Little Fires Everywhere(83)

“Dude,” Tim said when he’d caught up to Moody. “You know anything about this mystery girl of your brother’s?”

It took Moody a moment to parse this question. “Mystery girl?”

“He’s been bringing some girl over to my place in the afternoons while I’m at practice. Won’t tell me who she is.” Tim shifted his gym bag to the other shoulder. “Trip’s not really a man of mystery, you know what I mean? I figure either it’s someone totally sketch or he’s really into her.”

Moody paused. Tim was an idiot, but he wasn’t imaginative. He wasn’t the kind to make things up. A suspicion was beginning to form in his mind.

“You don’t know anything about her?” he said.

“Nothing. It’s been, like, two months now. I’m almost tempted to go over there one afternoon and catch them in the act. He hasn’t said anything to you?”

“He never tells me anything,” Moody said, and pushed the door open and went out onto the front lawn.

He was still fretting when he got home and found Izzy reading on the couch.

“What are you doing home so early?” he said.

“Mia had her other job this afternoon,” Izzy said. She turned a page. “Where is everyone? Is Pearl not with you?”

Moody didn’t answer. The suspicion was taking on an uncomfortable solid shape. “Some new project my mom’s working on,” Pearl had told him. “She just needs an extra set of hands.” Yet there was Izzy—a perfectly good set of extra hands—at home, telling him Mia was out. Without answering Izzy, he dropped his bookbag on the coffee table and headed to the garage for his bike.

All the way to the duplex on Winslow, he told himself he was imagining things. That there was nothing going on here, that this was all a coincidence. But there, just as he’d expected, was Trip’s car, parked across the street from the house. He stayed there, staring at Pearl’s window, for what felt like hours, trying not to think about what was happening inside, but unable to look away. It looked so innocent, that modest little brick house, with its clean white door, the peach tree in the front yard ruffled with soft pink blossoms.

When Trip and Pearl emerged, they were holding hands, but that wasn’t what shook him. There was an ease between them that, Moody was sure, could only come from being intimately comfortable with another person’s body. The way their shoulders jostled as they came down the walkway. The way Pearl leaned over to close the zip on Trip’s backpack, the way he leaned down to smooth a stray curl out of her face. Then both of them looked up and saw Moody, astride his bicycle on the sidewalk, and froze. Before either of them could respond, he jammed his foot onto the pedal and sped away.

It never occurred to Moody to confront his brother; this was only what he expected from Trip. All of his fury was saved for Pearl, and later that afternoon, when she tiptoed upstairs and rapped on his door, he was not in the mood to listen to her excuses.

“It just happened,” she said, once she’d shut the door. Moody knew from her voice that she was telling the truth, but it brought him little comfort. He rolled his eyes at how much she sounded like a character on a bad teen drama and went back to tuning his guitar.

“Whatever,” he said. “I mean, if you want to screw my loser brother—” Pearl flinched, and in spite of himself, he stopped. “You know he’s just using you, right?” he said after a moment. “That’s what he does. He’s never serious about anyone. He gets bored and he moves on.”

Pearl maintained a defiant silence. This time, she was sure, was different. They were both right: Trip got bored easily, and seldom thought about girls once they were out of his sight. But he had never encountered a girl like Pearl before, who wasn’t embarrassed to be smart, who didn’t quite fit into the orderly world of Shaker Heights, whether she knew it or not. Over the past two months she had wormed into his mind at all hours of the day: in chemistry lab, during practice, at night when he normally would have fallen asleep quickly and dreamed banal dreams. The girls he’d grown up with in Shaker—and the boys, too, for that matter—seemed so purposeful: they were so ambitious; they were so confident; they were so certain about everything. They were, he thought, a little like his sisters, and his mother: so convinced there was a right and a wrong to everything, so positive that they knew one from the other. Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn’t know: she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces. She thought about big things, he discovered, and in those afternoons after they’d been together, big things were what they ended up talking about: How bad he felt that he and Moody didn’t get along (“We’re brothers,” he said, “aren’t we supposed to be friends?”). How he wasn’t sure, at seventeen, what he wanted to do with his life: everyone was asking; he was supposed to be thinking about college, he was supposed to know by now, and he didn’t, not at all. There’s time, Pearl had reassured him, there’s always more time. Being with Pearl made the world feel bigger, even as being with him made Pearl feel more grounded, less abstract, more real.

“You’re wrong about him,” she said at last.

“It’s fine,” Moody said. “I guess if you don’t mind being the latest of his conquests. I just thought you had more respect for yourself than that.” If he looked up, he knew, he would see the pain in Pearl’s eyes, so he kept his eyes pointedly on the guitar in his lap. “I thought you were smarter than the sluts who usually agree to do it with him.” He thumbed one of the strings, nudged the tuning peg a little higher. “But I guess not.”