Call It What You Want

by Brigid Kemmerer

  “If you vomit in here, you’re going to clean it up,” he says.

  “Let me out,” I grind out.

  He pulls to a stop right there. Unlocks the doors.

  “Remember what I said,” he says. “That’s not the only proof I have.”

  “Connor knows,” I say.

  “Connor doesn’t know anything. He knows how to respect his father. He won’t believe you over me.”

  I didn’t call because my father wouldn’t let me.

  He’s right. Connor always obeys his father.

  I think of the way Bill’s hand smacked into my face and realize Connor has good reason to.

  I open the door and put a foot on the ground. The wind whips at the paper, and I’m careful to keep a grip on it.

  “And even if he does, Connor has seen what has happened to you,” Bill says. “I don’t think I could teach a lesson any better, do you?”

  “Go away.” I slam the door and glare at the darkened glass. “Go away.”

  He goes.

  I walk. I think. I seethe.

  When I get home, my mother is waiting in the dining room. My father is beside her in his chair.

  She looks like she’s been up all night, but she flies across the room and wraps me up in her arms.

  “Oh, Robbie,” she says. “I’ve been so worried.”

  “Me too.” I don’t hug her back.

  She hears the tone in my voice and draws back, studying my face.

  I shove the paper in her direction. “Did you know what Dad was doing?”

  She takes the paper from my hand, and her expression goes still. After a moment, she takes a deep breath and looks up. “Robbie. I’m sorry.”

  My heart stops. I’m sure of it. I can’t move.

  I don’t think I realized how much I needed her to deny it until she didn’t.

  She must finally get a good look at me, because she touches a hand to my lip. “What—what happened?”

  “Bill happened.” I brush her hand away. I don’t want her touch right now. I don’t want any of it. Behind her, my father sits silently. I’ve hated him for a long time.

  This is the first time I’ve hated her, too.

  “What does that mean?” she whispers. She glances down at the paper in her hands again. Her face pales a shade. Her face crumples. “I can—I need to tell you—”

  “Don’t bother.” I brush her aside and head for the stairs. When I reach my room, I slam the door.

  The noise or the tension must affect my father. He starts making panicked sounds.

  I don’t want to care. I don’t.

  Mom yells, “Oh, shut up!”

  The front door slams.

  He doesn’t stop.

  A car starts in the driveway.

  After a long moment, I take a breath. I open my door and go downstairs to take care of my father.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Maegan

  Rob hasn’t shown up for school. Obviously.

  Samantha tried to convince me to skip classes and stay holed up in her room, but I don’t have the strength to avoid my parents all day long. At least school offers a break from them, from Rob, from all of it. I’ve been keeping to myself, hiding in plain sight. My nerves have been a jangly mess, as if I’m waiting for some other shoe to drop. Will cops show up to arrest me, too? Am I an accomplice? All I did was … do nothing. Does that make me guilty?

  Sometime midmorning, I get a text from my father.

  DAD: All charges have been dropped. You’re off the hook.

  Relief should be the natural reaction, but it’s not. I feel like I’ve cheated again or gotten a free pass.

  MAEGAN: Thanks. Does that mean Rob is free?

  He doesn’t write back. Of course. Knowing my father, he’s mad that I even asked.

  The day drags, but I’m dreading the end of it, so I don’t mind. When the final bell rings, I can barely convince myself to head to the parking lot. To my surprise, Owen Goettler is waiting by the side of the building, right at the edge of the lot. I doubt he has a car, and I’ve never seen him over here. When he spots me, he peels away from the wall and approaches.

  I’m still stung from his comments yesterday, when he lectured me that Rob wasn’t hurting anyone. Was he right? Is that why I didn’t turn him in?

  Is Owen going to yell at me some more?

  But no, as he gets closer, I see that his expression is tense with worry. “Have you seen Rob?” he says.

  I’m surprised by the question, and I’m sure my expression shows it. “No, you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Of course he wouldn’t. Why would he?

  “Rob was arrested,” I say. “He was breaking into the Tunstall house.”

  Owen swears. “I told him not to do that.”

  “You knew?”

  “Yeah, I knew. He wanted to return those stupid earrings that no one was missing.”

  I can’t tell if he’s upset that Rob was arrested or upset that he was returning the earrings or what.

  Owen drops his voice. “Is Rob going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. My dad said the Tunstalls dropped the charges.”

  “Why?”

  I inhale to answer—but I have no idea. “Maybe they figured he’s been through enough.”

  “Do they strike you as those kind of people?”

  I remember what Rob said about Connor not answering when he really needed him. “No,” I admit. “They don’t.” I look across at Owen. “Not that it matters.”

  He hesitates. I hesitate. We’re both the unlikely friends of Rob Lachlan, but that doesn’t make us friends. I feel like we’re different planets orbiting the same sun.

  The thought adds another weight to the pile of guilt sitting on my shoulders.

  Owen raises his eyebrows. “Want to come over and talk about it?”

  I take a long breath. Dad probably wouldn’t like me going over to a strange boy’s house any more than he’d like me hanging out with Rob.

  “Don’t worry about it,” says Owen, misinterpreting my silence. He begins to turn away.

  “No.” I find my keys in my pocket. “Let’s go.”

  Owen’s mother is sleeping because she worked the night shift, so we have to tiptoe into the house. I don’t know where I expected him to live, but I’m surprised that it’s clean and bright inside, though the kitchen appliances look old and the carpeting is worn thin in places. Owen offers me a diet soda from his refrigerator.

  “It’s all we have,” he says. “Unless you want water.”

  “This is great, thanks.”

  We take seats at the kitchen table and stare at each other.

  One of us needs to speak, so I take a sip and smooth a hand across the table. “Did you really tell him not to return the earrings?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I thought we could have done something better with the money.” He pauses. “It doesn’t seem fair that they have them and they don’t care, and it doesn’t seem fair that Rob got arrested for returning something they weren’t missing anyway.”

  “Well.” I clear my throat. “Technically he was arrested for breaking and entering.”

  “We had a good plan,” Owen says, and even in a low whisper, I can hear his passion. “We weren’t going to hurt anyone. We weren’t really stealing. We were just taking what people weren’t going to miss and giving it to people who needed it.”

  “Owen.” A stern voice makes us both jump. “What did you just say?”

  His mother stands in the kitchen doorway, in leggings and a T-shirt and a threadbare robe. Her face is clean-scrubbed and her hair is in a messy ponytail. “I’m waiting,” she says when Owen doesn’t say anything. Despite the pajamas, her stance is fierce. “What do you mean, you were taking what people weren’t going to miss?”

  “Mom, it’s nothing—”

  “Don’t you dare tell me it’s nothing.” Her eyes flick to me. “And who is this? Another friend?”

  I scrape out of
my chair. “Mrs. Goettler,” I say hurriedly. “I’m—I’m a friend of … um …”

  “She’s Rob’s girlfriend,” says Owen, his voice resigned. “Mom—”

  “Don’t you Mom me. I’m still waiting for you to explain what you’re talking about. Were you and Rob stealing? Is that why you were hanging out with him? Did he force you to help—”

  “No. It’s not like that.” Owen puts up his hands, as if she needs to be placated. “It’s not a big deal.”

  She comes farther into the kitchen. “You’d better start talking. Right now.”

  I back away. “Maybe I should go.”

  “No.” She points at the chair I just vacated. “Sit. I want an explanation.”

  I sit.

  Owen talks.

  While he’s talking, I realize how little I knew about what Rob was doing. Through it all, I want to go back to the Rob Lachlan I first talked to about our math project. I want to shake him and say, No, don’t do this. Don’t get tangled up in this. You can’t make up for what your father did.

  Owen’s mother listens as he spills it all out, and she’s better at that than my father. When he gets to the part about Lexi Miter’s credit card being used to buy shoes, her eyes grow wide and angry, which makes Owen duck his head, but he keeps talking.

  At the end, her voice is deathly quiet. “And you think you were helping people?”

  Owen straightens in his chair. “Well … yeah,” he says earnestly.

  She takes a long breath, then looks at me. “Do you think they were helping people?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I mean, he’s right. No one was hurt. No one was missing those things.”

  “Owen. I don’t even know what to say.”

  “You were so mad about the guy who stole from us!” Owen explodes. “All I ever hear about is how hard you’ve had to struggle. How Rob Lachlan was the only one who got caught, how they’re all crooks.” He’s glaring at her. “I go to school with kids who have everything—and I don’t complain. You know I don’t complain. But it’s not fair that they get it all, and we get … we get this.” He gestures around the tiny kitchen.

  She leans forward. “Owen,” she says evenly. “Just because we don’t have something doesn’t mean we take it.”

  “But they don’t even need it!”

  “Says who?”

  He opens his mouth. Closes it.

  “You don’t get to decide who deserves to have what,” she says. “Or who doesn’t, for that matter.” She pauses, then pulls a pendant out from under her shirt. It’s a heart twisted into the shape of a mother and a baby, with diamonds mounted onto the setting. “Your father gave this to me the Christmas before he died. Do you think I should sell it for money?”

  Owen swallows. “Of course not.”

  “You don’t really need that Xbox upstairs. Should we sell that for money?”

  He flinches and doesn’t answer that.

  She puts her hand on Owen’s forearm. “You said they wouldn’t miss it. But how do you know? How do you know those earrings weren’t special to that woman?” Her voice has softened. “What puts you in the position to determine the best use of what you were planning to steal?”

  He looks down. “You don’t understand.”

  “Of course I understand. Of course I do. Just like I know there are people out there judging me for this necklace or judging you for getting a free lunch. Other people don’t have the challenges we have, Owen. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have their own.”

  Owen is quiet, very still in his chair. I wonder if he’s even breathing.

  Finally, he looks up. “I’m still not sorry.” He pulls his arm out from under her hand. “Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I’m still not sorry.”

  She stares at him. “Owen.”

  “I’m not,” he says, backing away. “No one got hurt. It might not have been right, but it still doesn’t feel wrong.”

  “Come back here,” she says.

  Owen doesn’t. He heads up the stairs.

  She turns her gaze on me. “Were you a part of this little crime ring, too?”

  “No!” I want to flee, too, but the part of my brain that controls my good-girl tendencies keeps me pinned in this chair. “I didn’t know until they’d done everything.”

  “And that Rob boy was arrested?”

  I swallow. “The Tunstalls decided not to press charges.”

  She takes a long breath and lets it out. “I regret the day I trusted that man with one cent of my money.”

  And “that man’s” son apparently wasn’t much better. I bite my lip and look down. I do not like this feeling.

  She puts a hand over mine, and I look up in surprise. “Owen can make his own decisions. I don’t blame Rob for all of it.” She pauses. “He seemed like a very lost boy.”

  “He is,” I whisper.

  “Are you a lost girl?”

  As soon as she asks the question, I realize I was. I was a lost girl. Lost in everyone’s impressions of me. Lost by letting their impressions replace the ones I have of myself. I force myself to hold her gaze. “I’m not lost. I want to do the right thing.”

  “Most of us do,” she says ruefully. “The problem is that it doesn’t always look the same for all of us.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Rob

  It’s well after dark, and Mom still hasn’t come home. I don’t know where she’s been all day, and I really don’t care. Maybe she’s over at the Tunstalls’ house, and they’ve all been laughing it up about how clueless I am.

  The nurse never came today. Maybe Mom canceled her because she was home, or maybe the woman didn’t show up. Either way, there’s a part of me that was glad to be left alone, even if it required taking care of Dad. I can’t get him upstairs by myself, but spending one night in his chair won’t kill him. We had dinner, and now we’re bingeing Doctor Who on Netflix.

  As the hours wear on, though, resentment builds in my chest. It’s not the first time Mom has walked out on me and Dad. Always before, I’ve had some sympathy.

  Tonight, I do not.

  Her key slides into the lock just before ten. Dad has fallen asleep in his chair. I pause the television and wait.

  She sneaks into the house as if she expects us all to be asleep, then jumps when she meets my eyes from the hallway.

  “You’re still here,” she says.

  “Where else do I have to go?”

  She winces, then looks past me, to Dad. “Do you want some help getting him upstairs?”

  Like I’m in charge. “He’s already asleep.”

  “Oh.” She hasn’t moved from the doorway.

  She says nothing.

  I say nothing.

  Finally, I turn back to the television and press play.

  My shoulders are tense, wondering what she’s going to do. As the minutes tick by, I think she’s slipped out of the room and gone to bed.

  The resentment grows, threatening to crowd my organs out of my rib cage until there’s nothing left but anger.

  Then she steps into my field of vision and presses the button to turn off the television.

  “I need to talk to you,” she says quietly.

  I’m frozen in place, my eyes locked on the black mirror of the screen. I don’t want to hear this, but I do.

  She eases onto the couch beside me, her face a shadow in the darkness of the room.

  “Yes, I knew,” she says.

  No kidding. I do not thaw.

  “Bill Tunstall had a plan,” she continues. “It started—it started very small. And I truly think, at the time, he believed he was doing something good for his clients. He was taking on risky investments in his own name and allowing them to buy in to share the profits.”

  I hold very still.

  She glances at Dad. “Bill invited Dad to do the same thing. With our money. For a while, it worked out great.” She swallows. “When the markets turned a few years ago, Bill couldn’t maintain the returns he’d pr
omised his clients. He was in a sticky position. He could have lost his license. He and Dad were best friends, so when he asked your dad to help, of course he said yes. It was supposed to be a tiny loan. A little fibbing with numbers. It was supposed to be a month and then he’d put it all back.” A tear sneaks out of her eye and she swipes it away. “He told me what he was doing, and I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I was so worried they would get caught.” Another tear. “But they didn’t. It was easy. Because they were moving money between two different firms and a separate bank, there was no paper trail. The market started going up again, and everyone was making money. The clients and us. It seemed too easy.” She has to swipe at her eyes. “It was too easy. When we had that market correction last January—you remember?”

  I nod. I remember everything in Dad’s office turned hectic. Clients were losing money, and the phones were ringing off the hook.

  Mom glances at Dad again. “Bill wanted Dad to cover again. To double down. Dad refused. I think the pressure was getting to be too much for him. People thought their accounts were down ten percent, but he knew they were down more than that. Most were down to nothing, but he was faking it. He cared about those people, Rob. He wanted us all to make money. With Bill in his ear promising good returns, bringing their friendship into it—I don’t think Dad considered the risk when it would all start falling apart.”

  “So, what?” I say, my voice dark. “Dad was such a great guy?”

  She begins crying in earnest, and to my surprise, she’s nodding. “Yes. He made some mistakes, but yes. He was a great guy, Robbie.”

  I swallow hard.

  “He wanted to pull the plug,” she says. “He told Bill he wanted to come clean. Your father wasn’t a dishonest man, but it got away from him. Do you understand that?”

  “No.” I don’t understand any of this.

  She shakes her head and puts her hand on the sofa between us. “He was going to replace all the money we’d taken. We were going to borrow against my trust. He was going to put it back, and we’d absorb the hit. He wanted Bill to do the same thing.” Another tear, but this time she swipes it away angrily. “Bill didn’t want to stop. He wanted Dad to put that trust money into their scheme. They argued, but Dad refused. He thought it was done. He told Bill he was replacing the money and getting out.”