“Good.”
“Did you eat lunch?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind?”
“Turkey sandwich.”
He takes off his shoes and goes upstairs. I watch the two second interaction and am mildly confused.
My mom is in the kitchen at four, starting on dinner with Tyr. “Lucy, do you want to help with dinner?”
“Sure. Yeah.” I get up and go into the kitchen. I wash my hands at the sink. Within ninety seconds, I am at the counter chopping onions next to Tyr while my mother takes pictures ofthe farmers’ market apples on her phone. She stays on her phone the whole time.
Dinner is good. We made pasta with the pesto and the tomatoes from the market. We plate it for the four of us at the table. Bear eats two servings. My mom eats one slowly while looking at her phone between bites. Tyr tells a story about a basement reno in Adrian that he is telling for the second time this week and that has gotten slightly more dramatic in the retelling. Bear laughs. My mother laughs in the right places.
Bear pushes his plate away and gets up. “Going to my room.”
I watch him go and wonder if this is the new routine now that Tyr’s here.
I’m on the couch under the gray blanket by nine-thirty. Bear hasn’t come back downstairs. His door has been closed since dinner. I have not heard the Switch through the floor in twenty minutes, which probably means he is on his phone watching YouTube on his bed.
My mom goes upstairs around quarter to ten. Tyr stays in the living room with me for ten minutes.
“Goodnight, Lucy.”
“Goodnight, Tyr.”
He goes upstairs.
The voicemail from Gianna is still on my phone. I haven’t listened to it yet. I bet it’s just her hanging up the phone, so I don’t bother to look.
I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I know I can’t stay here.
Chapter 29
Benson
Ihavebeenatmy desk for an hour pretending to do a problem set, and my phone has not lit up since Lucy’s call this morning.
I keep glancing at it between problems. That’s a thing I have not done since I was in high school. I’ve never been hung up over a girl, and I’m annoyed with myself about it. Around nine, I close the notebook, pull on whatever t-shirt is closest — which turns out to be Blue’s, judging by the Detroit logo on the chest — and go downstairs. Blue is at the kitchen island with the finance textbook he has been carrying around all weekend.
“Why the hell do you have my shirt?”
“Why the hell was it hanging in my closet?” I ask, looking down at it. “Want to go for a run?”
He looks at the shirt and shakes his head. “Give me two minutes.”
He marks his page with a sticky note and goes upstairs without another word. We lace up our running shoes in the entry hallway in silence. Stanley is on the couch watching something with a laugh track, eating something out of a tupperware that may or may not be Rowan’s leftover pasta.
“You guys running?”
“Yeah,” I answer.
He goes to stand up. “I’m coming.”
Blue says, “You’re going to die.”
