Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(69)

It’s partly because of Bo that I’m at Putnam instead of the community college. Because I trust him to keep his job, take care of Mom, watch out for Frankie, and not morph into a pervert or an * when I stop paying attention.

He loves them. Both of them.

I’ve never been completely sure Mom loves him back. He had to ask her out a bunch of times before she said yes. Had to court her for a few months before she started sleeping over at his place. She likes being with him, likes his house, but I don’t think she likes the idea of being Bo’s old lady for the rest of her life.

I think she’s addicted to the way my dad makes her feel. That exciting, edgy, f*cked-up rush she can only get from him.

“I fell in love with him the second I met him,” she told me once. “I was fifteen, and he drove into town on that motorcycle, and the world stopped spinning.”

Bo can’t compare with that. Nothing can.

I know, because I felt that way the first time I saw Caroline, and I still do. If there’s some way to turn it off, I haven’t found it yet.

Bo taps ash on a jagged glass edge, dropping it into the weeds on the other side of the window.

“What happened with the cops?” he asks.

He doesn’t mean did they search the place or leave—I already told him that. He means what did I do to get their attention.

“This girl I’m seeing—she’s got an ex who doesn’t like me much.”

“You give him a reason? Other than stealing his girl.”

“I didn’t steal her. They were already broken up.”

But I did steal her, a little bit. Freshman year, when she was across the hall, I watched her. Tried to get her flustered. I did things to catch her eye, and Nate knew it. He hated me even then.

He has every right to hate me.

“I got into it with him. For talking shit about her.”

Bo takes a deep drag, eyes narrowed, watching me. Waiting for the rest.

“Twice. Second time was a little worse than the first.”

I think of Caroline throwing up in my bathroom. The roaring pain in my hand when I connected with his face. His rib cage.

I gesture at the pack of cigarettes in Bo’s shirt pocket. “Can I have one of those?”

He lifts an eyebrow. I don’t smoke, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how. I need the rush right now—the way the nicotine will sharpen up the edges of everything, make me wary, make me smart.

I need to get smart.

He hands me a cigarette, and when I put it in my mouth and cup my hands around the tip, he gives me a light off his Zippo.

“What’s he got over you?” Bo asks.

“I knocked him down a fire escape. Might’ve cracked his ribs. Assault, I guess. Especially if he went to the hospital afterward.”

“Was there a witness?”

“His friend. And Caroline.”

He nods.

“I’ve sold to the friend,” I add.

“More than once?”

“Yeah.”

“So he tipped off the cops.”

“Probably. I mean, anybody could have, but probably. You think they’ll be back?”

“Yeah.”

I purse my lips and inhale, grateful for the small, rustling sound of the paper igniting. Grateful to have this tiny curling spark to look at, this tight fullness in my chest as I hold the smoke in my lungs.

It’s good to have somebody to talk to.

“You think I should just stop selling? Lay low for a semester?”

“If you can get by without the money.”

I hesitate. Take another drag. Grow some balls and admit, “I end up sending most of it to Mom.”

He makes this sound—I’m not sure what it means. Kind of a laugh, except with pain in it. He’s not surprised, though. There’s resignation in that laugh.

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Smokes his cigarette down to the filter, drops it onto the dirt floor, grinds it out.

“She don’t need it,” he says.

“What’s she doing with it, then?”

He shrugs.

“You don’t have any idea?”

“Presents I don’t need. Clothes and shit for her and Frankie. I think she gave money to one of your cousins to get rid of a baby, but she won’t talk about it.”

I let that sink in.

“She’s going out to see your grandma once a week.”

He doesn’t mean Mom’s mom, who used to live in California but is dead now. He means Dad’s mom.

He means a decade-old rift between my mom and my dad’s family has been quietly repaired, and she didn’t tell me. That my money’s paying for stuff Dad’s people need—or stuff they want—because that’s the way Mom is with money. If she’s got it, she’ll give it to anybody, for anything.

If I’ve got it, she figures that’s the same as if it’s hers.

“Has he been back here?”

I don’t have to tell Bo I mean my dad. We both know what this conversation is about, and it’s a relief to talk around the undercurrents beneath the words, dig up the buried wires without having to name them.

The longer I stay here, the more obvious it becomes that, underneath, things are deeply f*cked up.

Five miles away, living in a piece-of-shit trailer in the kind of trailer park nobody lives in if they have a better option, there’s a man with my eyes. My mouth. Fucking things up just by drawing breath.