I also knew that I couldn’t call Mom. I’d never had to bail Evan out of jail before. Show up to a huge house party with vandalism and a bunch of drunk teenagers with Evan in a police car? Sure. Twice, they’d been nice enough to release him to me. Evan had been warned by the local cops if it happened again he’d be arrested. Had he finally crossed the line? What if it was something worse? How bad was this? What the hell had he done? And what was a bond? How do you bail someone out? I don’t have that kind of money. Should I call my mom? My mind started to race, and my pulse followed suit.

As if I didn’t have enough shit going on in my own life, now I had to deal with something out of a reality TV series. Who do you call when your baby brother is in jail and you need to get him out? Calling Mom was out. Our grandparents didn’t live in the area. No dad. No family. No friends who knew anything about this kind of activity. Fuck. I could feel my shoulders tightening and I thought I might actually start to hyperventilate until it occurred to me: I actually did know one person who might have an inkling about how this all worked.

Darla.

Sam

We were watching a rerun of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which was new to Darla. Her cackling at something Charlie and Glen did was great to watch. It was always interesting to see something familiar to me through another person’s eyes as they experienced it for the first time. Joe was visiting his mom and dad. Darla and Trevor had spent the day visiting his brother, Rick, and Darla was cuddled next to Trevor, laughing her head off. I felt an emptiness in the space next to me on the couch and wondered how much longer I could wait before texting Amy again without looking like a stalker douchebag.

Ten minutes seemed right.

My nap had been fitful, two hours too full of might-have-beens and should-do-nows to be restorative.

Darla’s phone rang and she thrust her hand into her back pocket and dug around, finally pulling it out and flipping it open. “Yeah?” she said. “Okay, yeah Amy. What’s up?”

Why was Amy calling Darla right now when she wasn’t answering any of my texts? What had been comfortable suddenly became anything but.

I looked pointedly at Darla, raising my eyebrows when she glanced at me. In response she frowned, walking across the living room away from me and Trevor pressing the phone hard against her head and using a finger to cover her spare ear. “You okay?” she said. “Yeah. What? Why do you assume that I… So you called me?” Her voice got louder as her tone became incredulous. And angry. This was not a happy conversation.

I turned, throwing one arm behind the back of the couch, all my muscles feeling tense. Whatever was going on wasn’t good.

Trevor caught my eye and shrugged. “What’s up?” he mouthed.

“Don’t know,” I said in a low voice.

“You just assumed that someone like me,” Darla said in a mocking tone, “would be able to help you with this?” I could hear Darla’s heavy breathing, her outrage taking over the room. Trevor grabbed the remote, pausing Charlie in mid-scream on the screen. “Okay, al- alright, alright” Darla said, her voice progressively more compassionate. It was a tone that very few people could pull off, simultaneously pissed and nice. “I’m coming. I’m coming, and we’ll figure this out.” She flipped the phone shut, avoided eye contact with me, and addressed Trevor directly.

“I have to go. We’ll have to watch the rest of this later.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is Amy okay?”

“She’s fine, she’s fine,” Darla said, but the fact that she wouldn’t look at me told me that Amy wasn’t fine, that she was anything but fine. My mind raced. Was Amy sick? Was it me? Had she changed her mind? Had something gone wrong? Was this her way of reaching out to Darla? “What do you mean,” I said to Darla. “Why are you so upset that Amy called you?”

Darla opened and closed her mouth so many times she started to look like one of those fish that you put on the wall and that sings when you walk by. “I can’t explain, Sam,” she said, “I’m sorry, but it’s none of your business.”

“I’m going with you,” I said as Darla grabbed a lightweight sweater to go out the front door.

She halted and turned to me slowly. The blend of anger and determination in her eyes stopped me. Even Trevor took a step back; they were that startling. “Sometimes people have business that they don’t want other people to know about,” she said slowly. “Amy called me. Not you. So, let me be, Sam. Let me go and help her because I’m the one who has to go in and clean up the crime scene.”

“There was a crime?” I said.

She held up her hand, weighing her words, the expression on her face almost comical. “I don’t want to say whether there was a crime or not, but let’s just say Amy is safe.”

“What’s going on?” Trevor asked, folding his arms across his chest. He was just as pissed as I was, except it wasn’t his...whatever, girlfriend, who was in trouble.

“Look,” Darla said, “she’s not pregnant, she’s not physically injured, she’s not...it’s not as if she lost her phone up her hoohaw.”

Trevor and I looked blankly at each other. Sometimes Darla’s Ohioisms were baffling.

Darla waved her hand, exasperated. “What I mean is, it’s not as if she’s harmed, but if you don’t let me get going, you’re just going to extend her hurt. I’ll make sure she calls you.” Darla reached out and touched my arm, squeezing it with assurance. “I promise.”

And with that she walked out the door, leaving me with more questions than answers. Leaving me alone to wonder.

Amy

“You fucking piece of shit,” I hissed in Evan’s ear.

“Ooh, your girlfriend’s pissed,” said one of the guys in the waiting room as the guard brought Evan out. The guy held two fingers up to his lips and wagged his tongue between them. I rolled my eyes with disgust and turned away. Darla was waiting in yet another room. She’d walked me through the bond process.

It turned out Evan’s bail was $7,500 which meant that somehow I needed to come up with seven hundred fifty cash, and sign over some sort of guarantee. The only thing I had with that kind of value was my car. Once I realized I didn’t need it in the Fenway, I stored it back home at Mom’s—with strict instructions NOT to let Evan use it. It was paid for, and the blue book value was just over $7,000. Between next month’s rent from my checking account and the title of my car, I was able to bail him out. I didn’t worry that the entitled little son-of-a-bitch would skip out. Evan wasn’t the type to forge out on his own in the big bad world.

I had to hand it to Darla—she might have been angry that I called her, that I made the grand mental leap that she was the one person in my life that could walk me through bailing somebody out of jail – but I was right.

She was. Keeper of secrets and finder of smartphone extractors, she also was the only person in my life who had any kind of experience with this kind of thing, or, at least, that I knew had any experience with this kind of thing. Darla knew what to say to the judicial clerks, she knew what to say when we called a bail bondsman, she knew how to tell me where and when to gather my things.

And here we were, a handful of hours later. It was 9 AM, jail had opened, and Evan was barking bullshit in my ear. “Thank you Amy, thank you so much Amy,” he said, hugging me. “You wouldn’t believe the kinds of assholes in there.”

“Yeah, I’m staring at one.”

“Ha ha, no really. It’s not like I really did anything.”

“What did you do, Evan?”

“Like, nothing!”

“The police don’t routinely arrest and detain you, and charge you with shit for doing nothing. It’s not like you were sitting in front of the grocery store selling Girl Scout cookies now, were you?” Darla cracked.

“Who the fuck are you?” Evan snapped at her.

“I’m your fairy godmother.”

“She’s the person who figured all this out Evan, so shut the fuck up.”

He pulled his neck back in surprise as we walked. Evan looked like our dad; tall, lanky, with slightly stooped shoulders, and no neck. It was a strange combination. Most guys who are tall and slim have long necks with Adam’s apples that poke out, as if announcing their presence. But Evan looked shorter than he was, and the hunching made him seem more ominous. With Dad’s brown hair, just like mine, and Mom’s blue eyes, there was a pinched quality to him. He had just turned eighteen, and all the juvie records were about to be put behind him.

This one, though? He was so nailed.

“What did you do?” I said, my voice like ice chips rattling around in a cup.

“I just gave some pot to a friend—”

“Gave?”

Silence.

“You sold some pot to a friend?” I groaned.

“It’s not like I haven’t done it a million times.” He threw up a hand to shield his eyes as we walked out the main doors, as if aliens were descending to take him away. I wished they were.

“Shut up!” Darla said. “You don’t exactly announce that in front of cop central.” Evan glowered at her, but clammed up. She was right. A few hatted heads turned, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

“I was in Arlington,” he continued, as if that explained anything.

“You were in Arlington? We...you don’t live anywhere near Arlington.”

“I have friends in lots of places,” he said smugly. He grinned like a character in a John Hughes movie, the pastel-suited guy with the feathered, flippy hair. The guy you knew—you knew—within three seconds of his introduction, was going to be the bad guy.

“Well, good luck getting home. Call Mom for a ride.”

“You can’t tell Mom.” He grabbed my arm, hard. I could tell it would bruise. It wouldn’t be the first time Evan had hurt me, but it would be the last.

Darla grabbed his wrist, yanked his hand off of my arm, and twisted it. He howled in pain, and two cops nearby watched. I waved and smiled. They still watched.

“You touch her like that again and I will get two guys to come over to your house and kick the ever-loving-fucking-shit out of you, and your balls will end up so far up your throat you’ll think you’re suckin’ on two cough drops. You got that?”

All we could hear was our breathing, a straining, primal whine underscoring Evan’s. In the bright daylight I could see how pale he was, how sickly, but his eyes were calculating and clever still. Not afraid. He wasn’t actually afraid of anything.

Evan wasn’t real unless every speck of attention was focused on him. He was enjoying the idea that he could engage us in this nastiness. Everything he had done was based on some brokenness in him that would never heal.

Evan would never heal, and Mom would never change. Like the slightest bump that sends a perfect ball of dandelion seeds reeling out into space and time, Evan’s oily half-grin was all it took to knock off a lifetime habit of going along with this. I almost wanted to thank him for the clarity.