Expelled(34)

I suck in my breath. Most of the time I try not to think about my dad—I try not to let the pain in. But it’s always there, no matter what. It’s just waiting for me to pay attention to it. “I’ve asked myself the same questions,” I say quietly.

She hands me the Cheetos bag and I reach in. There’s nothing but crumbs.

“Do you think you could help me?” she asks.

I brush my orange fingertips against my jeans. “How?”

“We could go through his clothes together,” she says, her voice a quiet plea. “We’ll find a place to donate most of them. But maybe you want some things. Like his USC sweatshirt and his good suit.”

But grief makes me bitter. “What does a kid with no future need a suit for?” I scowl. “My first court date? A date with a probation officer?”

My mom’s eyes are green and sad. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Why not? Everyone else is,” I say.

“Oh, Theo,” she sighs.

For a second I think she’s going to say something else, but she just shakes her head. And I know she’s in pain, but I can’t help but wish she’d make some tiny stab at cheering me up for once, some small attempt to take care of me.

“Well,” I say after another minute. “I’m going to make myself some lunch. I can feel my blood burrito level dipping.”

I stand up and start to go inside when she says, “Wait.” She takes a deep breath. “I also got some news today—interesting news. Maybe even good.”

“What?”

“Someone wants to buy the Property.”

My heart seizes up in my chest, and I feel like I’m going to be sick. This is exactly what I’ve been afraid of. I try to speak but I can’t. My mouth just opens and closes uselessly.

“Theo?” my mom asks. “Are you okay?”

This utterly ridiculous question is what gets my vocal cords working—loudly. “What do you mean?” I yell. “Did you put it up for sale without telling me?”

“No, I would never do that! But, Theo, I can’t just keep paying for it. I can barely handle the mortgage on our house.”

“But you can’t sell it!” I cry. “You just can’t! It would be the worst thing you could do.”

Her fingers tighten their grip on the chair. “Says who? Do you think I should work day and night so you can have a place to party with your friends—is that it?”

I can feel the tears, but I won’t let them come. “It’s not about me. It was your place—yours and Dad’s!”

“But then he left me, Theo. He left us. That beautiful dream we had? It died with him. Whether we keep the Property or not, there’s no changing that.”

“You can’t sell it,” I say. I’m not yelling anymore. I’m barely even whispering.

“I’m not saying I want to, baby. I’m saying I might have to.”

If the Property gets sold, what do I have left?

It feels a lot like nothing.

“I thought you’d be… not happy, maybe, but relieved,” my mom says.

“Dad and I built that deck,” I say. “We dug all those raised beds. We fished there. We hung all those stupid novelty lights! That’s all I have left of him.”

I’m wiping tears from my face and my mom is looking wrecked.

“Oh, Theo,” she says. “It’s not all you have left.”

“Please don’t tell me how I have his eyes or his smile or some shit like that,” I say.

She shakes her head. “No, I don’t mean that. Earlier, when I started going through his things, I found this in the safe.” She holds out an envelope. It’s sealed, and on the front, there’s my dad’s handwriting.

For Theo, it says.





32


And I’d thought the day couldn’t get more awful.

I go upstairs to my room and put the letter on the desk where I used to do my homework, between my copies of The Great Gatsby and Catch-22. I can tell by his handwriting, which is shaky, that my dad wrote it after he got sick.

What did he need to say to me that he couldn’t say to my face? That he was scared? That he was sorry for what he was about to do? That he was bitter and enraged he’d received a death sentence at age forty-three?

What if he wrote about how he needed me to be good and to take care of Mom? Because obviously I’ve done a terrible job of that. Can the dead be disappointed in the living?

I don’t want to know the answer to that question.

Maybe not opening the letter makes me seem like a coward. And maybe I really am one. But I’m also standing on the thin edge of a pretty goddamn deep existential abyss, and I really don’t want to fall in.

I’ve lost my father, my school, and my reputation. I’m also on the verge of losing my best friend.

In other words: shit must change. And for the better this time.

I’ve got to make something good happen—something good to balance out all the bad. So what do I do?

I need to apologize to Jude, first of all, and I’ve got to give Sasha something to feel happy about. And maybe we need to celebrate at the Property, before that gets taken away, too.

Then, amid all the suckage of my current life, I get a brilliant idea.