“She’s on sick leave,” North said. He stabbed his finger at the register, opening the drawer.
“I’m not sick,” I said.
“Doc’s orders,” he said without looking up. “Go home and sleep. You’ve got school tomorrow.”
“You do, too,” I said. “You and Silas can’t work all night and then go to school. And don’t you have a football game coming up?”
“Aw. Look at her,” Silas said. “She’s adorable when she gets all worried about us.”
“Go home, Sang,” North said. He pulled a few twenty dollar bills from the register and dropped them into the money jar I was holding. He turned me by the shoulders, and then swatted at my butt.
“North,” I said, wanting to protest the money in the jar rather than going home. I hadn’t worked long enough to earn that much, plus the tips Gabriel and Luke gave me.
“Bye, aggele,” Silas said, talking loud and waving to make a point that I should go.
“Bye, Trouble,” Gabriel said, picking up on Silas’s tone and waving.
“Aw, she’s leaving?” Luke said as he dashed around the counter, plopping down a tray. He hooked his arm around my neck and tugged me in for a quick kiss on the forehead. “Bye, cupcake.”
I sighed, giving up. The boys were intolerable sometimes, but my heart didn’t want to stop pounding.
I was about to head for the front door, when Uncle materialized. He caught Luke as he was unhooking his arm from around my neck.
Uncle smiled. “No kissing in front of the customers.” He spotted the jar. He beamed. “See, what did I tell you? She’s a natural.”
I blushed, not knowing what to say.
“She needs to get home, though,” North said.
“Hey,” Uncle snapped at him. “Stop telling Luke’s girl what to do. You’re not her boss, kid.”
North grunted, walked around us and stalked off toward the kitchen.
Uncle patted my shoulder. “Want to work tomorrow?”
I started to nod, but Luke stepped up next to me. “She might, but we have to check with school and stuff.”
“Let me know where I can fill you in on the schedule,” Uncle said.
WHERE DO WE BELONG?
I borrowed shoes from Gabriel, and he stayed in the back of the diner to wash dishes until he could ride home with Luke. I walked home alone, taking the path through the woods alone while Gabriel stayed on the phone with me until I made it to the back yard.
I took the long loop through the woods so I could walk by Nathan’s house. The pool lights were still on but the house lights were off. I wondered if Nathan was still with Kota. Maybe he was spending the night with him.
When I got to my house, I entered through the side door, noting how it was unlocked. Marie didn’t close up the house before she went to sleep. I locked the doors behind me. I felt I was locking out the boys. But I reminded myself if they wanted in, they would get in. They all had keys.
The air in the house felt different to me. It was like walking in on someone else’s home. Smells were different. The temperature wasn’t comfortable. This made me a little sad, because now I was getting this feeling everywhere I went. There wasn’t a place that had that ‘coming home’ feeling to it.
There was a stack of dirty dishes by the sink. The trash was almost overflowing. I listened quietly for a moment. Even though I knew the boys weren’t here, I listened for them anyway, expecting one to appear, hearing me moving around.
I loaded the dishwasher, took out the trash and wiped down the counters. I was tired, but I was wasting time hoping maybe a boy would show up.
I started wiping down the kitchen table when I heard footsteps going toward the downstairs bedroom.
I followed the noise quietly. Old habits had me tiptoeing, and my hands were up, ready to defend myself. Flashes of my mother creeping through the house, trying to catch me doing something wrong swept through my mind, but I shut them down, burying them away. She wasn’t here. I knew that.
I poked my head around to peek inside. The room appeared to be untouched. The bed had been stripped, the mattress bare. Everything else was as it was the day my stepmother had been taken under the Academy’s care.
A rustling started deeper in the room. My hand crept up to my chest, reaching for my phone and I leaned in, trying to catch who it was.
Marie was in our mother’s walk-in closet scrounging through the top drawer of the chest of drawers.
“Marie?” I asked quietly.
Marie jerked back, her eyes going wide. She spotted me, frowned and then ducked her head around, looking beyond me. “What?” she asked.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for anything useful,” she said. She slammed the drawer shut. “What are you doing in here?”
“I heard noise,” I said. “I just came to see–”
“Well, don’t come in here.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s nothing in here that belongs to you,” she said. She pushed her arms out like a barrier. “This is my mother’s. So stay out of it and keep those boys out of this room.”
“Okay,” I said, unsure how to argue with her because she did have a point. There wasn’t anything in this room I’d wanted, but knowing she was excluding me from it felt so awkward. I backed up a few feet but stalled, considering. “Is everything okay?” I asked, unsure how to be delicate about it.
“What?” she asked.
“I mean, you seemed a little down and...”
“My mother’s in a hospital and I don’t know where she is,” she said flatly. “My father’s gone. Boys show up at random and dig through stuff and get in the way. What the hell isn’t wrong?”
“They help out,” I s
aid quietly. “They clean and they buy us food. They give us rides to school.”
“But where is my mother?” she asked. “Is she dead? Because I haven’t heard anything in weeks. I can’t reach dad. The phone’s down.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me that she could be dead. I pressed a palm against my chest. “Mom’s in the hospital.”
“Which one?”
Not too long ago, when Volto had kidnapped me, he asked a similar question, and I didn’t have an answer for him either. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her she was with the Academy and she would be safe, but I couldn’t because I wasn’t allowed. “I could find out.”
“How?”
“We could ask the boys,” I said. I didn’t want to impose on the guys, but thought they would understand. “We can get them to take us.”
I was concerned about my stepmother. Despite everything she’d done to me, even if she hated me, I felt bad that she was sick, and blamed a lot of her anger on her illness. Leaving it in the dark was how I dealt with it. But the longer I went without asking, the more awkward I felt about saying anything at all.
The fact that we weren’t asked to go see her was a strange feeling, too. I sensed if she’d had asked to see anyone, the Academy would have notified us by now.
Wouldn’t they?
Marie pressed her fingers to her eyebrow. “I can’t see her,” she said. This was her way of telling me she wouldn’t consider asking the boys for help. “I can’t call dad.”
“Did you want to?” I asked. I pulled the phone from my bra, presenting it.
She frowned, but took the phone from me. “What’s his number?”
I showed her the directory and punched the button for her to get it to dial out.
She held it to her face, waiting. “Answering machine,” she said.
“Leave a message,” I told her. “Maybe he’ll respond.”
She shook her head, pressing the button to disconnect. She tossed the phone back at me. “Just stay out of here.” She slunk off. I stayed downstairs, listening to her footsteps as she retreated to her bedroom.