The Neighbor's Secret(53)

“Why on earth would he want to meet me?”

“Your book.” Maxine overenunciated the words like Jen was being dim. “Your grant.”

“I’m just in the research stages.”

“Fair warning: he’s pretty aggressive. Actually.” Maxine snorted. “You’ll be an excellent match.”

“Me?”

“Please. I was there when you hid those books in the library so no one else could find them for that paper on—was it novice management?” Maxine clasped her hands together gleefully. “I can’t believe I remember the topic.”

“It didn’t happen like that,” Jen said.

“It did. You hid the whole stack in the lower archives, you little rat.”

Jen recalled hazily the jostle of books in arms, a rushed walk, a charged feeling of battle-readiness. The memory should be embarrassing, but Jen only felt a dull melancholy for her loss of ambition.

It had been electric to feel such purpose, to have that fiction of control over her life.

“I was a total asshole.”

“No.” Maxine wagged a finger. “You were a tigress.”

“I’ve become a soft-boiled egg. I sit in the audience and weep for Flower the elephant.”

“Not buying it.” Maxine regarded Jen with an annoyingly superior grin. “People don’t change that much.”



* * *



“Hello?” Jen called. She walked into the kitchen. “I’m home.” She stepped out of her shoes, rubbed her heels.

The boys had left a half-full pot of congealing ramen noodles on the stove. And a pile of dirty bowls in the sink, but she didn’t care.

Dinner had been delightful. Laurence the manager had handed Jen his card, with a sincere-enough call me whenever you’re ready and a double-cheek kiss. She felt inspired to sit down at her computer and finish that leatherback-turtle study, maybe even take a peek at the one involving monarch butterflies.

Upstairs, a door slammed. There was the thunder of footsteps.

“Hello?” she shouted again. Above her head was the screech of something being dragged across the wood floor. She heard Colin’s footsteps on the stairs.

“You won’t believe who I saw tonight,” she said in a half shout. “I won’t make you guess, it was Nan, who said you’re wonderful, and then I got a personalized psalm, something about feathers, do you know that one? It made me think of Emily Dickinson, ‘hope is the thing with feathers,’ which is ironic, because I think it was about worry, which is the opposite of hope. She smelled it on me, but it wasn’t entirely my fault because—”

Jen glanced up.

Colin was still in the doorway. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“We have,” he said, “a bit of a situation.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX



“Holla123 unfriended Abe,” Colin said in a rush.

Jen felt an all-too-familiar tsunami of hatred toward Holla123. “That little bastard,” she said.

She clipped up the staircase to Abe’s room and Colin rushed to keep up. “The thing is,” he stammered, “Holla123 is apparently only nine years old.”

“What?” Jen stopped midway up the stairs. “Did we know that?”

“No. Apparently his parents didn’t realize it was a war game, and saw some of Abe’s online communications and were horrified by the violence.”

“What did those idiots think? The game is called Foxhole.”

Colin laughed nervously as Jen knocked on Abe’s door.

“Wait. Before you go in—”

Jen opened the door.

“Abe had a strong reaction.”

The desk chair had been overturned and the video monitor was upside down and unplugged. A red beanbag chair had been eviscerated. Its white-bead filling covered the entire floor of his room like a fresh blanket of snow.

Abe was hunched like a turtle in the middle of the room, head tucked into knees; a pair of scissors were clutched in his fist.

“I have a new enemy,” he said. His voice was muffled.

Jen tiptoed through the beanbag filling and sat beside him, placed a hand on his spine, which felt damp and knobby.

“Holla123 is not the only game in town,” Colin said. “We’ll find another Foxhole mate.”

“The same thing will keep happening,” Abe said quietly. “The same exact thing.”

This is what the experts didn’t get: Abe was vulnerable, not some sophisticated villain.

Yes, said the Scofield voice, but every villain starts out vulnerable. In superhero movies and life.

“Why are we moping about a nine-year-old?” Colin said. “What happened to the power of positive thinking?”

Jen and Abe watched him curiously. Given the choice, their family would always hunker down to mope. She had been about to suggest they open the Oreos.

“Let’s go do something,” Colin said. “Let’s play hoops.”

“Now?” Jen said. “It’s ten o’clock on a school night.”

“I don’t feel like it,” Abe muttered.

“I’m sure your mom will let you earn points for it, right Jen?”

“It might be fun,” Jen offered.