The Red Hunter(109)

My stomach hollows out. One of the girls? Something horrible that one of them did or was done to them.

“What is it?” I say, my throat tight. “Tell me.”

“I just heard from my attorney,” she says. Then she lets out a laugh. “The group home has received a donation of three hundred thousand dollars.”

Relief is a flood. I sink to my knees.

“Do you know what I can do for my girls with this money?” Melba asks, her voice joyous, a person who knows that the only true happiness in this life is doing for others. “Do you know how much it will help us?”

“That’s—so wonderful,” I say, even as my mind struggles for meaning, for understanding. “Do you know who sent it?”

“My lawyer said there was just a box of cash and a note on plain cardstock,” says Melba. “It just said: From one of the good guys.”

The world is a tilt-a-whirl, and I just barely hold on.





forty-five


Who brings her parents to a concert? No one except dorky only children (single children was the correct term because only implied paucity, according to her mother). Pathetic, single children whose parents were sadly laboring under the delusion that they were still half cool. Which they so were not.

Okay, even Raven had to admit that her parents looked pretty good—Claudia in a simple sheath dress with platform peep-toe red shoes, and Ayers in triple black with a nice Armani belt with a brushed nickel buckle. And they were happy. And Raven was—weirdly—happy. What had started as an extended sleepover, where Raven and Claudia were just staying with Ayers until Claudia got back on her feet, had turned into a formal announcement to Raven that they were getting back together and going to be a family again.

And it was good, and weird. Because her parents, in her memory, had never been together, always separated. And some of the games she’d gotten used to playing no longer worked. But she could live with it.

“So,” Piper gushed. “Is it official? Is Troy, like, your boyfriend?”

“Um, yeah,” said Troy, coming up behind them. “It’s official.”

“Yeah,” said Raven, leaning into him “It is.”

Claudia and Ayers promised to give them a “wide berth,” whatever that meant, but there was no way they were going to see Above & Beyond at the Beacon Theatre without chaperones. Raven’s parents had paid for the tickets, too, seating themselves a few rows behind Raven, Troy, Piper, and her maybe-boyfriend Todd, who Raven didn’t really like.

Claudia and Ayers were at the bar, pretending they didn’t know her, and Raven excused herself to go the bathroom, waiting on the predictably endless line that was always.

“Hey, Raven.”

She jumped a little. It had been a few months, but she was still jumpy, having bad dreams about being locked in a tunnel, about fires devouring their apartment building. She dreamt about that bag of money, which had disappeared again, and the hideous face of Rhett Beckham. She didn’t like her parents to go out at night, and so they didn’t. This was the first night out for all of them in a long time.

She didn’t recognize right away the guy standing in front of her, and then it slowly dawned. She felt a little flutter of nerves. That dark hair, those intense eyes. Andrew Cutter.

“I saw on Twitter that you had your test.”

She remembered that night, how mean he’d been to her. She talked to her mom about it, and Claudia had asked Raven to think about what Andrew’s experience might be. How angry he must be, how damaged. Raven thought about it, but she still hated him a little. He had dark circles under his eyes, looking a little more ragged out than she remembered him.

“I thought you unfollowed me,” she said.

“Twitter feeds are public.”

“Okay,” she said, not knowing what else to say. She wouldn’t have imagined he’d given her a second thought.

She looked out into the crowd for Troy. She could see the golden crown of his head above some of the others. “So, yeah I got my test.”

“We’re officially not related,” he said.

“Right,” she said. “Lucky you.”

He smiled a little, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “No,” he said. “Lucky you.”

Then he walked off, disappearing into the throng. She stood there shaking for a moment. Then, no. She wasn’t going to freak out and leave. She was going to find her friends, her boyfriend, and have a good time.

She was still unsettled a little when her mom came up behind her.

“Who was that?” Claudia asked.

Her mom had white glitter shadow on her eyes—which might be a little young for her. But she just looked happy, lighter, freer than she had in as long as Raven could remember.

“No one,” said Raven, in what she personally thought was a stunning act of maturity. She deserved some kind of a reward for how grown-up she was being right now.

“You gave him the death stare,” said Claudia. There was a little wrinkle in her brow, as though she detected something was not right. Mom radar, always on.

“I don’t talk to strange boys, right?” said Raven. “Isn’t that what you taught me?”

“Yes, it is,” said Claudia, kissing her on the head. “Good girl.”

She might tell them later, but not now, not tonight. Tonight, they were going to be happy, have fun. The shadow of Melvin Cutter was gone from their lives for good. She biologically belonged to Ayers and was surprised to find that it didn’t matter all that much. Because it was the life they shared that mattered, the hours they’d spent in the park, the million Band-Aids he’d put on her knees, how he carried her bloody tooth in his pocket all day while they were at Great Adventure and still remembered to put it in the little pillow so the Tooth Fairy would come. Those were the things that made Ayers her dad, not the blood running through her veins. She didn’t love him any more totally. But she would never have known that without knowing. A pall had lifted from her mind, from their life, and they were free to move into the future.