Whisper to Me(17)

“Cass, I—”

“What?”

He swallowed. “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t be late for school.”



Of course, he never did find out anything at the restaurant. If he even asked.





“Slap yourself again.”

I slapped my face; it stung.

“Again.”

“Please. Please, no more.”

“Oh, okay, don’t. Let’s go play on the slot machines instead.”

JUST KIDDING.

Can you guess what the voice actually said? Yes! One hundred points to you. It said: “No. Do it.”

So I did.

I was in my bedroom in the apartment, sitting on the bed. Sunday before the last week of school. Outside it was getting hot, bright sun in the blue sky. A few scraps of cloud. The town was getting busier already. The workers for the piers had started arriving too. I even recognized a couple of them when I saw them walking down the street. Men and women who had been running concession stands since I was a kid. What they did in the winter, I didn’t know.

I went across to the main house. Dad was in his insect room, standing over a tank filled with tree bark and leaf mulch. He beckoned me in. I went over and stood by him. Shirtsleeves pushed up, he lifted a box. The tattoo of the seal on his arm seemed to swim as he moved. It was weird—he’d spent his whole life in the ocean, diving, and he lived in a town by the Atlantic, but he never went down to the beach anymore, not since he’d taught me to swim. Just played with his bugs in his study.

“I called your cell,” he said.

“Yeah? I must have missed it.” This was not true. I had taken the battery out and hidden the thing under the seat in the apartment. When you hear a voice that isn’t there, a disembodied voice, a cell phone becomes an unsettling object.

He sighed. “Okay.” He opened the lid of the box, which had holes punched in the side of it, and used tweezers to gently lift out a wriggling millipede. The thing was the length of his finger, bright pinkish red with spikes on its back, huge, like something out of a horror movie.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Desmoxytes purpurosea,” said Dad. “People call this one the dragon. Because of the red. From Uthai Thani province.” He deposited it on a branch, then reached into the box and took out two more.

“It’s gross,” I said.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

This was a script we followed. But then I went off-script because I realized he was holding his arm kind of funny. His hand and wrist were swollen. Then I saw the purple bloom around his eye. “You get in a fight?” I asked.

He grunted.

“At a bar?” This would have been bad. There had been a time after Mom died. A time with bars. And fights. Now there was a sponsor on the other end of Dad’s cell phone, and a disk in his pocket with ONE YEAR CLEAN written on it.

“Cass! No.”

“The restaurant?” I frowned.

“Yeah. Guy was making out he was a SEAL. Bragging, you know. Had a bunch of people with him, girls.”

“And he wasn’t?”

“Wasn’t what?”

“A SEAL.”

“Oh. Yeah, no.”

“How did you know?”

Dad looked at me. “He was bragging.”

I waited, just looking back at him.

“You see the shit we saw, you do the shit we did, you don’t brag about it.”

“So what did you do?”

“I said, ‘What team were you in, team twelve?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ and then I told him to get out of my restaurant. There are only ten SEAL teams. Guy didn’t want to lose face in front of his friends—so it got a little physical.”

“And you got a black eye.”

“Less than him.”

This I believed. “You in trouble?”

“Come on, Cass. Half the guys in the place are police.”

I had no comeback to this. “You want an ice pack?” I asked. “I’m going to the library, but I can grab one for you before I go.”

Dad shook his head. “School’s nearly out. You need a job,” he said. “You can’t be hanging around in the library all summer.”

“I don’t just hang out there.”

“Yeah, you hang out in the apartment above the garage too.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, Cass. About that …”

You know the cliché “I had a sinking feeling”? It’s a cliché for a reason, because you do feel like you’re sinking, down into the ground. “What?” I asked.

“I’m renting it. A couple of kids from up north. Lifeguard and a concessions’ stock boy.”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, no?” He took a step forward.

“No, no, no.”

“Cass, you’re shaking.”

I didn’t know that. Panic had cut all the connections between my mind and my body. I kept opening my mouth, but nothing was coming out except for no. I was like a goldfish spewing the word no instead of bubbles.

“Jesus, Cass, stop it, you’re scaring me.”

I took a deep breath. “I need the apartment.”