What Happened That Night

3 ~ k o l b y

Wilson Westbrooke was the only guy my sister Emily really, totally, completely loved, and for that reason alone, she never saw just how much he didn’t deserve that real, total, complete love from her.

Wilson Westbrooke was four years older than my sister—he was twenty-one when they met and now, two years later, he’s twenty-three—and he wore a lot of multicolored hoodies that varied in sizes, the hoods occasionally shielding the back of his shaved blond head like, as my sister described, a halo, and his jeans always had fraying holes around the seams and hems because he was only five foot eight and stepped on the backs of his jeans when he walked. He played a number of games on his iPhone, his eyes distant and disinterested as he stared down at his hands, so preciously holding his phone sideways, and he said yo to make himself sound tougher and more gangster or something, but instead it just sounded foreign on his tongue. His parents were well respected lawyers, his older brother always studying law, and he had a younger sister that Julliard was interested in enrolling. My older sister, Nora, said that Wilson Westbrooke was trying to compensate for being such a failure at all things law and ballet and that’s why he wore so many hoodies and refused to tailor his jeans. He wanted people to think the reason he just didn’t succeed was because he just didn’t try.

The day my sister Emily gazed across the street and saw him, just as her tongue was gliding across the melting sphere of her strawberry ice cream, was in the middle of May and it was after she had arrived home from her job at the movie theater, faintly smelling of over-buttered popcorn and frying oil, and she was leaning against the bumper of her newly purchased car, a two door mini Cooper, while she licked her ice cream. I was leaning against the car as well, bare foot, while scratching the faux diamond encrusted emblem of my shorts on my left thigh. I had vanilla ice cream with hot pink sprinkles when my sister slowly lowered her ice cream away from her lips, just barely tinged pink, when she elbowed my ribs and nodded toward him, toward Wilson Westbrooke, who was chasing after a basketball in the middle of the street after one of our neighbors—and his friend—tried to shoot a basket but it bounced off the rim with a vibrating thwack and it hopped away from them, almost as if it were disappointed in their lack of basketball skills. Wilson Westbrooke wasn’t wearing a hoodie then, having discarded it in a wrinkled, blue ball in the grass on the edge of the driveway, and his shorts were flagging around his ashen, little chicken thighs. My sister placed down her ice cream on the roof of her mini Cooper, the melting pink ice cream spreading across the blue rooftop, and I watched as she ran across our paved driveway and into the street, grabbing the basketball as it rolled near a drainage, and she was grinning as he walked toward her, already reaching out for the ball.

“Thanks,” I heard him saying to him as he took the basketball, which was slightly deflated I now noticed as he shifted it to his hip, using his wrist to keep it in place, and it suddenly struck me that he probably intended to look cooler than he actually did. There were sweat stains under his plain white T-shirt and his forehead was gleaming and he was panting in between words, but none of that seemed to matter to my sister as she laughed, swatting her hand through the air as if to say don’t mention it. She brushed back a lock of honey blond hair, the same honey blond hair she shared with our mother and I—our father and Nora had thick, brunette hair—and they stood there for another fifteen minutes, just talking to each other while her strawberry ice cream melted on the roof of her car and his friend threw up his hands and plopped down on the grass of his lawn, his sneaker clad feet resting the pavement of his driveway, the toes of his shoes pointed upward, and he tugged at grass blades, ran his hand through his hair, and tossed a couple of nearby pebbles before he finally called over to Wilson, “If you’re going to flirt instead of play, at least give me back my ball!” That seemed to shatter their tête-à-tête  and they smiled at each other one last time before Wilson ambled back toward his friend’s yard, shoving him in the shoulder and muttering something to him that I couldn’t hear that made his friend roll his eyes, his lips forming the word whatever.