Love in the Time of Serial Killers(14)

The cat gave a skeptical twitch of her whiskers.

“I know,” I said. “I’m reaching.”



* * *





?CONNER AND SHANI surprised me that night by showing up with burritos for dinner. I would never admit it, but I was beyond grateful not only for the food but also for the company. Already a few days in this house was inching me dangerously close to REDRUM territory.

The only problem with hanging out with them as a couple (besides the sometimes sickening levels of PDA) was that I was scared to death I’d blurt out something about the marriage proposal. I wished Conner had never even told me, because now I kept thinking about it at all these different junctions in the conversation. They were talking about going to another baseball game, and I almost made a remark like, Please tell me you’re not going to propose over the jumbotron. Shani made a comment about not looking forward to some assignment she had to finish up, and I thought about telling her at least she had something to look forward to, with a wink. I never winked. This secret was eating me alive.

“Pheebs?” Clearly, Conner had been trying to get my attention for a while.

“Hmm?”

“I asked if you thought we should get a dumpster,” he said. “You know, to help get rid of a lot of this . . .” He glanced around, as though no word in the English language could quite encompass what he was looking at. Finally, he settled on an anticlimactic “. . . stuff.”

“How much do those cost?” One effect of talking to Dr. Nilsson earlier had been that it had sent me on another spiral about my finances, thinking about how much the process of even applying to jobs was going to cost me. The document sites for me to upload my materials, the cost of any interviews that didn’t pay to fly you out, I’d probably need a nice blazer . . .

“I should get my first paycheck this Friday,” Conner said. “I can pay for it.”

“We’ll split it at least,” I said. There was some big-sister part of me that still found it hard to let my little brother take that on all by himself, even though it would’ve been a relief not to worry about it.

He shrugged.

“He’s doing so great at his job,” Shani said to me, as though this were a parent-teacher conference. “You got your calls to what, eight minutes?”

“Seven and a half,” he said around a bite of burrito, “and that’s not good. I’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Can’t you make a little more small talk,” I said, “pad the numbers a little? You’ve always been good at that, just talking to strangers.”

Conner swallowed, rolling his eyes at both of us. “The calls are supposed to be shorter,” he said. “You’re ranked on efficiency, and every hour they want you to do nine calls averaging six minutes and fifteen seconds apiece. That leaves almost four minutes an hour for a break, but you just save them all up at once and then you can take a fifteen-minute break every four hours.”

I glanced at Shani, who was smiling encouragingly at Conner.

“That’s . . . a lot of numbers,” I said.

Conner shrugged. “They gave me a laminated printout to keep at my station,” he said. “So I don’t have to do the math myself.”

“How do you like it?”

“It’s great,” he said. “They gave me a water bottle with the company logo on it. If you work there for a year you get a T-shirt.”

“Well,” I said. “Keep grinding.”

“It’s what I do best,” Conner said. “Remember how we played Heavy Machinery over and over, just to get enough lives to tackle the harder levels toward the end?”

It took me a second to track what he was talking about. Then he pointed down to the Crash Bandicoot tattoo on his calf, a goofy grin on his face, and I closed my eyes. Of course.

“It was mostly Slippery Climb,” I said. “It was about a billion years before they gave you a checkpoint.”

“But there was High Road, too,” Conner said. “That level was a bitch.”

Shani glanced between the two of us. “I’m assuming this is a video game.”

“This is the video game,” Conner said, “that started it all.”

From Shani’s nonplussed expression, I wasn’t sure that was the endorsement Conner seemed to think it was.

“Oh,” she said, springing up from her seat on the couch. “I brought that book I was telling you about.”

She rummaged through her oversized purse, coming up with a slim book with a black-and-white cover and the font choice of a church brochure. It was also obviously meant for an even younger audience than I had imagined, more preteen than teen. It seemed inappropriate to my situation for a number of reasons, and I had a visceral negative reaction to what on closer inspection was definitely Brush Script MT with a shadow effect. But Shani had been sweet to think of me, and she was about to be family soon. I accepted it with a smile.

“I read a few pages on the way over and it’s really powerful,” Shani said, glancing over at Conner as if for encouragement. “I think you’ll find a lot to identify with.”

That glance told me a lot. It told me that they’d discussed this, that they’d discussed me, and I could only imagine what conclusions they’d drawn. Conner had been only six when our parents divorced, only eight when I’d stopped coming back to my dad’s house every other weekend. So if he thought he had some insight into how I might feel about losing my father, who’d already been lost to me for years before, I’d love to hear it.