Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(43)

There was no doubt he was a genius.

Genius at avoiding homework. Genius at taking a bite of an idea, clamping down his jaws, and never letting go. Genius at making me want to bang my forehead repeatedly against the kitchen table where we sat.

I glared at him. It wasn’t a painless or guilt-free effort, not after checking the bottle-inflicted bruise on his chest fifteen minutes ago, but I did it. “I do know that’s what you were going to say. I know how your ball bounces. I also know that is not how we treat books. Are you trying to be difficult?”

He shook his head, shaggy hair flying, the grin shameless. “Nope. Not trying. Don’t have to. It’s really pretty easy.”

I pushed the sandwich on the plate toward him. Two pieces of bologna, three of cheese, sweet-and-sour pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard, it was his current favorite. Mystery meat and lard, but we’d gone to the grocery to spend some of the money the rich guy had given me for changing his tire. That deserved a celebration, for at least a few days, of whatever we wanted. We’d already had two pizzas instead of the usual one and now Cal was making his way through whatever the janitors swept off the slaughterhouse floor.

It was a good day—when I managed not to see bruises blotting the pages of my own textbooks when my attention wandered. Closing my eyes momentarily, then watching Cal work his way through his first sandwich with the manners of a starving pig tended to make the black-and-purple blotches disappear. Lack of table manners and Cal were linked to reassuring and normal in my brain. That let me say, yes, today was mostly a good day. Sunday, our last day before we had to be back at school, and I would’ve liked it serial killer free. But with Cal and his bulldog teeth firmly embedded in his theory, that wasn’t going to happen.

I did trust Cal’s instincts on the majority of things, but he was eleven. He’d seen monsters, the genuine horror movie article. He’d seen people behave in ways most average adults couldn’t comprehend, knew things most adults saw only on the news or on after-school specials. That was our life. We were a walking, talking PSA filmed by Wes Craven. Through it all, though, he’d stayed a triumph of sanity over endless shit.

Sometimes life did deserve a curse word or two.

But . . . the bottom line remained, he was eleven. Paranoid and cynical and with every right to be, yet still eleven. Once in a while eleven-year-olds jumped to wild conclusions. I’d talked to Junior. I didn’t automatically think he was innocent. It’d been years since I’d made that assumption about anyone from a casual hey-how-are-you? He might be innocent, he might not. He might be innocent of murder, but less innocent of other things. He certainly didn’t seem very bright. Calling the police on him because Cal thought his house smelled bad? It didn’t seem right.

And I did want to do what was right. Right thinking. Right action. Right speaking. Just as many of the sensei and masters of the dojos and gyms taught. It wouldn’t be right to tarnish the reputation of an innocent man and it was hard to do what was right in our world. If I didn’t try, every day, then one day it would become too hard to do right and very easy to do wrong. What kind of role model would I be then to Cal?

With Sophia the lines of wrong had already blurred drastically. I wanted, needed to hang on to keeping all the right I could in my life to balance that out. Even the smallest of good acts helped, each from a pebble to a massive stone that built the wall that kept me clean from the world we lived in now. Our world, Cal’s and mine, was not clean. We both were dealing the best we could. He bounced back, no matter what, and I built walls.

Then there was the police. If our neighbor was guilty of something lesser such as drugs or having three wives who didn’t leave the house, because I couldn’t buy uncatchable serial killer in the muddy dimness of his eyes, the police would come. It wouldn’t matter that the call was anonymous—they’d knock on all the doors, question everyone. I didn’t like to lie, Cal didn’t care either way, but through sheer osmosis from sharing the deceit-heavy air she breathed we’d both learned to do it well from Sophia.

But cops were all different. Some were indifferent, some polite and easy to fool, but some were razor sharp and they’d slice though the paper tower of lies we lived in. There would be a ruin of confetti the color of ashes at our feet before we knew it if we ran into one of those. They were rare, but there were cops who could take one look at the two of us or worse, if Sophia was around, the three of us and know at first glance how dysfunctional our “family” was. They would know we were left alone for weeks at a time no matter how clean we were and well behaved Cal pretended to be. They’d seen it before a thousand times, and maybe, like Cal, they could actually smell it on us. Taste the unbreakable codependency in the air—the kind that happened when it was only the two of you against everything else including your own mother.

There were teachers like that too and four years ago one had a social worker on the way to Cal’s school on his first day in the new town. She’d been moving across the parking lot toward him at the same time I’d showed up to walk him home.

I’d grabbed Cal’s hand, yanked him into motion and we ran. The teacher was sharp, the social worker was sharp, but neither were nearly as experienced as we were at running. Sophia was as eager to go. She had the same amount of desire to spend time in jail for neglect as Cal and I wanted to spend separated in foster homes. None.

I didn’t know what Junior was doing in his house. I doubted anything—he barely had the brainpower to tie his bathrobe, but even if he was up to something, the police were a last resort. Only if our backs were to a metaphorical bloodstained wall. It was too risky. We were good runners and disappearing came as second nature to us now, but it takes only one time. One mistake. One trip over your own feet. If that happened, I might not see Cal again, no matter how long I looked, how hard I tried.