Expelled(31)



She looks over at Jude’s car. “In that thing?”

“I thought you might be tired of riding around in your cute little vintage Saab. I thought you might like to experience the purple death trap known as Zelda, with your own personal chauffeur.” I give a little half bow.

She smiles. “Well, if you put it that way.” She climbs into the front seat and sees two coffees sitting in the cupholders. “One for me?” she asks.

“For you,” I say. “How long until you have to be at work?”

“Ninety minutes till I clock in,” she says. “Sometimes I go in early to sit in Starbucks and read the Times, just to get out of the house.”

“I want to take you to the Property—is that okay?”

She shrugs. “I’ve got coffee, I’m happy.” Then she flashes a smile at me. “I mean, not happy, but you get the idea.”

It seems to me like Sasha would, in the larger scheme of things, have a thousand reasons to be happy, but—as we have established—what the hell do I know? I’m no expert in anything, and least of all in Sasha Ellis.

I park near the dahlia patch and send up a flutter of sparrows. Curls of mist float above the surface of the pond like ghosts.

We sit on the edge of the deck, above the rustling cattails.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so focused on my own problems,” I begin.

“Seriously,” Sasha says, “don’t worry about it. I was just having a bad day.”

“Yeah, I’ve been having a few of those myself,” I say.

She nods, gives a half laugh.

“I was so hopeful for a while,” I say. “I mean, I thought we could really make something happen with the movie. But we’ve gone all around with our cameras and questions, and we still aren’t any closer to the truth about who framed any of us.” I take a sip of coffee. It’s already cold. “My whole ‘I want to write my own ending’ isn’t turning out the way I thought it would. And maybe it sounds like I’m giving myself a little pity party, but I sort of feel like it’s time for me to catch a bit of a goddamn break.”

“You must really miss your dad,” she says suddenly.

It’s a sentence that seems to take us both by surprise.

“Yeah,” I say after breathing deeply for a minute. “I still can’t believe that it happened, that it’s true. It’s like every single day I’ve got to learn it all over again—that I’m never going to see him again.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says softly.

You and me both, I think.

Because what, really, is there to say? I can’t tell Sasha about my recurring dream of finding my dad still alive but bleeding to death before my eyes, the red running like a river down the backseat of our old car. Or what it feels like to wake in the middle of the night with a sadness so heavy I almost can’t breathe. Or how my mom’s been broken in half by her grief.

So for a little while we just sit there, watching the blue pond, its small ripples a sign of all that cold, fishy life below the surface.

“Can I ask you a question?” I eventually ask.

“Okay,” she says.

“Where’s your mom?”

Sasha gazes up toward the sky. “Chicago,” she says. “I used to live with her there, you know. She was a painter.”

“Like Jude,” I say.

“But not at all like Jude. Because she stopped working on her art and started only caring about the art scene. It was cool at first, and kind of glamorous. But then she started partying a lot. It was like ‘Oh, so-and-so’s here from London with his gallerist, and I’ve got to show them we’re not a bunch of corn-fed Illinois mouth breathers,’ which apparently meant she had to go to really fancy restaurants and snort lines off the porcelain in the ladies’ room.”

“That’s crazy,” I say.

Sasha nods. “Things got pretty out of hand. She and my dad hadn’t been together for a really long time, and back then I only saw him a couple of times a year. But then one summer she didn’t come home for four nights in a row, and it started to seem like Pinewood might be a better place for me to be.”

“So has it been better?” I ask hopefully.

Sasha reaches down, grabs the head of a cattail, and then tosses it into the water. “No,” she says, “I wouldn’t say so.”

I guess I’m kind of surprised to hear this. “Do you honestly hate it here that much? Is it really so impossible to hang around with me in this beautiful place?” I ask, gesturing around us. “Does all this gorgeousness pain you or something?”

I’m trying to make a small and possibly unfunny joke out of it, because I feel like there’s something wrong—something she’s not telling me.

She says, quietly, “You guys are fine.”

“Wow,” I say, “thanks. That’s awesome you feel so strongly about us.”

She gives a short little bark of a laugh. “Sorry,” she says. “You’re better than fine.”

“How much better?” I ask.

“Oh, stop,” she says.

“Seriously, I want to know how many degrees past fine I am. Like five? Ten?”

She turns and smiles at me. She’s so dazzling I can barely stand it.

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