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“Just give them to me!” Vincent opened the top right drawer and grabbed Carmine’s wallet. Fumbling through it, he pulled out the silver American Express credit card and shoved it into his pocket before tossing the wallet aside, going right back to searching.
Carmine’s blood boiled. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I tried to be your friend,” Vincent said. “I cut you some slack, hoping it was a phase, but you only got worse. So I sent you away. After what you did last year, so help me God, I hoped you’d get the message. But no, you come back and start the cycle all over again. The fighting, the back talking, the disrespect . . . I can’t take it anymore.”
“What the hell did I do?”
“The better question would be what didn’t you do.” He slammed a drawer and grabbed the bottom one, but it wouldn’t budge. “What’s in here?”
Carmine didn’t answer, watching as his father yanked on it.
“Where’s the key to open it, Carmine?”
“You’re not getting it. You’re not getting any of my keys.”
Vincent stood up straight at his words. “I am getting your keys. You’re on restriction. You’ll go nowhere but to school, and you’ll stay there. No more cutting class. You’ll do your work, you’ll watch your mouth, you’ll keep your hands to yourself, and when that last bell rings, you’ll come straight home. Nothing else!”
eached up to touch her bruised face when it dawned on her what he meant. “I fell.”
“You fell? If you don’t wanna tell me, say so. No need for a bullshit response.”
“Honestly, I fell! I tried to, uh . . . I was . . .”
“You don’t have to explain. It’s none of my business, anyway.”
“But I did fall,” she insisted. He still didn’t look convinced, but she wasn’t sure what else she could say. She pointed to his bandage. “What happened to you?”
He touched his injury like she’d done and shrugged. “I fell.”
“Did you really?”
“No,” he said, laughing as he disappeared down the stairs.
She frowned. “But I did.”
* * *
When Carmine was ten years old, his father brought home a cat, its fur scraggly and tail chopped off. It infested the house with fleas and clawed up the furniture. Two weeks later the cat disappeared. Carmine never asked what happened to it. Frankly, he didn’t care.
When he was fourteen, it was two dogs. The first was a little ankle biter with kinky yellow fur and three legs. It pissed all over the house before chewing up Vincent’s favorite shoes. It didn’t last a week. The second dog was a pit bull with one eye and deformed ears. His father tied it up in the backyard, and it barked all night, keeping them awake. Carmine could barely function in school the next day, and when he got home, the dog was gone.
So Carmine wished he was shocked when his father brought home a girl, but he wasn’t. He figured he was just picking up strays again. But Carmine could tell something was different, and he didn’t know what to make of it. His father was buying the girl things. He hadn’t even bought the last dog any food.
That fact weighed heavily on him as he strolled down the stairs. He told himself it was sheer curiosity fueling his thoughts, but the truth was, in just one day, the strange girl had gotten under his skin. He couldn’t pinpoint why or what to do about it, but he didn’t like the nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach. It irritated him, keeping him awake all night long, like a tiny little hammer chipping away at his insides. Fucking conscience.
He paused on the second floor in front of his father’s office. “Hey, do you want me to—?”
“No.”
Vincent’s sharp voice made Carmine stop midsentence. “You didn’t let me finish. I was gonna ask—”
“I don’t need you to finish,” Vincent said, remaining hunched over his laptop with his reading glasses low on his nose. “I don’t want you to do anything for me.”
“But what about the—?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Vincent laughed humorlessly. “Not like you’d actually worry about it. You don’t care about anything that doesn’t benefit you.”
“That’s not true. I care about—”
