Chapter Nine:
Misery
Cameron was in the kitchen; pots, cupboard doors, kitchen drawers were clanking in his path. I was sitting at the kitchen table where he had bidden me to park myself after shooing Rocco away from the television into his room. I was trying to blink through the pain that was streaming into the back of my eyes from the very bright overhanging lights.
“How much did your brother tell you—about what he was up to when he was gone, away from you?” Cameron asked me.
“He didn’t need to say much,” I replied, rubbing my temples with two fingers. “The police reports and school records spoke for themselves.” There were also all the rumors that were floating around, things that were being whispered, things that I had heard my father scream at my brother behind the closed mahogany door of his study. I didn’t feel the need to tell Cameron this.
“What about when the police reports stopped after he left school? Did he ever talk to you about what he was doing?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “I didn’t see him very much after he ran away. He would sneak back into the house mostly to just boss me around, tell me what not to do.” I exhaled. “We argued a lot toward the end.” This I regretted more than anything.
“Hmmm,” Cameron mused over the sizzle of the frying pan.
He brought two large glasses of chocolate milk and came back with grilled cheese sandwiches and—bless his heart—a bottle of ketchup.
“Earlier, you called me Emmy, you know,” I mentioned while I squeezed the red stuff on the side of my plate.
He sat down, facing me and raised his eyebrows. “I did?”
I nodded and handed him the ketchup bottle, which he refused.
“Your brother used to call you that,” he said, watching me carefully.
“You knew him well enough to know that,” I surmised. He took a bite of his unsoiled but boring grilled cheese. Though my stomach grumbled, I left the sandwich there and waited.
“Well?”
He shifted in his seat. “I’m not sure where to start.”
“Starting from the beginning seems to work for most people.”
“Starting from the beginning would take a very long time.”
This made me almost giddy, but I tried to keep it cool and shrugged, “Apparently I’m not going anywhere for a while, so talk as long as you need.”
His lips curved up at the corners. “I don’t need to talk. I’m doing this for you,” he stalled.
I crossed my arms over my chest, not giving him any other opportunity to delay what I needed to hear.
“Fine,” he said, shaking his head. “If you eat, I’ll talk.”
I picked up a half of the grilled cheese and dunked it in my pond of ketchup. I brought it to my mouth and waited to see if he was going to keep his end of the bargain.
“Let’s see,” he said with his eyes turned to the ceiling. His gaze then came back to me, attached to a crooked smile. “The first time I met Bill Sheppard, he beat the crap out of me.”
I took a bite of my sandwich and almost choked.
“Your brother had just been transferred to my school—”
“Which school?” I tested with a mouthful.
“Saint Emmanuel.”
Saint Emmanuel was the last private school my brother had attended before being shipped off to live with his uncle. “That’s one of the most expensive schools in the eastern United States.”
Cameron’s stare bore into me. “What shocks you more—the fact that I went to a private school, or that I went to school at all?”
“Neither,” I told him. “I just didn’t peg you for the snooty type.”
His smile returned. “I’m not. What’s your problem with rich people anyway?”
This was obviously another stall tactic—even if it wasn’t, I wasn’t going there. “So you met my brother at Saint Emmanuel’s, and he beat you up. Why?”
“Bill had decided that he was going start selling to the kids at school. One day, he caught me selling on what he thought was his turf, so he beat me up to teach me a lesson. I was just a kid back then,” he clarified, “and I thought for sure that Spider was going to kill him for giving me a black eye—”
“How long have you known Spider?” I interrupted.
“A long time,” he replied. He hesitated before he added, “We were roommates in juvi … Spider had come up with the same plan as your brother a couple of years before.”
“You were in juvenile detention?”
“Yeah, for a little while.” His face slightly flushed, and he hurriedly continued, “By the time your brother came along, Spider and I already had the school as our turf and had spent a lot of time building business with the rich kids—”
“What were you selling, exactly?” I asked.
Cameron sighed. “Emmy, the only way I’m going to tell you this is if it’s is a one-way conversation. That means no more questions.” He waited for my acknowledgement, so I nodded and bolted the imaginary lock on my lips. It hadn’t escaped me that he had called me Emmy, or that I really liked it when he had.
“Bill’s customers were actually my customers. And my customers were a paranoid bunch of kids who were always looking over their shoulder, afraid that people would know their dirty little secrets, embarrass their families. They never bought from anyone they didn’t know, or didn’t trust, even a persuasive young blood like your brother.” I smiled, picturing my big-headed brother. This was the world Bill and I knew too well—the hiding, the lying, the sham.
“When Bill finally figured out why he wasn’t getting any business, he decided that he was going to become my partner. At first, I told him to get lost.” Cameron grinned wider. “But, when he told me about his new plan, it made a lot of sense. So, I finally convinced Spider—which wasn’t easy—and your brother, Spider, and I became business partners. Spider kept the product coming in, I kept the school kids well supplied, Bill expanded the business to the parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, et cetera.” He paused to take another bite. “You know, Bill had a way of making people feel like they were untouchable. Spider said it was the smell of money that was ingrained in his skin. Whatever it was, your brother was a great salesman, and, for a while, with our customers’ deep pockets, we had so much business that we had a hard time keeping up.”
“But your brother had one major weakness: women—the kind that came with a lot of baggage. He always had to come to some girl’s rescue.” Cameron smiled mischievously at me, and I took great care in red-coating the second half of my sandwich, willing my face to stay its normal pallor.
“Seemed like he had a different girl hanging off his arm every other week. But once the excitement was over and he decided that he was done saving them, he’d move on to the next train wreck, leaving a bigger wreck behind. He got caught up with this one chick … girl …” He corrected himself for my benefit. “… whose boyfriend liked to use her as a punching bag. Bill came to her rescue and beat up the boyfriend.”
“Turned out that the boyfriend wasn’t just one of my regular customers, he was also the dean’s nephew. Just a string of bad luck,” he said, shaking his head. “Bill’s dorm room was searched, and they found the stash that was hidden under the floorboards. Bill got arrested and kicked out of school.” I remembered this. Bill had been sent home in a police cruiser. Of course, no charges were ever laid—the Sheppards were too well connected for something like that to ever happen. But not even the Sheppard name could stop the gossiping. Bill had to be sent to live with a distant relative, cut off from the family, for the family name’s sake.
Cameron held my gaze. “You know, I had bigger stashes in my room, so Bill could have used me as a scapegoat to save himself. But he never did.
“Spider and I kept the business going after your brother got kicked out. We kept it lower key though, selling only to the students I knew. When I finished high school, your brother came to find me. He had whopping plans to expand the business, beyond rich kids and their families, and needed a partner. I brought Spider in, and we spent the next couple of years getting new suppliers and building more contacts. Your brother had big dreams, and the business kept growing, so much so that we had trouble keeping track of all the money that came in. So Spider brought Carly in, and soon we had the competition working for us. No one made a move unless your brother approved it.”
Cameron paused. The smile left his face, replaced by darkness. “When you’re on top like that, things get a lot more … complicated,” he told me carefully. “Everywhere you look, there’s someone who wants to take you down so that he can get a piece of your action. You start having to look over your shoulder all the time because your friends can become your enemies overnight. Just trying to keep yourself …” He looked away. “… trying to keep the people you love alive becomes a twenty-four hour job. It’s exhausting.
“And your brother had started to … change. He became …” He was trying to find the right word and settled on, “… jittery. He started keeping secrets, disappearing from Spider, Carly, and me.” Cameron took a breath here. “Things started to really fall apart when our clients and the other partners noticed the change and second-guessed his decisions. Before we knew what was really going on, Bill was dead.”
We took our last few bites in silence.
Cameron then pulled his eyes back up and surveyed my face. “To answer your question, yes, I knew your brother very well, and yes, I knew him well enough to know who you are, Emmy. Your brother was my best friend, and he talked about you all the time.” He stopped and waited anxiously.
“Why didn’t you tell me before now? Why did you say that you were never going to tell me about my brother?”
He pressed his lips together. “Because your brother wouldn’t have wanted you to know.”
“How would you know what was going though his mind?”
“He would have told you, wouldn’t he?” he pointed out.
“Maybe he just ran out of time.”
“Believe me, Emmy,” he insisted darkly, “Bill wouldn’t want you to know this much about his life.” Cameron picked up our empty plates and glasses and walked them back to the kitchen.
“Okay …” I decided to let it go and moved on. “Why are you telling me this now?”
He came back from the kitchen and leaned against the counter, searching my face again. “I had no other choice. I know how close you and Bill were and that it was difficult for you when he died.” He forced a smile. “I also know that you wouldn’t let up until you heard the truth. I wanted you to hear it from me … and to stop harassing my kid brother for information that he doesn’t have. He had no idea who Bill was or who you were. You’re making it very hard on me to keep the kid away from all that stuff.”
“Rocco wants to be part of all that stuff,” I reminded him.
“That’s not up to him.” He was adamant about this. I wouldn’t press him on that.
“Spider and Carly—they knew who I was, though.”
“Yes. They did,” he confessed quickly. He came to take the seat next to me. I could feel the heat off his arm. I wondered if he did this on purpose, to confound me.
“I have to leave for a little while,” he told me quietly. “I know that you have a lot of questions, but I meant what I said: the less you know, the safer you are.” He smiled his crooked smile. “Please don’t start any more hunger strikes while I’m gone. Rocco will not feed you, and from the smells that come out of his room I don’t think that he would even notice the smell of a decomposing body.”
His brown eyes were fixed on mine. I wanted to touch him, just a little bit to see if he was real, but I just yawned a long, boorish yawn. He chuckled and he reached out to gently squeeze my shoulder. My heart thudded—he was very real. “It’s late. You need to go to bed.”
I squinted toward the clock in the living room. Though my eyes were burning and my neck felt like it was holding up a bowling ball, I didn’t want to go to bed.
“When will you be back?” I asked, stupidly yawning again.
“I don’t know,” he told me. “Could be a couple days, could be a week. It depends on how things progress. I have a lot of catching up to do.” He winked at me, “I have to finish the business that was interrupted last time I was in the city.”
This time my yawn hit my eyes and made them tear up. This made him chuckle. “Go to bed, Emmy. I promise we’ll talk when I get back.”
He got up and hesitated before extending his hand to help me up. I took it—without comment this time. His hand was warm and it awakened something.
After he had led me to his bedroom door and after there was an awkward pause between us, he turned on his heels and started to walk away.
“What made you think that Daniel was my son?” he asked as I was grabbing the door handle.
I shrugged shyly. “Why else would you be paying Frances?”
Cameron considered this for a moment. “He’s not mine,” he told me, and with my heart still hotly pounding, I closed the bedroom door and pushed Meatball over before crashing into bed, still fully clothed.
There was overwhelming desolation. I had sensed it as soon as my eyes had fluttered open; even before I had noticed the string of light that was poking through the curtain borders and before Meatball started whining at the door to be let out of our cave. Whatever place Cameron had come to occupy inside of me was now being wrenched by distance. Weirdly, I felt him far away, and the only way I could explain this to myself was that he had quickly become the only true tie I had left to my brother. It was the closest I had ever come to knowing about my brother’s other life and I was starved for more. The fact that Bill had been involved in something most likely highly illegal wasn’t all that surprising to me—I was even a little proud of this. How entrenched he had been in these extracurricular activities and what part Cameron had played and might still have been playing in these endeavors, I didn’t know. Part of me wondered if the whole truth—and I was starting to have an idea what that truth might look like—would even perturb me, change how I felt.
My sixth sense was validated when I went outside to let Meatball get to his business and saw that Cameron’s car was gone.
Rocco and Griff were on the front stoop, so I held back the deep sigh that was inflating my chest and resigned to pinching my lips together.
“Ginger!” Griff exclaimed through a cloud of his cigarette smoke. “Where have you been hiding, love?”
The place looked abandoned. The vans and cars were all gone, and there were just a few guards left marching about the property line.
I smiled meekly at Griff while Rocco watched poor Meatball dash for the first patch of green he could find. “What’s Meatball doing here? He should be with the chief.”
I could feel my cheeks picking up color. “I guess he forgot to bring him,” I said, feeling guilty for having forgotten to let him out at a decent time.
“Doubt it,” Rocco muttered. He coughed out smoke signals, his lungs refusing to inhale the toxins from the cigarette he was trying to smoke. He quickly gave up the habit and put it out with barely a puff’s worth gone from it. Griff had already finished his and snuffed it out with his sneaker. He kept his twinkling eyes on me.
“Is everyone gone?” I asked, changing the subject and holding on to a miniscule glimmer of hope that my intuition was flawed.
“Yep,” Rocco confirmed gloomily. “Everyone is gone.”
The sun was blazing. I was cold still. The melancholy had followed me outside and engulfed Rocco too. Griff, who was cheery enough for the both of us, put his hand on Rocco’s head and shook it about to mess up Rocco’s already messy hair. “Aw, cheer up, buddy. You’ll get your chance to run with the big boys soon enough.”
Rocco shoved Griff’s hand away and stared dejectedly ahead.
Griff chuckled. “I don’t know why you want to leave so bad, Kid. This place is great when they’re not here to boss us around.”
“It’s boring here, and I’m not a damn babysitter,” Rocco sulked.
I imagined that he was referring to me as the baby he had to sit for. I didn’t take it personally.
“I can do a lot more than this, but they won’t let me,” Rocco said.
“Tell you what, Kid,” Griff offered, his eyes narrowing, “I’ll teach you how to fight, toughen you up a bit. And I’ll talk to Tiny when he gets back. Maybe he’ll let you tag along with them next time they go out.”
Rocco’s face lit up. “Really? You’ll teach me some stuff? You think they’ll let me go with them?”
“Sure thing.” Griff got up, using his rifle as a stretch bar over his head. He then swung the gun strap over his shoulder and sighed. “I better get back to my spot before another fly escapes through the tree line.” There was a wink at my expense and he walked away.
Rocco went into the house, and I sat on the stoop to soak in some warmth. Griff hadn’t taken two steps before I heard the crush of the gravel stop. “What are you up to today?” he asked me.
I opened my eyes and shrugged in response. My options were looking pretty bleak.
Griff had a mischievous smile. “Wanna help me play hooky?”
I couldn’t help but smile back.
He strolled back and grabbed my hand, pulling me up like a string puppet.
“Won’t you get in trouble if you don’t go back to work?” I asked as we made our way down the driveway.
Griff exaggeratingly scanned the landscape around us. “Tiny’s gone. Spider’s gone. There’s no one here to tell me what to do.”
This made me laugh. “Couldn’t they just call Tiny to get you in trouble?” I observed, my eyes on the other guards who were glowering in our direction.
“Have you seen any phones around here? Because I haven’t. All of our stuff like our cell phones were confiscated before we got here.”
“What if something happens, like someone gets hurt, or there’s some kind of emergency?” I was also assuming that 911 was an option in the middle of nowhere.
“Look at the guys with the big guns,” he said, pointing at one of the guards. “Do you think anyone else can just waltz in here? If someone gets hurt here, they stay hurt … or they disappear.”
I could feel the blood draining from my face.
“Don’t worry,” he said forcing a smile. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” Griff put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me in a one-armed crushing hug.
We kept walking down the driveway until we reached the tree line where the driveway became the gravel road that continued into the forest—the same road that Rocco and I had driven through when we first got to the farm. There were two burly men with machine guns standing on each side of the perimeter. They looked like twins, wearing identical black T-shirts and jeans and mirrored sunglasses.
As we attempted to walk past them, both men swiftly approached us and blocked our way.
“The girl doesn’t leave the property,” said the bigger of the two men.
“C’mon, man! We’re not going far. I won’t let anything happen to her. I’ve got my gun if something happens,” said Griff.
“Sorry, Griff. Chief’s orders. The girl stays here.”
“No one’s around. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.” Griff was thickly laying down the charm.
The man’s tone became harsh. “Listen, man, if you don’t want to follow rules and mess with the girl after you were told not to, that’s your funeral. But I ain’t gonna get shot for you. Now, you can turn around and we’ll forget all about this, or you can keep going and I will make this your funeral.”
I held my breath as Griff stood facing the two men in a standoff while he considered his next move. I felt like a dwarf among giants.
He turned back to me, slightly smiling. “I guess we’re not gonna get anywhere here.” He hooked my arm around his and led me away.
We walked along the property line, passing armed guards every once in a while. None spoke to either Griff or me. Griff remained silent, sulking. When I was sure we were out of earshot from any of the guards, I asked, “Who ordered you to not mess with me?”
“Spider, who else?” he said.
I couldn’t imagine why Spider would care who I hung out with. “Why?”
“Who knows why these thugs do anything. I don’t think they know themselves half the time.”
I glanced around. “What’s out there? I mean, we’re in the middle of nowhere. What could be so dangerous out on the road that we can’t take a walk?”
Griff cackled. “You’re right, there’s nothing out there. It’s not so much them wanting to prevent you from getting hurt out there. It’s more about them wanting to keep you in here.”
“Why?” I asked again.
“Beats me,” Griff shrugged. “One thing I do know though, eventually everything leads to money for them. So whatever their reasons for keeping you here alive it probably has something to do with money.”
A shiver went down the back of my legs.
“Look around you, Ginger,” he said. “The big house in the middle of nowhere, the brutes with the guns. This isn’t a vacation, and these guys are definitely not tour guides. They’re crooks. All of them. Except for the kid, maybe—I think that Kid’s too young to understand, but he’ll eventually become like the rest of them. He has no chance of ever getting out.” A light seemed to go off in Griff’s head. “C’mon. I have to show you something.”
We quickened our walk to an almost jog and made our way back up the driveway. We passed the front of the house and followed the driveway down, going the opposite direction to where the driveway bent to the right. As we neared a bunch of bushes, I found that the driveway kept going through the trees and down a small hill. At the bottom, there was a large garage with another guard pacing back and forth by the tree line.
“What’s this?” I asked as we approached.
“This is where the no-rankers sleep.” He was proud of this.
We walked through the side door and into the garage.
The garage was more like a showroom. Parked side by side was an array of cars. I had no idea what kind of cars they were, but they looked really shiny. As we walked past each car, Griff rhymed off with passion the various car brands and explained in great detail each car’s particularities; make, model, horsepower, torque, engine. It was all beyond my understanding, but it sounded good.
I was told that the car parked nearest to the door was a silver Ferrari; it gleamed under the fluorescent lights that hung above it. Next to it was a lime green Lamborghini, followed by a red Porsche, a burgundy Rolls-Royce, a black Aston Martin and a canary yellow Maserati—a rainbow of expensive cars.
In some ways, Griff reminded me of my brother. Bill had also been a car aficionado. As a teenager, the walls of his bedroom had been plastered with pictures of cars that he had ripped from magazines. Of course, he also had pictures of half-naked women—though these women were usually straddling a car.
We reached the end of the showroom and walked through a doorway. Hanging off nails on the wall were masses of vanity plates from all states and even a few from Canada and Mexico.
“This is what I mean. These guys are real good at hiding, and I’d venture a bet that none of those cars were bought off a car lot,” Griff said.
Something hanging off the wall caught my attention. I moved in closer.
Stuffed in a clear plastic bag that hung off one of the nails were hundreds of driver identity cards. I was staggered. I immediately recognized the grinning face that was on the ID that was on top of the stack. It was Bill’s face, though the ID indicated that the man in the picture was ‘Buzz Killington’ from Arkansas. I pulled the bag off the nail and unzipped it. There were more drivers’ licenses that had my brother’s face. I also found cards from other states and countries with Cameron, Spider, and Carly’s pictures on them. Like my brother’s cards, they had different names attached to the faces.
I pulled one of Bill’s cards out of the bag and struggled to swallow.
There were few photos of my brother. The last picture I had seen was one taken when he was fourteen years old; one of those fake school pictures—awkward smile, neatly gelled hair, green and yellow cardigan worn only once for five seconds. This picture was stacked with the rest of the family stuff that my father strategically kept on one shelf in his office behind his desk—the clients could see the pretense of a family man, but my father’s back was turned away from the shelf.
The worst thing about this was that I couldn’t remember what Bill looked like as a grownup. In my mind he had been forever fourteen. Now I had a picture of my brother … as a man. He looked more tired as an adult, but at least he hadn’t lost his curly blond locks.
Griff looked over my shoulder at the ID in my hands. “I wonder who that is? I haven’t seen him around here.” He stepped away and added in passing, “A thug like the rest of them, I’m sure.”
I should have, could have, defended my brother, but there was a water balloon in my throat threatening to explode at any second. And deep down, I knew that Griff was probably right.
Griff made his way to the back of the room and disappeared behind another wall where a stairwell led to a second story. I stuffed Bill’s—or rather Buzz Killington’s—driver’s license in my pocket, put the plastic bag back on the nail, and hurried after Griff, who had already climbed up the stairs and waited for me at the top on the second story. As I climbed up to meet him, he smiled and, with a finger to his lips, motioned me to be quiet.
The second story was one big open space, covering the whole length of the garage. The space was dim, with curtains of black garbage bags and bedsheets covering up the six-foot windows that flanked both of the elongated sides of the floor space. About a dozen cots were lined up in rows, one row on each side of the room. Four of the cots were occupied by sleeping men, one of whom I recognized as a night guard. The sound of snoring and heavy breathing eerily echoed off the walls.
We tiptoed over to one of the cots in the middle of the room.
“This one is mine,” he whispered, color appearing on his cheeks.
Griff had things strewn everywhere under and around his cot. I sat on the empty cot that was next to Griff’s bed while he rummaged under his bed, and I noticed a box of magazines on the floor. The one at the top was called Cage Fighters Weekly with a caption in large red letters that read, “Griffin ‘the Grappler’ Conan: Best Pound-for-Pound Fighter in the World?” Under the caption was a picture of a black-eyed, bruise-faced, threatening-looking Griff, shot from the waist up. He had his gloved fists up and muscles seemed to bulge out of every part of his body, including his neck, which looked like it was the size of parking meter. One by one I picked up the other magazines that were stacked under it, most of which had Griff pictured on the front, in similar stances as the first magazine, or with him holding golden belts.
Griff finally reappeared from under his bed, pulling out fighting gloves similar to the ones that he had been pictured with on the covers.
“This is you,” I murmured, holding one of the magazines up. Griff sat next to me on the bed and peered at the magazine in my hands.
“Yeah. It was me,” he said somberly. “It’ll be me again once I get back on my feet.”
“Don’t you need to be out there if you want to get back on your feet?”
Griff pressed his lips together. “There are a bunch of dodgy people who are waiting for me to pay them. I have to pay off all the bad debt before I can do anything else—otherwise I’ll turn up dead before I ever get a chance to hit the gym.”
“Don’t fighters make a lot of money, especially those who win?” I asked, tapping on the cover of the magazine where he was holding up a title belt.
“They do and I definitely did,” he told me. “But I also made a lot of stupid mistakes while I was on top. I got too used to people serving me wherever I went. You should have seen it, Ginger. I could walk into any hotel, and they’d put me and my buddies up in the executive suite right away. Gambling. Unlimited booze. Chicks. Whatever I asked for. I thought that I could get away with anything and that the money would never run out. That was true, for a while,” he said, his eyes distant. “I was spending more time partying and forgot all about fighting … especially training for fights. I started showing up in the ring unfit and hung over. Then I started borrowing money to keep up with the lifestyle. I lost all of it.”
He took the magazine from my hands, throwing it on top of the others and kicking the box back under the bed. He lifted his head and strained a smile. “Working for these crooks will get me the money I need to pay off what I owe. At least no one can come find me here, and I can stay alive long enough to get the dough.”
We got up and tiptoed past the sleeping guards, making our way back downstairs and outside in the bright sunlight. We walked up to the house and into the kitchen. Rocco was sitting at the table, halfway through a loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter. I fixed some lunch for Griff and me while Griff handed the black gloves that he had dug out from under his bed over to a thrilled Rocco. Rocco tried the gloves on, but they were one size too big.
“You’ll grow into them,” reassured Griff.
It wasn’t so bad at first. I spent my time with Rocco and Griff. We moved from the gym to the pool to the kitchen to the TV. I watched from the sidelines while Griff taught Rocco how to fight and wrestle. Griff would even let Rocco practice his punches on Griff’s face. Griff chuckled every time Rocco’s fist connected with his face, and I hid my face in my hands.
“Iron jaw,” he told Rocco and me, slapping his own cheek. “That’s how I was able to keep my title so long. I let ’em hit me till they get too tired or cocky. When they start making mistakes, I attack and finish them off.”
Rocco was a captive audience to Griff’s fighting tales.
One afternoon, we even started up a game of football with some of the other guards. Griff found ways to play on the position opposite from mine so that he could tackle me; though I was able to outrun him and most of the other guys. Rocco found this hilarious.
“You don’t run like a girl,” he praised. It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever told me.
I was being well entertained, and it worked … for a short while. But I wasn’t sleeping. I spent my nights rolling around in bed, annoying Meatball or wandering aimlessly in Cameron’s room, looking out the windows at the dark nights or looking over my brother’s fake ID, which I had leaned against my ballerina lamp.
Every day I waited, anxiously, and the more time that passed, the more I started withdrawing from Griff and Rocco and everyone else. I didn’t want to be entertained anymore. I started to go off by myself, trying to find a small space where I could be alone; that was what I was doing when Rocco found me in the library curled up with a book. He lumbered in with a bag of Cheetos and plopped himself on the opposite couch. We sat in silence while he crinkled the bag and crunched away. He got up, picked up a book, and leafed through it, leaving orange fingerprints behind. He threw it next to him, put his feet on the coffee table, sighed, took them back down, repeatedly threw a pillow up in the air and caught it—more orange fingerprints.
Then all the noise stopped. When I glanced over my book, he was looking at me. “What’s going on between you and my brother?” he asked me.
Heat rose up my neck. “Nothing,” I stammered, caught off guard. “Why do you ask?”
“I have my reasons … and you look like you’re about to slit your wrists,” he observed.
“Where’s Griff?” I asked, looking for a change of subject.
He shrugged. “Dunno. Still sleeping I guess.”
I wasn’t surprised. Griff had become a man of leisure, taking well to life at the farm without the bosses.
“He’s too old for you,” Rocco opined.
“Who? Griff?” Griff had also taken to following me around, which made my quest to be alone very difficult.
“No. My brother.”
“Cameron’s not too old for me!” I half-shouted, too quickly. I tried to recover by adding, “Isn’t he only twenty-six?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, and how old are you?”
Eighteen. No, nineteen. When was my birthday again? I had to trace back a few months to the day I had gotten a birthday card in the mail, the exact day of my birthday—someone had planned it well. The card was signed “Love, Mom and Dad,” in Maria’s handwriting, and had a check stuffed in it. The check had been endorsed by my father—that was something, right? Except that the numbers were in Maria’s handwriting again—the hearts over the i’s gave her away. Maria had been far too generous with the zeros after the double digits. It didn’t matter in the end. I tore the check up and threw it away. “Nineteen,” I settled.
“Oh.” Rocco looked deflated.
“How old are you?”
He seemed to think about this. “Eighteen.”
“What year were you born?”
He was stalled and when he couldn’t respond fast enough, “Fine. I’m sixteen.”
I couldn’t tell if this was true or not. It didn’t really matter. “Shouldn’t you be in school right now?” I sounded like someone’s mother. Not like mine, though.
Rocco shrugged. “I can’t go back.”
“Why not?”
“I got in a fight because of a girl.”
This was starting to sound familiar. “I thought you couldn’t fight?”
“I didn’t win,” he told me. “I won’t go back until I know I can beat the other guy, one way or another.”
I suddenly understood why Rocco was bent on growing up so fast. “What happened to the girl?”
He chuckled slightly. “She felt sorry for me, so she stuck around for a while.”
“That was nice of her.”
He shook his head. “Not really—she hooked up with my mom’s boyfriend. They stole our TV before they left.”
I couldn’t hide my shock. He chuckled again. “I couldn’t wait to get rid of my mom’s boyfriend. I just didn’t think I would lose the TV too.”
We slipped back into silence. I tried to go back to my book. There was another long exhalation. “What’chu reading?”
I put my book down. “Philosophy.” I had found a whole shelf dedicated to ancient philosophers—worn books, many of which I had already read in my first-year philosophy class.
“What’s that?”
“Philosophy? Aristotle. Plato. Descartes. Rousseau. Ethics. I think, therefore I am.”
There was a blank look on his face.
“It’s the rational investigation of existence, truth, beliefs, all that stuff.”
He looked even more confused.
“It’s supposed to help you understand why we are the way we are … why we do the things we do … why we think the way we think.”
“Who’s we?”
“Humans.”
“Oh,” he said and went back to his bag of Cheetos.
More days passed. Some days it seemed like tending to Meatball’s needs was the only reason I ever left Cameron’s room. Other days, I would just lounge around the house in my pajamas all day. The insomnia was getting to me.
In the middle of the night, I heard my door squeak open, and then it proceeded to slowly squeak shut again. I opened my eyes to see a tall figure in the moonlight that was leaving the room and closing the door behind him.