I actually tripped over my own feet. “What?”
“There was something there last night. With you and Ryan.”
“You are certifiable. Which is probably okay, given that you’re currently surrounded by doctors who can treat you.”
She nudged me with her elbow. “I’m being serious. There was this, I don’t know, fiery spark or something. Like if you’d been alone with him in that room, the whole place would have burned down.”
Angie always had been prone to romantic delusions. “If it had burned down, it would have been because I was trying to destroy the evidence and the body. The only thing between us was a mutual disgust and animosity.”
I could see I hadn’t convinced her, so I pressed on. “Why are you even bringing it up? It’s not like we run in the same social circles. I won’t see him again.”
“Not unless it’s meant to be.”
My best friend fervently believed in “meant to be.” I blamed her mother for all the telenovelas.
It didn’t help things that Angie’s own love story had started because of “meant to be.” She’d recounted it a dozen times. She’d been late to an interview. Her alarm didn’t go off. The water in the shower wouldn’t turn on. Her dog threw up all over the outfit she’d chosen to wear. Just one delay after another.
And then, right as she was turning into the parking lot of her new potential employer, Hector ran into her, giving her a mild case of whiplash. I’d told her more than once that I didn’t think bodily injury via vehicular accident was particularly romantic, but Angie insisted it was. That if she hadn’t been late, if so many things hadn’t gone wrong, if she’d been just ten seconds earlier or ten seconds later, they wouldn’t have met. Hector felt so bad about her injury that he stayed with her in the hospital until her family arrived and then came over to check on her every day for a week. By the end of that week, they knew they’d be together for the rest of their lives.
But neither of them had known just how short that would end up being.
“Not everyone can have love at first crash. Which is another reason to never fall in love. My insurance rates wouldn’t recover.” Parker had a nasty habit of parking in illegal zones whenever he took the van out, and we had a small mountain of unpaid tickets. “Last night was not ‘meant to be.’ Last night was only about you meeting him. Nothing else.”
“Well, I thought Ryan was very charming. Didn’t you think so?”
See? Moonstruck. “No. He was a punk.”
“Only to you. I wonder why?” Her voice sounded sincere, but I saw the mischievous twinkle in her eye. Like his punkness had meant he liked me.
But this wasn’t elementary school. We weren’t six years old, and he didn’t pull my pigtails.
I tried a different tactic. “We don’t have anything in common.”
Angie started ticking off fingers. “You’re both beautiful, you both love music, and you both lost your moms.”
“His mom died. Mine’s still here.”
She squeezed my forearm, not saying what I knew we were both thinking. That in a way, my mom had died. Physically she was here, but mentally she hadn’t been herself in almost seven years.
One last-ditch effort. “Can I again refer you to the disgust and animosity part?”
Angie shrugged one shoulder, as if that didn’t matter. “Musicians are passionate people.”
“I’m not passionate. I’m the Ice Queen.” A name bestowed upon me by Chuck Glass senior year when I’d punched him in the esophagus after he’d lured me under the bleachers. (Another thing brothers are good for—teaching you how to throw a really effective punch.) Chuck had told anybody who would listen that I was so frigid I’d give Frozen’s Elsa a run for her money. The nickname had stuck, in part because Cole thought it was hilarious and encouraged it. He shortened it to IQ, which he pronounced ick. He especially liked that it made the guys at school leave me alone. “Keeping them away from you is a full-time job,” he’d muttered. I’d angrily told him I didn’t need a chaperone and then demonstrated my throat-punching skills on him, which he rated as two thumbs-up after he stopped writhing around on the floor.
“You’re not the Ice Queen. You just don’t know it yet.” Angie checked her phone. “We should probably head back.”
Despite me repeatedly explaining my rules to Angie over the years, she didn’t seem to believe me when I said the musician thing would never happen. Especially Rule #2.
We turned around, and I wondered whether anything she’d just said had merit or if she was such a hopeless romantic that she saw potential even where none existed.
“If Ryan’s not happening, I noticed you did seem to like the guitar player. Which I get. What is it about guys in a band that women like so much?”
“I actually know this.” It was something I’d researched because I didn’t understand how a bunch of gross nerds like my three brothers had a line of pleeches waiting backstage after every show. One blog I read suggested that it was because musicians knew they could get whoever they wanted, making them generally disinterested, detached, and noncommittal, which women apparently found irresistible.
A study found that musical ability had a high correlation with levels of prenatal testosterone. Which meant musicians were more athletic, healthier, and more likely to create a baby. Something apparently no woman’s ovaries could resist. “Some of it is social proof. When a guy is onstage performing and every woman around you wants him, that makes him valuable. If you’re the one who gets him, you win. We’re a generally competitive animal.” Which was how I explained my reaction to Ryan last night. It had been all the screaming groupies who wanted him. That was why I had been attracted to him until he opened his mouth.
That he was retina-melting hot had nothing to do with it.
Not wanting to dwell on my mental image of him, I kept talking. “Charles Darwin said musical ability came to be only in order to charm the opposite sex. A caveman who learned to sing and make music was so superior at basic survival skills that he had free time to become artistic. Which made him more attractive as a possible mate.”
“Huh.” Angie seemed to be weighing my overexplanation. “I thought it had something to do with their innate rhythm onstage, translating to other areas.” She laughed while I blushed and continued on. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to scorch your virgin ears. But if it’s an evolutionary thing, that means you can’t do anything to stop it. You have to be with Ryan. For the good of the species.”
Now I giggled, glad I could dismiss my physical reaction to him for what it was—pheromones and cavewoman instinct.
Even if my lizard brain wanted him for his baby-making ability, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I worked with the guy or something. I thought I’d never see him again.
If only I’d known then what was about to happen.
It wasn’t until later that evening that I realized I couldn’t find my cell phone.
“Parker, have you seen my phone?” I pulled my bed away from the wall, thinking the phone might have slipped down the side. No luck.
My second-oldest brother paused at the doorway, putting on a jacket. The smell of his cologne filled the room. He’d put on too much, as usual. “Your room looks like a crime scene. Why would I have seen your phone?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find it.”
“You say that like this is the first time that’s happened.”
“Shut up.”
He laughed. “Awesome comeback, Maze. Where’s the last place you had it?”
“If I knew that,” I muttered through clenched teeth, “I would have it back already.” I was forever losing my phone. I had thought seriously, more than once, about supergluing it to my hand. If I didn’t love playing my guitar so much, I probably would have.
There was no money to buy a new one, so I had to find it.
“Hey, how’s your friend Angie doing?” Despite the fact that he was a total computer geek, Parker was a capital-P player and had his own personal harem—an ever-rotating roster of women who would drop everything just for the chance to hang out with him. He’d recently decided he should add Angie to that list. I think he did it mostly to annoy me.
It worked. “You stay away from Angie.”
“She’s hot.” He made that statement as if it excused any dog behavior on his part.
“I’m serious. Leave her alone. I found her future husband.” When I said that, Parker’s face turned pale. The thought of commitment freaked him out even more than it did me, and that was really saying something.
He held up both his hands like he was surrendering. “Okay. I’ll stay away from Angie. For now.”
I threw my pillow at him, which he easily sidestepped while laughing. My aim was pretty bad.
Which was probably a family trait, given the current urine-splattered state of our bathroom.
“If you’re done hurling things at me, I’m going out for a few hours.”
Given that he was near my room, that meant he was sneaking out. “Through the back door?”
The always upbeat, always happy Parker actually frowned. “Fitz is stressing, and I don’t want to deal with him right now. See you later.”
I heard the back door close quietly as he left. I should have reminded him not to park anywhere stupid, as he typically did.
Well, I had officially ransacked my own room and come up short. Parker said he hadn’t seen it. Maybe Cole had.
I went across the hall and knocked on the door of his room. No response. I opened the door and stepped into the darkened bedroom. “Cole?”
He was already asleep, snoring softly. He worked the early-morning shift (starting at 3:00 a.m.) at the bakery around the corner. Which meant that he usually went to bed early. On nights we had gigs, he would leave straight from the show and go to work. Doing my best not to disturb him, I looked around for my phone.
There was one recharging on his nightstand, but it was Cole’s phone. I picked it up and used the flashlight app to search his room.
I noticed a picture tacked to his bulletin board of Cole and me when we were seven years old and had both lost our front teeth. We’d shared a room when we were younger, and even though we were way too old for that now, I missed him being close by. Everybody had called us the twins, despite the fact that we were born nine months apart and had different mothers and were different races.
But even then, people could tell we were brother and sister because of my father’s stupid genes that seemed to dominate every one of our DNA strands. We all had his musical talent, dark caramel-colored (as my mom had liked to say) hair, and high cheekbones. And even Cole, who was half-black, had our dad’s pale-green eyes. I’d read once that green eyes were one of the rarest eye colors. Something like only 2 percent of the entire world had them. (Given my father’s favorite pastime of creating offspring, that 2 percent was probably related to him in some way.) It somehow seemed fitting that my father’s DNA took over everything and dictated how things would be for us, even at a molecular level.
I hated that I had to be reminded of him every time I looked in a mirror or into the faces of the people I loved best, or every time I sang or played. That I had talent because of him.
After I closed Cole’s door, I went to find out if my oldest brother had seen my phone. He sat at the kitchen table, which was papered with bills and a single calculator. Fitz had his hands fisted in his hair, his head bowed, his shoulders caved in.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
He jumped as if I’d startled him. “Maisy. Hey.”
Usually Fitz was the most mellow person in the world. He took whatever obstacles came his way and didn’t worry about getting past them. It made him the perfect guardian when our mom had to leave. Things didn’t worry him.
But now? His feathers looked seriously ruffled. “What are you doing?” I asked.
He let out a world-weary sigh. “I might as well tell you. I can’t protect you from this much longer. I think we’re going to have to sell the house.”
“What?” I couldn’t keep the panic out of my voice. This was not just a house. This was our home. The only home I’d ever known. Fitz couldn’t sell it. “Why?”
“Because Century Pacific has raised their rates again, and the money is almost gone. I don’t know how we’re going to make next month’s payment.” He handed me a piece of paper. It was a bank statement.
Showing an almost zero balance.
I sank down into the chair next to him, dumbfounded, and stared at the statement. I’d known for a long time that things were not great, that we had to tighten our belts, but I had no idea we were at “sell the house” bad.
Especially because Fitz had always been so responsible. He’d created a strict budget for us, and we’d stuck to it. We didn’t go on vacations; we didn’t have big Christmases or birthdays. We bought only necessities.
We all had day jobs—at our mother’s insistence. Although she had encouraged our musical aspirations and put us in lessons when we were kids, she told us we had to have something to fall back on just in case. Fitz had gone into carpentry, Parker did graphic design, Cole baked, and I cut hair. I really hated cutting hair, which is why I never made much money doing it, but I contributed to the household finances.
It still wasn’t enough.
“I can’t believe the entire inheritance is gone.” It felt surreal.
“Mom never wanted us to touch the principal. She always supported us off the interest. But that facility costs so much that I didn’t have a choice.” We had maxed out Mom’s long-term disability and her health insurance about two years after the accident.
“How long do we have?”
Fitz rubbed the dark stubble along his jawline. “A little less than a month. We should probably get the house ready to put on the market.”
We wouldn’t have to do much. We lived in a really desirable location. It was only a five-minute walk to one of the most famous beaches in the world. Which meant that even if the entire house was repeatedly flooded, festered with termites, and declared an annexed protectorate of the Cockroach Kingdom, we would still get millions of dollars.
But how long would that last? Our mom was only forty-eight years old. She would hopefully be around for a long time.
I racked my brain, trying to think of solutions. We didn’t have anything of real value except the house. “Maybe we can bring Mom home, and we can take care of her.”
“She needs round-the-clock medical supervision, Maisy. None of us are qualified to do that. She’s also much happier there than she was here.”
“What about government assistance?” Now that we were officially superpoor.
“I don’t want Mom to end up in a government-run facility. Not if we can prevent it.”
He was right. Angie had told me horror stories about state-owned institutions. Fitz was always right.
“Earlier—was there something you wanted to ask me?”
Now was not the time to mention my missing cell phone, when my brother was already drowning in financial woes. “Do Cole and Parker know?”
“They know. They’re not happy about it, either.”
I tried not to get upset. Of course I was the last to know. My brothers thought it was their job to protect me from everything in the world, including bad news.
“Don’t worry, Maisy. Things will work out.” He leaned over and patted the top of my hand. “I’m going to turn in. Good night.”
“Night,” I mumbled, chewing on the end of my hair. It was something I did when I got really stressed.
This was the worst thing that had happened to us since the night of Mom’s accident.
This house allowed us to live together while we pursued our dreams of making it big as a band. It made it so we could work menial jobs that freed us up to practice and perform. Now what would happen? We’d probably all go our separate ways. Fitz would most likely marry his on-again, off-again highly religious girlfriend and start his own family. Cole had talked a lot about moving to New York, wanting to meet his biological mother’s relatives. Parker would probably get an STD and die without me around to remind him to get annual physicals.
People would say it was past time for us to move on with our lives. I was almost twenty-two years old. I should have been living on my own. With an actual career, like Angie.
I should stop pretending this band thing really had a chance of happening.
In a daze, I went back to my room and closed the door behind me. I absolutely had to find my phone now. I’d seen for myself that there was no money to replace it. I pulled up the phone-finder app on my computer. It took forever to start up and pinpoint the location.
I’d expected to see a glowing dot at the location of my house. Instead, my phone was in Calabasas.
Which was an extremely upscale, ridiculously expensive place to live.
Why was my cell phone in Calabasas?
I sorted through my memories, trying to figure out when I could last remember having my phone. I hadn’t used it when I’d visited my mom. In fact, the last time I had it was . . .
When Diego took a picture of me, Ryan, and Angie.
Diego had my phone.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Now I had to contact him and get it back.
Since this wasn’t my first rodeo, I knew what I needed to do. I ran into Cole’s room and quietly grabbed his phone. I texted my number.
If my phone was on, it should buzz, and the message would be visible on the locked home screen. That would mean somebody had to be standing by my phone, ready to answer. Which was why I alternated my texts with calls. Call, text, call, text. Losing my phone so often had made me something of an expert on strangers and cell phone behavior. Talking on a random phone completely freaked out some people, but they had no problems texting. It was why I alternated, not knowing who would be on the other end. If they were weirded out by talking, hopefully the ringing would get them to pick up. Once I had texted and called my phone for two hours straight until somebody responded.
I tried to do a search for “Diego De Luna” and “Calabasas” on my computer. If he didn’t get my texts, maybe I could find his address and drive up there. Unfortunately, we had the crappiest internet service known to man, which made the page just hang and not load a response. It seriously would have been faster to drive to Google and ask them my questions in person.
Thankfully, ten minutes later Diego answered my text.