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Brooks grabbed the small statute back from Anderson and handed it to Dylan. “We would’ve been disappointed if you didn’t win your first year back.”
Derek’s hands clenched into fists. He’d always thought of rage as a hot thing. Like fire or lava or that time Olive dropped her straightener on his arm in the bathroom.
But no, Derek had already dealt with fire tonight. What was building inside him was a polar vortex. An explosion of sub-zero, icy fury.
As the party started to break up, the Gallagher kids and their father gathered around the table cleaning up the ashes of the fire. Then the stories started.
While Dylan wasn’t the only person who had “won” the award over the years, it all devolved into stories about Dylan. Sometimes they were just straight mocking Dylan’s ADHD, and it wasn’t even subtle. Every time Derek opened his mouth, Dylan shook his head. That stupid nonsmile was still plastered to his face, pretending he was in on the joke, trying to treat it all like this wasn’t some decades-long humiliation ritual for a family’s whipping boy. Did he endure this every year? Dylan was still holding that stupid goddamn quasi-phallic discolored pickle in his hands. His knuckles were white. His ears were bright pink.
“I found it.” Brooks pushed his phone in Derek’s face.
Dylan mumbled a pleading curse. “Guys, please…”
“Here’s the photo of the first ever Pickle Award Ceremony.” Brooks gestured to his phone. On it was a picture of Dylan as a small-for-his-age kid, crying and holding a large jar of pickles.
Anderson popped up at Derek’s other shoulder. “Hysterical, right? So funny that that the pickles were literally the only thing that survived. Dylan. Dilly. Pickles. Dill Pickles.”
Derek’s nostrils flared. “Yeah, I get it, dude.”
“I won last year, but the competition was less fierce since Dilly was sick.”
As he looked up from the photo, Derek caught Dylan’s eye. The little boy in the photo looked so broken while the man who meant so much to Derek was forcing himself to make that stupid face that was like the Black Mirror version of his perfect smile.
Something splintered inside Derek. He snatched the stupid thing from Dylan’s hand and shook it out in front of Anderson. “This. Is. Not. Funny. None of this is funny, you giant jackass.”
Felicity’s voice broke the silence first. “Finally.” She chucked her cider bottle into the trash. “Here we go.”
Chapter 38
Dylan pressed his hand to Derek’s back. Shit, the last hour had been miserable for him, but he hadn’t wanted this to happen. An actual confrontation between Derek and his brothers? Not good. Derek twisted out of reach.
“Oh, come on.” Anderson said. “He gets it’s all a joke. Don’t you, Dilly?”
“Uh…” Dylan said.
Derek flung out his hand toward Dylan, seemingly having forgotten in his fury he was still holding the “award.” Held in Derek’s fist like that, it looked even more like a misshapen, puke-colored dildo than usual.
“Just look at your brother. You think that’s what he looks like when he thinks something is funny? Look at his face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?” Dylan asked, slightly offended.
“For starters, your ears are all pink, which means you’re uncomfortable.”
“My ears?” Did his ears actually turn red when he was embarrassed?
“And when he laughs for real his stupid dimples underneath his mouth come out, but now he just looks like he’s in pain. Are you jerks even paying attention to the fact that it bothers him?” Derek growled.
Something about the way Derek said “dimples” helped Dylan shake the weight of mortification of the last hour. Derek noticed his dimples?
“It’s a joke,” Calvin said. While more measured than the other two, he’d stood by and watched it happen, year after year. The relentless teasing. All of it.
It was Felicity’s turn to do what Dylan had expressly asked her not to do… again. “That’s the thing though.” Her face was scarlet, as she marched all four feet and eleven and a half inches of herself to somehow tower over their three brothers. “It’s not a joke. You’re making him the joke. Like everything he went through before he got diagnosed should be some joke to shame him about—all the shit he had to put up with for most of his life. Oh ADHD, ha-ha, like oh look, there goes a squirrel! But do you know how hard it was for him? All the way until he was grown up. Do you know how hard it is for a man to ask for help because he’s just not coping? Because I’m sure that shit’s braver than anything you two jerks have ever done.”
“It’s braver than anything I’ve done recently too,” Derek added in a controlled voice that hid most of his anger.
Dylan placed a hand between Derek’s shoulders. “Babe.”
Derek’s voice was a shattered whisper when he faced Dylan. “It was hard for you.”