All three of my brothers looked up at me. Dangling upside down by my knees, I waved at them and managed a weak smile.
IHAVE THREE BROTHERS:Liam, Tuck, and Charles (never Charlie). All older. Charles is nineteen, with investment-banker hair and carefully cultivated muscles. Liam and Tuck are eighteen, fraternal twins—Liam is the one with fashion sense and a swagger, and Tuck likes to wear a fedora. I’m the baby at sixteen. People used to say my mother kept trying until she got a girl. My brothers used to say she should have quit while she was ahead. They didn’t say that anymore. In fact, they didn’t mention her at all, because silence, repression, and denial are healthy ways to deal with family problems.
When we were younger, I used to follow them around like a puppy dog. They’d climb onto the roof; I’d climb onto the roof. They’d sneak into a humans-only club; I’d sneak into a humans-only club. They’d rob a jewelry store; I’d…well, watch mostly. Dad had firm ideas about when it was age appropriate to embark on a life of crime.
I didn’t know it was ever age appropriate to try to rob yourself.
“Anyone want to explain why you were trying to steal Mom’s piano?” I asked.
None of them answered. Instead, they removed their masks and glared at one another, as if they could shoot fire out of their eyes. (We can’t. Just out of our mouths.)
“Liam.” Charles had mastered the art of inserting the maximum amount of disapproval into two syllables. It was a skill that came with being the oldest and most responsible. He’d started acting like a miniature adult around the time he discovered his four-year-old sister tasting his special birthday dinner to check if it was okay, because I’m thoughtful like that. Also, I was curious what venison pizza tasted like. (For the record, it tastes weird.)
“I checked!” Liam said. If Charles is the most responsible one, then Liam is the least. Mom used to say he’d forget his head if it wasn’t attached. In response, he once bought some plastic heads from a wig shop and left them around the house where she could find them.
“Obviously not well enough.”
“She’d left!” Liam cried. “Movie started at seven-fifteen, ninety-minute run time, plus previews. After that, she’d planned to be out back at the grill.” He’d taken notes on my plan? I didn’t think anyone was even listening when I told them about it, especially Liam, who rarely took anything I said seriously. Or anything anyone said seriously. No one had even said our traditional “Bye, have fun storming the castle” when Gabriela had swung by to pick me up. “Everyone left, exactly as they were supposed to. I did the sweep, came in to disable the cams, exactly as planned.” Liam was the family’s expert on all things with wires. He loved fiddling with anything electrical or explosive. As a little kid, he was constantly accidentally blowing up the TV. You know, as one does.
Still dangling, I felt my head begin to ache. “Guys, I can tell we all have a lot to talk about, but would you mind helping me down first?” I crunched myself up to grab the arms of the chandelier. My sweaty fingertips touched the metal, then slipped, and I swung back down.Ow.Also, the smoke alarm was still beeping loud enough to echo inside my skull.
“Youshould have seen her come home,” Liam said, poking Charles in the shoulder. “If you were in position, how did she get by you? Tell me that.” He poked again. Poke, poke, poke.
Charles caught his finger.
“Ow.”
Charles let go. “Tuck needed help with the window,” he said, his voice reasonable, as if of course nothing could ever be his fault. In Charles’s case, age also came with a large dose of superiority. As the oldest brother, he was the crew leader for all their schemes.
Tuck kicked the glass shards from the vase toward the center of the room, into one pile. “You didn’t need to break it. Three more minutes and I would have had it melted,” he muttered. Tuck was always convinced he could conquer any task with just a few minutes of effort. After that, he usually lost interest. But he was the best of the three of them with flame—that was due to natural talent, though, not practice. He wouldn’t have had any problem incinerating that chopstick.
“You couldn’t maintain the heat,” Charles said.
“You didn’t give me a chance.” Muttering again. He was going through a mumbling stage, Mom had said. Dad was always hollering at him to speak up.
“You had chances,” Charles said. “This wasn’t amateur hour. We needed perfection. Everyone had to be on their game. If you couldn’t perform, then I had to replace you.”
“Seems like the only one off their game was you, Charles,” Liam pointed out. “You left your post. You let her slip past you. You broke the window, instead of letting Tuck melt the glass, which was probably what alerted her.”
Charles, in addition to being the oldest, was also the strongest, due to the amount of loving attention he paid to his biceps. He used that strength to loom menacingly as he argued. “I was not the one who—”
I cut into their argument again. “Hello? Up here?”
They ignored me, again. Instead, they kept hurling accusations at one another until they were standing nose to nose in the middle of the fallen statues and broken glass. Smoke was beginning to curl out of the corners of Liam’s mouth, and Charles’s hands had curled into fists. Tuck just looked like he wanted to hide under a table.
Brothers can be such idiots.
Stretching my arms out, I began to swing. The chandelier creaked but swayed with me. I reached my arms toward the railing, as if I were a trapeze artist preparing to leap to the next trapeze. My fingertips grazed the wood. I swung back, then forward. The chandelier creaked louder. I heard the plaster in the ceiling crack and had the fleeting thought that this was a bad idea—then my hands grabbed onto the railing as, simultaneously, the ceiling gave way. I clung to the railing as the chandelier dropped. A foot down, the wires caught it.
All three brothers looked up.
I scrambled over the railing. The chandelier now hung by its wires only, like a loose tooth. The ceiling around it was cracked.
All three of them, in exactly the same tone of voice, said,“Sky!”
And I took that as my cue to leave.
Scurrying down the hall, I hurried to the security room. It occurred to me that even though my idiot brothers had failed to steal the piano, theyhadsucceeded in shutting off all our security systems—which meant we were vulnerable to any non-idiot thief who decided to visit us tonight. It also meant that since it was my brothers’ work, I might be able to figure out how they’d done it. If they’d shut it off in the software, it could be a relatively simple fix. I knew the codes too. If Liam had rigged something with the hardware…that could be trickier. Regardless of what my brothers did in the foyer, it was the height of stupidity to leave the entire security system down. Stepping over the spilled lo mein, I walked into the security room.
