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Plus the blowback made him pretty sick.
I sigh. Unsaid is where I’m supposed to go if not with Grandad. I very much doubt Philip is planning on letting me stay. “You can tell Grandad I’m only his manservant till I get back in school. And that’ll take me a week, at most.”
“Tell him yourself,” Philip says.
Maura folds her arms across her chest. It’s so strange to see her bare hands that I’m embarrassed. Mom hated gloves at home; she said that families were supposed to trust one another. I guess Philip believes that too. Or something.
It’s different when the hands belong to someone I’m not related to, even if she is my sister-in-law. I try and force my gaze to her collarbone.
“Don’t let him bully you into staying at that creepy place,” Maura tells me.
“We used to live there!” Philip gets up and takes a beer from the fridge. “Anyway, I’m not the one telling him to go.” He pops the top, takes a long swig, and unbuttons the neck of his white dress shirt. I see the necklace of keloids, where his maker cut across his throat to symbolize the death of Philip’s previous life, and then packed the wound with ash until it scarred in a long, swollen line. It looks like a flesh-colored worm coiled above his collarbone. All laborers—minor crime bosses—have them. Just like a rose over the heart showed you were one of the Russian bratva, or like a yakuza inserts pearls under the skin of his penis for every year in jail. Philip got his scars three years back; now all he has to do to see people flinch is loosen his collar.
I don’t flinch.
The big six worker families came into power all down the East Coast in the thirties and have remained that way ever since. Nonomura. Goldbloom. Volpe. Rice. Brennan. Zacharov. They control everything, from the cheap and probably fake charms dangling near lighters on convenience store counters, to tarot card readers at malls who offer little curses for twenty extra dollars, to assault and murder done for those who can afford it and know who to pay. And my brother’s one of the people you pay, just like my Grandad was.
Maura looks away from him, gazing dreamily out the windows at the mostly dead stretch of grass outside the apartment. “Do you hear the music? Outside.”
“Cassel wants to stay at the old house,” says Philip with a quick, quelling look in my direction. “And there’s no music, Maura. No music, okay?”
Maura hums a little as she starts collecting the plates.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“She’s fine,” says Philip. “She’s tired. She gets tired.”
“I’m going to go do my homework,” I say, and when neither of them stops me, I go upstairs to Philip’s office in the loft. The couch is made up with new sheets, and the blankets she promised are piled on one end, so freshly washed that I smell the laundry detergent. Sitting in the leather chair in front of the desk, I spin around and switch on the computer.
The screen flickers to life, revealing a background screen littered with folders. I open a browser window and check my email. Audrey sent me a message.
I click so fast that it opens twice.
“Worried about u,” it reads. That’s it. She didn’t even sign her name.
I met Audrey the beginning of freshman year. She usually sat on the cement wall of the parking lot at lunch, drinking coffee and reading old Tanith Lee paperbacks. One time it was Don’t Bite the Sun. I’d read it too; Lila had loaned it to me. I told her I liked Sabella better.
“That’s because you’re a romantic,” she said. “Guys are romantic—no, really. Girls are pragmatic.”
“That’s not true,” I told her, but sometimes, after we started dating, I wondered if she was right.
It takes me twenty minutes to write back to her: “Home for wk. Looking forward to lotsa daytime tv.” I hope that it conveys the right amount of nonchalance; it certainly took long enough to fake.
Finally, I hit send and groan, feeling stupid all over again.
Most of the rest of my email that isn’t spam are links to the video of me clinging to the Smythe roof that someone already uploaded to YouTube, and a few messages from teachers, giving me the week’s assignments. I take the latter as a sign that all is not lost in terms of getting back into Wallingford, despite the former. I still have last night’s homework to finish too, but before I start, I want to figure out how I’m going to convince the school to forget all about the incident on the roof. After a little bit of Googling, I find two sleep specialists within an hour’s drive. I print out both addresses and save both logos as jpgs on my flash drive. It’s a start. I take it for granted that no doctor is going to put his reputation on the line to guarantee I won’t sleepwalk again, but I can find a way around that.
I am feeling pretty cocky, so I decide to tackle weaseling out of Grandad’s cleaning plan next. I call Barron’s cell. He answers on the second ring, sounding out of breath.
“You busy?” I ask.
“Not too busy for my brother who almost took a nosedive. So, what happened?”
“I had a weird dream and started sleepwalking again. It was nothing, but now I’m stuck at Philip’s mercy until the school realizes that I’m not going to kill myself.” I sigh. Barron and I were on the outs when we were kids, but now he’s practically the only person in my family I can really talk to.
“Philip pissing you off?” Barron says.
“Let’s put it this way: If I stay here long enough, I am going to kill myself.”
