Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  What happened after that day at the park?

  What exactly did we leave behind in Germany?

  Is this really our new home?

  Why doesn’t Dad ever talk about Raven Brooks? About my grandparents?

  It’s these questions and so many more that keep my hand frozen over a stack of blank paper, a red pencil primed and ready to go.

  The basement is pretty dreary—windowless, with nothing more than a hanging light bulb here and there.

  I try holding a few sheets of paper up to the walls, but then an idea strikes me.

  I bound back up the basement stairs.

  “Mom, I need some boards,” I say to her as she seeks out a drawer to put the knives in. When she turns, she’s holding a particularly menacing-looking butcher knife.

  “On second thought, maybe I’ll just find them on my own,” I say, and she looks confused for a minute. Then she turns to see the knife in her hand.

  “What was it you said you needed?”

  “Boards,” I say. “Like, wooden planks or something.”

  Mom looks tired. She puts the heel of her hand to her forehead and closes her eyes.

  “Should I even ask why?”

  I shake my head.

  “I thought I saw some tools in the backyard, maybe near that old potting shed. You’re welcome to whatever you can find,” she says.

  I run out the front door and barely dodge the mover carrying in a heavy box of machine parts. A lone white arm dangles from the box, its robotic joints dormant and unprogrammed.

  “Watch for spiders! Or snakes! Or whatever else breeds here!” Mom calls out, remembering to worry.

  “Yup!”

  I spot the splintering potting shed in a far corner of the overgrown backyard, but all that stands against the side of it is a dirt-caked shovel and a rusted screwdriver. Just my luck; the door to the shed is padlocked shut.

  I glance stealthily over my shoulder to make sure I’m alone before sliding the leather lockpick pouch from my pocket.

  It wasn’t a skill I intended to pick up, not really. It’s just that there was a lot to explore in Germany. A lot. Our apartment building alone was over two hundred years old, and our landlord wasn’t exactly the sharing type. He forbade Mya and me from rummaging in the most interesting places, like closed-off basements and attic storage spaces. The lockpick set was for sale at a local traveling market, and it seemed like too much of a coincidence that it could have been right there, on sale for the exact amount of Deutsche Mark I had in my pocket, on the exact day Mr. Fischer had chased us off from the basement door.

  “We could wait until after dark,” I remember telling Mya, who had nodded earnestly. That very night, in the basement of our two-hundred-year-old apartment building, I fumbled my way through all the picks, trying to remember what the salesman had told me while Mya held the flashlight steady. When we finally got in, the basement turned out to be a total bust—just some dusty old dressers, some old lanterns, and a bicycle. That really wasn’t the point, though; the opened lock was. Suddenly, I had a master key to an entire world of secrets … or at least I would as soon as I got better at picking.

  I guess I never really thought of it as wrong. There are people who can decipher codes, people who can translate languages. I can pop locks.

  I realize, though, that not everyone sees it this way, which is why I’d rather not get caught. It’s not that I’d get into trouble for busting into a rickety potting shed. It’s that Mya’s the only one who knows my secret skill, and I’d rather keep it that way.

  The padlock is an easy one, but it’s rusted, so I have to chisel the gunk away first. After that, the lock is on the ground in three seconds, and inside the shed, I find a ton of spiderwebs, a few sheets of plywood, and some dusty cans of paint that I assume were left over from painting the outside of the house about a thousand years ago.

  “Jackpot.”

  I drag the boards from the shed along with a few of the small buckets of paint. All that’s left are the brushes, and after absolutely not screaming when a spider crawls down my arm from one of the bristles, I emerge from the shed with what I need.

  “Honey, pick those up! You’re going to carve a line right across the floor. Oh for Pete’s sake, Aaron!”

  Mom is still scolding me when I reach the basement stairs, bumping the plywood on each step as I descend.

  I decide I’m going to be surrounded by sunlight. Sunny days never seem to stay long enough, but I can fix that. Down here, I can sit under the sun and draw no matter what’s going on up there. Down here, it’ll be okay.

  I paint the sun a bright yellow. It’s the bucket with the least amount of paint in it, but I make it go as far as I can. When I finally do run out, I switch to blue and make sure the sky covers most of the wood that remains. I don’t have any more colors, so I mix the blue into the empty yellow bucket and let it absorb the color from the bottom and the sides until green emerges, and at the bottom of the pictures, I draw hills of grass.

  Later that night, after the paint has dried, I take one of the thick black markers we used to label our moving boxes and draw a perfect + across the pictures, framing them into four equal window panes. I prop the boards against the walls and stand back to examine my work. The single light bulb above does its best to illuminate the room, and my paintings still manage to cast brightness into the basement.

  Down here, no one can see in; it doesn’t matter what my family’s done. I can simply be.

  I’m just about to turn off the light and head up to dinner when I hear the basement door open. Mya pads down the stairs in her socks with the little rubber grips on the bottoms. They make a peeling sound each time she steps.

  “I don’t want to go to sleep tonight,” she says, sitting in front of the paintings. She doesn’t need to say she likes them. She’s already sitting under them, so they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.

  “What’s the matter?” I say, sitting beside her.

  “I had a nightmare last night,” she says. She’s matter-of-fact, but she’s scared.

  “I know,” I tell her.

  My parents were in the adjoining motel room with their door cracked, but if either of them woke when Mya started thrashing, they didn’t let on. I rolled from my bed and sat on the edge of hers, putting my hand in hers and letting her squeeze so hard it hurt, but it was one of the only things that settled her down when she had one of her nightmares. She never really wakes from them. She just sort of drifts away again, going to wherever she goes that isn’t as scary.

  She used to get night terrors once in a while when she was younger, but I’d never seen it so bad as when we were in Germany. Especially after the accident. Since then, it’s been almost every night.

  “So, you’re just going to stay awake forever?” I say, staring at the sunny sky I’ve created.

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Might get a little boring.”

  She thinks for a minute. “I’ll learn Mandarin.”

  I nod approvingly. “Ambitious.”

  “Do you think anyone is looking … for us?” she asks after a while.

  I shake my head automatically, even though I’ve asked myself that same question at least a hundred times and have yet to come up with an answer. I’m trying not to be angry that I can’t ask Mom or Dad, because why bother? They’ll only get all weird and evasive and change the subject, or Dad will fall into one of his bad moods, and it’s just not worth it.

  So instead, I keep shaking my head and saying, “Nah.” And when that doesn’t feel like enough, I say, “Definitely not.”

  She doesn’t say anything, so I’m not sure if that means she believes me and feels better or knows I’m lying and doesn’t want to hear me lie more. Maybe I’m just like Mom and Dad to her.

  “Dinner! Where are you two?” I hear Mom say from upstairs. She sounds tired. Her voice always gets higher when she’s tired.

  Mya and I hustle up the steps so we don’t make things wo
rse by dawdling. When we stumble into the kitchen, the table is set, and Dad is already a huge presence. Something has changed between this morning and now, when it’s just the four of us, and we’re left to look at one another across the table over takeout boxes.

  “I haven’t unpacked the dishes yet,” Mom says by way of apologizing for the food we’d always rather eat anyway. Maybe she’s saying it for Dad’s sake. He stares at the flattened hamburger in its little Styrofoam box, a bundle of limp french fries beside it on a plastic place mat.

  “Where have you two been?” he asks, his voice quiet. He doesn’t look up.

  Mya looks at me.

  “The basement,” I say.

  “Why?” he says, and it doesn’t feel like there’s a right answer.

  “Just … exploring,” I say.

  “Don’t you have enough to do in your room? You have your own rooms now,” he grumbles, slowly picking up his burger.

  Okay, so there was the right answer. I should have said enjoying my new room.

  “Yeah,” I say, lowering myself into my chair. Mya follows. Mom lifts her eyebrows at me, trying to urge me to say something more, but it feels like I’m tiptoeing through a minefield. This is what it’s like now with Dad. It’s so good until it goes bad. Then we’re all … wrong.

  “Um, it’s cool,” I say, and Dad finally looks up, suspicious. “The room,” I clarify.

  He keeps staring at me.

  “Thank you?” I try.

  “Is that a question?” he says, squeezing the ketchup out of his burger. I watch it drip onto the to-go container.

  “I like mine, too,” Mya chimes in, and immediately his expression softens. Not much, but enough. He’s always gentler with Mya.

  Mom releases a quiet breath I didn’t realize she’d been holding, and we all chew in silence. It’s at least better than facing the inquisition.

  “Didn’t that used to be your mother’s sewing room?” Mom says, finally taking a bite of her own burger. “Mya’s room, I mean?”

  Dad starts chewing more slowly. “Mmhmm.”

  “I thought that’s what I remember you saying,” Mom says, her voice trailing off toward the end.

  “Did Grandma sew a lot?” Mya asks, first directing her question toward Dad, but when he doesn’t answer, she looks to Mom.

  “Not sure she had time for that,” Mom says, choosing her words carefully as she eyes Dad. He’s back to focusing on the placemat.

  “No, she didn’t,” he says, like that answers anything at all. I’m trying so hard not to be mad about leaving, about having to move here basically in the middle of the night, about Dad’s scary moods, but it’s all getting hard, and he makes it harder when he stops talking altogether. And what’s so wrong with telling your kids about their grandparents anyway? Shouldn’t he want to share all these boring stories?

  Mya looks from Mom to Dad for answers, and Mom finally speaks up.

  “Grandma and Grandpa both worked very hard,” she says, and Dad’s grip on his burger tightens.

  “Doing what?” says Mya. I can’t tell if she’s being oblivious or just pushing her luck.

  “They were scientists,” Mom says carefully, but now I’m hoping Mya keeps pushing because this is starting to get interesting.

  “You mean like, doctors, or—?”

  “Something like that,” Mom says, starting to squirm.

  Then Mya looks at me, mischief glittering in her eyes. “Like mad scientists?” she says, and I have to pick it up now because she’s practically lobbed the ball into my court.

  “Like evil geniuses,” I say, and we both start in with our best evil laughs, and Mom looks like she’s about to pop.

  Not before Dad does, though.

  “Enough!” he roars suddenly, standing hard enough to hit the dining room table and then bending to clutch his kneecap.

  Mom practically chokes on her burger, and Mya and I stare at each other because that’s the safest place to look. We should have known this was going to happen.

  “Ted,” Mom tries after she’s managed to swallow her bite. “Come on.”

  This is the way Mom talks to him now, like she’s measuring the balance between asking and pleading. This never used to be Mom.

  Dad looks around like he can’t remember why he’s angry. That doesn’t stop him from crumpling his paper napkin into a tight ball and throwing it onto the table, pivoting on his heel to leave the room.

  “Where are you going?” Mom asks, now actually sounding worried.

  “Meeting Ike,” he says without turning. Instead, he strides over to the living room and shoves his feet into his shoes.

  “This late?”

  “He works late,” Dad says, and he finally sounds like he’s calming down a little. He turns to Mom.

  “Security guard work,” he says, and the look on his face is an apology.

  Mom accepts it by saying nothing.

  Then, without another word, Dad opens the front door of the house he grew up in and leaves like it’s just any other house in the world.

  Such a big decision. Will it be the blue shirt with yellow stripes or the yellow shirt with blue stripes?

  It would probably make Mom sad to know how little I care about what I wear on my first day of school in Raven Brooks. She made a special trip all the way to the outlet malls just so she could get Mya and me clothes we’d feel comfortable in. She’s trying, I know she is.

  Dad is, too. This morning he pulled out a waffle maker that hasn’t seen the light of day for at least a year. He had to plug it into a converter since he first bought it in Germany, which meant he had to detach the power drill he was trying to charge, only to discover we didn’t have any vanilla, so he gave us extra syrup to make up for it.

  “Can’t have you guys going hungry on your first day,” he’d said while he filled every single square with butter and maple.

  It’s not that we aren’t grateful. I can tell Mya is smiling even harder than normal so our parents can’t see how nervous she is. And I’m smiling—a step up from basically never smiling—because I don’t want them to know how not nervous I am, even though I probably should be.

  It’s just that school feels really unimportant in light of everything else that happened this summer. And it’s hard to feel like this isn’t all just temporary anyway. At least half of me is expecting to wake up any day now and find out we’re leaving, even though we just got here. I’ve pictured it more times than I can count: Dad nudging me awake, an empty cardboard box in his hands, “How does London sound?” Or Mom whispering in my ear, “Hurry now, we leave for Ontario tomorrow.”

  We left Germany in a hurry, so why not leave Raven Brooks just as fast?

  Apparently, though, we’re staying long enough to have to attend school, at least for now, so I have to choose a striped shirt I don’t care about and a pair of shorts I don’t care about and go to class and learn about things I don’t care about. All while I wait to see when and where we’ll go next.

  “Yellow with the blue stripes,” Mya says from behind me.

  I turn to see her wearing her own new first-day outfit: frayed denim shorts, green shirt knotted to the side, and the plastic purple watch she never takes off.

  “You don’t look like an ogre,” I say.

  “Thanks,” she says. “You still do, but I’m sure you’ll be forgiven.”

  “Why are we even bothering with this?” I ask her.

  “You mean school?”

  “I mean pretending we aren’t … temporary.”

  “I dunno,” Mya says, staring at a spot on the carpet. “I’m starting to think this is where we’re staying.”

  I watch her closely, trying to break her code. I know Mya better than anyone, and even I have a hard time reading her sometimes.

  “This place is weird,” I say.

  “You’ve barely even left the house,” Mya says, straightening her ponytail.

  “Well, this house is weird,” I say.

  “Aaron,” she says
, finally looking at me, “we’re weird. Face it, we are home.”

  Little sisters aren’t supposed to be right as often as Mya is, and it’s times like these when it annoys me the most.

  “You have syrup on your shirt,” I say, because at the moment, that’s my leg up. Pathetic. Then I drag my backpack down the stairs, hitting every step with a bump.

  Mom gives me a kiss on the top of my head. “Where’s your sister?”

  “Syrup,” I say, then move on to my dad.

  He takes my shoulders in his burly hands. It would have been so easy for him to be disappointed in me. Physically, he’s everything I’m not: wide-shouldered, with limbs that could be trained to swing heavy bats or throw balls fast and far. The only thing I’ve ever been good at—or had any interest in doing—is wielding a colored pencil.

  And Dad is proud of me. He tells me so, and he means it, too. He doesn’t mean everything he says, but about that, he’s telling the truth. He says I “have an eye,” then I tell him I have two, and he laughs and I laugh, and it’s been thousands of moments strung together just like that. And that’s all we need to say because we both know how talking about it can kill it, so we let it be.

  “Go draw the world on fire,” he says.

  I nod. This is what we say instead. Instead of Go light the world on fire, he tells me to draw it. I’m pretty sure he thinks drawing is what keeps me away from the same boundless mania that consumes him when he works. He has no idea I inherited it from him, and that both come from the same place inside me.

  Mya finally skips down the stairs, a tiny wet spot on her shirt where the syrup used to be.

  We walked to the schools the other day so we’d know how to get there. Conveniently, the elementary, middle, and high schools are all lined up next to one another.

  Friendly Court is so quiet, I wonder for a moment if all those people who were watching us move in were hired extras, and this is some sort of huge joke nobody’s let us in on yet. But as soon as we round the corner onto Third Street, I see a few more kids with backpacks, and I decide maybe there just aren’t any other kids on our block. Sometimes, the easiest answer wins out.