Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  Three chairs scrape the floors as the grown-ups stand stiffly, leaving Mya and me at the table with the last slice.

  “Mine,” says Mya, recovering quickly from the awkwardness.

  I don’t fight her. My appetite has officially died. Between memories of Germany, this morning’s encounter at the grocery store, and whatever just happened, it’s a wonder my stomach hasn’t turned itself fully inside out by now.

  I look at Mya and wonder how she’s doing it. But I know better. She’s taking it all in, too. She just has different ways of dealing. Her torment comes at night.

  I hear the front door close a little harder than it needs to, and my parents mutter something that gets loud for a second before dying back down. All I catch was “don’t understand” and “worry yourself” before I hear Dad retreat to his study down the back hallway.

  When Mom returns, she smooths her hands over her skirt and pretends nothing happened.

  “We’ll have to order from this pizza place again!” she says, her voice that weird, high-pitched chirp she gets when she’s covering something up.

  “Pretty sure we don’t have a choice,” I say.

  “Good point.”

  * * *

  I can’t sleep that night. It was lights out almost two hours ago, but I can’t get my stomach to settle. At first I tell myself it’s just the pizza, but I’m an even worse liar when I’m trying to lie to myself. The day’s conversations are circling my brain like a flushed toilet, and after another fifteen minutes of tossing and turning, I head downstairs for a glass of water.

  I don’t even make it to the kitchen before I see the glow of light coming from Dad’s study, which is weird because I could have sworn I heard him go to bed over an hour ago.

  It’s impossible to do much actual creeping in this house, with every floorboard making a different sound when you step on it, but I move as quietly as I can down the little back hall.

  When I get to the door, it’s cracked just enough for me to see not my dad, but my mom, sitting at the desk piled high with papers scrawled with notes and designs. Her head is in her hands, and though she isn’t moving, I can hear her sniffling softly.

  I don’t mean for her to notice me there, but the stupid floors …

  “Oh! Aaron, I didn’t hear you,” Mom says, wiping her face like it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to be sitting alone in Dad’s study crying at night.

  No kid should ever see their parents cry. No matter how old I am, it feels like something at the core of the earth is rupturing when I see my mom cry. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, the only thing I want to do is dig a hole and bury myself.

  Anyway, we’re both here instead of sleeping, and we’re both thinking about something that needs to be shared, even if it’s just with each other.

  “What that lady at the grocery store said today …” I begin, and please fill in the rest. I’m begging her to please say the rest.

  “Go on back to sleep, Cat.”

  Cat. She hasn’t called me Cat in over a year. I remember the last time. It was four in the morning in Germany, and I’d caught her in a moment just like this, when we both should have been sleeping, but neither of us were. It was when things were starting to get bad, and at the time, it brought me so much comfort to hear her call me that name like she used to. Her two kids, Cat and Mouse.

  It doesn’t have the same effect anymore, which makes me feel even worse.

  “I can’t,” I tell her, then stare at the pile of papers her elbows are resting on. She carefully moves some folders over the tops of the most exposed papers without breaking eye contact with me. It’s an eerily familiar move.

  “What do we do when we can’t sleep?” she asks me. Because we all have a method in this household. At some point or another, all four of us are plagued by fits of sleeplessness. It’s a family legacy.

  “Think of the bright places,” I say, less from belief and more from rote memory. I think about the fake windows I hung in the basement, painted with sunshiny days, the vibrant pictures I’ve plastered my bedroom walls with, all their yellows and minty greens and light blues.

  I’m trying, Mom. But the darkness always seems to find us.

  “I know you’re worried,” Mom says in a rare moment of candidness. “But this place is going to be different, Cat. This place is going to be a new beginning for us.”

  She’s so close to being convincing. If I were to close my eyes, I bet I could almost fool myself into believing her, that Raven Brooks really will be different, and that we can simply erase everything we left behind—everything we escaped halfway around the world.

  But I can see her eyes, even with the meager light my dad’s desk lamp puts out. The edges of her eyelids are rimmed in pink, and why else would she be crying unless she weren’t just as convinced as I am that things are already starting to fall apart?

  I give her one more chance to tell me what she’s really thinking.

  “So, you think moving here was the right thing to do?”

  Mom stares at me in the doorway for what feels like a very long time before saying, “I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”

  I tell her good night and go back to my room with her words chasing one another through my head.

  I wouldn’t have done it any other way.

  Which isn’t the right thing to do. It’s more like the only thing we could do.

  It’s some time before I finally hear my mom pad up the stairs and slip back into her room where Dad is sleeping. I wait even longer to make sure she won’t be awake to hear me go back downstairs.

  The door to Dad’s study is closed, but it’s not locked. The folders Mom slid over the papers are still there. When I reach for the folders to scoot them over, I have to work to steady my shaking hand.

  Think of the bright places, I tell myself. But it’s far too dark in this room for that.

  I see that the first paper is a photocopy of a contract carrying my dad’s signature, along with a scribbled signature from someone at the Golden Apple Corporation.

  I take a full breath in and push it out. So, it’s official. My dad will design a new amusement park for the Golden Apple Corporation, whatever that is.

  That would have been enough truth to swallow for one night, but the light blue schematic rolled at the top and bottom edges underneath the signature page is impossible to ignore, so I move the contract aside.

  What I see is the worst kind of omen.

  There, sketched and erased and sketched over, with recalculated steepness and near impossible angles, is the beginnings of a roller coaster that makes terror its priority. I’ve seen a schematic like this, only instead of rails and ties and golden apples, the previous one had water and boats. But those same steep drops, those same inhuman climbs—they all looked just like this.

  He wouldn’t risk making the same mistake again.

  I so badly want this to be true. I’m willing to do almost anything I can to believe it.

  But the truth is written all over his desk.

  Enzo has an actual game room, a space that’s bigger than my bedroom, with no door or closet, so it’s more like a loft on the second story of their house. It’s one of those places my mom would call a “rumpus room,” which always sounded ridiculously old-fashioned to me.

  Anyway, “game room” is the perfect name for it, because Enzo has basically every video game ever made, and Mya and Maritza are quickly making their way through that entire collection.

  “How do I punch?” Mya says frantically, jamming her thumbs against the buttons.

  “Well not like that,” says Maritza. “You look like you’re trying to dance.”

  Mya’s character flails and dips while a three-headed beast lunges through the air.

  “Not even rhythm can save you now!” I taunt her from the other end of the room. Enzo and I had to choose: We could either let our sisters have a turn, or Enzo’s dad was going to make us watch a documentary on water fowl.

&nb
sp; No one said we couldn’t give them a hard time, though.

  “Go back to your lame book project,” Maritza says to me with the same level of comfort she tells her own brother to bug off, and I can’t help but feel flattered.

  Enzo pulls me back into our discussion, which isn’t about a book project, even though Enzo sort of wants it to be.

  “Dude, I’m telling you, we could make a comic book series or something,” he says, watching my hand closely.

  It started as a butterfly, but my drawing took a dark turn—that happens sometimes—and now I’ve created a sort of mutant moth-man, with a twisted body and frayed wings, and he’s standing in the wreckage of a town he’s just destroyed.

  “I dunno,” I say, adding some shading to the side of the moth guy’s face. “It’s just sort of something I do for fun.”

  That’s not true. Half the time I draw without even realizing what my hand is doing. All I know for sure is that it feels better when my hand is moving, and when I finish a drawing, I’m always a little sad. Which I guess is why I keep doing it, so I never have to finish.

  “Or like a comic strip, for the school paper!” he says, either not hearing or not caring about my lack of enthusiasm.

  “Why don’t you talk to your dad?” I say. “You like to write; your dad works at the newspaper. I bet he could hook you up with some sort of … I don’t know, internship or something?”

  “Nah, Dad isn’t like that,” Enzo says, the excitement draining from his voice. “Dad’s all about making it on your own merits, no special favors. Besides, he wants me to be an accountant or a nurse or something.”

  Enzo turns his notebook to a blank page, hiding the words he showed me earlier, which were actually really good.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” says Enzo. “He’s super into what he does, but he doesn’t want me or my sister doing it. He says it’s not stable enough, whatever that means.”

  Enzo looks embarrassed, like I might think differently of him now because maybe they haven’t always been the type of family to have a game room or a house in New Town. The thing is, though, I know exactly what his dad means by unstable.

  “My mom is sort of the same,” I say, because I’ve seen the way she fidgets and distracts herself when she sees me drawing. It’s not that she isn’t proud of me; I think she just sees me looking like Dad.

  Enzo’s quiet, and after a second, I realize it might be because I mentioned my mom, and his own mom died when he was really young. I didn’t get the impression that it was an off-limits subject, necessarily. I mean, he was the one who told me after I basically wouldn’t stop staring at the mountain of framed pictures on their mantel. But now Enzo is staring at the middle of the table we’re standing around, his notebook in front of him, my sketchpad in front of me, and I wonder if maybe I’ve said too much.

  It’s something else he’s thinking about, though.

  “Hey, don’t tell anyone I said that. About my dad, I mean,” he says. “Okay?”

  I nod right away, a little surprised. “I won’t.”

  “Thanks.”

  It’s that easy. He gave me a secret and asked me to hang on to it, and all of a sudden, I’m trusted. For the first time in a long time, I’m holding on to a secret that isn’t mine or my weird family’s.

  It feels pretty great.

  “And that’s how you behead a Gorgon,” says Maritza from across the room, setting her controller down triumphantly.

  “If I ever make it to the center of the earth, I’m taking you with me,” says Mya, in awe of her new friend.

  “Okay, but I have piano lessons on Wednesdays,” says Maritza, completely serious.

  “My dad’s making carnitas tonight,” says Enzo.

  “I’ll go tell him you guys are eating over,” Maritza says, springing to her feet without asking if we want to.

  We do, though.

  * * *

  If my dad were the friend-making type, I bet he’d be friends with Mr. Esposito. Maybe I expected him to be sad because his wife had died a long time ago or stressed because his job at the newspaper was hard, but it turns out Enzo and Maritza’s dad is really cool. He’s intense, but almost like he’s on the other side of intense from where my dad is.

  “But then a squirrel chewed through the camera cables, and we were able to get the story out first,” he says, putting a big pile of shredded pork on a plate next to some potatoes and handing it to Mya.

  He’s telling us how the Raven Brooks Banner scooped the cocky reporters from the TV station—“forfeit by rodent,” he’d called it—but it doesn’t really matter what he’s talking about because he can make anything a story.

  “If there’s a rodent involved, Dad has a story about it,” Maritza says, pulling Mya into the seat next to her.

  “You have had a weird number of vermin encounters,” says Enzo.

  “Did I ever tell you about the rat poop incident from college? My roommate had this hazmat suit, and—”

  “Maybe rat poop can wait until after dinner?” Maritza says, her fork just below her mouth.

  “Ah, of course,” says Mr. Esposito, then stares wistfully into his memory. “Good ’ole Jay. I wonder what ever happened to him. I should look him up.”

  I tell Mr. Esposito that I’ve never had carnitas this good before, which is the truth, and he manages to accept the compliment graciously and quickly dismiss it all at the same time.

  Instead, he turns the topic to Mya and me.

  “So, we’re in the presence of a couple of local celebrities,” he says, and I hope he isn’t going where I think he’s going with this.

  I glance at Enzo, who looks a little sheepish, but he doesn’t know it’s a much more touchy subject than it should be. “I may have told him about your grandparents.”

  So much for my appetite.

  “I bet your dad’s parents told you some pretty fantastic stories from their heyday here in Raven Brooks,” says Mr. Esposito, not slowing his eating even a little. He’s digging, though. I guess that’s what you do when you work at a newspaper.

  It suddenly occurs to me why Enzo might have invited me over. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting a little.

  “Actually, we never met them,” I say to Mr. Esposito, hopeful that this might cut the conversation short.

  Then Mr. Esposito does something surprising—he comes clean.

  “Sorry,” he says to Mya and me. “I promised the kids I wouldn’t bring it up. They didn’t want to embarrass you,” he says.

  I look again at Enzo, and I feel at least a little better about him.

  “I’m nosy,” says Mr. Esposito, not at all ashamed. “The town owes a lot to your grandparents and the work they did when they were alive.”

  Because he’s being so honest, I decide to take a chance, too. “What … what was their work?”

  Mr. Esposito’s face falls. “Well, that’s the thing. I was hoping you and your sister would be able to shed a little light on that. Your grandparents were … do you know what mercurial means?”

  I nod, even though, not really, no.

  “They were always something of a mystery,” says Mr. Esposito, sensing my bluff. “I suppose all geniuses are.”

  I immediately think of my dad, and this is where my stupid, slow brain finally makes the connection.

  My grandparents had secrets to keep, just like my dad does. Just like my whole family does, apparently. Some people get inheritances. We get a weird old house and a billion questions.

  “My parents don’t really talk about them,” Mya says, looking ashamed. I don’t want her to look that way. She didn’t do anything to deserve that.

  Mr. Esposito smiles kindly, even though I can tell he’s disappointed that we’re as clueless as he is.

  “Talking about people who are gone can be painful for some,” he says, and I don’t mean to, but I look over my shoulder at the mantel in their family room, the piles of framed photos of his late wife glittering under the overhead light.

 
When I turn back around, I see him catch me staring, and instead of clamming up, he says, “She was a wonder.”

  So, this is what it feels like to live out in the open, no secrets to protect, no topics to tiptoe around.

  * * *

  At home that night, I lie in bed asking myself why Mr. Esposito said all those things about my dad’s parents. He was probably just being nice. That would be the normal, nonparanoid response to somebody being polite. But I’m not normal, and paranoia is quickly becoming my next best skill after lockpicking.

  I think back to everyone who’s had anything to say about my grandparents in the short time we’ve lived in Raven Brooks: Mr. Esposito, Mr. Gershowitz, Mr. Donaldson, even that grocery store lady, Mrs. Tillman. They’d all told me how important my grandparents’ work was. So why did it always sound like they were about to say something else?

  In fact, the only person who’s said anything different is that jerk from eighth period. What had he called them? The town wingnuts?

  Maybe all those people who said nice things were just trying to cushion a blow. Tell me all the good things about them before I hear what they really mean to say … that they were “mercurial.” Troubled. Maybe even dangerous.

  From the other room, I hear Mya cry out suddenly.

  I can usually tell a nightmare from the sound of her voice, but I’m still getting used to all the echoes in this house, so I creep into her room quietly.

  Her forehead is pinched into folds, and I can see from the glow of her pink night-light that her eyes are moving around behind her eyelids.

  I kneel beside her bed and push the hair away from her face.

  “It’s okay, Mouse. It’s not real. Not anymore,” I whisper over and over again, until the lines on her forehead smooth over and the scream that’s caught in her throat dies.

  I pick up her little rag doll from the floor and tuck it into the crook of her elbow. Then I pull the red jewelry box down from her dresser and open it to reveal the little ballerina on its spring in front of the mirror. I tip the box over and wind the bar until the ballerina begins to turn to her little mechanical song.