“Not for long. My sources just confirmed that they are going to be merging with Chemfree. They’re just waiting for funding … from us.”
“Two small American firms that will corner the pharmaceuticals market,” I mused. “That’s all well, but we will need an inside guy before we move the business over.”
“Already done,” he said, a look of satisfaction flooding his ugly face. There was no trace of doubt in his voice.
When I hesitated, Spider eyed me to see what I would do. If we didn’t make a move soon, we would lose millions. This was for the best of the Coalition, and that was why we were here.
“Sell our shares,” I settled. “As soon as possible.”
The Sheppard family, I knew, wouldn’t survive this. But I comforted myself in knowing that Bill would have made the same decision.
CHAPTER SEVEN: EMMY
SMILE. THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING
I was smiling. Because that was what the Charlie Chaplin song said to do, with promises that the sun would come shining through. So I hid my sorrow behind a smile. But the clouds never parted.
Time heals all wounds. At least, that’s what people say. Yet I still found myself dreaming of Cameron and Rocco every night, each dream becoming more vivid as the pregnancy progressed. Each dream leaving me sweaty and heartbroken. I couldn’t stop dreaming about them, even if I’d wanted to.
Griff had kept his promise and never left my side. At school and at work, he walked me to the door and was waiting for me when I was done. If I found myself wandering about the house in the middle of the night, he would come find me.
I’d smile. He’d smile. But we barely spoke. Well, Griff tried to talk to me, reason with me, plead with me initially. I had started talking to him in monosyllables.
It was weird how lonely you could feel even when you were never alone. Having Griff there was better than not having Griff there. So I smiled. Griff mostly smiled too. But I noticed his gaze wandering off into nothingness. I knew that I was breaking his heart, and as much as this killed me, I was incapable of giving him what he wanted: for us to move on.
If my roommates ever wondered why Griff kept so close to me, they never asked. Too mesmerized, I supposed. Griff had become somewhat of a celebrity around our house. Hunter had dragged everybody he knew to the house just so they could see Griffin the Grappler Connan with their own eyes. Everything about Griff was infectious. His laugh, his self-assuredness, the way his mouth crinkled at the side when he smiled. Hunter had quickly learned to not bring any girls around to meet Griff; otherwise, he’d be ignored the rest of the night as the girls swooned over Griff.
I knew that everybody was tolerating Meatball and me because of Griff.
Griff was a little put off by the attention, especially when we finally happened to find ourselves alone only to be immediately interrupted again. But he was polite enough and signed autographs when requested. He even eventually signed Hunter’s poster after Hunter agreed to take it off their bedroom wall. All the attention Griff was getting made me feel even more alienated. The only time anybody ever really talked to me was to ask me questions about Griff—and then I hid behind a smile.
I hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten, how bad I had gotten, until Griff was walking Cassie and me to school one morning.
“You changed your hair color,” I remarked, making small talk with Cassie. Her hair had gone from kettle-black to blonde, and she had removed her pale-face makeup to reveal her blonde eyebrows. It seemed she had given up her vampire ways for sun-kissed.
Griff and Cassie simply looked at me as though I were talking to them from the moon.
“I changed it two weeks ago,” she said with a smirk.
I had taken a liking to doing my homework in the school library. Because it was quiet; because Griff couldn’t talk and I could be alone with my thoughts. While Griff picked a nearby table and read a book, I sat at a computer to write my criminology paper. The fact that I had decided to write on the topic of white-collar crime wasn’t coincidence. Every day I scoured the news, looking for anything relating to my father. It had become an obsession, a release, a drug. I couldn’t walk by someone’s discarded newspaper without grabbing it. I couldn’t sit at a computer without seeing what new information there was on my father. For the first time in my life, I was getting to know my father; unfortunately, it had to be through the eyes of various reporters. I just wished someone had something nice to say about him, other than his great ability to make money. At least I was double-dipping on my time and using the information I collected on my father’s crimes to write my criminology paper.
Griff and I found ourselves having fewer and fewer things to discuss, that is, argue about. Everything had been said. He wanted to move forward, and I couldn’t. We were at an immovable, focal impasse, and trying to make small talk was rendered pointless when there was such a huge boulder hanging over our heads. Sometimes we would walk all the way to school and back without ever saying one word to each other. Sometimes I would go to bed at night realizing that I hadn’t uttered one word to anyone all day. I had already given up hope that Griff would come around, and I could feel that Griff was giving up hope that I would come around. But the more sedentary I became, the worse the dreams of Cameron and Rocco became. To the point that I barely slept or ate anymore. There was a lot of wandering around the house in the middle of the night.
The obsession with my father hadn’t replaced my obsession with Victor and Spider. In fact, it had fueled it. On one of my news-hunting exercises, I had come across a picture of Victor in the Callister City Standard. He was standing next to a mound of paper-wrapped bricks of cocaine. Another glorious moment for the local hero. I wanted to punch a hole through his papered face. Instead, I cut out his picture and stuck it on my bedroom wall, hiding it under one of my Van Gogh posters so that Griff wouldn’t see it. When I realized that this art project was half-finished, I drew a picture of a red ugly spider and stuck this next to Victor’s picture. I had gone from staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling to glaring at a replica of Wheatfield with Crows.
I didn’t just want revenge—I needed it. But with Griff following my every move, I couldn’t do anything to obtain it. And this was slowly killing me, like a long drawn-out fever.
****
“I made pancakes,” Griff announced one Friday evening when we were alone in the house—a rare moment. I was lying on my bed doing homework—trying to do homework. My mind was always elsewhere nowadays.
I smiled. Of course I smiled. “Not hungry. Thanks.”
But Griff had stopped smiling as of late. “C’mon,” he ordered with that infectious voice of his.
This was something that Griff had started doing instead of smiling: insisting on food, for me. His cooking skills were my least favorite of his attributes. He would try to sneak healthy stuff in my food, like replacing sugar with protein powder. (Who does that?) I could barely keep anything down; eating pancakes that would probably taste like flaxseed oil was a new form of torture.
My eyes had found their way back to Plato’s Symposium. I was already two weeks behind on the required readings for ethics.
Griff kept standing there. I kept ignoring him.
He sighed a sigh that came from deep within. As though it were his last breath. “How long are you going to keep this up for?”
“I’m not hungry,” I insisted, with a smile that I really had to work hard on.
I saw Griff’s body turn rigid, like something was rising inside of him. He lifted his fist, held it up like he was about to hit something. He took another breath through clenched teeth and let his fist slightly bump the doorframe. I could see it was taking all his resolve to not explode.
“Goddamn it, Emily. What is so wrong about wanting to move on from the bad into something good?”
I let go of the stupid smile. “I can’t move on, Griff. Maybe you can forgive and forget so easily, but I can’t. If I don’t do something, I’ll die.”
&n
bsp; “Because they’re going to come and kill you?” he said, mocking me darkly. “You still haven’t given me any good reason as to why they would ever come after you again. Why did they grab you in the first place?”
I stared blankly at him. This was more information that I wasn’t letting go of.
His eyes were on fire. “So you’re going to kill two drug lords. Have you ever even killed someone, Ms. Sheppard?”
“No,” I said, wincing. “But there’s a first time for everything.”
“Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”
“I sound ridiculous?” I slammed my book shut and got up. “Rocco, a fourteen-year-old kid, a kid who looked up to you, gets killed for no reason. And I’m the ridiculous one? At least I have a sense of loyalty.”
“He’s dead,” he shouted, his arms extended. “The kid was a really great kid, and something like that should never have happened to him. Or to you. But he’s dead now, and we’re alive. We have a chance to be happy. Karma will get those bastards back, and maybe someday we’ll be able to settle the score ourselves. But for now, we need to stay out of their way and out of their world.”
“I already told you, Griff. I’m not asking for your permission, and I sure as hell don’t need you.”
He was silent.
I turned sideways to avoid bumping into him as I left my room.
Griff pulled his arms around me, in a sort of hug, pinning my own arms against my body, my back held against his chest.
“What are you doing?” I demanded when I realized it wasn’t a hug. I struggled to get out of his enfold.
“How are you going to get out of this, Em? If someone comes up and just grabs you like this. What are you going to do?” he asked me, on the edge of hysteria.
I wiggled around, tried to jump, tried to kick from behind, but nothing changed the fact that I was stuck. Meatball had come flying out from under my bed and tried to nudge us apart. Since he spent most of his days with Griff while I was at school or work, they had come to some kind of understanding. Now he was confused as to what he ought to do.
Griff was trying to make a point, and he had a point. I couldn’t move.
Anger bubbled inside me. “Let go of me.”
“These men that you want to go after, these men that you want to kill, they all have guns. You want to kill them when you can’t even get out of my arms. What are you going to do when you come face-to-face with someone who’d love nothing better than to have you wedged against him like that?”
Furious tears came gurgling out.
Griff turned me around and held me at arm’s length. “The hurt, the pain, the hate. You have to let go. If you don’t, you’ll become just like them, and you will die.”
Pain shadowed the boyish features of his face.
And this made me so angry. Because I didn’t want to be the one to cause him all this pain. And yet I was.
“You’re an asshole,” I hissed before he could say anything else.
I went through the closest door and locked it behind me. I bent over, putting my hands to my knees. I took several breaths and wiped the furious tears that Griff had managed to squeeze out of me.
Funny enough, I was in Joseph, Hunter, and, now, Griff’s room. The room that anyone would usually avoid. But I remembered it being far messier than this. There was no food or dirty dishes lying around, and I could actually see the carpet. Griff had made a valiant effort at making his bed, which was difficult given that all he had was a mattress on the floor made snug between Hunter’s and Joseph’s beds.
I had no idea that Griff was so responsible in this world. When we were at the Farm, in the underworld, Griff slacked off as often as possible.
At the Farm, I was the responsible one. The one who hoped for the best, the one who lay mostly passive, waiting for someone else’s decision. Now the tables had turned. Griff was the responsible one. The one who made his bed and didn’t go running after drug dealers.
I could hear Griff pacing outside the door, so I was in no hurry to get out. I just couldn’t deal with his reality, which was probably pretty close to the rest of the world’s reality. But it wasn’t mine.
By grabbing me like that, Griff had basically told me that I was just a stupid little rich girl who was looking at life through her murky rose-colored glasses. It was worse than a slap in the face.
When I saw that Joseph’s computer was on, I sat down and got on the Internet. Though I was scouring the news again, it wasn’t for my father. I was looking for something, an article I recently read in the Callister City Standard.
While I was waiting for the archived search to load, a message bubble popped up in the screen’s corner. It was a message from someone named Bubbalicious.
“Need help.”
I snickered. I couldn’t resist. “Don’t we all?”
“Serious. I’m failing three of my classes.”
“That really sucks,” I wrote back. I knew what that felt like. I was lucky if I made it through class without drooling on my notebook while I slept.
“My boyfriend told me you hacked the school’s system to delete the electronic library. Genius. Can you go in and change my grade too?”
I yanked my fingers off the keyboard as if it had just caught fire. So Joseph had been the reason why I had lost my job at the library.
The search engine returned with a list of articles matching my keywords.
“Hello?” Bubbalicious wrote back. I printed the article I had been looking for and had the good sense to print the conversation that Joe didn’t know he’d had with Bubbalicious before I erased it.
Apart from the fact that he looked barely past puberty and spent a lot of time in front of his computer, I realized how very little I knew of Joseph. We had been living under the same leaky roof for over a year, and I didn’t even know his last name. Then again, he probably didn’t care to know my last name either.
When I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV. While Bill was in the next room allowed to poison his brain with whatever kept him quiet, I was sitting with another adult. Music lessons, science and math, French, German, Mandarin. It was never enough for my mother. If she suspected that one of her friends—acquaintances really—had smarter, more thriving, better children, then I could expect to have a brand-new teacher the next day. Everything I saw, everything I heard was being controlled by my mother and her paid minions.
When I was eight years old, my mother saw a little girl wearing the same dress as me at a party. My eight-year-old self must have looked fat because I had a nutritionist the next day and was put on a diet. I ate a whole cheesecake that night. My mother thought it was my way of rebelling against her, that my brother was a bad influence on me. I just really liked dessert.
I was eventually sent away to school because that was what parents did to rebels like me: they sent them to overpriced prep schools. My mother made special arrangements for me to get my own room, with no TV allowed of course. I just had to be the weird homeschooled carrot-haired kid who had no idea who Elmo was. Making friends was super-easy from then on. I hung out in the bathroom a lot.
I did full-out rebel when I left my mother’s clutch and moved to Callister. But moving into small quarters with a bunch of other people had been a bit of a stretch for a social idiot like me. Now I wished I would have taken the time to get to know Joseph a little more. He seemed like the kind of guy a desperate girl like me might need.
Griff eventually gave up pacing outside the door. I heard him go down the stairs and back into the kitchen. Cold pancakes on his plate.
I was about to go back to my room when I spotted boxes under Joseph’s bed. Reclusive, secretive Joseph. I couldn’t resist. I quickly fell on my knees and started snooping. There were a lot of computer parts and wires and a serious lack of condoms. At least he wasn’t so delusional as to think that he was going to get lucky sometime soon. There was also a can of red spray-paint. I imagined him a graffiti artist. Who was this kid? Whoever Joseph was, I liked him
.
Griff had made his point—I couldn’t fight a grown man with my bare hands. But he had also hit a nerve when making his point. All my life, others had been making decisions for me, deciding the person I was going to be. Griff’s reality check had had the same effect on me as my mother’s nutritionist. I needed to show them that they were wrong about me, about what this spoiled little rich girl could accomplish. Eating a whole cake did not kill me, and neither would Victor.
I folded my printouts and stuffed them in my pocket. Then I took the can of spray-paint and hid it under my shirt. I snuck back into my room to drop off my stolen goods and went downstairs with a smile so that Griff and I could go back to not speaking over cold pancakes.
****
Griff was right. I was not an assassin, and I did not own any weapons. But I wasn’t totally helpless either. I had options, and I had a brain. I just needed to work through it all.
When I left for work on Monday morning, I was dressed in a gray hooded sweater and a pair of old navy-blue sweatpants. It hadn’t escaped my attention that my clothes were floating on me lately, when they ought to have been fitting snug at around six months pregnant. I tried to put this out of my mind as I hid the newspaper article and can of spray-paint in my book bag.
Griff barely looked at me the whole way to work. When I reached for the door to the admissions office, he turned around and walked away. A small seam ripped inside of me even though I was grateful that he didn’t decide to sit in the waiting area all morning until I was done working—something that he often did.
I knew it wasn’t going to be too difficult faking illness to get out of work. I wasn’t exactly a picture of health these days. After I struggled to put one foot in front of the other and had had to hold on to a desk when a dizzy spell came, Betty came to my rescue and had me sent home, even though I hadn’t really spoken to her much in the past weeks. The worst part was that I hadn’t even started faking my illness yet.
I hopped on a bus headed downtown and closed my eyes, waking up at every stop to ensure that I wasn’t going to miss mine.
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