“Uh . . . I guess.” I look around too, frickin’ blank. All I can think to take is my clamshell ashtray. “The clothes, anyway. I suck at packing.”
“Toothbrush?” Jase suggests mildly. “Razor. Books, maybe? Sports stuff.”
“My lacrosse stick from Ellery Prep? Don’t think I’ll need it.” I tap out another cigarette.
“Bike? Skateboard? Swim gear?” Jase glances over at me, smile flashing in the flare of my lighter.
Mom barges back in so fast, the door knocks against the wall. An umbrella and a huge yellow slicker are draped over one arm, an iron in one hand. “You’ll want these. Should I pack you blankets? What happened to that nice boy you were going to move in with, anyway?”
“Didn’t work out.” As in: That nice boy, my AA buddy Connell, relapsed on both booze and crack, called me all slurry and screwed up, full of blurry suck-ass excuses, so he’s obviously out. The garage apartment is my best option.
“Is there even any heat in that ratty place?”
“Jesus God, Ma. You haven’t even seen the frickin’—”
“It’s pretty reliable,” Jase says, not even wincing. “It was my brother’s, and Joel likes his comforts.”
“All right. I’ll . . . leave you two boys to—carry on.” She pauses, runs her hand through her hair, showing half an inch of gray roots beneath the red. “Don’t forget to take the stenciled paper Aunt Nancy sent in case you need to write thank-you notes.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Ma. Uh, forgetting, I mean.”
Jase bows his head, smiling, then shoulders the cardboard box.
“What about pillows?” she says. “You can tuck those right under the other arm, can’t you, a big strapping boy like you?”
Christ.
He obediently raises an elbow and she rams two pillows into his armpit.
“I’ll throw all this in the Jetta. Take your time, Tim.”
I scan the room one last time. Tacked to the corkboard over my desk is a sheet of paper with the words THE BOY MOST LIKELY TO scrawled in red marker at the top. One of the few days last fall I remember clearly—hanging with a bunch of my (loser) friends at Ellery out by the boathouse, where they stowed the kayaks (and the stoners). We came up with our antidote to those stupid yearbook lists: Most likely to be a millionaire by twenty-five. Most likely to star in her own reality show. Most likely to get an NFL contract. Don’t know why I kept the thing.
I pop the list off the wall, fold it carefully, jam it into my back pocket.
Nan emerges as soon as Jase, who’s been waiting for me in the foyer, opens the creaky front door to head out.
“Tim,” she whispers, cool hand wrapping around my forearm. “Don’t vanish.” As if when I leave our house I’ll evaporate like fog rising off the river.
Maybe I will.
By the time we pull into the Garretts’ driveway, I’ve burned through three cigarettes, hitting up the car lighter for the next before I’ve chucked the last. If I could have smoked all of them at once, I would’ve.
“You should kick those,” Jase says, looking out the window, not pinning me with some accusatory face.
I make to hurl the final butt, then stop myself.
Yeah, toss it next to little Patsy’s Cozy Coupe and four-year-old George’s midget baby-blue bike with training wheels. Plus, George thinks I’ve quit.
“Can’t,” I tell him. “Tried. Besides, I’ve already given up drinking, drugs, and sex. Gotta have a few vices or I’d be too perfect.”
Jase snorts. “Sex? Don’t think you have to give that up.” He opens the passenger-side door, starts to slide out.
“The way I did it, I do. Gotta stop messing with any chick with a pulse.”
Now Jase looks uncomfortable. “That was an addiction too?” he asks, half in, half out the door, nudging the pile of old newspapers on the passenger side with the toe of one Converse.
“Not in the sense that I, like, had to have it, or whatever. It was just . . another way to blow stuff off. Numb out.”
He nods like he gets it, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Gotta explain. “I’d get wasted at parties. Hook up with girls I didn’t like or even know. It was never all that great.”
“Guess not”—he slides out completely—“if you’re with someone you don’t even like or know. Might be different if you were sober and actually cared.”
“Yeah, well.” I light up one last cigarette. “Don’t hold your breath.”
Chapter Three
ALICE
“There is,” I say through my teeth, “an owl in the freezer. Can any of you guys explain this to me?”
Three of my younger brothers stare back at me. Blank walls. My younger sister doesn’t look up from texting.
I repeat the question.
“Harry put it there,” Duff says.
“Duff told me to,” Harry says.
George, my youngest brother, cranes his neck. “What kind of owl? Is it dead? Is it white like Hedwig?”
I poke at the rock-solid owl, which is wrapped in a frosty freezer bag. “Very dead. Not white. And someone ate all the frozen waffles and put the box back in empty again.”
They all shrug, as if this is as much of an unsolvable mystery as the owl.
“Let’s try again. Why is this owl in the freezer?”
“Harry’s going to bring it in for show-and-tell when school starts,” Duff says.
“Sanjay Sapati brought in a seal skull last year. This is way better. You can still see its eyeballs. They’re only a little rotted.” Harry stirs his oatmeal, frowning down at what I’ve tried to pass off as a fun “breakfast for lunch” occasion. He upturns the spoon, shakes it, but the glob of oatmeal sticks, thick as paste, stubborn as my brother. Harry holds the spoon out toward me, accusingly.
“You get what you get and you don’t get upset,” I say to him.
“But I do. I do get upset. This is nasty, Alice.”
“Just eat it,” I say, clinging to patience with all my fingernails. This is all temporary. Just until Dad gets a bit better, until Mom doesn’t have to be in three places at once. “It’s healthy,” I add, but I have to agree with my seven-year-old brother. We’re way overdue for a grocery run. The fridge has nothing but eggs, applesauce, and ketchup, the cabinet is bare of anything but Joel’s protein-enhanced oatmeal. And the only thing in the freezer is . . . a dead bird.
“We can’t have an owl in here, guys.” I scramble for Mom’s reasonable tone. “It’ll make the ice cream taste bad.”
“Can we have ice cream instead of this?” Harry pushes, sticking his spoon into the oatmeal, where it pokes out like a gravestone on a gray hill.
I try to sell it as “the kind of porridge the Three Bears ate,” but George and Harry are skeptical, Duff, at eleven, is too old for all that, and Andy wrinkles her nose and says, “I’ll eat later. I’m too nervous now anyway.”
“It’s lame to be nervous about Kyle Comstock,” Duff says. “He’s a boob.”
“Boooooob,” Patsy repeats from her high chair, the eighteen-month-old copycat.
“You don’t understand anything,” Andy says, leaving the kitchen, no doubt to try on yet another outfit before sailing camp awards. Six hours away from now.
“Who cares what she wears? It’s the stupid sailing awards,” Duff grumbles. “This stuff is vomitous, Alice. It’s like gruel. Like what they make Oliver Twist eat.”
“He wanted more,” I point out.
“He was starving,” Duff counters.
“Look, stop arguing and eat the damn stuff.”
George’s eyes go big. “Mommy doesn’t say that word. Daddy says not to.”
“Well, they aren’t here, are they?”
George looks mournfully down at his oatmeal, poking at it with his spoon like he might find Mom and Dad in there.
“Sorry, Georgie,” I say repentantly. “How about some eggs, guys?”
“No!” they all say at once. They’ve had my eggs before. Since Mom has been spendin
g a lot of time at either doctors’ appointments for herself or doctor and physical therapy consults for Dad, they’ve suffered through the full range of my limited culinary talents.
“I’ll get rid of the owl if you give us money to eat breakfast in town,” Duff says.
“Alice, look!” Andy says despairingly, “I knew this wouldn’t fit.” She hovers in the doorway in the sundress I lent her, the front sagging. “When do I get off the itty-bitty-titty committee? You did before you were even thirteen.” She sounds accusatory, like I used up the last available bigger chest size in the family.
“Titty committee?” Duff starts laughing. “Who’s on that? I bet Joel is. And Tim.”
“You are so immature that listening to you actually makes me younger,” Andy tells him. “Alice, help! I love this dress. You never lend it to me. I’m going to die if I can’t wear it.” She looks wildly around the kitchen. “Do I stuff it? With what?”
“Bread crumbs?” Duff is still cracking up. “Oatmeal? Owl feathers?”
I point the oatmeal spoon at her. “Never stuff. Own your size.”
“I want to wear this dress.” Andy scowls at me. “It’s perfect. Except it doesn’t fit. There. Do you have anything else? That’s flatter?”
“Did you ask Samantha?” I glare at Duff, who is shoving several kitchen sponges down his shirt. Harry, who doesn’t get what’s going on—I hope—but is happy to join in on tormenting Andy, is wadding up some diapers from Patsy’s clean stack and following suit. My brother’s girlfriend has much more patience than I do. Maybe because Samantha only has one sibling to deal with.
“She’s helping her mom take her sister to college—she probably won’t be back till tonight. Alice! What do I do?”
My jaw clenches at the mere mention of Grace Reed, Sam’s mom, the closest thing our family has to a nemesis. Or maybe it’s the owl. God. Get me out of here.
“I’m hungry,” Harry says. “I’m starving here. I’ll be dead by night.”
“It takes three weeks to starve,” George tells him, his air of authority undermined by his hot cocoa mustache.
“Ughhh. No one cares!” Andy storms away.
“She’s got the hormones going on,” Duff confides to Harry. Ever since hearing it from my mother, my little brothers treat “hormones” like a contagious disease.
My cell phone vibrates on the cluttered counter. Brad again. I ignore it, start banging open cabinets. “Look, guys, we’re out of everything, got it? We can’t go shopping until we get this week’s take-home from the store, and no one has time to go anyway. I’m not giving you money. So it’s oatmeal or empty stomachs. Unless you want peanut butter on toast.”
“Not again,” Duff groans, shoving away from the table and stalking out of the kitchen.
“Gross,” Harry says, doing the same, after accidentally knocking over his orange juice—and ignoring it.
How does Mom stand this? I pinch the muscles at the base of my neck, hard, close my eyes. Push away the most treacherous thought of all: Why does Mom stand this?
George is still doggedly trying to eat a spoonful of oatmeal, one rolled oat at a time.
“Don’t bother, G. You still like peanut butter, right?”
Breathing out a long sigh, world-weary at four, George rests his freckled cheek against his hand, watching me with a focus that reminds me of Jase. “You can make diamonds out of peanut butter. I readed about it.”
“Read,” I say automatically, replenishing the raisins I’d sprinkled on the tray of Patsy’s high chair.
“Yucks a dis,” she says, picking each raisin up with a delicate pincer grip and dropping it off the side of the high chair.
“Do you think we could make diamonds out of this peanut butter?” George asks hopefully as I open the jar of Jif.
“I wish, Georgie,” I say, looking at the empty cabinet over by the window, and then noticing a dark blue Jetta pull into our driveway, the door kick open, a tall figure climb out, the sun hitting his rusty hair, lighting it like a match.
Fabulous. Exactly what we need for the flammable family mix. Tim Mason. The human equivalent of C-4.
TIM
We walk up the creaky garage stairs and Jase hauls a key out of his pocket, unlocks the door, flips on the lights. I brush past him and drop my cardboard box on the ground. Joel’s old apartment is low-ceilinged and decorated with milk crate bookcases, ugly couch, mini-fridge, microwave, denim beanbag chair with Sox logo, walls covered in Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and all that—tits everywhere—and a gigantic iron weight rack with a shit-ton of weights.
“This is where Joel took all those au pairs? I thought he had better game than this massive cliché.”
Jase grimaces. “Welcome to Bootytown. Supposedly the nannies never minded because they expected it of American boys. Want me to help yank ’em down?”
“Nah, I can always count body parts if I have trouble sleeping.”
After a brief scope-out of the apartment, during which he makes a face and empties a few trash cans, he asks, “This gonna work for you?”
“Absolutely.” I reach into my pocket, pull out the lined paper list I snatched off my bulletin board, and slap it on the refrigerator, adios-ing a babe in hot-pink spandex.
Jase scans my sign, shakes his head. “Mase . . . you know you can come on over anytime.”
“I’ve been to boarding school, Garrett. Not like I’m afraid of the dark.”
“Don’t be a dick,” he says mildly. He points in the direction of the bathroom. “The plumbing backs up sometimes. If the plunger doesn’t work, text; I can fix it. I repeat, you’re always welcome to head to our house. Or join me on the predawn job. I gotta pick up Samantha now. She ended up not going to Vermont. Ride along?”
“With the perfect high school sweethearts? Nah. I think I’ll stay and see if I can break the plunger. Then I’ll text you.”
He flips me off, grins, and leaves.
Time to get my ass to a meeting. Better that than alone with a ton of airbrushed boobs and my unfiltered thoughts.
Chapter Four
TIM
When I walk up the Garretts’ overgrown lawn after the meeting—which only partially took the edge off—the first thing I see is Jase’s older sister, Alice, tanning in the front yard.
In a bikini.
Shockwave scarlet.
Straps untied.
Olive skin.
Toenails painted the color of fireballs.
Can I say there are few things on earth that cheer me up more than Alice Garrett in a bikini?
Except Alice without a bikini. Which I’ve never seen, but I’ve a hell of an imagination.
She’s almost asleep, in a tiny blue-and-green lawn chair, her head and her long, always-morphing hair (brown with blond streaks right now) flopping heavily to one side, curling shorter in the late-summer heat. Because I’m unscrupulous, I flop down on the grass next to her and take a good long look.
Oh, Alice.
After a few seconds, she opens her eyes, squints, flips her hand to her forehead to block the sun, stares at me.
“Now,” I tell her, “would be an excellent time to avoid unsightly tan lines. I stand ready to assist.”
“Now,” she says, with that killer smile, “would be an even better time to avoid lame come-ons.”
“Aw, Alice, I swear I’ll be there to soothe your regret for wasting time once you realize I’ve been right for you all along.”
“Tim, I’d chew you up and spit you out.” She slants forward, yanks the straps of her bikini behind her neck, ties them, and settles back. God. I almost can’t breathe.
But I can talk.
I can always talk.
“We could progress to that, Alice. But maybe we start with some gentle nibbling?”
Alice shuts her eyes, opens them again, and gives me an indecipherable look.
“Why don’t I scare you?” she asks.
“You do. You’re scary as hell,” I assure her. “But that works fo
r me. Completely.”
She’s about to say something, but the family van pulls in just then, even more battered than usual. The right front fender has flaking paint. They’ve tried to put some rust primer around the sliding back door. The side looks like it’s been keyed. Both hubcap covers on this side are missing. Alice starts to get up, but I rest my hand on a smooth brown shoulder, press her down.
“On it.”
She squints up at me, head cocked to the side, rubs her bottom lip with her finger. Then settles back in the chair. “Thanks.”
Mrs. Garrett, wearing a bright blue beach cover-up-type thing and a wigged-out face, climbs out of the van.
“Everything okay?” I ask, sort of a joke since there’s nothing but ear-melting screeching when I slide open the side door. Patsy, George, and Harry are all red-faced and sweaty. Patsy’s mouth is open in a huge O and she’s a sobbing mess. George also looks teary-eyed. Harry’s more like pissed off.
“I’m not a baby,” he announces to me.
“Clear on that, man.” Though he’s wearing bathing trunks with little red fire hats on them.
“She”—he jabs a sandy finger at his mom—“made us leave the beach.”
“Patsy’s naptime, Harry. You know this. You can swim in the big pool for a while. Maybe we can get a cone at Castle’s after the sailing awards.”
“Pools aren’t cool,” Harry moans. “We left before the ice-cream truck, Mommy. They have Spider-Man Bomb Pops.” He stalks up the steps, his angry, scrawny back all hunched over his skinny, little-dude legs. The screen door slams behind him.
“Whoa,” I say. “Child abuse.”
Mrs. Garrett laughs. “I’m the meanest mom in the world. I have it on good authority.” Then she glances at George and leans into me, smelling like coconut sunscreen. At first I think she’s sniff-checking my breath, because that’s why adults ever get this close. Instead she whispers, “Don’t mention asteroids.”
Not my go-to conversation starter, so all good there.
But George is clutching a copy of Newsweek, his shoulders heaving. Patsy’s still shrieking. Mrs. Garrett looks back and forth between them, like, who to triage first.