Betrayal stung extra sharp when my mom’s eyes narrowed in accusation: “Did you hurt your uncle Magnum, Joss?”
At that point, Griffin and Brady rocketed up from the bed, Bobo barking at their sudden, jolting movements. Griffin told them I didn’t owe them a single answer. They were the ones who needed to explain themselves to us.
Oh, but being forthright with us wasn’t in their plans.
Possibly an entire minute eked by, during which nothing momentous happened beyond a ratcheting up of the already suffocating tension. With heavy, disappointed sighs, Griffin and Brady sat again. It was obvious: Our ’rents were total shits. We were better off without them.
When the ’rents merely fidgeted, Layla said, “What? You’re caught with your pants down and you’ve got nothing to say for yourselves?” She scowled and shook her head. “Typical.”
Typical of what, exactly, I didn’t know. Nothing about our situation was normal, not by a long shot.
“You could start by apologizing, ya know,” Layla added with a marked harrumph. “It’s the very least you could do after all the majorly messed-up crap you’ve done to us.”
Brady alsohumphed. “If they start, there’ll never be an end to it, that’s how much apologizing they’ve got to do. Not that I’m in the mood to forgive them for any of it. No way. They went too far. Waaaaay too far. Besides, from the looks of them, not a one of them’s got the guts to suck it up and even try to make things right.”
“Hey,” Porter and my dad protested at once.
Brady shrugged. “Just tellin’ it like it is,fake dads. You don’t like it, well, then ya damn well shouldn’t’ve stabbed us in the back with a whole kitchen’s worth of knives.”
With a slight hitch, he added, “We trusted you.”
“What do you mean, ‘fake dads’?” Porter hedged, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Laylatsked. “He means, jig’s up, motherfuckers.”
“Layla,” Celia automatically censured. “Watch your mouth, and your tone, too, while you’re at it.”
“I’ll do no such thing,Jackie. You’re all here, with adead fucking bodybetween us, still not wanting to say a damn word that matters ’cause you’re waiting for us to talk so you can figure out what we know and what we don’t know. ’Cause you’restillplanning on lying to us, straight to our faces.”
As one, the ’rents exchanged telling looks. Even my mom and dad gazed at each other from across the room, sharing an entire conversation through their stares.
“We knoweverything, okay?” Layla said. “Ev-er-y-thing.”
She waited a long beat so that could really sink in.
“You’ve been found out. Caught with your arms in the cookie jar, up to the elbow. Caught with your dicks stuffed all up in the neighbor’s wife, ya get me?”
“Layla,” Celia breathed on an affronted wheeze.
If she’d been listening to endless recordings of our private conversations, surely she couldn’t truly be surprised by how Layla spoke when she wasn’t holding back. Not that dicks in neighbors’ wives had anything to do with anything, but my girl had always been way better at bluffing than I was.
As much as we’d managed to learn thus far, it was more like a whole heap of diddly-squat thaneverything, considering how much life-altering shit we still didn’t comprehend. I wasn’t even sure we were in the ballpark of “everything.”
But I wasn’t about to split hairs, especially not when Layla was on a roll.
“I assure you, none of us”—she gestured to the five of us; Bobo perked his ears at the attention in his general direction—“are in any mood to play.” She let her warning hang. “In case ya failed to notice, it’s your disgusting boss lying dead on the floor. There’s no talkin’ your way out of this one.” She harrumphed another time, glaring openly at all the liars crowded into my bedroom.
My mom looked around at her friends before taking a half step forward. “Not sure where all this anger toward us is coming from—”
Layla, Brady, Hunt, Griffin, and I allhuhed in disbelief at the same time.
A bit more timidly, my mom powered on. “Maybe you can start by telling us why Uncle Magnum is naked, and by all appearances dead, on Joss’s bedroom floor.”
I opened my mouth to answer but Layla was already muttering under her breath: “Uncle Magnum.” She was only gathering steam. “Uncle Magnum, you say…”
I clamped my lips shut and got out of her way.
She jabbed a stiff, accusatory index finger at the air above the corpse. “That man’snotour uncle anything. You didn’t meet him in grad school. And he’s no family friend. What he is, is a nasty-ass, revolting pervert who tried torapeJoss.”
