by C. G. Drews
It’s not impossible. No matter what Avery says, Sam refuses to believe it’s impossible.
He stops outside a row of apartments. Paint peels. Windows are barred. Piles of junk sit in gutters. Is this even the right number? He’s torn between hoping Avery is here, and wanting him to be at work. Just so long as whoever opens the door doesn’t take one look and call the cops.
Does he know anyone who doesn’t want him in jail? He needs new friends.
Or any friends.
A friend.
A non-judgemental dog maybe.
‘What is my life?’ he mutters and knocks.
A thump sounds on the other side, followed by, ‘Go to hell.’
Sam pounds his fist on the door again. ‘Is Avery Lou there? I’m his brother.’
Silence.
Sam kicks the door. A car crawls past and he glances at hard faces staring at his shimmering back. In this street of broken glass and rusted pipes, he is a prism of colour.
Footsteps thump and the door cracks open to show a sliver of Avery. His eyes are soft with sleep, hair mussed, and he’s shirtless with every rib on his concave chest showing. Great. Sam can go right back to feeling guilty that he hasn’t made sure Avery’s been eating.
‘Wow, it is you,’ Avery says. ‘I thought you hated this place.’ He pauses. ‘And me.’
Sam grits his teeth. ‘You know that’s not true. Now can I come in? I’m about to be arrested.’
Avery opens the door. ‘I guess that’s usual. But I—’ He breaks off with a choke.
Sam shoves past, leaving glittering footprints. Honestly, it wouldn’t be that hard to catch him. Screw the yellow brick road – just follow the sparkling glitter path to Sammy Lou. And he’s pretty shy, but God help him, he is two minutes away from ripping off his clothes.
Avery opens his mouth. Closes it.
Sam rakes a hand through his hair and feels glitter stick to his scalp. ‘I need a shower.’
‘You need a pressure hose,’ Avery says. ‘What … how?’
‘I screwed up stealing a house, OK?’ Sam folds his arms. ‘Just lend me some clothes and—’
Avery bursts out laughing.
It’s his real laugh, all light and giddy, and it shakes his whole body.
Usually Sam loves that laugh, but today he kind of wants to murder someone. He itches. ‘Super mature, Avery.’
Avery clutches his stomach and slams the front door. He sags against it, hand over his eyes while he laughs and laughs and laughs.
Sam waits.
‘I just can’t even look at you.’ Avery presses his knuckles into his eyes. ‘It’s too much. It’s too funny.’
‘Would you shut up and listen?’ Sam snaps.
Avery makes a show of holding his breath. He nods.
Sam starts, ‘So I was stealing a house—’
Avery cracks up again.
Sam is done. He’s just done. He’s ruined the one good, one pure thing he had with the De Laineys. He’s got literally nothing on his back except for stolen clothes and seven tonnes of glitter. And his brother is a jerk.
‘Screw you, Avery,’ Sam says. ‘I’m really uncomfortable.’
‘Is it on your teeth?’ Avery swipes a hand over the back of his eyes, his shoulders still shaking with suppressed hysterics. He looks so much younger when he’s laughing. ‘Well, you’re officially the prettiest Lou.’ Avery sets himself off again.
Sam hopes he hacks up a lung.
He stalks past Avery, brushing himself off so someone will have a fun time cleaning up. Although from the looks of this place, no one’s cleaned in a decade. Downstairs consists of a kitchen squashed in one corner and a few damaged sofas around an unreasonably expensive TV.
While the De Lainey chaos was all toys and clothes and sewing projects and buckets of seashells, this apartment is mouldy pizza boxes, empty bottles and broken boxes. The coffee table – which has three legs, the fourth being a pile of textbooks – is piled high with laptops, phones and a knot of chargers. Stolen, obviously. The carpet smells like cat piss. A curtain partitions off what probably was the dining room but is now more mattresses on the floor and clothes and spilled rubbish.
Sam rubs the bridge of his nose. ‘Can I please just take a shower?’
‘A shower is not going to fix this.’
Sam closes his eyes. That’s a mistake. All he can see is Moxie’s stupefied expression, her shock melting into terror, her first instinct to be self-defence. Against him. A criminal. A creep hiding in her house. Hot, anxious knives carve his stomach.
Avery finally registers the look on Sam’s face and folds his smirk away. His fingers flap anxiously and he goes to dig clothes out of a broken suitcase. ‘Don’t be mad at me.’
‘I’m not mad.’ He is, a little, but he’d rather lie and skip having to calm Avery down later because he’s terrified of angry people.
‘So what happened? Does this story involve you making out with a clown?’ He grins suddenly.
‘Hilarious,’ Sam says. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’
Avery picks up a shirt and shakes it out. Crumbs fall out of the folds. He shrugs and flips it over his shoulder since Sam didn’t specify clean clothes.
‘What? Oh. Day off.’ But he has too many lying tells. Like how he immediately hunches over, waiting for a blow. ‘Shower’s upstairs,’ he says, fast. Distracting.
Sam sighs and follows him upstairs. The rail is broken in four places – how does that even happen?
‘How many people live here?’ he asks, while Avery slams a hip against the sticky bathroom hinges. There are other closed doors, muted voices behind them.
‘Um, I don’t know? They let me take the sofa and I don’t have to put in for rent.’
‘Um … and why would they do that for you?’
Avery gives him a cutting look. ‘Because I have friends. Good friends. I’m helpful. Sometimes I drive for them at night when they’re doing jobs.’ The hinges unstick and Avery tumbles in. ‘I don’t even always have to sleep on the sofa.’
A sharp pang hits Sam’s guts. What exactly is he saying? ‘But they’re all way older than you.’ They’re using you. They’re bad news. Are you a getaway driver? Please, oh please, do not tell me you’re sleeping with someone. Sammy does not have the energy for that conversation.
Avery dumps the clothes on the sink and roughly clears a spot between bags of makeup and shaving kits and tins of hairspray. ‘Red towel behind the door is mine.’
‘We probably need to talk,’ Sam says, trying to keep his voice level.
‘OK. About what?’ Avery’s face is so open – so naive.
Sam scratches glitter behind his ear. Later. Just do it later.
‘About why you’re covered in glitter?’ Avery says.
‘Never mind,’ says Sam. ‘It won’t happen again.’
It will never, never happen again.
Hot water and soap can scrub out a multitude of evils.
Just not glitter.
Sam spends a good seventy per cent of his time in the bathroom swearing and the remaining thirty per cent raking fingernails over his scalp and always, always coming up with more glitter.
He gives up.
Why couldn’t Moxie have just slapped him? Why did she have to go into the office at all? He needed that fragile paradise. He needed it so he could breathe again.
He hesitates over his glitter-covered clothes – De Lainey clothes. Then he stuffs them into a garbage bag.
Forget it, Sam. It’s over.
Sam has to turn up the cuffs of Avery’s jeans, but the shirt is uncomfortably tight. Meaning – it actually fits, instead of the loose ones he’s been stealing off the older De Lainey boys. Sam likes clothes he can disappear into instead of tight ribbed cotton that shows his bones and sunken stomach. He stomps downstairs,
meaning to ask Avery for something else, but Avery sits on the sofa with his legs kicked up on a coffee table. And he’s not alone.
A girl with blood-red hair, expensive clothes, and cool eyes sits beside him. She’s at odds with the trashed house, the broken sofa they sit on, and Avery’s bedhead and half-suppressed hand-flapping tic.
Avery’s put on a shirt, but he still looks dishevelled beside this girl.
They’re both drinking beer.
Avery won’t look at Sam and Sam knows he has to fight this. He tugs the neck of his shirt and scuffs across the room to stand in front of them.
The girl looks him up and down coolly. ‘I’m Vin.’
‘You look slightly less like the glitter apocalypse,’ Avery says. His fingers mess about with screws and a broken hinge to distract him from flapping. Once upon a time, it was little cars.
Sam tucks his hands into his jean pockets. ‘Um, hi … Vin. Well, Avery and I can get out of your hair now.’
‘Avery lives here.’ Vin has a smooth voice, soft and rich, but Sam’s stomach clenches. He’s not sure if it’s because this girl is taking Avery away from him or because her voice is so cold.
‘And you too?’ He can’t imagine Miss Ironed Jeans living here.
Vin smiles and leans back, one arm covered in gold bracelets slung lazily over the back of the sofa. ‘Sometimes.’
‘And how’d you meet?’ Sam says, aware his voice is more accusatory than conversational. ‘Over drinks? Because you know Avery’s barely seventeen, right?’
‘OK, OK.’ Avery shoves himself off the sofa and sets the beer down. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He grabs Sam’s arm, but the skin is still mostly scabs and bruises and Sam snatches away with a muted hiss. ‘Oh,’ Avery says, ‘you still look like roadkill. How’s your side?’ Before Sam can grind out a reply, Avery snatches the corner of Sam’s shirt and jerks it up. The skin around Sam’s left side looks raw from the scalding shower. A few scabs have knocked loose and left pinpricks of blood.
Sam jerks his shirt back down. Avery’s always woeful at personal space, but Sam’s not in a patient mood today.
Vin, however, has a flicker of interest in her cold eyes. ‘What happened?’
‘He threw himself in front of a car,’ Avery says. ‘He thinks people will like him better if he saves them.’
Sam’s fingers curl into fists. That’s not why—
Is it?
‘Avery,’ Sam tries again, voice quiet, ‘can we go? I need to get my backpack from the mechanic’s.’
‘Oh, right. Let’s—’
‘I’ll take him over,’ Vin says.
No way. ‘Thanks,’ Sam says, ‘but we’ll just—’
‘OK.’ Avery starts fiddling with the hinge again and casts an anxious look at Vin, one Sam doesn’t like because it obviously has history and Sam’s not used to missing pieces in the puzzle of Avery Lou. It freaks him out, what happens when he’s not here.
It freaks him out when Vin scoops her hair over her shoulder and Avery gets this soppy look on his face. Like she could ask for the sun and he’d scramble to get it for her.
Sam didn’t imagine it’d go this far.
And he’s stupid stupid stupid, but he knows the thousand little pins in his stomach are jealousy. That Avery can be such a mess, but someone still likes him.
‘Be nice,’ Avery whispers.
Sam is nice.
Sam is nice while he gets into Vin’s car – a partially refurbished sports car, half painted and missing hubcaps, with Avery’s touch all over it. He’s obviously fixing it up for Vin. Is that why she likes him? The car runs smooth as an oil spill and Vin goes twice as fast as the speed limit. Sam is nice even though he’s seriously queasy before they pull up in front of the mechanic’s. The place is open. An unfamiliar man talks with a customer over a car.
Sam’s chest aches. Avery’s replacement? He said he had the day off but … he was lying, wasn’t he?
Sam reaches for his seatbelt buckle but Vin catches his sleeve. Sam is nice instead of punching Vin in the throat. He knows he’s being unreasonable. All Vin’s done is drive him here, which is decent, and befriend Avery, which makes Sam want her dead.
‘I’ll go in,’ Vin says, ‘since Avery told me you’ve got a history here.’
Decent. The girl is just being decent.
Sam slumps back in his seat and watches Vin glide into the mechanic’s and have a few words with the new guy. No one seems angry. Vin flips her deep red curls over her shoulder and laughs, then she vanishes. Sam taps anxious fingers on the window and hopes Vin just picks up the backpack without looking inside. She might think the backpack is full of coins, right? Sam’s a thief. Coins are logical.
Any thin threads of hope he has snap instantly as Vin strides out of the mechanic’s with the backpack in one hand – and walks away from the car.
No.
Sam scrambles for his seatbelt. He flings himself after the fast disappearing Vin, his mind crumbling in confusion.
no no no no no no
He tears down an alley after her, but they’re right by the wharves and Vin goes straight for the oil and muck-slick ramp lined with fishing boats and forklifts moving crates. She circuits them and pauses by the water edge.
‘Hey!’ Sam’s voice echoes, too shrill. He springs forward. ‘No! Wait—’
With a cool look of frosted steel in Sam’s direction, Vin swings the backpack up and
over and
d
o
w
n
into the sea.
The cry that escapes Sam’s lips is hardly human.
He flings himself down the wharf, realising too late that he should’ve gone straight for fists and Vin’s perfect face. Vin catches him from behind and pins his arms to his sides. She’s strong and tall and knows how to lock her arms around a writhing body. She slams Sam against a cement pillar and for a horrible second Sam thinks this is the end. He’s going to be thrown between fishing boats into the frothing, rank sea to drown and he’ll never see Avery ever ever ever—
‘Chill out, kid.’ Vin’s voice is calm as a finely tuned engine. ‘Avery said you’d freak out, but I thought you’d just yell a bit. I’m letting you go now. Don’t hurt yourself.’
Arms release Sam and he tips forward, hitting the rough cement on his knees and looking down, down, down to the water below. It’s too far to swim, the water too filthy, climbing out again too impossible.
His cheeks are wet.
His backpack is gone.
Somewhere in the far back of his skull, the words Avery said tick over in a shower of betrayal.
‘He told me about your crazy habit.’
He told. Of course he did … when Avery starts talking, he’ll tell anything to anyone. He doesn’t even understand when he shouldn’t. But how long has he known about the keys?
‘You want to survive this life, you need to take a knife to that sensitive little heart of yours.’ Vin folds her arms, stance easy and confident, and despite the sluggishly working dockyard, no one pays attention to them. She towers over Sam, a glacier of cold eyes and fancy heels. ‘I’m working on that with Avery, so sure, I’ll fix you up too. I need a kid like you. A good lock pick. You’re so small … and fast, right?’
Sam stares at the scabs on his palms.
‘But you need to shed the baby face. Harden up. I mean look at you, kid. You’re crying over a backpack. You’re too soft.’
Even if Sam could explain the keys – explain how, if he fit them together, they were a map of the last year where he had nothing except stolen houses and fantasies of imaginary families – he wouldn’t tell it to someone like Vin. He couldn’t even explain it to Avery. The keys were promises.
They were all he had.
Vin hauls Sam to his feet by the back of his T-shirt. He do
esn’t struggle. Dimly, he’s aware he could hit Vin now – really hit her. But his arms hang loose at his sides.
Avery knew Vin was going to do this. He knew.
‘You want a house, right?’
Finally, Sam looks up, his lashes thick with tears.
‘Get your shit together, stop being sentimental, and work for me,’ Vin says. ‘You’ll get money and then you can get what you want.’
Sam’s mouth works, but it takes a moment for the words to come out. ‘Doing what? Drugs?’
Vin gives a laugh and slides on aviator sunglasses. ‘Sometimes. But I prefer to use my crew to gut houses, just like you do. Plus a few tools of persuasion to get bank details out of the occupants.’
Sam stares at her. ‘Armed robbery?’
‘Something like that.’
‘But Avery works at the mechanic’s.’
‘He did. But yet, he’s extremely good at taking apart doors.’ Vin starts back towards the car. ‘I know you’re only a kid, so come on. I’ll buy you some chips on the way back. We’ll make a hardass out of you eventually.’
Sam wipes his face on his T-shirt and stares at the water. He could at least try to climb down there, swim, hopefully not get crushed between cement walls and boat hulls. Except he doesn’t want to die. Except Avery let this happen, wanted it to happen, and Sam will do anything for his brother. If he doesn’t go with Vin now, he’ll be sleeping on the street.
We gut houses like you do.
They have no idea.
It’s not about the stealing from houses. It’s about stealing the houses. He puts his wishes into small metal keys and tucks them in his pocket to keep him breathing.
Right now, his lungs are rust.
He follows Vin.
Avery drops down on the sofa where Sam’s sprawled. The TV is on, sound muted, and Sam’s flipping through channels with kaleidoscope swiftness. Avery pokes the back of his neck. Sam doesn’t react.
‘How long did you know about my keys?’ Sam doesn’t actually want the answer, but he’s been lying around this house for two days and his voice is hollow from disuse.