“It’s thermos Thursday, Q,” her brother said, not looking up from the tortoise.
“That’s right,” Quinn said. “It’s thermos Thursday. How do you feel about oatmeal?”
“I feel good about oatmeal.”
“Good,” Quinn said. “That’s what I’ll make.”
She had this, she thought. Easy peasy.
* * *
Quinn wasn’t sure how it happened, exactly. One minute Julius was parked in front of the TV with his thermos of oatmeal, his three perfectly smooth blankets, and his VHS recording of Guinness World Records Primetime. The next minute he was gone.
Gone.
What had happened was this: Quinn was in the kitchen, chopping onions. Chili was what her mom had recommended for Thursday’s dinner. It was a win-win: Julius liked chili, and chili fit in a thermos. The recipe was right there on the fridge. So Quinn was chopping away when her phone pinged. It was a Snapchat from Ivy, Carmen, and Lissa. Their mouths were open and they were barfing up rainbows. The caption read, We ate too much.
Quinn snapped back a picture of the onion she was chopping. I’m making dinner.
Ivy snapped back a picture of herself wearing hippie glasses and a flower tiara, holding her fingers in a V. Peace.
Quinn almost snapped a picture of herself with bunny ears and a pink nose, but then it hit her: Holy crap. She wasn’t wearing her wig. She ran to the foyer and grabbed Guinevere off the table, not bothering with wig tape, just stopping in front of the hall mirror to make sure her part was straight.
Back in the kitchen, Quinn tried again. Rabbit ears. Pink nose. Somebunny loves u.
Carmen snapped back a picture of her and Lissa with huge, stretched-out mouths and tiny piggy eyes.
Quinn snapped back a picture of her face beside the pan of sautéing onions and browning meat. Chillin w my chili.
This went on for some time. She dumped a can of pinto beans on top of the meat, snapped a picture. Quinn dumped a can of diced tomatoes on top of the beans, snapped a picture. When the simmering time was up, she put down her phone. She scooped chili into a thermos and set it on the table with a spoon and thermos top of milk. She walked into the living room to tell Julius dinner was ready.
Julius wasn’t there.
Quinn looked around the room. The TV was off. The blankets were on the floor.
“Jules?” she said, not too loudly. “Where are you, bud?”
No answer.
She checked the downstairs bathroom. No Julius. She checked the laundry room. No Julius. She checked Phil’s office. No Julius.
“Buddy? Dinner’s ready.”
Quinn wasn’t worried yet. Not really. Julius had probably gone up to his room, to find one of his books or to lie under his weighted blanket for a while, staring at the ceiling. He did that sometimes after school, to decompress.
“Julius?”
His room was empty. So was the upstairs bathroom. So was Quinn’s room, and her parents’ room, and the tiny spare bedroom filled with baskets of laundry waiting to be folded.
“Bud?”
Quinn could hear her voice getting louder. She could feel a tightening in her chest as she ran back downstairs to check Mo’s studio. You don’t think I know how to babysit my own brother? she’d told her dad.
Julius wasn’t in Mo’s studio.
He wasn’t in the front yard.
He wasn’t in the backyard.
“Julius!”
Quinn’s chest was getting tighter and tighter. What was she supposed to do, call her dad and interrupt his department dinner? Call her mom, 2,600 miles away, and send her into a panic by saying I can’t find Julius? No way was she doing that. No freaking way.
Quinn had lost her brother. He had vanished, right under her nose. How could this have happened?
Quinn ran back into the kitchen and grabbed her phone off the counter. Her hands were literally shaking as she called the first person she could think of.
“Nick?” she said. “I need help.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Tommy’s piece-of-junk car pulled into Quinn’s driveway. She ran down the front steps.
“Hey—” she said when Tommy hopped out of the car. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt and Gulls Head football shorts. “Aren’t you still grounded?”
“Yup,” Tommy said.
“But—you’re allowed to drive?”
“Nope,” Tommy said.
Quinn turned to Nick, who was easing his legs out of the backseat and onto the pavement. “I thought when you said someone would drive you, you meant your mom or dad.”
“My mom’s getting her hair cut,” Nick said. “My dad’s at work. You said right away.”
“Yeah, but … I don’t want Tommy to get in more trouble.”
“Hey,” Tommy said. “Let me worry about that.” He put his hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “What can I do to help?”
For a second, Quinn just looked at him. Tommy Strout was the nicest person in the world. How could Nick hate him so much?
“What do you need?” Tommy said.
The tightness in Quinn’s chest returned full force. “I can’t find my brother. He just … took off.”
CHAPTER
17
IT DIDN’T REGISTER WITH QUINN UNTIL she and Tommy were halfway up the slate steps and Nick was hobbling behind them. “Oh my God,” she said when it hit her. She hadn’t seen Nick all day. She turned around and looked at him. “Did you wear your legs to school?”
“No. I put them on when I got home, to practice stairs.”
Tommy turned around, too. “Hop on my back,” he said.
“I’m not getting on your back,” Nick said.
“Nicky. It’s steep. Hop on.”
“No.”
“Nick,” Tommy said.
And Quinn said, “Shhh.”
She heard Julius before she saw him, his voice floating down from somewhere high. “We have been recording the world’s achievements since 1955. Yours could be next.”
Sure enough, when she looked up—one, two, three stories, to the very top of her house—Quinn saw her brother. Blue sweatpants. Red shirt. Blond stegosaurus hair, lit up by the sun that was just starting to set.
Julius was on the roof.
Julius was on the roof, and he was snapping his fingers.
OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod, Quinn thought.
“Is that him?” Tommy said.
Quinn nodded. She wanted to scream through cupped hands, What are you doing? Get off the roof! But you couldn’t scream at Julius.
“Come on,” Quinn said.
She launched herself up the steps, two at a time. She flung open the front door. She sprinted up the stairs to the second floor, through her parents’ bedroom, over to the ceiling panel with the fold-down ladder. It hadn’t occurred to Quinn to check the attic. It wasn’t a finished room. It was full of mouse droppings and loose insulation and cardboard boxes that her parents still hadn’t unpacked. Quinn had only been up to the attic once, but she remembered another fold-down ladder that led outside. Her dad had gone up there to fix a gutter.
“Roof access?” Tommy said. He was right behind Quinn.
“Yeah.” She started to climb. “You need to know something before we get up there. My brother doesn’t like loud noises. And he hates to be touched.”
“Okay,” Tommy said.
“But if we have to grab him, we grab him.”
“Right,” Tommy said. “We won’t let him fall.”
Quinn and Tommy made their way through the mess to the ladder leading straight up to a skylight in the roof.
That was when Quinn suddenly remembered how much she hated heights. Hated them. The nausea she felt when she climbed the narrow wooden slats and stepped out through the skylight reminded her that nothing—not a bald head, not Ethan Hess, not an itchy wig that she’d thrown on so hastily it could come off in the next stiff breeze—nothing was worse than standing on the roof of a thr
ee-story house. Especially not a roof that her brother—her orchestra-conducting, jazz-finger-snapping, tap-dancing, judo-kicking brother—was currently on top of.
Standing on the roof, taking fast, panicky gulps of air, Quinn thought for a moment that she would pass out.
“Maybe you should go first,” Tommy whispered.
Yes. Quinn nodded.
What would Mo do? This was the question Quinn asked herself as she inched her way forward. Mo would use her calmest voice, her slowest movements.
“Julius?” Quinn spoke softly. She crept slowly. “Hey, bud. It’s Q.”
“Q.” Julius didn’t turn around, but he snapped his fingers excitedly.
“That’s right.” Quinn took another baby step forward. Her knees were shaking, but her voice held steady. “What are we doing up here?”
“On twenty-one April two thousand fourteen, Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet, both from France, broke the Guinness World Record for highest BASE jump from a building with a jump of eight hundred twenty-eight meters, two thousand seven hundred and sixteen feet, six inches. They performed the jump off the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, UAE.”
“Wow,” Quinn said. Another shuffle forward. “That’s really high.”
“I’m the highest BASE jump kid,” Julius said, snapping away.
“What’s that, bud?”
“I’m the highest BASE jump kid, Q. The highest BASE jump kid.”
Quinn’s stomach dropped, either from the view of the ground, which she could now see looming below her, or from the words coming out of her brother’s mouth. Quinn forced her eyes to look straight ahead. She breathed through her nose. “You want to break the world record for BASE jumping?”
“Not break a record. Set a record. I’m the highest BASE jump kid.”
Holy shiz. Holyshizholyshizholyshiz.
Quinn took another breath.
“Buddy,” she said softly. “Those guys who BASE jump? They wear special stuff. Like helmets. And parachutes. And … you know … kneepads. Like the ones I wear sometimes when I’m skateboarding.”
“Kneepads.” Julius gave a little kick that took him closer to the edge.
“That’s right. And you’re not wearing kneepads right now, are you?”
“I’m wearing sweatpants, Q. Size ten.”
“Right.” Quinn shuffled forward another centimeter. “And sweatpants, bud? Sweatpants are not what you want to wear to set the first kid’s BASE jumping record. They’re not thick enough. They won’t protect your knees.”
“They won’t protect your knees.”
“That’s right. Only kneepads will protect your knees … Hey, bud. Why don’t you take my hand and we’ll go downstairs and find you some kneepads?”
“No touching, Q. I don’t like touching.”
“Yeah, I know you don’t like touching. But it’ll just be for a minute, until we get to the ladder, okay?”
“A minute is sixty seconds.”
“That’s right. It probably won’t even take that long. It’ll be more like twenty seconds. Okay?”
“Okay, Q.”
Quinn reached out her hand. Julius did one of his spontaneous spin moves, catching his heel on one of the roof shingles. Tommy and Quinn dove at the same time. Tommy’s hand grabbed her brother’s shirt. Julius’s hand grabbed Quinn’s hair. The three of them landed on the roof in a series of slow-motion thumps.
Quinn …
Julius …
Tommy …
Guinevere didn’t land with a thump. She made no sound at all. Quinn didn’t even notice she was gone.
“Ow, Q.” Julius was the first one to speak, lifting his head and shaking it from side to side. “No kneepads.”
“Yeah, bud. Kneepads would have been good here.”
It wasn’t until Quinn got to her feet that she realized Nick had made it up onto the roof, and he was staring at her head. So was Tommy.
Julius wasn’t staring at Quinn’s head. He was staring into space, flapping his hands. But Nick and Tommy were definitely staring at her head.
“I have alopecia,” Quinn said. Her whole body was trembling, but her voice was strangely calm as she bent down to rescue Guinevere. “It’s an autoimmune disorder. Don’t worry. It’s not contagious.”
* * *
In the living room, after it was all over—after the four of them had descended from the roof, after Quinn had poured four glasses of orange juice—Julius curled up on the couch and fell asleep.
“He’s out for the count,” Tommy said.
“That happens sometimes,” Quinn said, “when he’s overstimulated.”
Nick was standing in the doorway. He hadn’t said much since they got downstairs. He hadn’t said a word about Quinn’s head. She’d considered putting Guinevere back on, but then she thought, what’s the point? She wasn’t getting any balder.
After a minute of them standing in silence, watching Julius sleep, Tommy said, “You were great up there.”
“Me?” Quinn said.
“Yeah, you.”
“So were you. If he’d jumped … if he’d fallen…” Quinn shivered. She didn’t want to think about that. “You saved him.”
Nick started applauding from the doorway, one of those slow-motion claps. “My brother the hero.”
“I’m no hero,” Tommy said.
“Sure you are, Tom,” Nick said. “You prevented a horrible tragedy. Imagine what would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”
“Sarcasm noted,” Tommy said. “Thanks.”
“Oh, you think I’m being sarcastic? What makes you think that? Are you a mind reader?”
Tommy looked at Quinn. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
Quinn shook her head. “It’s okay.”
“What are you apologizing for, Tom? You’re not apologizing for me, are you?” Nick pressed a hand to his chest. “For my behavior?”
“Jesus, Nicky,” Tommy muttered.
“Oh, now you’re blaming Jesus? Nice, Tom. Real nice.”
Quinn wasn’t sure what to do. Should she ask them to take it outside? She glanced over at Julius. He was still asleep, three blankets pulled up to his chin, face soft, blond hair tufting out on the couch pillow. Sleeping, Julius looked like any other kid. Exactly like any other kid.
“You know something, Nick?” Tommy said. “I’m getting pretty sick of this crap.”
“Oh yeah? What crap is that?”
Quinn watched the muscles in Tommy’s jaw clench. “You know what crap.”
“This crap?” Nick lifted one of his prosthetic legs in the air. “This crap right here? Is this the crap you’re talking about?”
“Yeah. That’s the crap I’m talking about.”
“Right.” Nick lowered his leg to the floor. “Well, I’m sorry that my amputated limbs are getting on your nerves.”
Tommy took a deep breath and looked Nick straight in the eye. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I have apologized a thousand times over. What more do you want from me?”
“I want you to know what it’s like! I want you to feel pain! That’s what I want!”
“So hit me!”
Nick snorted. “Hit you?”
Tommy stepped forward. He raised both arms out to his sides. “Hit me. As hard as you can.”
“Can I use an ax?”
“You guys,” Quinn said. “Come on.” But it was like they couldn’t hear her, like she wasn’t even there.
Nick took one step toward Tommy, then another. “Squat,” he said.
“What?”
“Squat down. You’re too tall.”
Tommy widened his stance. He bent his knees like one of those Olympic weight lifters. “How’s this?”
“Good.”
“You guys,” Quinn said again.
But Nick was already raising a fist in the air, letting it fly. He connected with Tommy’s shoulder, just barely, stumbling a little on his metal feet.
“Come on,” Tommy said, wagglin
g his fingers toward himself. “You’re a quarterback, Strout. You can do better than that.”
“I’m not.” Nick huffed through his nose. “A quarterback. Anymore.”
“Stop,” Quinn said. “This is crazy.”
Nick regained his balance. He cocked his arm.
“Do it,” Tommy said.
“Stop,” Quinn said as Nick’s fist sailed through the air again. This time he hit Tommy square in the face. Quinn heard a pop, like the sound of a carrot when you bite it in half. Tommy’s head snapped back and his legs collapsed underneath him. Quinn watched in stunned silence as blood came gushing out of Tommy’s nose and onto the hardwood.
From the floor, Tommy let out a few choice words before lifting his shirt to his face to catch the blood. “Well…?”
“Well, what?” Nick said.
“Do you feel better?”
“Yeah.” Nick nodded slowly. He looked a little dazed. “I do, actually.”
“Good. ’Cause I’m pretty sure you broke my nose.”
Quinn ran to the kitchen and grabbed a dish towel. She brought it back for Tommy. “Here. Keep the pressure on. That’ll slow the bleeding.”
He clutched the towel to his face and groaned.
“Should you…” Quinn hesitated. “Call your parents?”
Tommy shook his head, eyes squinting in pain. “I can drive to the hospital.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded, wincing again. “Yeah.”
“I’d come with you if … you know…” Quinn glanced at Julius, asleep on the couch. There was no way she was waking him up.
“’T’s okay.”
“Here,” Nick said gruffly, reaching out his hand.
Tommy looked at him.
“Take it,” Nick barked.
“Why, so you can drop me on my ass?”
“I won’t do that.”
Tommy took Nick’s hand, and Nick yanked him up. The towel fell to the floor. Tommy’s nose was crooked and still gushing blood.
“Jesus,” Nick muttered. “Mom’s gonna freak.”
“Yeah.” Tommy bent down to retrieve the towel and pressed it to his face again. “Dad’ll be impressed, though.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to call them?” Quinn said. “Or an ambulance?”