Expelled(12)

“I’ll be right with you, ma’am,” Sasha calls to the woman behind me. “Goddamn pillow freak,” she mutters, and then she turns her cool gaze back to me. “For your information, Theo, most people don’t care about the truth as much as you do. And there are a lot of things people just don’t want to know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs, dismissing the question. “So what do you suggest we do?” she asks.

“We launch an investigation.”

“Listen, Sherlock, we had our hearings—”

“And we were expelled, though there was only circumstantial evidence against us!” I practically yell.

Sasha doesn’t say anything for a minute. And then she says, “You do make a point.”

“I have to be honest here,” I say. “My life sucked plenty before all this, and I have the holes I punched in my closet to prove it. And now it’s worse, and frankly that’s not okay with me. I want life to return to its customary level of suckage, stat.”

Sasha smiles then. It’s not a very big one, but I think it’s real. “Okay,” she says. “Fine. Let’s get your life back to its familiar suck status. Now get the hell out of here before you get me fired.”

“Okay,” I say, “but first I’m going to need your phone number.”

Sasha blinks at me. I can’t believe I just demanded it like that—who am I to ask anything at all of the thrilling, terrifying Sasha Ellis? But then she grabs my receipt and quickly scribbles down ten digits. I hold my breath as I take the paper from her small, cool hand.

“Thanks,” I whisper—like she’s given me something precious. Which in some small way she has.

“Whatever,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Go.”





11


Later I make Jude drop me off at the Property, because it’s a nicer place to be alone than my empty house. Dinner is a box of graham crackers and a crumbling wedge of prehistoric cheddar that I discover in the back of the mini fridge. Honestly, it’s no less depressing than the microwaved burritos I eat alone every other night.

I sit on the dock, watching the rippling water, until dusk turns everything a deep blue. Then I get up and go turn on all the lights in the gazebo.

There are literally hundreds: the rafters sag with strands of chili peppers, pineapples, cowboy boots, stars, fish, and cacti. My dad could never resist a box of novelty lights. He found them utterly hilarious—and yet totally functional! he’d add.

It’s just another thing I’ll never understand about him.

Not his love for something so stupid—I get that.

It’s more like: how could someone so full of life, so ready to be thrilled, just…go?

I know the easy answer. A year ago he was diagnosed with ALS, which is pretty much the cruelest disease imaginable. Your motor neurons, which you need for muscle control, just start dying. First you can’t hold a coffee cup. Then you can’t stand up. Eventually you can’t even breathe.

Also: there’s no cure.

So my dad knew this wasn’t a fight he could win.

But somehow the easy answer doesn’t entirely cut it. That he would have died anyway, in two years or in ten, doesn’t make things any less terrible. There was still the blood. The gun. The shattered back window of the car.

There was still me, age sixteen, finding him.

I don’t have the words for that horror.

I don’t think he meant it to happen that way. But once he was gone, he didn’t have much say in the matter.

Sometimes I think my dad must have left me a note—just a few words to say that he was sorry, that he loved me, that he knew he was leaving the game of life early but he didn’t like the look of the scoreboard.

I’ve searched for it, all over our house and all over the Property, and I’ve never found it. But who am I to say that it doesn’t exist? People believe in all kinds of things they might never actually get to see.

I run my hand under the cushions of the couch, though I’ve done it a thousand times before. I find what I always find: crumbs, spare change, a fishing lure. And so what? It’s not like a note would make me feel better.

It just might make me feel less numb.

But inside an old wooden trunk I find something I’d somehow missed before. It’s a half empty bottle of Knob Creek whiskey—or, as Jude would describe it, half full.

I pick it up and give it a sniff. Alcohol doesn’t go bad, does it? I’m probably supposed to sip it or something, the way Professor Ellis did, but I throw it back like a frat guy instead. It burns my throat, and warmth quickly spreads through my body.

I’ve had Jack and cokes at parties before, not that I went to that many. But I’ve never clutched a bottle of 100-proof whiskey by its neck, the way Parker did in that picture. Even now, when I can, I pour it into a chipped coffee mug. Do I have better manners than Parker, or am I just more of a wuss?

I know what he’d say.

Outside the crickets are making a racket, like they’re having some kind of insect rager. But in here it’s just me and the Knob Creek, so I might as well pour myself another glass. Mug. Whatever.

Bugs, attracted by the lights, fling themselves against the gazebo’s screens. They’re so loud they sound like raindrops.