Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  Then he turns to me, his expression impossible to read. “Your grandparents left behind quite a legacy.”

  I suppose I should say thank you. It almost sounds like a compliment. Almost.

  * * *

  Even if it was supposed to be praise, the last thing I want to do is thank Mr. Donaldson for bringing any of this up in front of the whole class. People seem to want to know where we came from, why we’re here, who we are—all questions that sound like they’re meant to be polite—but they’re really trying to weed out the weirdos.

  If Raven Brooks knew who we were, where we came from, why we were here … they’d expel us faster than you can say wingnut.

  Now I have Mr. Donaldson giving people a whole new reason to look more closely at that family who moved into that blue house on that street where those people used to live.

  I have virtually no memory of what happened during the rest of eighth period. I think I wrote my name in the corner of a textbook. I think I slid a syllabus into the front flap of a folder marked CIVICS. I think I wrote down a homework assignment that’s due at the beginning of next week. All I know for sure is that I’ve made it outside into the muggy afternoon, and I’ve loaded my bag down with books I’ll probably forget at home more often than not, and I’ve pretended not to hear Enzo call to me from across the courtyard because all I want to do is grab Mya and get home before I can see one more question form on the mouth of one more person who wants to know one more thing about me that I can’t or won’t tell them.

  Mya’s the first one out the front doors of the elementary school.

  “Let’s roll,” I say, grabbing the strap of her backpack.

  “I want to walk home with Maritza,” she says, looking for her new friend.

  “Not today,” I say, and she starts to protest, but she must see the concern on my face somehow because she gives it up pretty easily and lets me pull her down the street and around the first corner we find, hopefully evading anyone for at least most of the walk home.

  When we do finally walk through the door, our ankles are itchy from being scratched by alleyways full of overgrown weeds.

  “How was the first day?” Dad asks the second we walk through the door. I didn’t expect him to be right there. I didn’t have a chance to fix my face into something resembling “meh.”

  “It was all right,” I say with a shrug, but he’s definitely not convinced. He looks to Mya for a more complete answer.

  “I made a friend. Her name is Maritza, and she lives in New Town. And she’s into mechanics and how things work, oh and she likes pie. And I like pie!”

  “Wait a minute,” Dad says, looking extremely serious.

  He leans down, towering over Mya like a stone wall, his hands on his knees, his shoulders hunched. He fixes his green eyes on Mya’s, and she looks right back, fearless.

  “Did you say … she likes pie, too?”

  “Uh-huh.” Mya smiles.

  “And—and you like pie?”

  “Dad, you know I like pie.”

  Dad stands, pulling at the curly tip of his mustache while he contemplates this remarkable revelation.

  Suddenly, he slaps the sides of his legs. “Well, I can see no way around it. You and Mitzy—”

  “Maritza,” she says.

  “You and Maritza will simply have to be friends.”

  “Agreed,” Mya says, and they share a stout handshake, one pump before letting go.

  “You two are weird,” I say.

  Dad turns his sparkling eyes on me, and for just a second, today didn’t happen. Raven Brooks didn’t happen. Germany didn’t happen.

  For just a second, there isn’t a single secret to hold or carry, and we’re just the Petersons, four weirdos with a few geniuses sprinkled in, with no family legacy and nothing to whisper about and a dad whose job is so boring, it’s not even worth talking about.

  “And you?” he says. “Anyone there as interesting as you?”

  It was the highest compliment to give in our very strange family, to be interesting.

  “Maybe,” I say, thinking Enzo probably qualifies. “I mean, not anyone interesting like you, but …”

  Dad eyes me closely, then smiles like he always does when I skirt that line between funny and what Mom calls “smart.”

  He reaches out and puts his big hands on my shoulders, his forehead to my forehead.

  “My son, my progeny, my heir-apparent …”

  I wait. We stare.

  “You will never—and I do mean never—find someone as interesting as me.”

  Then he laughs his earthquake-level laugh, the one that shakes his stomach and splits my eardrums in half. It’s worth it, though. It’s a great laugh.

  I head upstairs to drop my bag and my notebooks in my room, but the sight of Mom sitting on her bed stops me. She’s staring off into the distance, like something from another lifetime is haunting her, and she has zero idea I am watching her relive all of it behind her. The reflection of her face in the vanity mirror is so pale, I wonder at first if she’s really even there, or if I’m seeing a ghost that resembles her.

  I try to say something, but just as I open my mouth to ask if she’s okay, she takes a big, slow breath, and as she lets it out, she says, “It will be different this time.”

  But nothing in the way she says it, nothing in the way her body sits rigid on the edge of the bed, says that she believes what she’s telling herself.

  “Mom?”

  She doesn’t turn at first, and I look behind me to see if Mya’s following up the stairs, but I can hear her in the background, chattering away with Dad in the living room.

  I try again, this time after taking a step into her room. “Mom?”

  She slowly places her hands on the tops of her thighs, looks down at them, then looks up and turns to me. For just a second, it’s like she’s never seen me before.

  Then she says, “Aaron? How long have you been standing there?”

  “Just for a minute,” I say, thinking I’ve done something wrong, though I have no idea what could be so wrong about looking at my mom while she talks to herself.

  “I’m home from school,” I say to her. It sounds so dumb coming out of my mouth, but it’s almost like she needs a reminder about where I’ve been, or maybe where she is right now. I’ve never seen my mom act like this before.

  Then, with one slow blink of her eyes, she’s back.

  “How was your day, hon?”

  She smiles, and it’s her usual smile, her same comforting glow, her same soft eyes. I’ve tried drawing her tons of times, but pencils and paint never seem to capture what she actually looks like.

  “Mom?” I say. It’s not the right time, but the right time doesn’t really exist. Still, it doesn’t come out like a question. “Everyone here knows who Grandma and Grandpa were, don’t they?”

  Her face is so still, I think maybe she’s blinked back to her other self, the one that was there when I first came upstairs. But she turns her head away from me while she resets the expression on her face. When she turns back again, she’s smiling. But I think she forgot that the vanity mirror is in front of her, and I could see her face change. And in that moment when her face changed, I saw her deciding how she wanted me to see her.

  “They were very … influential,” she says. She takes the same pause that everyone seems to take before they describe my grandparents. But these were Dad’s parents, her in-laws. They were her family, too. What could be so confusing about them that everyone keeps tiptoeing around the answer?

  “I don’t know what that means,” I say. I mean, I know what influential means. I just don’t know what it means when the word is said in that tone of voice.

  “There’ll be plenty of time to hear all about them,” she says, and her eyes get cloudy again. “Later.”

  I know I’ve gotten all the answers I’m going to get from her today. And honestly, I’m tired of guessing. I’m tired from everything today. All I want to do is eat a hamburger the size o
f my face and crawl into bed with a sketchpad. I can’t think of anything that would make me feel better than that.

  * * *

  Dinner wasn’t hamburgers—it was chicken potpie, but that was enough to get Dad and Mya talking about pies again. When they laughed, Mom laughed, and when Mom laughed, I laughed, and it was all okay for a little while. But now that it’s time for me to go to bed and do exactly what I planned to do—sketchpad and all—I can’t think of anything I want to draw. Not a good sign. Obviously, my mind is elsewhere.

  Because this home still doesn’t feel like ours. Not in the way that it doesn’t feel like ours yet, but in the way that it feels like it still belongs to someone else. Every time I go wandering the halls, it’s hard not to feel like a burglar. I keep thinking someone is going to call the police when they see my shadow moving across the window from outside. And it wouldn’t be that out of the question that someone would be watching. It feels like that’s all anyone has been doing since we moved here.

  When I get to the foot of the stairs, I think about the last place I felt any sort of artistic inspiration, and I remember the fake windows I painted to cover the walls in the basement. The thought of being tucked away safely down there, away from all the questions of this house and who used to live in it, comforts me enough to overcome the typical basement-at-night fear. Truly, I don’t think there’s ever been a person in the history of ever who didn’t at least flinch at the idea of the dark spaces beneath a house.

  I descend the steps to the little pad of concrete I’ve made my own, and there are my papers and pencils scattered just where I left them. It’s weird, but drawing is the only thing I never have to chase Mya away from. It’s like there’s this unspoken understanding that she won’t go near those. The art stuff is sacred.

  The minute I pick it up, the pencil starts to move. I don’t even have a picture in mind; I’m just holding the yellow, then the green, then the blue and the black. I’m letting my arm move my hand, and when I’m done, I’ll see what it is that’s keeping me awake.

  It’s an island.

  But I’m probably the only one who would be able to call it that. It’s not like it’s obvious or anything. There’s the yellow sand that drifts back and forth from the edges of the page, kind of like it’s trying to decide whether or not it even wants to be on land. There’s the blue water that takes up most of the paper, which is weird because I’ve never been big on water; I’m not the best swimmer. There’s the green of the thickets of trees growing on the rocky land with its sandy beach. And there’s the black.

  That part’s underneath.

  I really don’t know what to make of the black. It’s not quite a geometrical design, because it’s not just right angles and it’s not just curved lines. I’d say it’s a maze, but I think that would have to imply some sort of plan.

  To me, it just looks like confusion. Lots of it. And there’s so much of it, it takes up most of the space in the water.

  It feels so good to finally get out of my head whatever was crowding it. I whip out another sheet from my oversized sketchpad and set the lead to the paper, when all of a sudden, a whistling sound wafts up to my ear.

  It’s so faint, I can’t tell if it’s wind whistling or a person. Dad sometimes whistles, but I’m pretty sure he’s asleep like I should be. I consider that it might just be the wind outside. Old houses make strange noises, or so Mom has said at least ten times since we’ve moved into Grandma and Grandpa’s old house, with all its groaning floorboards and rattling pipes. Strange, though, because I don’t remember it being windy at all tonight. In fact, it was super hot this afternoon.

  Just when I think the sound has faded and maybe I imagined it, it starts up again, and this time, a distant but loud bang follows.

  I’m on my feet before I think about it, the black pencil and sheets of paper still in my hand. This time, I could hear that it was coming from somewhere behind the wall on the other side of the basement room. The only door in here is the one leading back to the stairs, and the sound didn’t come from the windows I painted onto the wood.

  I hold so still, I even stop breathing for a minute. I wait for the sound to return, but the silence is even more unnerving than the whistling and the banging.

  Without even scooping up the rest of my pencils, I head toward the staircase and take the first couple of steps backward, eyeing the room for what may follow me. Then, at a sprint, I thunder back up the stairs, pushing through the basement door with a little too much force, and the back of the door hits the doorstop, wobbling it on its spring.

  I wince at the racket.

  “Who’s there?”

  Every muscle in my body seizes.

  “Aaron, is that you?”

  The blood returns to my limbs. It’s just Dad.

  Walking carefully for no reason at all (considering I could have just woken the dead a second ago), I make my way down the hall to Dad’s study, where I see a yellow arc of light pouring onto the dark floor. Dad’s sitting figure casts a looming shadow into the lamplight.

  “What’re you doing up?” he asks me, not angry, but maybe a little worried. No … distracted.

  I shrug.

  Dad holds his eyes on me. “What’s that in your hands?”

  I look down, forgetting what I was clutching. “Just some drawings.”

  Dad extends his hand. He wants to see. He always wants to see.

  I show him the top one first, the pirate ship I tried to draw before I lost inspiration. Dad examines the sketch closely, looking for all the details. Then, without saying a word—without even looking up—he reaches for the other picture I haven’t shown him yet. Somehow, he knows this other drawing is the important one, the one I couldn’t get to sleep before drawing.

  When I hand it to him, he doesn’t even pull it toward him. He examines it at arm’s length, his eyes moving over it like he’s reading text. He’s so motionless, I wonder for a second if he’s still with me, or if he’s gone into some sort of paralysis.

  His expression scares me. Not a lot, but enough to make me want to back up. I don’t, though. I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

  When he does finally look up at me, it’s like he wants me to tell him something. He wants me to guess what he’s thinking.

  “You don’t like it,” I say.

  His bushy eyebrows knit together. “Why would you say that?”

  I shrug.

  He looks back down at the drawing, taking in the blue waters, the black veins crawling through it.

  “Aaron,” he says, his voice unnaturally quiet. Dad was born with a boom: Everything from his shoulders to his voice to his mustache is big. It’s weird when he’s quiet. “You … you have a …”

  There are so many things he seems to want to say, and I don’t get the impression that they’re good, necessarily. Just like I don’t want to offend him by backing away, he doesn’t want to hurt me by telling me whatever it is I have—whatever it is he’s seeing in me.

  “You have a certain eye,” he says, and I have no idea what he means.

  “Like, artistically, or … ?”

  He doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t disagree, either. Instead, he looks up at me, and I’m a little startled by it. But I’m glad he’s finally looking at me. “You’re capable of wondrous things,” he says, and whether it’s awe or fear or something in between, I can’t say, but whatever it is Dad’s trying to tell me, it’s important.

  I break eye contact long enough to look at his desk. It’s only just occurred to me that Dad is awake right now, too. We’re both creeping around the house in the middle of the night like robbers.

  He sees me staring at his desk, at the distinct blue grids with their edges curled over the back of his desk. I haven’t seen him working on blueprints since Germany. My stomach drops.

  “What’s that?”

  Without looking down or breaking contact with me for even a second, Dad smoothly pulls a manila folder over his work and lets the outer edges of his eyes c
rinkle with a sad smile.

  “Not a thing,” he says.

  I want to believe him. There was a time when I would have. There was also a time when he didn’t have that sad edge to his smiles, when he used to look at me with unconditional happiness. Now when he looks at me, it’s like he’s searching for answers.

  Tonight, I decide to call him on it.

  “Are you still proud of me?”

  The crinkles around his eyes deepen.

  “Of course I am,” he says softly. “Why would you ask that?”

  I shrug. Shrugging seems to be my thing tonight. It’s so much easier than trying to come up with words.

  Then Dad does something that surprises me. He takes his hands away from whatever he’s covering on his desk and cups my face, making sure to hold my gaze for a good few seconds before talking.

  Then he says, “Aaron, always remember this: You are incredible, and your mind is capable of incredible things.”

  He lets his words linger in the stagnant air of his study for a moment before asking me, “Do you understand what I mean?”

  I nod as the pit in my stomach deepens.

  When I walk out of his study, I’m still holding my sketches of things I don’t understand and the pencil that drew them. I look at the wall above the light switch in Dad’s study on my way out, eyeing the picture of my grandparents, their serious expressions and their minds that were probably capable of incredible things, too.

  In bed, still wide awake, I stare at the ceiling and wonder if Dad had meant to make me feel better by saying what he said. It’s so hard to tell anymore. But whatever his intentions were, what he said made me feel anything but okay.

  Dad’s mind is capable of incredible things, too. And look where that’s gotten us.

  My mom’s weird for a handful of reasons, but one of the biggies is because she likes to go grocery shopping.

  “It’s the best way to know you’re home,” she said earlier today while trying to convince Mya and me to go with her. I guess it’s easier than saying she knows this wasn’t supposed to be home, but things don’t always work out the way we expect them to.