by Hart, Callie
Silver lifts her chin, steel forming in her eyes. With a swipe of her hands, she bats her tears away. She’s a complex creature, this one, but I know how the gears and cogs turn inside of her. She and I are very much alike. She’s hurting and she’s afraid, but I can’t treat her that way. I can’t walk around the kitchen island and hug her. Not right now. Maybe in an hour or so, I’ll be able to take her into my arms and press her to me. I’ll be able to make her feel safe. If I so much as think about coddling her now, her hurt and her fear will take a turn for the worse. She’ll lash out in a destructive way, and that won’t help. Against my own better judgement, I stand fast and let her breathe.
“I’m okay. A little sore but I’ll live. If you want to help, then maybe we could all just act normal. Just have a nice night and make some food. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Is that okay?”
Not thinking about it anymore is tantamount to burying your head in the sand, but things are tenuous right now and Silver needs time to process things. After a long moment, staring into her face, I give her what she wants. “Fine. But if I find out you’re one of those monsters who put pineapple on their pizza, I’m gonna have to reassess this entire relationship. Some things just can’t be overlooked.”’
She smiles, and it’s like the storm brewing inside the kitchen has just broken without ever reaching its climax. I’m relieved. I’m able to pretend, to joke and to laugh. To not look at the bruises she’s wearing and go to DEFCON 1. I’m able to do all of this because I got really fucking good at hiding my feelings back when I lived with Gary fucking Quincy, and I can stow my emotions when I really have to. But inside, I’m a fucking mess.
Cam returns, and the evening continues like nothing at all is out of the ordinary. The three of us laugh and shoot subtle digs at one another as we construct our food. As we eat, we talk about light things. Unimportant things. I ask Silver if she wants to come and see Dread Station II with me and Ben on Friday. It’s almost as if tonight is a normal night, the same as any other, and we’re all having a great time. The underlying, niggling current of tension in the Parisi household, however, is studiously ignored but felt by all.
This is not okay. This is not okay. This is not okay.
At just after ten, Silver pushes her plate away, groaning, and looks at her dad. “Alex is staying the night?” She poses it as a statement, but really it’s a question.
Cam opens his mouth, looking down at his own empty plate, but I speak before he has a chance. “I actually have to get back to Salton Ash. There are a couple of things I have to take care of back at the trailer.”
Yeah. I have to Google a few new interesting torture methods and sharpen my fucking throwing knives.
Silver looks disappointed, but I think she’s still exhausted from the nightmare of a day she’s had. Cam leaves us alone while I say goodnight to her at the bottom of the stairs. “If you need me, text me and I’ll come running,” I whisper into her hair. Now’s the time for that hug. I pull her into the circle of my arms, and the righteous vengeance I’ve been tamping down all evening roars in my ears, deafeningly loud. She feels so fragile pressed up against my chest. So small. There’s barely anything to her. The thought of Jacob Weaving laying his hands on her, when she seems so vulnerable with her head nestled into me, below the crook of my chin, makes me want to raze all of Raleigh to the ground.
“I have a meeting with the social worker first thing tomorrow morning, but I’ll see you at school?”
Silver tips her head back and I kiss her deeply, stroking my thumbs over her cheeks. It takes more will power than I possess to let her go. It’s insanely hard not to follow up the stairs behind her, but somehow I find the strength to do it.
I don’t leave immediately. I wait at the foot of the stairs until I hear the door to her bedroom click closed. Then I head straight for Cameron’s office; I enter without knocking. The guy’s standing in front of his imposing desk, leaning against the polished oak, his hands driven deep into his pockets.
Obviously, he was expecting me. “Well?” he asks.
I set my jaw, flaring my nostrils. This is a bad idea. It’s a really bad fucking idea, but I don’t really care anymore. It has to be done. “The guy’s name is Jacob Weaving. And don’t worry. You aren’t gonna be the only one doing the hurting. We have until Friday night to make him suffer, and there’s a bag of tricks in the trunk of my car that’ll make the job easy.”
18
ALEX
“Everything seems to be in order. I’m impressed that the place is so clean and tidy.”
Maeve Bishop, my official social worker, stalks around the trailer like she’s inspecting a prison cell and she’s pleasantly surprised by the conditions. I grunt from where I’m slumped in my seat on the couch, waiting for her to sign off on her never-ending paperwork so I can get the hell out of here. “I’m not an idiot, Maeve. I do know how to wash dishes and tidy up after myself.”
She gives me a reproving look over the top of her clipboard. The infernal fucking clipboard. I’m sick to death of the sight of them. For years I’ve had them brandished at me like they give the person holding them some sort of power over me.
“No need to get pissy,” Maeve rebukes. “Just doing my job. You know you should have told us you weren’t living with Montgomery anymore. You should be thankful they’re signing off on your new living arrangements at all. It’s highly irregular that they’d let a teenager, still in school, live alone, let alone someone with your track record for…”
“Anarchy?”
“Issues with authority.”
I smirk at that. I s’pose she’s right. She wanders through to the kitchen again, checking for the third fucking time that the stove actually ignites, and hot water comes out of the tap when she turns it on. “Not long now, anyway,” Maeve calls to me. “It’ll be your birthday soon, and I won’t have to pay you anymore of these visits.”
“Yeah. Right.” Don’t I fucking know it. My birthday is coming up soon. Five months and change. April twenty-seventh. That piece of shit, Gary Quincy, always used to tell me that they must have gotten my date of birth wrong by a month. He loved to sneer that I was the biggest April fool’s joke of all.
“I visited Ben last week,” she says, walking back into the living room. “He told me Jackie was taking him on vacation to Hawaii after Thanksgiving. That’ll be nice for him, don’t you think? She’s going to home-school him there until after Christmas. Can’t remember the last time I managed to get away.”
I just stare at her blankly. Jackie and I are hardly on great terms, but we do communicate from time to time about Ben’s well-being. She hasn’t mentioned that she’s planning on taking him to Hawaii. She sure as shit hasn’t told me she was taking him away for six fucking weeks. It’s supposed to be my year to take Ben on Christmas Day. Something sour and cold pinches in my chest.
“No fucking way.”
Maeve perches herself on the edge of the coffee table, sighing deeply. She was bright and sunny a second ago, telling me how great it is that Ben’s being taken away for the holidays, but now her mask has slipped, revealing the truth beneath it: she knew I was going to react badly to this news.
“Come on, Alex. You don’t need to cause a stink. Think of Ben. Six weeks in the sun, getting to play on the beach every day? Jackie said she’s signed him up for surfing lessons. Regular kids with regular families aren’t lucky enough to get a vacation like that these days. For a kid in foster care, it’s basically unheard of. Can you imagine any of your old foster-carers shelling out to treat you like that?”
“No,” I answer stiffly. “They were all too busy trying to burn me with their cigarettes.”
Maeve’s a good coordinator and she’s great at filing her paperwork. She’s not very good at the emotional side of her job, though. She gets uncomfortable when people like me tell her the raw, unadulterated, bare facts of life. If she could have it her way, she’d spend her days believing that kids placed in the care system are fuss
ed and adored over like cute little puppies and nothing bad ever happens to them.
Idealists should never be placed in roles where society will probably let them down; eventually, Maeve will be so jaded by the things she sees and hears in this job of hers that she’ll probably end up moving to a cabin in the woods and she’ll forsake humanity altogether. Or it’ll all get to her so badly, she’ll end up snapping and killing someone.
She pulls on a tiny thread that’s worked free from the hem of her pencil skirt. “Look. Okay. Jackie asked me to tell you about Hawaii. I told her I thought it would be better if it came from her, but she was worried about you causing a scene when you take him out on Friday. She said in exchange for Christmas, you can have Ben for Easter.”
“I’ll already be Ben’s legal guardian by Easter. And fuck Easter, anyway. Why would she try and trade Christmas for Easter? Some bullshit religious holiday—”
“Christmas is a religious holiday.”
I give her an arctic look. “Don’t pull that shit. Christmas is about presents, candy and food to kids these days. It’s special. Easter’s just a week off in the middle of the fucking semester.”
Maeve splays her hands. She looks remorseful, but she isn’t going to do anything about the shitty situation. I already know what she’s going to tell me. I stare up at the popcorned ceiling while she spews out the usual bullshit lines. “Alex, you can accept this gracefully, or you can create problems. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how you take it. You are entitled to spend time with your brother, but when is entirely up to Jackie. She’s Ben’s legal guardian, and if she wants to take him on vacation for six weeks then there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop her. My recommendation?”
“Let me guess. Lie down like a little bitch and take it? Let Jackie walk all over me?”
Maeve is not impressed. “If you’re still dead set on trying to get custody of your brother, then let Jackie have this one. If you act like a mature adult instead of throwing a temper tantrum, then that can only reflect well on you when the time comes to present your case before the family law court.”
I glare at the side of her head. “Why do you people keep on saying shit like that?”
“Like what?”
“If I’m still determined on taking Ben. There is no ‘if’ here. It’s happening.”
Maeve takes a deep breath. She opens her mouth, about to say something, but then she stops herself short. Her words seem to have upped and left her. Her gaze dips, her eyes settling on the record player on the other side of the room. “All right, Alex. This is probably the dumbest thing I will ever do in my entire career, but you’ve convinced me. I’ll help you get your application together for custody of Ben. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure this works out for you. If you don’t lose your mind over this Hawaii thing.”
I study her, searching for the lie. She’s not supposed to get involved with things like that. She’s certainly not supposed to help me. I can’t find the deception in her eyes, though. As far as I can see, she’s telling the truth. I may not like Maeve very much. I may not think she’s right for her job, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect her. Like I said, she’s a great coordinator, and she can file a fucking form like no one else. She was the one who kept me out of prison after the whole Gary Quincy exhumation and subsequent desecration incident. If she says she’ll help me put together my case, then my chances of being awarded custody of Ben just went from thirty-five percent to a solid seventy. That’s a significant improvement in odds.
“Why? Why would you do that for me?”
Maeve shrugs halfheartedly, a weary look on her face. “Well. You are turning eighteen soon. Once that birthday rolls around, everything changes, doesn’t it? You’ll be an adult. And I get the feeling you’re going to need the responsibility of looking after Ben to keep you on the straight and narrow.”
Even though she doesn’t say it, I hear what she’s really implying. She thinks the responsibility of looking after Ben will be the only thing that keeps me out of fucking prison.
I haven’t said shit to Maeve about Silver. A girlfriend might complicate things where CPS are concerned. But it isn’t just the prospect of taking care of Ben that’s keeping me on the straight and narrow now. I have her to think about, too.
“I need to get moving,” Maeve says, picking up her purse from where she dumped it on the end of the couch when she arrived. She gets up slowly, heading for the door. “I’m supposed to file this paperwork by the end of the week.” She holds her clipboard, loaded with her secret forms, aloft in the air. “You know what would look really good on this form, though, Alex?”
“What?”
“A better address. With a separate bedroom for a little boy to sleep in every once in a while.”
She wants me to get a new place? I laugh quietly at the impossibility of such a suggestion. “D’you know how hard it is to find a reasonably priced two-bedroom apartment in Raleigh, Maeve? They don’t exist. You’re either looking at a five bedroomed mansion, or a rat-infested studio apartment overlooking a dumpster lined alleyway behind a bar.”
She stands in the doorway with the door cracked; a rush of freezing cold air blasts the side of the trailer and comes charging in like an uninvited guest. Maeve’s teeth are chattering together when she says, “Really? ’Cause I seem to recall seeing a pretty perfect spot advertised in the window of the hardware store this morning when I dropped by. The apartment above the actual hardware store, I believe. And the rent was pretty reasonable. Only nine hundred, including utilities.”
She’s got to know about my little sideline with Monty. She’d hardly be saying nine hundred bucks a month is reasonable amount of money to spend on rent to a teenager with a part time job if she wasn’t. “If you’ve got some money set aside, I’d recommend calling in there and putting a deposit down on the place as soon as possible. I doubt it’ll be available for long.”
“And why the hell would they rent the place to me in the first place?” I grumble.
“Because Harry was a friend of my father’s?” Maeve says lightly. “And he’s doing me a favor?” She steps through the doorway and out of the trailer, but she pauses there on the step. “You’ve got one chance at this, Alessandro. Just one. Please don’t fuck it up, or I’m gonna look like a complete moron, okay?”
Begrudgingly, I give her a military salute.
“Oh, god. This really is a bad idea, isn’t it? Just get your ass to school, Alex. And don’t let me down.” The trailer almost seems to shrink when Maeve slams the door closed behind her.
19
SILVER
Raleigh’s one of the few schools in the entire state that breaks for a full week over Thanksgiving. There are still three days left before that break begins, though. Dad tells me over breakfast on Wednesday morning that I can stay home if I’m not feeling well, but I decline his invitation to play hooky, determined not to be chased out of school by that evil little limp-dicked prick.
Dad holds a hand to my forehead, miming out the act of taking my temperature. “I don’t know, kiddo. Your head feels weird.”
“I don’t have a temperature, Dad.”
“I didn’t say it felt hot. I said weird. If you stay home today at least, we can do a drive-by on your mom’s new pad and egg the place. Sounds like fun, no?”
“Dad.”
“What? It’s supposed to rain later on this afternoon. The mess will probably wash away before she even comes home and notices it.”
I give him a wry look as I shove my notepad into my backpack. “Then what would even be the point?”
“Because you would know that we’d done it. And I would know that we’d done it. And it would make me feel good.”
“Didn’t have you pegged as the petty type, Father,” I say teasingly. He hasn’t mentioned Mom much at all lately. He hasn’t seemed angry, either. Not about her, anyway. It’s a little saddening to hear him joke about stuff like this, though. He is joking, I can hear it in h
is voice and see it in his eyes, but there’s always an element of truth to this kind of thing. He’s still hurting, which it totally understandable. They were together for twenty-three years, for crying out loud. That’s a long time to get used to someone always being there, no matter what. A hole the size of the one Mom ripped open in Dad’s life is going to be noticeable, regardless of how mad at her he might be.
With my backpack now hanging from my shoulder, my feet shoved into my shoes, and the keys to the Nova in my hand, I’m just about ready to leave for school. I pause for a beat in the kitchen though, leaning my elbows against the breakfast bar, standing next to Dad as he skims over the morning news on his laptop. “This isn’t a break, is it? Between you and Mom. It’s final. You guys aren’t planning on getting back together, are you?”
Dad slowly closes the laptop, spinning his bar stool around to face me. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I used to think I had everything figured out, but then this happens, and I don’t even know the answers to the simplest questions. I don’t even know what I want to happen, kiddo. The only thing I know is that this house feels much bigger than it used to now. And sometimes, I want to drive by your mother’s new pad and egg the place. Beyond that, everything’s far too complicated to even think about.”
So, so depressing.
I leave, wishing I could make everything easier for him. Not just the Mom stuff, but my shit, too. He’d seethed inside Darhower’s office yesterday, when I lied and claimed I’d fallen and hit my head. Fucking seethed. He’d also been hurt, and I hate that I did that to him. Most of all, I’m sick to death of worrying him all the time.
At school, everyone’s buzzing about me being frog marched to Darhower’s office yesterday, and it quickly becomes clear why: I’m being expelled. I’m being transferred to a military school for girls. I’m sick, and Darhower didn’t want the other students to see me collapsing in the halls; someone caught me laying into the notice board outside the gym with my fists, having some sort of psychotic break. The gossip is rife. No one knows the truth, though.
