Betty could interrogate a terrorist armed with nothing but a gap-toothed grin and homemade apple pie.
Hank’s kind eyes doubled as weapons of mass confessions.
Reed had never heard the word “no” in his life.
And Nash… Well, Nash was Nash. All he had to do was breathe, and people tripped over their feet to please him. He possessed a presence money couldn’t buy.
“Sheep gravitate to likable people. Likability is not a quality you can learn, but one you are born with,” Mother once informed me after Basil had invited everyone in our grade to her tenth birthday party except me. She looked down her nose at me, disappointment staining her voice. “I am likable; you are not. I lead the Junior Society; you are an outcast. Perhaps you should learn to be like sheep.”
Nash’s existence poked holes in Mother’s theory. He was simultaneously unlikeable and magnetic. Fuck the sheep. When I grew up, I wanted to be like him.
“Are you okay?” Reed repeated.
No.
Yes.
I didn’t know. Physically, fine. Mentally? A little shaken and a whole lot of bloodthirsty. But Reed was a pacifist at heart, and I had no clue what he would say if he knew what I would do if I ever got my hands on Able.
The adrenaline had pacified me in front of the office, but now that I was home, my body demanded I fight or I would shake and never stop.
“Yes,” I finally spit out. When Reed continued to study me, I shoved my hair out of my face and sat up. “I promise. I’m okay. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
But a lie of omission…
It occurred to me that my lies had piled up like an intersection crash. One after the other after the other. I needed to stop, but the alternative—a.k.a. the truth—appealed to me less.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Stop asking, Reed.” I shot him an exaggerated eye roll, glanced at the clock, and slipped under the covers, hoping he would drop the subject.
After a minute of staring at me pretend-sleeping, he did. Truthfully, Able Cartwright didn’t bother me. I had fought him off. I had stopped him. I had won.
Able Cartwright was a cockroach. It might take a ridiculous amount of attempts to crush him, but make no mistake—life will crush him.
Cockroaches die eventually.
This crush, on the other hand?
I’d tried everything from dating other boys to kissing Stella Copeland in her closet during seven minutes in heaven.
And still, it had a heartbeat.
Vibrant. Loud. Pulsing with life.
And I didn’t want to kill it.
“I don’t understand!”
“What is happening?”
“Stop, please! I’m begging y’all.”
An argument pervaded my dreams. I reached out, my hands finding empty sheets in the starless dark. Reed had left. I crossed my fingers and hoped Dad hadn’t found him sneaking out of my room. I would sooner lunge on a blade than let Reed take the fall for making me happy.
Slipping into drawstring shorts under my oversized shirt, I forced myself out of bed and into the hallway. My arms found their way across my chest, and I shivered in the cold, cursing my mom and her need to keep the AC at sixty-five degrees.
“Only poor people suffer in the heat, darling.”
I followed the voices into the living room. A yawn in my mouth died down the second I caught sight of both my parents, Hank and Betty Prescott, Reed, and Nash. They stood wrapped around the walls of the room like an exhibition at Madame Tussauds, frozen in varying degrees of rage and anxiety.
The Winthrop mansion comprised of cold marble with a farmhouse twist. Reed joked Dad was the farmhouse, and Mother was like the cold marble.
Tonight, the marble had taken over, and we stood inside a tomb of statuario, gold, and silver—mummified, waiting for life to move on and forget about us.
I rubbed my bleary eyes and took in the scene as quick as I could. Mother wore that frozen stare of hers. Dad stood like a Hummer, imposing, arms crossed as if daring someone to talk to him.
Tremors rocked Betty’s round frame. Hank stared between Betty and Nash, whose relaxed shoulders spoke of boredom, but instinct demanded I not be fooled. He was more alert than the rest of us.
It made the baby hairs on my arms stand up as I brought my focus onto Reed. Handcuffed beside his brother, his fury left no feature of his unscathed. I barely recognized him through his scowl.
In front of the fireplace with hands on their hips, two detectives took turns speaking, police badges proudly displayed. I’d been transported into a Dirty Harry flick, except instead of Clint Eastwood, I got cheap suits and a frantic Southern mother. (Betty, not Virginia. My mother couldn’t give two shits.)
“Reed?” My voice halted the yelling.
The two detectives scrutinized me in unison. I didn’t want to think of how I looked with the mascara-stained cheeks and bed head, my arms clenched around my chest to fight the chill and feet shoved into the hot pink bunny slippers Reed had gotten me as a gag gift last year.
Instead, I turned to Reed. “What’s going on?” My eyes dipped to the cuffs interlinking his wrists. “Why are you handcuffed?”
“Able is in the hospital.” The voice belonged to Reed, but it didn’t sound like Reed. It sounded like rage, thinly veiled, looking for a target. “He woke up long enough to tell the police I beat him up.”
One detective approached Reed. “Is that a confession?” His eyes lingered on Reed’s Able-Cartwright-has-a-small-dick t-shirt, and I realized we’d never taken them off. Great.
Nash stepped in front of his brother, blocking him from view. “It’s not a confession, because I did it.”
The other detective shook his head. His man bun bobbed with the movement. “Mr. Prescott, you expect me to believe you assaulted a boy ten years younger than you with whom you don’t spend time, do not go to the same school as, and no longer live in the same town as? Allow me to remind you hindering an investigation is illegal, and the victim has already identified his assailant.”
“Nash!” Betty glanced between her sons, desperation turning her brows into a mountain peak that met at the middle. “You will not take responsibility for something you didn’t do.”
“Ma—”
“Nash.”
Their stare-down lasted a full minute. Tension swarmed the air, and no one dared to breathe loud. Meanwhile, I kept my head down, confused as I tried and failed to make sense of this. Reed wasn’t violent. That sounded more like Nash, who Basil used to gossip would punch a man out for breathing at him the wrong way.
Reed was a pacifist. He took out his aggression on the football field. Even then, he was a quarterback, and I’d never seen him tackle anyone. Ever. And I’d gone to all of his games since his mom had become our housekeeper and his dad had taken up the mantel as our groundsman.
One time, a fight had broken out on the football field, and Reed had been the first to walk to the sidelines and wait for it to subside. Yet, he’d fought for me. That pleasure in my chest, like a balloon filling the space around my heart with air, returned.
“Detectives…”
Dad stepped forward, pulled a cigar from his front pocket and a lighter from his back pocket, then lit it. We waited as he tilted the cigar above the flame, taking his time to turn it until the foot ignited.