Sunkissed Serendipity

Chapter 24

Julian

As I get out of my car, I see a hand on the door handle. As I close my door, my eyes take in as my brother runs to the front door, with Isla picking up her pace to keep up with him. Isla gets to the front door, but before she can stick her hand out to get inside the house, Jack slams the door in her face.

"Oh," she says softly, her voice carrying to where I was watching them in my car. I close my car and head off to where she had a hand up by the door. A look on her face tells me she didn't know what to do now. I looked at her hand to find that she didn't have any keys, so I knew she must have given them to Jack.

I make my way to my front door, brushing past her. I get my keys out and open the door. Looking at her as the door opens up, I ask, "What happened?"

"Fuck," she curses when she hears my question and takes in the fact that I was standing next to her. She keeps her voice small as she says, "I think I made Jack angry."

I get into our house, dropping off my bag beside the door, which I'll have to get later, and say, "And he slammed the door on you? I'll get him to apologize to you."

"No," Isla says, running a hand through her hair and looking as if she were the one at fault here rather than my brother, who was downright rude to her. She closes the door behind her. "I, uh, I think he was finally starting to get his skating trick, and I forced him to leave."

I only looked at her, wondering why she was feeling guilty about that. I got that he didn't want to leave, but Isla wasn't supposed to always listen to him.

She gives me a thin smile, walking further into the house and saying, "He had finally found something he wanted to do. I told him we had ten minutes left, and he told me he really wanted to get his trick down. But once time had passed, I headed over to him, and while I was calling out to him to leave, he kept trying and trying to get the task down. But he couldn't, and as I kept calling out to him, he got frustrated and then called off the trick and started to walk home."

"Hm," I say, following her to where she was going by the living room. "But Jack is in the wrong for being rude to you."

"Maybe," she says, but then shrugs. "But I already saw that he wasn't feeling well, and I still press the situation. I wish that I gave him a little more time."

I studied her for a moment, still trying to figure out where she got all this empathy for my brother from. She then whispers, "Everyone made a point to not hang out with him at the park. I noticed the way they kept their distance, and at first I didn't think Jack had noticed, but he did. He just didn't verbally show it, and I think he focused on skating and trying to master a new technique to ignore it. And well—" she stops, letting out a frustrated sigh.

It dawns on me now that whenever Jack was treated differently because of my dad's case, she felt bad for him on a personal level. I don't think anyone else has ever felt this bad, not even my friends. None of them knew the lengths of the way people treat us, expecting it to be awful. They don't know that some people stopped hanging out with me just because their parents didn't want them to be around me. Or that Jack lost his friends that used to hang out with him every day, taking Jack away from home for a time. It was a hard change, and nobody else felt bad enough to empathize with it.

"Sorry," she says to me once she looks up at my face and makes the assumption that I'm offended that she had talked of this. "I didn't mean to pry and use the situation between your dad and Jack to understand how Jack is feeling. It may not be my place."

She looks down at her hands, obviously feeling guilty for stepping over the line, even though I had given her permission to cross it when I told her about my dad the other day. I scooted closer to her, even though we had taken two different couches adjacent to each other. "Isla, it's fine."