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“Checking up on you? I’m your mother! I should be there! It is so unfair that I have to be cooped up like this while you’re gallivanting around on rooftops, getting into the kind of trouble you never would have if you had a stable family—a mother at home. That’s what I told the judge. I told him that if he put me away, this would happen. Well, not this specifically, but no one can say I didn’t warn him.”
Mom likes to talk. She likes to talk so much that you can mmm-hmm along with her and have a whole conversation in which you don’t say a word. Especially now, when she’s far enough away that even if she’s pissed off she can’t put her hand to your bare skin and make you sob with remorse.
Emotion work is powerful stuff.
“Listen,” she says. “You are going home with Philip. You’ll be among our kind of people, at least. Safe.”
Our kind of people. Workers. Only I’m not one. The only nonworker in my whole family. I cup my hand over the receiver. “Am I in some kind of danger?”
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. You know I got the nicest letter from that count. He wants to take me on a cruise with him when I get out of here. What do you think of that? You should come along. I’ll tell him you’re my assistant.”
I smile. Sure she can be scary and manipulative, but she loves me. “Okay, Mom.”
“Really? Oh, that’ll be great, honey. You know this whole thing is so unfair. I can’t believe they would take me away from my babies when you need me the most. I’ve spoken to my lawyers, and they are going to get this whole thing straightened out. I told them you need me. But if you could write a letter, that would help.”
I know I won’t. “I have to go, Mom. It’s study period. I’m not supposed to be on the phone.”
“Oh, let me talk to that hall master of yours. What’s his name. Valerie?”
“Valerio.”
“You just get him for me. I’ll explain everything. I’m sure he’s a nice man.”
“I’ve really got to go. I’ve got homework.”
I hear her laugh, and then a sound that I know is her lighting a cigarette. I hear the deep inhalation, the slight crackle of burning paper. “Why? You’re done with that place.”
“If I don’t do my homework, I will be.”
“Sweetheart, you know what your problem is? You take everything too seriously. It’s because you’re the baby of the family—” I can imagine her getting into that line of theorizing, stabbing the air for emphasis, standing against the painted cinder block wall of the jail.
“Bye, Mom.”
“You stay with your brothers,” she says softly. “Stay safe.”
“Bye, Mom,” I say again, and hang up. My chest feels tight.
I stand in the hallway a few moments longer, until the break starts and everyone files down to the common lounge on the first floor.
Rahul Pathak and Jeremy Fletcher-Fiske, the other two junior-year soccer players in the house, wave me over to the striped couch they’ve settled on. I take a hot chocolate packet, and mix it into a large cup of coffee. I think technically the coffee is supposed to be for staff, but we all drink it and no one says anything.
When I sit down, Jeremy makes a face. “You got the heebeegeebies?”
“Yeah, from your mother,” I say, without any real heat. HBG is the abbreviation for some long medical term that means “worker,” hence “the heebeegeebies.”
“Oh, come on,” he says. “Seriously, I have a proposition for you. I need you to hook me up with somebody who can work my girlfriend and make her really hot for me. At prom. We can pay.”
“I don’t know anyone like that.”
“Sure you do,” Jeremy says, looking at me steadily, like I’m so far beneath him he can’t figure out why he has to even try to persuade me. I should be delighted to help. That’s what I’m for. “She’s going to take off her charms and everything. She wants to do it.”
I wonder how much he’d pay for it. Not enough to keep me out of trouble. “Sorry. I can’t help you.”
Rahul takes an envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and pushes it in my direction.
“Look, I said I can’t do it,” I say again. “I can’t, okay?”
“No, no,” he says. “I saw the mouse. I am completely sure it was heading toward one of those glue traps. Dead before tomorrow.” He mimes his hand slashing across his throat with a grin. “Fifty dollars on glue.”
