Page 4 of Jesse

I’m just the one they got.

“Where’s Joey again?” I ask.

If Johnny’s the serious oldest child, Joey’s the troubled middle kid and I’m the spoiled youngest. Even though I’m thirty-three now, they still call me Baby Boston.

Fuckin’ hate it.

“He’s… I dunno. Tokyo, I think. Not really sure. He just called last week apologizing and asked me to make you do it.”

“Last week?” I say. “How come you just told me this today?”

“Because I know you.” He laughs. “You’d have disappeared on me if you knew ahead of time.”

“But everyone knows I’m showing up in his place, right?”

God, I can’t even imagine how people would react if I just popped in out of nowhere. A nightmare scenario plays out in my head of Joey being introduced and me walking out on that stage to glares and gasps. Finger-pointing and accusations.

“Of course,” Zach says, pulling me back into reality. "Can you just trust me for once? Jesus. I know what I’m doing.”

Goddamned Joey. He’s probably gambling over in Japan. Or making dumbass deals with the Yakuza. How come no one cares when Joey fucks up? He does it all the time still. He hasn’t spent the last five years cleaning up his act and getting sober, that’s for fucking sure. It’s only me they hate. It’s only ever me.

“OK.” I sigh with resignation. Because I said I’d do this, so I will. “What time we gotta be there? Should we be leaving now?”

“Punctualality is overrated.”

“Punctualality?” I say. “Dude, that’s not even a word. Did you even attend those classes I paid for?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“No. The word is punctuality.”

“Whatever. You know what I meant.”

“How come no one calls you the dumb one?”

He laughs. “They’re too busy calling you the spoiled, rich asshole one.”

I exhale. Feeling defeated and already in a bad mood about tonight and the whole shit show hasn’t even started yet.

“I’ll call for the car if it’ll make you happy.”

The car isn’t gonna make me happy. But Zach doesn’t wait for me to protest, just walks out of my bedroom to do his job.

He’s ten years younger than me. The youngest of all the Boston Boys. My first cousin, my father’s brother’s only child. But his father died a long time back when he was just ten, so he came to live here in the building with us.

Zach is really the Baby Boston. Not me. But his side of the fam never caught the public’s curiosity like our side did.

I blame my father for that. He’s the reason people hate me.

My father died just as Zach was graduating high school and that’s when we learned that Zach’s trust fund was missing in my father’s documents. We knew Zach had one. He has to have one. We all have one. But my father did something with it. Or hell, knowing my father, he got drunk one night and gambled it away, or used it to pay someone off. He was just that irresponsible with his money. When you have so much of it you don’t miss a few million going missing you are a breed apart.

We’ve found cash stashed everywhere after he died. In the walls of the penthouse upstairs. In the goddamned floorboards. In the ceiling. And statements from bank accounts in places like the Cayman Islands, and Costa Rica, and Panama.

But none of it ever had Zach Boston’s name on it.

So I took over and paid his way through college. My trust fund is obscene. Whatever our father was really up to, it never touched us. So I guess I can’t complain too much about him.

But how come nobody talks about that? How nobody trashed his name? How come no one ever followed his ass around taking sneaky pictures to publish in the tabloids?