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Her words were growing slower, drawing out. “’Kay. What happens then?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far yet. But maybe it illuminates—”
“What?”
“What’sactuallyunique about you.”
“So what’sactuallyunique about me?”
“From what I’ve seen so far? Your ability to eat enormous quantities of Red Vines.”
“You’re the worst.” On the verge of sleep, her drawl intensifying.
“You’re the worst, too.”
“Night, X.”
“Night, Josephine.”
3
The Butt-Clappers
The next day Evan did his twice-weekly circuit of the safe houses he maintained around the Greater Los Angeles Area to ensure that they looked lived in and to fine-tune his load-out gear and backup vehicles. As had become routine, he wound up at the home of Mia’s brother and sister-in-law for a visit with Peter in the backyard.
Evan’s relationship with Mia had been a confusion of starts and stops; though she no doubt sensed the contours of his secret life, as a district attorney she couldn’t ever know who he truly was or she’d be forced to arrest him. Despite all that, they had a basic underlying trust, especially when it came to her ten-year-old son. Mia had asked that Evan look out for Peter if anything went wrong on the operating table, to be the kind of old-fashioned influence on him that Evan had never had in his own childhood. When Mia had fallen into a coma, he’d tried to honor that promise as best he could.
It was the first of his standing obligations that involved another human being.
He and Peter ate sandwiches on the patio table while Peter’saunt and uncle banged around inside, shouting at each other from different rooms in a manner that Evan continuously mistook for arguing.
The sandwiches, halved into isosceles triangles, consisted of bologna, yellow mustard, and Wonder Bread. With his tongue Peter shoved a masticated glob through partially clenched teeth, baring his lips to show Evan the result.
“Check it out, Evan Smoak.” Peter had a raspy voice that inexplicably made everything he said sound amusing. “Bologna Play-Doh!”
He leaned forward, let the mush dribble onto the paper plate. Then he mashed it with his fingers, building a starchy snowman. He paused, glanced up. “Why aren’t you eating?”
Evan looked at the misshapen bologna Play-Doh, streaked red from the traces of Kool-Aid lingering on Peter’s tongue, and did his best to calm the OCD swarming his brain stem like wasps. “Not hungry.”
The cloying smell of Tropical Fruit tickled Evan’s muscle memory. He stared down at the plates set before them, the kind of meal he’d seen on TV growing up in the foster home. Most people didn’t understand how broke broke could be. The kind of broke when bologna was too expensive so they’d eat mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner. There was a secret shame to that kind of poverty, carried on the inside like a stain.
“Okay. Didja know”—with a dirty fingernail, Peter dug at some bread lodged between his front teeth—“if your butt cheeks were horizontal, they’d clap when you walked up the stairs?”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“Wouldn’t that be so funny?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then we’d just consider it normal. Like footsteps.”
Peter laughed that big openmouthed laugh, his charcoal eyes lit up. “So, like, at malls and stuff in the stairwells, there’d just be all this butt-clapping. Like a herd of butt-clappers.”
“If you start a garage band,” Evan said, “that should be your name.”
“Herd of Butt-Clappers?”
