“It’s the J-File, Benny,” I say, feeling agitated.
“It would appear to be,” Ben says. “Though I would have to examine more of the papers to be able to say for certain. These papers definitely appear to have similarities with my dream diary.”
“You’ve seen these before, right?” I ask. My voice gets louder. “Mom never visited you in your dreams, right? You just made up this crazy story. I know you know how to lie now. Why would you have lied about this?” I have to take slow breaths, talk myself down. If I keep this up, Ben is going to have one of his class-A meltdowns. Or maybe I’m going to have one of Ben’s class-A meltdowns. Like the nuclear reactor I’m named after (though I believe I’ve had more actual meltdowns than it’s had; the name Zoe apparently was an acronym for “zero power,” which makes a girl feel good and all). And there’s a gun in my bedside table. (One with no bullets in it, I think, I think?)
But Ben stays calm. He’s really changed, this little brother. This maddening little brother, the Trask bound for goodness if not greatness.
“If Mom hadn’t visited me in my dreams, how would I have known that it wasn’t Dad’s fault?” he says. And maybe he’s right.
The J-File. I don’t know, obviously, how this turned up, torn, in the heating duct. Maybe Mom hid it there, having second thoughts about giving it to P.F. Maybe then she had second thoughts about the second thoughts and visited Ben in his dreams to complete what she started.
Or maybe Ben really had found it, and had some understanding of what he was looking at. He might have gotten upset, then destroyed it in one of his now-rare fits, and forgotten that part, holding on to the J-File part that he saw in that steel-trap brain. I don’t know. I do know that I’m hungry. And tired of wondering, all the time, who is lying. And just tired. I put the Ziploc in my dresser and try to give Ben a hug. He squirms away, which is an odd relief. Not everything has changed.
“Where’s your friend Pete, honey?” Aunt Lisa asks when we come back downstairs.
“He had to go,” I say. “I think he’ll be back.”
“Good,” says Aunt Lisa. “He seems very nice.”
“Is he your boyfriend?” asks Uncle Henry. I shrug.
And here we all are, at home, waiting for our pizza. I pet Roscoe, toss his ball around, put off starting on laundry and homework. Ben sits on the floor reading a very thick book. Dad is in his ransacked office, ignoring the mess, catching up with the Internet. Uncle Henry and Aunt Lisa watch television, nibbling on the homemade sausage. Nothing’s changed; everything’s changed. I know these people as well as I know anything, and in some ways I know everything about them. I love them. They love me. I can predict what they’ll do in almost any situation. Almost.
What I don’t know yet is what I’ll do. When I was little, between lectures about Ayn Rand’s cats and the proper technique for executing a perfect kick and the reasons why bread crusts are disgusting, Dad would tell me that the most important thing is not to be tripped up by your own worst tendencies. To learn your own patterns, and learn how to defeat the bad ones. To stop yourself from making the mistakes that your body and your brain want you to make. To make sure you won’t be your own fatal enemy. That I won’t be my own fatal enemy.
Whenever I looked confused or annoyed at this sort of ranting—which was a lot—he’d repeat a quote from Abraham Lincoln, Dad’s favorite “dead white powermonger.” Maybe he figured Abraham Lincoln was someone a ten-year-old girl could relate to, or at least someone we’d both heard of outside our home, unlike Ayn Rand.
The quote: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
I would stare at him, bored and pissed off. He would then go on to describe in great detail his “quibbles” with Abraham Lincoln—namely, that our sixteenth president suspended habeas corpus and expanded the role of the federal government. (In the name of ending slavery. Yes, Dad did admit that ending slavery was a good thing to do. “But at what cost?”)
“What enemy should I make my friend, Dad?” I once asked. “What enemy do I want to destroy?”
“Your own weakness,” he replied.
“That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. It doesn’t even mean anything.”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“What’s a metaphor?” I asked.
Dad left and made a sandwich.
All these years, a few English classes, and a mother I never knew later, I think I might have a better idea what Dad was trying to say.
But I know what I need now. More metaphors. I’m serious. I need for my enemies not to be quite so goddamn literal for a while. I need to know what I like. Who I am. Maybe I can see what it is inside me that could turn me into a slow-acting poison specialist, and then dead.
I wish my mom were here to help me with that part. But in a way, I guess, she already has. And now that I know, I suppose I can think about the next move. Which is dinner. Which suddenly, very suddenly, feels much more important than it had.
“Dad,” I call out. “Dad?”
“What, honey?” he shouts.
“C’mon, Roscoe,” I say, tapping my thigh and walking into the office. The office is exactly how P.F. and I left it. A worse wreck than usual. Papers akimbo. Books all over the floor. Framed movie posters are hanging crookedly, but they might have been that way even before the great search of the J-File twisted through this place like a tornado on a mission.
“I’m sorry it’s such a mess in here,” I say. “We were trying to find … Mom’s list.”
“I’ll clean up tomorrow,” says Dad, looking around like he’s noticing the state of things for the first time. He definitely won’t clean up tomorrow. He probably won’t ever clean up. I’ll do it one day when I don’t want to work on a school project. Or when school is over and I have nothing else to do, and I’m drifting toward … I don’t know what yet.
“I don’t want pizza,” I say suddenly. “I’m really hungry for Lee’s.”
I squeeze Roscoe’s ball in my hand for what seems like minutes. It feels like my whole future depends on what Dad says next.
And what he says is, “Okay, baby girl. You can choose.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you first and foremost to my dream of an editor, Dan Ehrenhaft, and to everyone at Soho Teen. It’s almost impossible to imagine a better experience than I’ve had working with you. And a huge thank you to my agent, Emily Sylvan Kim at Prospect Agency, for your cheerleading and representation, and also for being a thoroughly terrific person.
My husband Ray is not only the most supportive, and brilliant, and hilarious partner I could ask for—his deep knowledge about Ayn Rand, and his Murray-the-dog walking skills, were also both essential to the completion of this project. Murray the dog and Derrick the cat’s adorableness were also crucial in harder-to-define, but obviously still-very-important, ways.
And thank you Mom and Dad. I hope you know that none of the parent characters in this book are based on you. I love you very much, and I appreciate everything you’ve done for me—including all the times you didn’t tell me, exasperatedly, to go use my law degree already. My brother Lee and sister-in-law Lori are also better cheerleaders than I could have asked for. Plus, their dog Kaya is by far the cutest husky mix I know.
I am lucky enough to have married into a family as warm and supportive as the one I was born into. Thank you, Lehmanns and Rosas, for making me feel like one of your own (and for not telling me exasperatedly to go use my law degree).
There aren’t enough thanks in the world for the friends and family members who have helped in various critical ways through the years. In no particular order, but with lots and lots of appreciation, and apologies in advance for anyone who I have forgotten with this very forgetful brain: thank you to Jodi, Alex, Karen, Sharon, James, Dan, Theresa, Eli, Lucia and Sean, Vicki and David, Steve, San and Abs, Jamie, Dan and the kiddies, Aunt Sandi and Uncle Albert, cousin Ally, Mr. and Mrs. Sockol, cousins Kenny and Lisa and Bill—and Aunt Arleen and Uncle
Larry, please know that I borrowed the dog story out of love.
Thank you to Back Porch Books for publishing my first novel, and to Rick and Jeff for everything it took for that to happen.
Finally, while it may not seem obvious, I don’t think any of this would have happened had Columbia Law School not admitted me, educated me, and set me on a strange and unpredictable (and maybe a little impecunious) path that led from New York to Saipan to DC, with many stops along the way. Thank you especially, CLS, for not telling me too exasperatedly to go use my law degree already.
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