Kids These Days

Chapter 2: Finn

It's five in the morning, and I'm standing at the gates of the Indianapolis Airport. The air smells like burnt coffee and polyester carpeting and deja vu, and I can't help feeling like I'm living life in a circle. One year ago, I was standing outside this very terminal, fidgeting with a cheap plastic watch and frantically trying to calculate my odds of surviving the summer. The only difference is that now, I'm wearing the brand-new Casio sports watch my mom bought for my birthday, and I'm no longer the one getting on the airplane-- I'm waiting for someone to get off.

Junior year is over, summer is officially here, and my sister is coming home.

I step away from the payphone, returning to where my mother is anxiously hovering. (If Ronan wants to be a dick, that's fine-- I don't need him to go on vacation with me. I have other friends. I have tons of friends!) For a moment, I consider inviting Anna, but then I quickly decide against it. We're still friends-- not best friends, but friends-- and we always do homework together after school. Anna is tutoring me in algebra. (I just doodle dolphins in her notebook.) But something is different between us now. Something feels off.

Even though she apologized for happened last year, and I forgave her, I still don't fully trust her, and I think she knows.

It's becoming an unspoken thing. And I hate unspoken things.

"Do you think your sister remembered to get her hair cut?" mom asks me, holding up her vibrant hand-made sign-- "Welcome back, Sarah!"-- that took hours (and many tubes of glitter glue) to make. "You know her curls need monthly trimming."

"I'm sure her curls look fine," I reassure her. (Mom has been going stir-fry crazy lately. I think she's suffering from reverse empty-nest syndrome.) "Sarah is an adult now. She can take care of herself. And schedule her own haircuts."

"Oh, honey...." Mom winds an orange curl around her finger, and I notice she isn't wearing her wedding ring. I can't remember when she took the ring off-- I'm pretty sure dad still wears his. It catches me off-guard, and my stomach drops like I'm the one experiencing airplane turbulence. "I just hope she's okay. She's been at Oxford for so long."

"Wonder why," I mutter.

Mom shoots me a sharp look, but she doesn't reply.

(Like I said. Unspoken things.)

My friendship with Anna is messy enough, but it's nowhere near as complicated as my home life. Three years ago, my parents argued their way into an ugly divorce, resulting in my sister's decision to attend Oxford college. (Apparently, she couldn't leave Indiana fast enough.) And then there's the small issue of the mystery man she decided to elope with last summer-- the mystery man nobody knows about except me.

Here's a piece of advice: if your sister writes you a letter about her British fiance, then asks you to keep him a secret, just say no. Blood might be thicker than water, but familial loyalty isn't worth the blood that's going to flow out of my mangled body when mom finds out I've been hiding Sarah's marriage for two years. I'm dead. So, so dead. Like, deader than Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It's only a question of who will kill me first-- my mother, or Sarah herself.

"Oh!" Mom gasps and clutches at her chest like one of the swoony Victorian women in her favorite BBC shows. "I think I see her!"

I crane my neck to get a better view of the terminal. Either mom is hallucinating or I'm losing my eyesight, because I can't catch a glimpse of Sarah anywhere-- it's still too early for the Indianapolis Airport to be packed, and the only nearby people include a gaggle of tourists speaking rapid-fire German, several harried-looking business men and women clutching their red-eye coffees, and a middle-aged married couple struggling to retrieve their suitcases from baggage claim.