How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas - Molly O'Keefe Page 0,6

years). The first time I saw him he’d had a black eye and a ripped shirt, and he’d eaten fistfuls of the microwave popcorn I’d popped. And then Mom had come home and while Wes and I argued about where to hide Sam, Sam sneaked out the back door taking a silver candlestick with him.

A move that had been so scandalous to me when I was ten. Now I loved it. Loved that he took that candlestick, got some food and his mom some antibiotics for a sinus infection that wasn’t going away and a pair of slick new tennis shoes. I loved that he took that candlestick and came back the next day. For Wes. And more popcorn.

“You can stay,” Wes had told Sam. “But you can’t steal. My mom finds out and she’ll have you arrested or something. So you ask me for anything and it’s yours, but you can’t steal.”

They smacked hands and ran off to do very thrilling and mysterious fifteen-year-old boy stuff, and I’d run after them as fast as my legs could carry me.

And then, suddenly, Sam was just there. More often than not. He asked for money one other time, and Wes and I pooled what we had in our birthday stashes and gave it to him. A thousand bucks.

Wes had said it was for bail for his dad.

Sam never said anything, but six months later he paid us back. I have no idea what he did to make that money.

Yeah, I didn’t fall in love with him then. Or when he enlisted three years later, and Wes and I saw him off. Sam hugged me so hard my feet were lifted up off the ground, and he whispered, all rough and gruff in my ear, “Stay safe, kid.”

Two years later, I didn’t make the cheerleading team in high school and Wes must have told him. And out of the blue Sam wrote me a letter telling me that cheerleaders were lame and the fun at football games was always under the bleachers. Not on the field.

He took the time and the care to try and make me feel better about stupid high school shit by writing a letter from some place in Iraq. I mean…maybe I fell a little in love with him because of that letter. We started playing video games on-line after that.

Wes didn’t know. I never told him and neither did Sam. Our friendship was a tiny little secret we kept. Or, I did. Maybe Sam was embarrassed and that’s why he kept his mouth shut.

But the real moment, the final kill shot, had been the year he came home and could no longer tell us where he was stationed. Or what he did there.

I found him in the middle of the night in the kitchen—our kitchen. The Kane family kitchen. Wes had his own place at that point but he was away on business.

So, he’d come to me.

And his eyes were dark and his mouth was different.

“Is this okay?” he asked. “Me being here.”

“Always,” I said, surprised by how much I meant it. By how much I wanted it.

And I could tell something had happened. Something big. Something awful. Something he couldn’t tell me about and somehow he couldn’t handle on his own.

I popped popcorn he didn’t eat. Made tea he didn’t drink. Told stories until he smiled. Jokes until he laughed. I stayed at the kitchen island, and by the time the sun came up I was twenty years old and I was deeply in love with my brother’s best friend.

I’d thought it would go away. He got deployed again and I wrote him and he wrote me back. We played video games. He showed up, he vanished again.

I got my own apartment, and when he was home he’d come over and played Skyrim all day with me. We ordered pizzas and drank beer like nothing was different, but the entire time my body thrummed with the nearness of him. Tracking him around my apartment. Around my life.

Years I’d spent loving this guy and he didn’t know? Didn’t see? Was I so invisible? Or was he pretending? And why did that feel so much worse?

Now he was back with that fresh pink scar.

And I was dressed up in the shoes and the thong because I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I might end up in flames, but I was taking a shot.

The last of the champagne went down in one big gulp and I turned, ready to confront