She reached up to touch her bruised face when it dawned on her what he meant. “I fell.”
“You fell? If you don’t wanna tell me, say so. No need for a bullshit response.”
“Honestly, I fell! I tried to, uh . . . I was . . .”
“You don’t have to explain. It’s none of my business, anyway.”
“But I did fall,” she insisted. He still didn’t look convinced, but she wasn’t sure what else she could say. She pointed to his bandage. “What happened to you?”
He touched his injury like she’d done and shrugged. “I fell.”
“Did you really?”
“No,” he said, laughing as he disappeared down the stairs.
She frowned. “But I did.”
* * *
When Carmine was ten years old, his father brought home a cat, its fur scraggly and tail chopped off. It infested the house with fleas and clawed up the furniture. Two weeks later the cat disappeared. Carmine never asked what happened to it. Frankly, he didn’t care.
When he was fourteen, it was two dogs. The first was a little ankle biter with kinky yellow fur and three legs. It pissed all over the house before chewing up Vincent’s favorite shoes. It didn’t last a week. The second dog was a pit bull with one eye and deformed ears. His father tied it up in the backyard, and it barked all night, keeping them awake. Carmine could barely function in school the next day, and when he got home, the dog was gone.
So Carmine wished he was shocked when his father brought home a girl, but he wasn’t. He figured he was just picking up strays again. But Carmine could tell something was different, and he didn’t know what to make of it. His father was buying the girl things. He hadn’t even bought the last dog any food.
That fact weighed heavily on him as he strolled down the stairs. He told himself it was sheer curiosity fueling his thoughts, but the truth was, in just one day, the strange girl had gotten under his skin. He couldn’t pinpoint why or what to do about it, but he didn’t like the nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach. It irritated him, keeping him awake all night long, like a tiny little hammer chipping away at his insides. Fucking conscience.
He paused on the second floor in front of his father’s office. “Hey, do you want me to—?”
“No.”
Vincent’s sharp voice made Carmine stop midsentence. “You didn’t let me finish. I was gonna ask—”
“I don’t need you to finish,” Vincent said, remaining hunched over his laptop with his reading glasses low on his nose. “I don’t want you to do anything for me.”
“But what about the—?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Vincent laughed humorlessly. “Not like you’d actually worry about it. You don’t care about anything that doesn’t benefit you.”
“That’s not true. I care about—”
“No, you don’t.”
“Christ, can I get out a full sentence? I’m trying to help.”
“I don’t need your help,” Vincent said, shaking his head. “I asked you to do one thing, and you couldn’t do it. Lesson learned, son. I now know I can’t count on you.”
Ouch. The list.
“I forgot,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you.”
“It’s too late. I already asked someone else.”
“Who?”
“Jen.”
He grimaced. “Why her?”
“Well, she knows the sorts of things girls need, since she is one.”
With some effort, Carmine refrained from making a crack about Jen’s age, but he couldn’t hold back his opinion entirely. “If by that you mean they need birth control and a heavy dose of penicillin, I agree.”
Vincent shot him a disapproving look. “You can’t judge, given the company you keep.”
“True, but I’m not exactly role model material, am I? Would you want me doing the shopping?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “You’d come home with underwear no bigger than dental floss.”
“And you think Jen won’t? She doesn’t even wear underwear.”
Vincent glared at him. “Aren’t you late for school?”
“Whatever.”
He turned to walk away, but his father called after him. “If you really want to make it up to me, there’s something you can do.”
Carmine glanced back at him. “What?”
“Stay out of trouble.”
“I’ll try, but I’m pretty sure wreaking havoc is in my genes, Dad.”
* * *
An hour and a half later, Carmine waltzed into his second period classroom and disrupted the American history teacher, Mrs. Anderson, in the middle of a lecture. She smiled curtly. “Mr. DeMarco, you’re just in time to give your presentation on the Battle of Gettysburg.”
He groaned, having forgotten all about them having oral presentations today. She motioned toward the front of the room, and he begrudgingly took his place as she sat behind her desk. “You can begin any time.”
“Uh, the battle happened in Pennsylvania. It was, like, 1800s.”
Mrs. Anderson corrected him, “1863.”
“Yeah, what she said. General Lee led his army up from the South; they met the North in Gettysburg. A bunch of people died on both sides, hundreds of thousands.”
“Tens of thousands.”
“Same difference,” he said. “The South lost and the North won. Abraham Lincoln came and gave the Emancipation Proclamation.”
“The Gettysburg Address,” Mrs. Anderson said. “The Emancipation Proclamation was delivered six months before the battle.”
He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Who’s giving the report here?”
She waved her hand. “Proceed.”
“Like I said, the North won. The slaves were all freed. Hurrah, hurrah. The end.”
He bowed jokingly, and everyone laughed as Mrs. Anderson shook her head. “Did you even read the material?”
“Of course I did.”
“Who was the leader of the North?”
“Lincoln.”
“No, he was the president.”
“Yes, which means he was the f**king leader of everyone.”
Mrs. Anderson’s face clouded with anger. Oops. “You won’t use that language in my classroom.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” he said. “I thought I already did.”
A collective gasp resonated among his classmates as Mrs. Anderson stood, and Carmine started toward the door before the words could come from her mouth. “Principal’s office,” he muttered, mocking her at the same time she said it.
In no rush to see the principal again, Carmine headed out of a side exit, going for his car in the student parking lot instead.
* * *
The house was silent when Carmine made it home. He headed to the third floor and paused at the top of the stairs. In the library, in the same spot she’d been hours earlier, stood Haven. She stared out into the backyard with a vacant expression, her arms wrapped around her chest.
He cleared his throat to get her attention, and she flinched but didn’t look his way. After a moment, he strolled over and stood beside her. Her body grew rigid as she held her breath, tension rolling off of her when their arms brushed together. The simple contact wouldn’t have registered with him if not for her reaction. “Have you even moved today?”
“Yes.”
He waited for her to elaborate, but no more words came. It wasn’t until then that he realized she had on his shirt and pants, vaguely recalling his father taking them from his room. “You’re wearing my clothes.”
Carmine didn’t think it was possible, but she managed to grow tenser. “I can take them off.”
He stifled a laugh. “You’re offering to take off your clothes for me?”
“Your clothes. I have none of my own.”
And just like that, she made him feel a twinge of guilt. She’d have had clothes if he had done what his father asked. “What happened to whatever you came here in?”
“They were bloody, so Dr. DeMarco got rid of them.”
“Whose blood?”
“Mine.”
He tilted his head and stared at her. There was something strange about the way she stood motionless but still managed to seem like she was fidgeting. It made him uneasy.
“Keep the clothes,” he said, wanting away from her to clear his head. He didn’t like feeling uncomfortable in his house. “I’m gonna take a nap, Heaven.”
“Haven,” she corrected him.
“I know,” he said. “I kinda like Heaven, though.”
She turned to him, their eyes meeting for the first time since he’d walked in. “Me, too.”
* * *
Despite Carmine’s fierce protectiveness over his belongings, he wasn’t careful about what he did with things. His bedroom was cluttered, everything haphazardly strewn around the floor. Shoes were scattered among heaps of dirty clothes, his hamper sitting empty in the corner of the room. His desk was covered with papers and books, a laptop buried somewhere in the mess.
It never bothered him. He was used to it, nothing about his life neat or tidy. He felt safe tucked into the chaos, surrounded by the things only he controlled. It was that he craved—control over his life—because it was the one thing Carmine never had.
A loud succession of bangs pulled Carmine from his nap, and he staggered to the door to find his father there. Vincent barged into the room, stumbling over some stuff lying on the floor. Grumbling, he kicked it out of the way. “Where are your keys?”
Carmine rubbed his eyes, his guard going up with someone in his personal space. “What?”
“Your car keys,” Vincent said as he started searching through the desk, furiously pushing things around and tossing half of it on the floor.
“What the hell do you want my keys for?”
“Just give them to me!” Vincent opened the top right drawer and grabbed Carmine’s wallet. Fumbling through it, he pulled out the silver American Express credit card and shoved it into his pocket before tossing the wallet aside, going right back to searching.
Carmine’s blood boiled. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I tried to be your friend,” Vincent said. “I cut you some slack, hoping it was a phase, but you only got worse. So I sent you away. After what you did last year, so help me God, I hoped you’d get the message. But no, you come back and start the cycle all over again. The fighting, the back talking, the disrespect . . . I can’t take it anymore.”
“What the hell did I do?”
“The better question would be what didn’t you do.” He slammed a drawer and grabbed the bottom one, but it wouldn’t budge. “What’s in here?”
Carmine didn’t answer, watching as his father yanked on it.
“Where’s the key to open it, Carmine?”
“You’re not getting it. You’re not getting any of my keys.”
Vincent stood up straight at his words. “I am getting your keys. You’re on restriction. You’ll go nowhere but to school, and you’ll stay there. No more cutting class. You’ll do your work, you’ll watch your mouth, you’ll keep your hands to yourself, and when that last bell rings, you’ll come straight home. Nothing else!”