When No One Is Watching(33)
He nods stiffly, places his coffee down on the chair next to me, then the camera, and yanks his shirt up. It’s nothing I haven’t seen a dozen times through his window, but it hits a little different now that he’s right in front of me. My neck and chest go hot in a flash and I look away.
I should just start building my cabin alongside Fuckboy Creek because obviously it’s where I intend to spend the rest of my days.
“Sydney, was this all a devious plan to get him to take his shirt off?” Drea whispers, and now it’s Theo who’s getting her elevator-eye treatment. “Well played, well played.”
“Dre.” I give her a if you don’t cut it out look, but she’s busy pretending to run her hand over Theo’s chest hair while the shirt is up over his head. She jerks her hand back when his head pops out of the shirt’s neck.
He turns the shirt inside out and pulls it back on. “I’m just gonna hide this important social justice message that seems to be embarrassing Sydney.”
His tone is a little . . . persnickety.
“Was I supposed to thank you? Appreciate it and give you a cookie or two?”
He looks down at me, his face flushed from embarrassment and his gaze wounded as he tugs the shirt down around his waist. “I know you don’t need my help, but do you want it? I thought you were just giving me shit for fun, but if you seriously don’t want me around, let me know now.”
“You know, that’s very thoughtful of you to ask, Brad,” Drea says in a surprisingly friendly tone, grabbing my coffee and taking a sip, then returning the cup to my hand. “Sydney does need the help. She’s not a super detail-oriented person.”
“My details for the tour are oriented, thank you very much,” I say as I turn to glare at her, but she has her phone out and isn’t paying me a bit of mind.
I take a deep breath, lowering my hackles and trying not to be the person Marcus always told me I was. “You got a date lined up or something?”
“Line up in progress. There’s this cutie working at the new Jamaican-Mexican fusion restaurant and he slipped me his phone number with my beef patty taco. Might as well make the most of the changes gentrification has wrought, right?”
She wiggles her brows, glances at Theo, and then blows me a kiss as she walks off, navigating around raised garden beds while her eyes seem to be glued to her screen. After I put my tools away and wash my hands, Theo and I head for the heritage center, marinating in the full-on August heat and humidity, and the awkwardness shared by a person who’s committed a faux pas and the person who corrected them.
He slows as we pass the medical center, looking up at the huge sign on the fence with a 3-D rendering of what the VerenTech campus will look like. “What do you think of the VerenTech deal? I used to pass the people protesting, and talked to a few of them, but I didn’t really get why people wouldn’t want it in our neighborhood when other states were dying to have VerenTech choose them.”
I bristle at his use of our but don’t snap at him.
“Well, a big part of it is how people addicted to crack were treated back in the day.” I sniff and start walking. “People acted like those addicts were soulless zombies, or jokes, or problems to lock away and take their babies from. Now white people get hooked on something, and we’re building fancy new facilities to research how to fix things.”
He has the nerve to give me a look. “Do you think Black people are immune to opioids? I’ve seen all kinds of people hooked on them. I mean, the other night, in this very spot a guy who was high out of his mind—”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, some drugged-up Black dude from Gifford Place is exactly who’s making the cover of magazines and news reports when people discuss the opioid problem.”
“The alternative is not helping anyone, then?” he asks.
“The alternative is not dropping the research center and the adjoining headquarters of a major corporation dead in the middle of a community that still gets overpoliced based on War on Drugs bullshit. It’s gonna be like seeing a middle finger every day for some people. Oh wait, it won’t be, because none of us will be able to afford living here by the time it’s done.”
He doesn’t say anything for once and we keep walking.
“It used to be an asylum, you know,” I say eventually, feeling guilty for snapping. “Before it became a hospital. People always used to say the place was haunted. Like, bad haunted. Ghosts-tryin’-to-kill-you haunted. Supposedly, that’s the real reason for all the malpractice lawsuits they got.”
Theo flashes me a grin—he’s not mad at me. Good.
“I’m sure the doctors backed that theory.”
“Yup. And when I was a kid, there was a rumor that if you stayed out too late, the men in the white coats would get you and you’d never be heard from again.”
Theo looks up at the building, old and with dead vines clinging to the sides of it but still imposing. He rubs at his arms.
“Creepy. Was that like the clown-van-kidnappers urban legend?”
“The what?” I cut my eyes at him.
“When I was growing up, they used to say clowns drove around in a white van and tried to lure kids in. I heard it in, like, six different states. There has to be some truth to it.”
I laugh and shake my head. “That is the worst kidnapping plot I’ve ever heard. Dress like something that will send kids running and screaming from you and try to lure them into your clown van? Not even clown car for consistency? Come on now.”