“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.”