“Like I had a choice,” I mumbled, but she was already gone.
Ji Hyun tugged at the cuff of my jeans with smudgy green fingers. She babbled something that might have been Korean or might have been a mixture of Klingon and gibberish.
I reached down and unclamped her fingers from my jeans. I gave her the closest thing I could find—a rolled-up newspaper still in its plastic wrapper—and she curled her chubby hands around it. “I’m only eleven,” I mimicked Amanda, as I plunked down next to her on the sofa. “And yet you’re old enough to watch mutilated corpses on television.”
“Hey. Focus on Forensics is educational.”
I watched for a minute as they showed a dead body trapped beneath the surface of a frozen lake, one ghost-pale hand splayed out against the ice as if the victim was reaching out for help. “Sure it is.”
Jo Lee pulled a tiny vial out from under the sofa and held it up in the air with a squeal. Amanda looked down and squawked in protest. “Max, Jo Lee has my nail polish.”
“I care,” I said.
“She’s going to try and eat it,” Amanda said in a singsongy voice.
“No, she isn’t. She is not that stup—” I reached down and pulled the bottle of pink sparkly polish out of Jo’s grubby fingers just before she could put it in her mouth. She started to wail at the top of her lungs. Immediately Ji started screaming too. God, they were the most lethal tag team ever. For a second I thought about the other kid, the one Ben and Darla almost adopted before they fell for my broken-down, ten-year-old, problem-child ass. He probably never had to babysit. “That kid dodged a bullet,” I muttered. The twins screamed even louder.
I wrestled the remote control out of Amanda’s hand and turned up the volume. I flipped through the channels and feigned interest in a hockey game. I didn’t really like watching sports, but I loved torturing Amanda.
“Maaax,” she whined. “This is boring.”
“Why don’t you go play tea party with Ji and Jo,” I suggested. “Preferably in the street.”
Amanda’s face crumpled, and for a second I thought she was going to cry. I felt like the world’s biggest dick. Sometimes I forgot my sister was just a kid and talked to her the same way I did to Pres and Parvati.
“Jeez. Only kidding, Mandy.” I flipped the TV back to where she’d had it.
Her lips turned back up so quickly that I wondered if I’d just gotten played. “I know,” she said. “Cool. This is the one where they find that girl everyone thought ran away to join a harem.”
“That’s a girl?” The soggy blob being hoisted from the water didn’t even look human.
“Yeah. You remember the Prom Queen Killer, don’t you? Supposedly she was his first victim.”
“Doesn’t this stuff give you nightmares?” I hoped the twins weren’t going to grow up to be serial killers from seeing shit like this.
“Nope,” Amanda said.
I pulled my phone out of the side pocket of my cargo pants and sent Preston a quick text telling him I wouldn’t be able to meet him until after six thirty. I wanted to text Parvati too, but her parents were known to monitor her cell phone, and she’d catch hell if they saw a text from me.
It was right before seven when I pulled my car into the overlook parking lot. The lot was empty except for the Jacobsens’ van and Preston’s BMW.
“Hey.” I slid out of my car. “Sorry I’m late. I had to babysit.” I rolled my eyes.
“No worries.” Preston smiled slightly as he slammed his car door behind him. “I wish I had some siblings I could corrupt.”
I started to reply but then caught sight of his backseat. His whole car was packed full of camping gear. “Wow. You actually packed all that? You’re really taking this alibi seriously.”
“I didn’t want my mom to find my tent and sleeping bag in case she goes snooping around in my room,” Pres said. “Besides, I figured you might want to use my stuff. I know your little two-man piece of crap leaks.”
I looked up at the night sky. Stars stared down at me, winking in a weird sort of synchronization. The moon hung low and heavy, a hair away from being full. “Is it supposed to rain?”
Preston had turned his back to me and was looking out at the ocean. “No, but you know how fast things can change around here.”
I followed his gaze, watching the waves crest and break against the rocks. He seemed unusually pensive. Maybe he was just nervous. “You sure you know this girl well enough to go visit her?”
“Probably not.” He turned and walked along the edge of the cliff, stepping carefully past unstable places and loose rolling rocks that might give way under his feet. “You ever feel like you don’t know anyone?” He looked out at the water again. “Or like no one knows you?”
I inched closer, trying to decide if I could grab him if he started to fall. “What are you talking about?”
“I figured you’d understand, being adopted and all. You grew up with random strangers. How fucked up is that?” Preston held out his arms as if he could fly, like he was daring the wind to sweep him off the edge of the cliff. I leaned back, away from the drop-off. Below us, the tide had come all the way in and the ocean slammed viciously against the rocks. “Pres, come on,” I said. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Don’t be such a girl.” His tone was light, but I sensed a weird undertone of hostility that had swirled up from out of nowhere.
“Is this about your dad?” We had just elected a Republican president, and Senator DeWitt was the front-runner to be appointed Secretary of Labor. DeWitt had originally gotten rich as CEO of DeWitt Firearms, and his pro-gun viewpoint didn’t sit well with many of California’s hippie pacifists, so now his political opponents were jumping at the opportunity to rip him to shreds. Pres didn’t seem to be upset by the internet headlines that had started cropping up, but maybe he just hid it well. It had to be hard seeing his family name dragged through the mud, especially when many of the accusations about his dad were probably true.
“What he does doesn’t reflect on you,” I said. “You’re not the same person.”
Preston stared downward, past the crags in the rock face where the ravens nested, earning the cliff its name. “I don’t know who I am.” The black water churned and sprayed.
“Dude, you’re kind of freaking me out.”
Preston turned away from the cliff. When he saw my expression, his face relaxed, his lips turning up into a slow smile. “Sorry, Maximus. I didn’t mean to get all heavy. I think I just need a break from everything.”