Lochlan was not a happy camper Saturday morning. To find Caleb in the guest room and then at the breakfast table set him on edge and made his words clipped and his affection short and dry. He just closes up shop and endures. And yet he's gracious, offering the newspaper before he's read it (no one read it in the end), asking Cale if he needed a coffee refill when I was otherwise engaged cleaning Ben's glasses for him because he does an awful job and then complains about it.
Once Caleb left after lunch I got to work on thawing Lochlan out.
This goes back thirty years, their intense competition and dislike of each other. Cole forged such incredibly close friendships when most of Caleb's high school friends seemed to run off and join the navy. He did not. He knew from birth that he wanted to be rich and nothing less would do. The best way to do that was to get his law degree first so no one would ever be able to fuck him over ever. Lochlan took Caleb's place as Cole's brother, in spirit. They did everything together. Caleb became the big brother removed, the driver, a third parent, a voice of responsibility when Cole and Lochlan were busy learning independence and chasing teenaged thrills.
And girls. Let's not forget the girls. I think Lochlan managed to steal a half-dozen girlfriends out from under Caleb by virtue of his exotic charm and his ridiculously tousled strawberry curls. He also went away to work for weeks at a time and the mystery of that was a huge draw. He was freewheeling and popular.
He had no curfew. For a fifteen-year-old, that was big.
Everyone was looking for a good time, where Caleb grew up early, financially stable at seventeen, with goals, decorum and charisma. He was chivalry defined, but no one appreciates that when you're in high school. He was too serious and too focused.
After the damage had been done, Lochlan proved to be a little too freewheeling for most of those girls. He didn't care if they were happy or comfortable. He didn't care if they were present. He didn't care what they wanted to do. He would make plans with the boys and if a girl showed up, cool, if not, whatever. This frustrated Caleb even more, because now Lochlan was just throwing away the very thing Caleb wanted and couldn't keep.
And then I came along.
Suddenly all eyes were focused on Lochlan and he rose to the challenge. Suddenly there's this stupid ten-year-old following him everywhere but at least she's not eight anymore and as long as she promises to stay with him she's allowed out later and what a pain in the ass but she's sorta pretty too and not as annoying as she used to be and Lochlan could talk to her and he did. Maybe he needed someone to look after who needed to be looked after instead of a gaggle of girls bound for college. Yes, let's just go the other way and pick someone in elementary school.
Only it wasn't romantic. In the least. So stop that.
Besides. I had a crush on Caleb. Actually I had a crush on just about everyone back then because I had read Bailey's copy of The Outsiders and I likened the boys to the characters in the book. I romanticized everything because I had just discovered that boys and girls could be in love and maybe I would be too some day but for now I really wanted to spend time with the boys because they were out doing things and having adventures and going to the beach and to the lake and all the ten-year-old girls I knew I had abandoned two years early when I wanted to live in the woods by the bridge over the little stream up the path between the end of my street and the baseball field. The path was big enough for three bikes across sometimes and sometimes you had to walk single file. It was always full of mud. The girls my age did not want to get dirty, they wanted to stay inside and play Pool Barbie.
Caleb was Dallas from the depths of S.E. Hinton's mind. The oldest and most mysterious. But Lochlan was Ponyboy. He paid attention to me and I liked it. I liked it an awful lot.
The war had begun.
