be in the corner right now.”
    “If we were in the third grade,” Seth informs me, “I’d so be kicked out of school right now.” He reaches out and pulls another curl.
    “I hated that in the third grade,” I warn him.
    “She loves it now,” Lisa says with a smirk. As if she even knows me.
    I hold out the bottle to Ellen. She takes it and drinks.
    “We’re co-opting your liquor,” I tell Sleev-eth. I’m having fun.
    Here’s when I first noticed Jack trying with me, after a lot of years of not. It was this past summer, the first Friday of our annual two-week beach vacation at Commons End. We’d just arrived at that year’s rental house after a five-hour drive. Which should have been three hours, but the shortcut my father thought would shave off ten minutes ended up getting us lost. So whatever.
    “Anna,” Jack called up to me. I was on the elevated deck, hauling my suitcase and my mother’s. It was dusk but still hot from the sun of the day. I could feel my skin prickle from sweat and aggravation.
    “What?” I asked him.
    “You want me to unpack so you can go check out the water?”
    “Huh?”
    It’s always Jack and me who have to take everything out of the car and indoors. My father usually insists on packing the trunk before we leave, which involves a lot of impatience and yelling because he’s sure that not everything will fit. Then, on the arrival end, he never helps unload. And with her bad back, my mom can’t do much either.
    “I’ll unpack,” Jack said. “You want to go see the ocean before it’s dark, right?”
    It was something we usually raced each other for. Who would get their half finished the quickest, jog the two blocks, scramble up the narrow dune path, and reach the peak first. Who would get to throw off shoes, slip-slide down, pad across the warm sand,