I probably would have been embarrassed by it if I hadn’t been so focused on the words.
“Copy control plus c,” I read out loud to myself. “Is it the painkillers they gave me, or is that weird?”
“Marcus has one that says ‘Paste control plus v.’”
I didn’t scream like I’d thought I would have at having a deep voice in the room with me. Instead, I lifted my head and looked at the source. I was totally blaming the medication for the fact I hadn’t put two and two together that there was a human being under the t-shirt.
“What does it mean?”
Lifting his head to rest his arm under it, he smiled proudly at me.
“I was born on March twenty-eighth at ten minutes before midnight. He was born on the twenty-ninth at just before one o’clock in the morning. So, I’m the original, and he was a copy and paste version of me.”
“How does that work for birthdays?”
“Sometimes hospitals will just put the births of twins born on different days as the same day on birth certificates, but the hospital we were born at didn’t offer it to Mom and Dad. Ours says we’re twins, but it has the different dates on them.”
That was interesting, but it wasn’t what I was asking. “But how do you celebrate?”
“When we were younger, we’d have our individual days, and then have a huge party with our friends at the same time. Now, it depends on what’s going on with life and how busy shit is.”
“I remember going to some of your parties when I was little, before I was allowed to say no.”
Adjusting his position so he was facing me more, Jackson nodded like he remembered me being there. “Why did you stop coming?”
“Because boys smell and girls are superior. Why else do girls stop going to boys' birthday parties?”
“I’m fucking awesome. For that alone, you should have been ecstatic to even be invited.”
Rolling my eyes, I braced for the pain to hit me at the move, but instead, I only had the same amount I’d woken up with. Winner!
“You guys were mean, and you know it.”
Jackson blinked at the words, then frowned. “No, we weren’t. What the hell are you talking about?”
Wiggling the fingers of my left hand to ease the stiffness in them thanks to the cast, I recounted all of the misdeeds I could remember.
“You wouldn’t let me join in when you did things—”
“Because we didn’t want you to get hurt when we did dumb shit.”
“—you wouldn’t let me go into your room—”
“Because we were boys, and we were getting changed. It wouldn’t have been decent, and we didn’t want to embarrass you.”
“You stole the pizza off my plate.” I waited for him to find an excuse for that, but he winced instead.
“That was Marcus. He’s a fat fucker who eats everything in sight.”
“What about when your friend gave me a wedgie at your party? You sent me back to where the parents were inside, and told me not to come back out.”
“Because I was going to punch him, and I didn’t want you to see it or get hurt.”
“And the time you held me under the water in the pool when we were playing water polo?”
“There were three yellow jackets near you. I was trying to save you. Plus, you punched me in the balls when I did it.”
Apparently, I had a thing about hitting him in that area.
“And when we played hide and go seek, and you guys left me hiding and went off somewhere else?”
This time, he cringed. “Okay, that was because we all had our first girlfriends, and we wanted to sneak out and meet them. That was a dick move.”
“I was in that closet for two hours.”
“Shit,” he mumbled, rubbing his face with the hand that wasn’t under his head and the pillow.
“Yeah, that’s why I stopped coming with my dads when they went to your parties. Plus, I had friends and boyfriends of my own, so I had better things to do.” The words might be harsh, but no more than his had been about having a girlfriend and leaving me in a closet for two hours while he and his friends went to meet theirs.
Tilting his head slightly, he picked up a chunk of my hair and twiddled with it. “I thought curls were supposed to be dry and rough?”
The change in the subject made me blink, but then I realized he was doing it to lessen any tensions that could have built from the direction our conversation had been heading in.
“I get my hair trimmed regularly to get rid of any split ends. Plus I use a lot of products in it to keep it from drying out and looking manky.”
His eyebrows lifted at the word, but then he chuckled, “Manky?”
“Manky,” I confirmed. “Some of my friends used to put gel or mousse in their hair to stop the curls frizzing, but my dads always bought me the products aimed at curly hair that moisturize it as well as preventing it from poofing out. Because of them, I don’t have dry hair that gets matted together.”