“Where you came from doesn’t define you,” he said. “You are who you are right now. And, he unfollowed you. To me that means he’s not going to be happy to see you.”
Troy was a good kid, a mama’s boy, a straight-A student. He looked alternative, but he was a button-down geek at heart.
“So what if he’s your half brother,” Troy went on. “He’s a stranger. You share biology and nothing more. I’m more your brother than he is.”
He looked different somehow, his face fuller; maybe it was just that they didn’t see each other every day like they used to—in person anyway. They FaceTimed almost daily, did their homework together. He had a little bit of stubble at his jaw. And his voice kept doing this weird thing, like he had a cold. It would get deeper, then higher. He kept coughing when it happened, looking at her weirdly.
She turned out her phone to show him a picture of Andrew Cutter, he was on stage—black jeans, red tee-shirt, combat boots. He stared down at the electric guitar in his arms.
He reached out and took the phone, stared, then looked back at her. “He does look like you—a little.”
“A lot,” she said.
He shook his head. “It’s hard to tell from a picture. Lots of people have black hair and dark eyes.”
“Lots of people have brown hair,” she said, lifting a strand of her own. “Not black, not like this.”
“If he doesn’t want anything to do with his father, what makes you think he’s going to want anything to do with you—even if you are, by some distant chance, his sister? Half sister.”
“It’s not a distant chance,” she said. “It’s like a fifty-fifty chance.”
Troy sighed, tossed back her phone.
“Like I said.” He sat up and leaned forward, arms on his knees. “I’m with you. I’m just—worried about you, Birdie. I don’t want anyone to hurt you.”
She moved over to the couch and sat next to him. He dropped an arm around her, and she let her head sink to his shoulder. They sat like that awhile, the afternoon sun washing in through the big west-facing windows.
“I’m already hurting,” she said. “This is about trying to stop.”
She wondered if that was true. If that’s what this was really about—lying to her parents, Twitter stalking @angryyoungman, going to the club where his band was playing to try to talk to him.
Troy shifted to take out his wallet—a beat-up old pleather thing with the stamp of a shamrock. He slid two cards from one of the slots and held them up before her. She drew in a breath.
“You did it,” she said. She was shocked. Maybe he wasn’t such a goody two-shoes after all. She really didn’t think he’d pull it off, even after they stopped in that copy shop and had their pictures taken, supposedly for passports.
“My cousin did it.”
Oh, right, his mysterious cousin with supposed ties to the Latin Kings, the Hispanic gang that ruled Riverside and East Harlem. She took the fake non-driver’s ID from Troy, held it out. It looked real—like really real. It even had a glittery rainbow seal underneath the laminate. Raven Bishop-Martin, twenty-two years old. She could pass for twenty-two, couldn’t she? She stood up and looked in the mirror over the couch. Hmm . . . maybe not. Her breasts were barely there. Without a padded bra, she was almost completely flat. With enough makeup, though? The right outfit? Maybe.
He took it back from her and shoved it in his wallet along with his.
“You promised only with me,” he said. “And only this once. So I can keep it, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You can keep it.”
He got like that sometimes, all big brother, protector. Sometimes it was nice. Sometimes it was annoying. He was only older than her by eighteen days.
He flopped back down on the couch and started tapping with his thumbs again, texting, tweeting, Instagramming pictures of himself, whatever. Whenever she logged on to anything, it was a wall of Troy, pictures of himself, what he was eating, thinking, feeling, where he was, what he was doing.
How can you miss your friends? her mother asked. Their entire consciousness is on display online. Like Claudia should talk. If anyone was oversharing, it was Raven’s mother. She was the poster child for TMI.
But there was more to people than that, though, wasn’t there? What they posted about? The online Troy was not the guy on her couch, the one who held her hand in kindergarten. Her mom was not just a rape victim, a home repair blogger.
She walked over to the window, and the sun was already dipping low. She hated this time of day before the afternoon had fully ended and night was yet to begin. There was something about the transition between light and dark that made her sad. She wanted to call her mother and confess—where she was, what she was planning. Troy certainly wouldn’t stop her.
But she didn’t. There was a tug, something pulling her down the path she was on. It was too strong to resist. She went into her room to get changed.
twelve
Afternoon seemed to leak into early evening as Josh walked through the house following Claudia. He watched her, the way she threw her arms around when she talked, listened to the bright bell chime of her laugh. He examined the house. The way the stairs had creaked beneath his weight, how the old wood dipped. He observed the water stains on the ceiling. The banister was dangerously loose, and the wainscoting looked at is if termites might be getting at it. There were lots of problems he knew, many of them worse than she thought.
The basement was the worst of it, with those beams that had fallen. They’d need to be shored up before it was even safe. The last time he’d been down there, he’d heard a suspicious creaking. And it had been impossible to clear away the debris on his own.
But the bones were there. A good old house, solid in its foundation. Not like the crap that went up now, houses that felt like Styrofoam boxes, cheap and flimsy.
It’s in there. I know it is.
It’s not. I’ve been through every room, every closet, the attic, the cellar. It’s not there. It never was.
It’s in there.
Josh knew that house. Over the years, he’d come to know it intimately, his hands had been all over her, probing into all her private places. She had never given him what he was looking for. Rhett was convinced now that he’d have reason to really tear the place up, they’d find what was hidden. He was wrong. This house wasn’t keeping any secrets.
From the kitchen window, Josh had watched Rhett slip from the backseat of the car and duck into the barn. Was he still in there? Or was he back in the car? Claudia had said the boys from Just Old Doors were coming out. Rhett better get his ass out of that barn before they did.
“What do you think?” asked Claudia, her back to the outside. “Do you think it’s too much work for you? Do you think it’s too much work, period?”