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I stare up into the darkness and wish that I wasn’t so tired. “It’s hard to be a good person,” I say. “Because I already know I’m not.”
“Sometimes,” Sam says, “I can’t tell when you’re lying.”
“I never lie,” I lie.
* * *
After not sleeping all night, I’m pretty dazed in the morning. When Valerio bangs on the door, I answer, fresh from a cold shower that jolted me awake enough to put on some clothes. He looks relieved to find me alive and in my room. Next to Valerio stands my brother Philip. His expensive mirrored sunglasses are pushed up onto his slicked-back hair, and a gold watch flashes on his wrist. Philip’s light brown skin makes his teeth look whiter when he smiles.
“Mr. Sharpe, the board of trustees talked to the school’s legal team, and they want me to communicate to you that if you want to come back to school, you need to be evaluated by a physician, and that physician must be able to assure the school that you’re physically and mentally fit and that nothing like the incident that took place the night before last will happen again. Do you understand me?”
I open my mouth to say that I do, but my brother’s gloved hand on my arm stops me.
“You ready?” Philip asks lightly, still smiling.
I shake my head, gesturing around me at the lack of any bags, the scattered schoolbooks, the unmade bed. Yeah, sure, Philip has finally shown up, but it would be nice if he’d asked me if I’m all right. I almost fell off a roof. Clearly something is wrong with me.
“Need some help?” Philip offers, and I wonder if Valerio notices the edge in his voice. In the Sharpe family the worst thing you can do is be vulnerable in front of a mark. And everyone who isn’t us is a mark.
“I’m good,” I say, grabbing a canvas bag out of the closet.
Philip turns to Valerio. “I really appreciate you looking after my brother.”
This so surprises the hall master that, for a moment, he doesn’t seem to know what to say. I guess that few people consider calling the local volunteer firemen to drag a kid off a roof as great care. “We were all shocked when—”
“The important thing,” Philip interrupts smoothly, “is that he’s okay.”
I roll my eyes as I shove stuff into the bag—dirty clothes, iPod, books, homework stuff, my little glass cat, a flash drive I keep all my reports on—and try to ignore their conversation. I’m just going to be gone a couple of days. I don’t need much.
On the way out to the car, Philip turns to me. “How could you be so stupid?
I shrug, stung in spite of myself. “I thought I grew out of it.”
Philip pulls out his key fob and presses the remote to unlock his Mercedes. I slide into the passenger side, brushing coffee cups off the seat and onto the floor mat, where crumpled printouts soak up any spilled liquid.
“I hope you mean sleepwalking,” Philip says, “since you obviously didn’t grow out of stupid.”
3
I PUSH BRUSSELS SPROUTS around my plate and listen to my nephew scream from his high chair until Maura, Philip’s wife, gives him some frozen plastic thing to bite. The skin around Maura’s eyes is dark as a bruise. At twenty-one, she looks old.
“I put some blankets on the pullout couch in the office,” she says. Behind her are grease-spattered cabinets and paper-strewn laminate countertops. I want to tell her that she doesn’t need to worry about me on top of everything else.
“Thanks,” I say instead, because the blankets are already in the office and I don’t want to rock the boat of Philip’s hospitality by seeming ungrateful. I don’t, for instance, want to point out that the kitchen is too warm, almost suffocating. It reminds me of the holidays, when the oven has been on all day. And that makes me think about our father sitting at the dinner table, smoking long, thin cigarillos that yellowed his fingertips, while the turkey cooked. Sometimes, on bad days, when I really miss him, I’ll buy cigarillos and burn them in an ashtray.
Right now, though, all I miss is Wallingford and the person I could pretend to be when I was there.
“Grandad is coming tomorrow,” Philip says. “He wants you to go over to the old house and help him clean it out. He says he wants it all fixed up for Mom, when she gets out.”
“I don’t think that’s what she wants,” I say. “She doesn’t like people messing with her stuff.”
He sighs. “Tell that to him.”
“I don’t want to go,” I say. Philip means the house we grew up in—a big old place stuffed with the many things our parents accumulated. No garage sale was left unplundered as they grifted their way across the country each summer, while we kids stayed down in the Pine Barrens with Grandad. By the time dad died, the junk was so piled up that there were tunnels instead of rooms.
“Then don’t,” Philip says, and for a moment I actually think he’s going to look me in the eye, but he addresses my collar instead. “Mom can take care of herself. She always has. I doubt she’s even going back to that dump when she finishes her sentence.”
Mom and Philip have been on the outs since the trial, when he reluctantly bullied witnesses to help her defense team. Philip’s a physical worker—a body worker—who can break a leg with the brush of his pinkie. I don’t think he forgave Mom for being convicted despite what he did.
