“That’s not what I meant!”
His head is in his hands. I try to hold him, but he leans away from me. I say, “Even if you’re the one who put him there, he deserved it.”
I mean this. It’s completely all right with me if he flat-out killed him. That’s how much I hate the man who did this to him.
I say, “Like you didn’t actually do it, right?”
“Jesus Christ, who do you think I am?” He’s rolling his head around like it’s too heavy for his neck. “But I might as well have. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt says, ‘Where did Art run off to?’ and I say, ‘He’s in the garage, getting more charcoal.’ I pointed.”
“That’s not the same as killing him. Jack, it’s not.”
He looks straight at me. “I’ve already thought of every excuse there is. People in that line of work make enemies, it’s inevitable. But if I hadn’t pointed . . .”
“You were a kid.”
“I was fourteen. Old enough.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it is! If I didn’t know how bad it was, I would have owned up to it before now.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake! What is it with guys owning up and confessing and being a man and taking responsibility? What’s the point of telling people, ‘By the way, I might have gotten my dad killed’?”
This makes him cringe. Good going, Nicolette.
“Maybe if I did that, I’d get what I deserve.”
Oh God, he’s so completely effed up for a smart person.
I say, “I spent my life being totally bad, Jack. I swear. I ignored five or six rules a day. Sneaking around. Taking my clothes off for a college boy who was totally into someone else and completely depraved. I mean, I’m a good person. I’m like the opposite of a mean girl. But I’m close to being the daughter from hell. And Steve never even acted like he wanted to hurt me. Not once.”
Apart from the time he said he was going to get rid of me (and I believed him), but this wouldn’t help my argument.
I say, “I wish your mom had taken him out. I truly do. Then he never would have gotten a chance to slice you up.”
Weakly, Jack says, “She wasn’t in a position where she could call the police.”
“She could have stopped him and plead self-defense when they got there.”
He says, “You’re locked and loaded, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t used to be. I told you. I used to be nice.”
“The nice daughter from hell? What are you now, the scourge of God?”
I climb onto the other bed and take his hand. I wait for him to look at me, his face that rigid mask he has sometimes. I say, “One of us has to be.”
Jack puts his arms around me, his face in my hair. “Sometimes you make my blood run cold.”
But I know he likes the way I am, or why is he leaning back into me? Why is he cupping his hands on my head like a bulletproof hat? Why is he holding me like this, like I was blowing past him in a tornado and he has to hold on tight to pull me out of the vortex and into his shelter?
74
Jack
I’m a very persuasive guy. In Model UN, whatever country they gave me took over the world. But the closer we get to Ohio, the harder it is to persuade Nicolette of anything. By now, you’d think she would have figured out how into her I am and how I’m trying to look out for her.
“Could you at least lay out what I’m supposed to do?”
“You’re supposed to have my back,” she says. “That’s it. You don’t like it when the girl makes the plan, do you?”
“Give it a rest. I wasn’t ecstatic when my brother made the plan either.”
“That was a bad plan. This is a good plan.”
“Will you at least entertain the possibility that having me wave a gun at Mendes could escalate the situation?”
“For you. What about for me? How does sending a guy to throw me off a cliff get escalated? Just because you’re reformed, you think the next guy he sends after me is going to think I’m adorable? Because I don’t.”
The problem isn’t that she’s wrong about how bleak her situation is, it’s that she doesn’t see how storming the stronghold of the man who made it bleak—her stepfather, the deadly force behind Don’s errand—could get us killed.
Nicolette puts her hand over my hand. “All I want is for you to do this one thing for me. You know how to work that gun, right? If you have to.”
I look over at her, and she’s dead serious. “Yeah, but it’s not like I’ve been in combat.”
“Or hunted. Or shot skeet. Or a moving target.”
I don’t let myself blow up. I say, “That’s all the more reason we shouldn’t be doing this.”
She’s tiny, but she got the gun away from me, held it on me, and humiliated me completely. What’s Mendes going to do, fold his hands in his lap?
“You just have to stand there and look scary,” she says, as if showing up armed were an everyday occurrence, like getting the mail and putting on your pants.