Brother Knows Best

"Uhhhhhhh," I stammered out, staring at Philip like I'd never seen something like him before.

There he was, standing in the hallway just feet away from the scene in the bathroom, looking at me all confused and pondering.

A million different thoughts ran through my head, each leaving me more unsure than the previous one. Should I say something? Distract Philip? Drive him away? Tell him the truth? Should I protect Heather and my brother or should I let their mutual best friend know the truth? Should I do the loyal thing? The moral thing? The selfish thing?

Was the moral thing really just very selfish on my end, and I was only justifying it in my mind by saying that it was the moral thing?

"Err, Cassidy?" Philip said uncertainly, looking at me with concern. I didn't blame him. I probably looked like I was about to have an aneurysm or something.

"Uhhhhhhhh," I continued standing in front of the bathroom door dumbly, not making a move lest it upset the balance of everything. I was afraid to tear my eyes away from Philip too. Afraid that if I turned away and looked into the bathroom, he would storm over and demand to know what was going on.

Just what the heck his girlfriend and his best friend were doing together. Everyone knew people didn't just standly together idly in bathrooms, and definitely not at Teresa Schilling's house.

And how could Caleb, my twin brother, the guy who was genuinely a better person than almost anyone else I knew, do something like this? And to his best friend nonetheless.

Philip raised an eyebrow. I had a sense that unless I could come up with something quick, I wouldn't be able to stave him off for much longer.

And I was right.

He frowned at me. "What's going on Cassidy?" he asked, before taking a step towards me.

My eyes widened in horror as I watched him get closer. "Wait!" I shouted, raising both my hands, palms spread out towards him, to prevent him getting any closer. It wasn't so much that I had made the decision to shield Caleb and Heather from his wrath but more the fact that I hadn't decided what to do yet that made me try and stop Philip. If he walked any closer, things were about to get so out of control that I wouldn't be able to deal with it.

Philip frowned at me, but he stopped in his tracks nonetheless.

"What's going on?" he asked, a bit hesitantly, looking towards the bathroom. "What's in there?"

"Errr…" I stammered. The wheels turned in my head, but I couldn't come up with anything that made since. "Err…"

But while I was standing there dumbly, trying in vain to make the wheels in my head spin out something coherent, something totally unexpected happened.

"Hey Phil."

And I turned in horror towards the sound of the voice and watched as Heather's head popped out into the hallway from the bathroom, her hair perfect despite the makeout session that she had with my brother.

Why in the world was her hair always so damn perfect?

She looked sheepish and reluctant, and she gave a tiny little awkward wave at Philip before dropping her hand down at her side.

What. The. Heck. Was. She. Doing?

Had she completely lost her mind?

Had she managed to stash Caleb away somewhere in the short time that I was standing there all bumbling and confused?

Did she already have an explanation handy?

Or had she already deemed the whole idea of trying to keep Philip from finding out about what had just happened so fruitless that she just decided to give up right then and there? Could she not live with the guilt and wanted to confess already?

Philip was looking just as confused as I felt. Well, definitely more confused because I had at least known that Heather was in the bathroom.

"Heather?" he asked, tilting his head. "I thought you were still downstairs."

Heather sighed. Her clothes were now all rightfully on and proper, thank goodness, but she was still looking quite sheepish.

I stared at her, wondering what she would say. She could technically still get away with this. She could just tell Philip that she was using the restroom and then drag him away from the scene.

She sighed again. And then slowly, with a rather reluctant, pointed look at the boy she was dating, she said, "Nope, I'm here." And then, without pause, she jerked her thumb to point towards the inside of the bathroom. "And Caleb's here too."

My mouth opened in horror and shock. Was I about to watch a murder scene happen in front of me right now? Was I about to be witness to a crime? Was that what was about to go down?

For a second, Philip didn't seem to comprehend what was going on. He didn't seem to fully get what Heather had just said.

Tilting his head, he repeated Heather's last words. "Caleb?" he asked.

And then, perhaps because he had no other choice once Heather had ratted him out, my brother stepped out of the bathroom and into the hallway to stand next to Heather.

He had that same, sheepish look on his face that Heather had. His hair was less perfect, but at least his clothes were proper too. "Hey Phil," he said softly. And then he gave that same, reluctant, and awkwardly embarrassed wave that almost mirrored exactly what Heather had done just minutes ago.

Oh no.

Should I step in front of Caleb, try and protect him? Should I try to tackle Philip to the ground? Why weren't Caleb and Heather nearly as worried for their own safety as I was? Were they totally crazy? DId they even care about their lives?

Philip seemed to be have begun comprehending everything as these thoughts were swirling about in my head.

"Oh," he said, shocked and unnerved and dumbfounded. "Oh!"

His eyes widened. He raised his eyebrows at his two best friends. "You two?" he said, genuinely shocked. "Oh!"

His mouth opened and closed, but no sound really came out as he stared from Caleb to Heather.

I waited for the inevitable explosion. It was as if the four of us were in some surreal cocoon on non-reality away from the party that was still raging on downstairs. In this entire time, not a single person passed us in the hallway.

Before Philip could get over the shock though, Heather spoke again.

"And Cassidy opened the door a few minutes ago and ran into us," she said, jerking her head towards me and clearing her throat.

Ran into them was a bit of a euphemism for what actually happened, but I didn't entirely blame her for not saying what had actually happened.

Philip's eyebrows raised. "Oh," he said again, as if that was the only thing he could think of. He turned towards me and for a few seconds he just stared.

"Err," I muttered, shifting uncomfortably at this entire situation. Why the hell was Philip staring at me for so long? What the hell was he staring at me for? Shouldn't the entire focus of his attention be on Caleb and Heather?

Philip was frowning, although his gaze never shifted off of me. Starting to feel thoroughly confused now, I asked, "What is happening?"

I definitely did not feel like I should be the one asking that question. But everyone around me was behaving so strangely. In fact, none of them were acting remotely in the way that I thought they would.

There was Caleb and Heather, who seemed a lot less guilty and anxious than they should be. For two people who just got caught cheating on their mutual best friend with one another, they seemed more embarrassed than anything else.

And there was the best friend himself. Philip seemed a lot less angry and horrified than he should be. In fact, the only emotion I could detect out of him thus far was confusion. It couldn't take him this long to comprehend the situation, could it? Was he waiting for some sort of confirmation in the form of a big neon sign that was going to drop down from the ceiling of Teresa Schilling's house?

I rubbed my temple, feeling totally out of it when no one even spoke or attempted to answer my question. "I'm sorry, but is there something you all know that I don't?" I asked finally.

I had said this more rhetorically than anything else, and only because the situation was getting so strange, but the way the three of them reacted was something else entirely.

In fact, Philip, Heather, and Caleb seemed to have more of a reaction from this one statement of mine than anything else that had happened in the past half an hour thus far. Almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth, that look of guilt that I thought my brother should have felt when I opened the bathroom door appeared on his face. I had only seen that look a few times in my life before, mostly because Caleb rarely had a reason to feel guilty, but it was there now, clear as day.

And Heather - well, Heather wasn't looking at me. In fact, Heather wasn't looking at anyone. She had her eyes closed, and she was rubbing her temples with a frown on her face, as if she was truly irritated by something. For the first time since I opened the door to the bathroom, she looked undoubtedly unhappy.

And then there was O'Brien. O'Brien couldn't even look me in the eye. In fact, he couldn't look anyone in the eye. For a guy who was supposed to be furious at the scene in front of him, he was certainly having a hard time looking at either of the two people who supposedly betrayed him, or the girl who literally had nothing to do with the entire thing and had just asked a simple question.

It was pretty obvious at this point that my question had hit the mark. That there was indeed something going on that I didn't know, but that apparently the rest of them were all aware.

My nervousness was quickly turning into irritation. "Okay, what the hell is going on?" I demanded.

For a good minute that followed there, it seemed as if the three of them were just about to ignore this question as well. At this point, I had asked three questions that all remained unanswered, while the other three of them looked anywhere but me.

Maybe Maisie would've told me to just let it go if she was here, but she wasn't here, and I sure as hell wouldn't let it go.

Heather I couldn't really pick on because I didn't know her that well, and Philip I didn't really want to pick on because our relationship was tenuous at best and he might have potentially just gotten cheated, but Caleb I could target.

I swiveled on my heels until I was facing my brother, who seemed to know what was coming. If anything, he turned a deep shade of scarlet and looked even more guilty than he was already looking.

"Caleb," I said, and I could even hear the slight snarl in my voice. "Want to tell me what it is exactly that I don't know?"

Caleb fidgeted uncomfortably. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He looked like a five year old who just got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Before he could speak however, Philip's voice came from behind me.

"Heather and I are no longer together!" he exclaimed.

I rounded on him, my eyes wide. "What?" I asked.

Philip rubbed the back of his head, as if he was surprised by his own outburst. "Err, yeah," he said. He still couldn't seem to look me in the eye. His gaze shifted briefly, very briefly, to me once while he was talking, and then he quickly looked away again, as if there was something very interesting going on where the carpet met the wall in the hallway.

I was about to offer my condolences, tell him how bad I felt about the whole relationship ending thing, but then I thought about it for a few seconds, and none of it really made sense.

"You guys literally just got together," I said, narrowing my eyes at him.

O'Brien was resolutely not looking anywhere near my general direction at this point. "Yeah, we realized we were better off as friends, no hard feelings," he said all this very, very quickly. If I wasn't so hyper focused on what he was saying, I would have for sure missed it all.

"When did you break up?" I asked.

Philip gulped. "Recently," he answered, and then proceeded to do the same edgewise shifting that Caleb was doing.

"My brother said you guys came to the party together," I told him pointedly, jerking my head back towards Caleb. I didn't even have to look at my brother to know that he was wincing.

Philip's expression mirrored what I thought Caleb's must have been.

"Very recently," he said, his voice a bit quieter.

I crossed my arms. I felt as if I was on the verge of grasping something, but when I waited, nothing came to me.

Instead of answering Philip or cross-examining him any further, I turned towards Heather.

I half expected her to corroborate Philip's story, to say something along the lines of an affirmation that they had indeed broken up very recently. Maybe it was all true, maybe her and Philip got together not long ago, came to the party together, and then broke up at the party, and then she immediately proceeded to go somewhere and make out with my twin brother.

Maybe all that really happened.

But I doubted it.

Heather was the one here that I knew the least. She had the least incentive to tell me the truth. Despite what Maisie always said about how awesome of a person Heather was, I didn't really know how to think of her.

She didn't meet my eyes either. For once,, Heather didn't look like she had just walked straight out of a photo shoot. I mean, sure her hair was perfect and her clothes were fashionable, but she looked like she was having a migraine.

The last time I looked at her, she was rubbing her temples as though she was in pain, but now her hand was over her eyes, as if she was really in pain.

"Is this true?" I directed my question at her. "Heather?"

Even though I knew her the least, for some reason I got the sense that Heather wouldn't lie to me in this moment. That she somehow found it very painful to lie to me in this moment.

Of course, I could be entirely off mark, but I had to try.

At my words, she looked up, frowning.

For a moment, she stared at me, and I was going to repeat my question because it looked like she didn't hear what I said. But then she looked up, away from me, and her eyes shifted behind me to Philip.

And then, slowly, she turned towards Caleb.

Both of them said nothing.

Finally, Heather looked at me again. Besides looking pained, like she did before, her expression betrayed nothing. "Cassidy," she sighed. "Do you mind if I talk to these two for a second? Alone?"

I had no reason to refuse. I had no right to refuse either. So I left with one last glare at Caleb, with one last confused look at Philip. I didn't say anything to either of them on the way out - I simply didn't know what to say.

I went outside to Teresa's garden. My whole body felt numb. My mind felt numb. I barely registered who I had passed or what was going on in the house on my way outside. What the hell had just happened?

It was still noisy outside. Teresa had set up a little drinks and food area out on the patio of her parents' house, and even though most of the people were inside the house where the party was still in full swing, a few had made their way outside. They stood there, talking and laughing and enjoying the chips and drinks.

I did not want to join them.

In fact, human interaction was the last thing I really wanted in the moment.

I found a little corner of the garden that was mostly in the dark, far away from where the patio and the crowd was. I sat down on a bench there, my heart racing. I felt as if I had just run a marathon, even though the most exercise I had gotten was probably from jumping up in shock from seeing Caleb and Heather make out.

For a long time, I just sat there, replaying the events of tonight in my head, attempting to make sense of it all.

I had walked upstairs and run into Heather and Caleb, who had been making out.

Now, I didn't know how Heather felt, but I knew how Caleb felt. Up to today, I had assumed he had a crush, like a lot of other guys did, on the hottest girl in the school. Up to today, I had thought that this was an unrequited crush that Caleb should have given up on.

But that appeared not to be the case.

No, I shook my head. I didn't know if it was the case or not. For all I knew, Heather could be drunk and just playing him. I shook my head again. I hoped not. Wait, did I hope so? Were they even making out? Did I misread the entire thing?

I replayed the scene in my head again, from the moment I walked in on them in the bathroom. Yeah, they had definitely been all over each other, there was no way I could have been mistaken about that.

But Heather was with Philip. She was dating him, they both acknowledged it, the whole school acknowledged it.

And now here was where my comprehension completely broke down.

Was she actually dating Philip? I didn't buy that story about them having broken up recently. But why wasn't O'Brien angry at all? Just what did they all know that I didn't?

But try as I might, I couldn't figure it out. I don't know how Sherlock Holmes did it, but I was clearly not cut out to be a detective.

I don't know how long I sat there. It probably felt like way longer than it actually was, but before I had actually mustered the energy to move, Caleb found me.

He was my ride home, after all, and I would have gotten up and told him that I wanted to go home, except that he wasn't alone.

Heather was walking behind him, towards me. I didn't see her at first, but there she was. I half expected Philip to show up to, but even though I craned my neck to look when I saw the two of them approach me, he was nowhere to be found.

I felt a little silly, because for a second there I had hoped that he was coming too.

The two of them sat down on the bench beside.

"There you are," Caleb said softly. "I looked all over. You didn't answer your phone."

I shrugged. "Are you going to tell me what's going on?" I asked.

Caleb's mouth twisted. He seemed to have trouble answering my question. I glared at him, but when he remained silent, Heather spoke.

"I will," she told me.

I turned towards her, surprised. She rubbed her right arm with her left hand. "I feel like I owe you that," she told me, very softly.

I waited expectantly, but then she seemed to have trouble too.

"Well," she finally said, looking clearly uncomfortable. "I'm having a little trouble beginning this story. Maybe you can ask me some questions? And I'll answer them truthfully?"

This sounded so weird to me, but I wasn't about to give up this opportunity.

"Are you cheating on Philip?" I asked immediately

"No," she answered just as fast.

I frowned. Of course she had no reason to lie to me, but she didn't have to seek me out and do this either.

"Did you make out with Caleb?" I asked again.

To my right, I could detect a movement from my brother. I didn't even bother looking at him. My focus was entirely on Heather.

Even in the dim lighting we got from where we were sitting, I could see Heather blush. She looked embarrassed, but she didn't shrink away.

"Yes," she answered.

"But you didn't cheat on Philip?" I narrowed my eyes at her.

"I did not," she confirmed.

"So you're not with him?"

"No, I'm not."

"So you guys broke up?"

There was a slight pause.

"Not exactly," Heather finally said.

I waited for her to clarify, but after a few seconds, it became obvious that she wasn't going to. We were in some weird twenty questions game of truth, and I had no idea why it was so hard for her to explain things to me, but if this was the way I was going to get to the truth, then I was definitely going to keep asking questions.

"What do you mean not exactly?" I demanded.

"I mean, we never broke up," Heather said, with a shake of her head.

"But you're not together?" I asked.

She shook her head again, her perfect hair cascading down her back in waves.

I wanted to shout at her in frustration. She was literally driving me insane. What was with these nonsensical non-answers. What was with my brother, now suddenly mute beside me?

And then, something clicked in my head.

"Were you and Philip ever together?" I asked.

I waited with bated breath for her answer, and I didn't have to wait long.

"We were not," Heather answered resolutely with a sigh. It wasn't a sad sigh. In fact, she seemed more relieved than anything else, as if she was finally getting something off my chest.

"Why in the world would you pretend to be together then?" I asked her incredulously, trying to ignore how happy her answer just made me.

My mind was racing again. So Heather and Philip never dated? I tortured myself with this knowledge for weeks for no reason? I agonized about this and tossed and turned over it all these nights in my room for no reason?

Heather looked distinctly uncomfortable again. "Phil asked a favor of me, and despite my hesitations and all my reservations, I agreed."

I stared. "He asked a favor? He asked you to pretend to date him?"

Heather nodded.

"Well," I crossed my arms. "Maybe he was hoping this play pretend to turn into something more."

Heather shook her head immediately. "He doesn't like me," she said without any hesitation whatsoever. "He asked me to do this for entirely separate reasons."

I blinked. "And what were those reasons?"

Heather looked up at me, her eyes kind and clouded. For a moment, I was suddenly struck with the odd thought that I wished I knew her better.

"I can give you my side of the story, but I can't give you Phil's. I think for that, you should talk to him," she told me with a rueful smile.

What the -

She was driving me insane. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shake my brother too. I wanted to shake the truth out of them.

"Ugh," I rolled my eyes, because I really couldn't help it. "Fine. Then why were you hesitant to agree to his ask?"

"Because I thought it was dumb. It was a dumb way for him to get what he actually wanted, and I thought it probably wouldn't work."

"Then why did you agree?"

"Because he was miserable."

I was going to tear my hair out. "You're not going to tell me the reason behind why he asked?" I said, standing up and facing them.

Heather couldn't meet my eyes again. "It wouldn't be fair to him," she said.

I covered my eyes. This night was so bizarre.

I sighed. And then I sighed again. And then I sighed again and I willed myself to stop asking anymore because it seemed like I was going to get no more out of Heather except frustration.

Except I had one more question.

I turned from Heather to Caleb. They were sitting on the bench, both of them looking at their feet. They were sitting a whole person apart, because I had just been between them, and they made no move to move closer.

"So what's going on between you two?" I asked.

At this, both of them looked up with matching expressions of surprise on their faces. Apparently they had not been expecting this question.

They then looked at one another, and quickly looked away. This time, I could see both of their faces turn red.

It was Caleb who answered this time. "Um, we haven't talked about that yet," he said, clearing his throat.

And even though I was irritated with him, I liked my brother enough to drop it.

"Do you know what's going on with Philip?" I asked him directly instead.

Slowly, Caleb nodded.

"Does everyone know except me or something?" I crossed my arms.

Caleb and Heather looked at one another once again, less embarrassed now that the question at hand wasn't about the two of them.

"Only Heather and I know the full story, I believe," my brother answered.

"And you're not going to tell me?" I had to ask, even though I already knew the answer. But I was already planning to give my brother hell as soon as we got home.

He shook his head, and then he stood up, so that he was looking at me at eye level. Suddenly he looked really serious.

"You should talk to Philip," he said in an unusually stern voice.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes again.

But it turned out, my brother wasn't done. He reached out a hand and touched me gently on the elbow. "And Cassidy? Go easy on him okay."

Whatever I was expecting, it wasn't this.

"Go easy on him?" I asked, repeating his words. Why would I need to go easy on him? What was Caleb even saying.

But my brother simply nodded.

"He has way more to lose here than you do."