by M. G. Reyes
The girl followed him to the punch bowl in the living room. He poured her a glass, enjoying what was rare for him—some unalloyed female attention.
Girls could usually tell he was gay and didn’t look at him the way she was looking at him. It wasn’t that he wanted to string her along, but just that it was nice not to be dismissed. Any minute now she’d catch sight of Paolo, or one of the other tennis players who’d come to the party. Then she’d be gone and he’d be alone. The only gay guy in the house to judge by the total lack of interesting-looking boys.
“I’m gay,” he said, lifting a glass to hers. “Just thought I’d get that out there. You’re very cute and I like talking to you, though. So please don’t go away.”
She grinned, mischievous. “I knew you were gay. And I’m not going anywhere.”
“Seriously, you knew? Huh. I thought I’d at least have a shot with you.”
“Are you bi?”
“Bi? I wish.”
“Why?”
“More options. You, for example. Or the four other hot girls I live with.”
“You live with four girls?”
He laughed. “Do you know anything about this house?”
“I know that Candace lives here. And she’s having a party. I thought that’d be enough.”
John-Michael grabbed a plate of cookies from a passing boy, who barely noticed.
“Try one.”
She took a bite and gave a blissful smile.
He said, “I made it.”
“Really?” A pout. “Now I wish you were bi, too.”
He shrugged. “What are you gonna do?”
“Candace is emancipated,” the girl said. “I knew that. I didn’t realize you all were.”
“Free as birds.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. That must suck.”
He glanced at her for a second, but the girl didn’t seem to be joking. She licked chocolate off a finger and gave him an expectant, sympathetic look.
“Are you kidding? Most people are, like, seriously envious.”
“Really?” She shrugged. “Not me. I love living at home.”
He just stared.
“My folks are, like, these amazing people. I’m very lucky. They’re cool. My mom teaches music and my dad runs an ice-cream factory. Well, actually, he owns it. And a parlor, too. They’re really interesting and fun and they cook so well, I mean, both of them. I have my room and my own bathroom, my bike, my electric scooter, my car. They take me to concerts at the LA Phil and the ballet. . . . Why would I want to live apart from them? Doing all my own housework, laundry, no one to help with homework?”
“Who are you?”
She laughed. “Honestly, doesn’t it sound good? Breakfast in bed on the weekends. Mom’s blueberry waffles and bacon. I mean, I guess something must have gone wrong in your lives for you to want to be emancipated. Am I right?”
He paused, wondering if what he was feeling was jealousy or skepticism. “I guess.”
The girl continued to stare at him, then let out a huge laugh. “All right, I’m messin’ with you.”
“What?”
“My life isn’t like that, not at all!”
“So your folks don’t do any of that cool stuff?”
“Not really. Just the work bits. My brother and I hardly see them. But maybe if we didn’t actually live in the house, they’d make time to see us. Like, real time.”
John-Michael stared straight into his Sea Breeze. The mention of parents was having its predictably gloomy effect on him. “And you want that?” he said, aware that he sounded mournful.
“Yes,” she concluded. “Definitely. They’re not a bad set of ’rents.”
“Then you’re right,” he admitted wistfully. “You are lucky.”
GRACE
BALCONY, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27
“Thinking of joining the stoners?” Grace stared down at Paolo, an ironic smile on her face. “You know, you don’t have to do it their way.” A couple of seconds later she was joined on the second-floor landing by Candace.
“I don’t want to . . . I mean . . .” He frowned. “I don’t?”
Grace grinned the mischievous grin she knew caught people off guard. “I mean, you don’t have to wait for the bong. I got Lucy to give us enough for a joint.” The smile and comment had the desired effect. Paolo couldn’t hide his surprise.
“You guys smoke?”
Candace replied, “Hardly ever. Tina—Grace’s mom—is real strict. A total health nut. And Grace doesn’t drink. Now, on account of having to get up at stupid o’clock tomorrow morning, neither do I. Still . . . some form of intoxication seems appropriate given my news. I mean, TV! Kind of life-changing, you have to admit. So, you wanna join us on the ver-ahn-dah, my dear?”
“You gonna smoke that in the open air? Hey, maybe you want to invite some cops, too?”
Candace laughed. “Relax. We’re not big smokers. Two tokes and then we turn into pumpkins.”
They headed upstairs. There was only one area of the balcony that wasn’t occupied by couples already well on the way to hooking up. Turning their backs on the ocean, the three housemates tucked themselves into a corner. Grace lit up the misshapen cigarette and took a drag. Candace relaxed in anticipation as Grace exhaled slowly through smiling teeth. Candace took the joint from her fingers, inhaled, and passed it to Paolo. “Oooff. I’d forgotten.”
Paolo drew in the smoke and held it there for a couple of seconds. “Been a long time?”
Grace gave a beatific grin. “We don’t get out much.”
“Well, Tina’s not here to stop you,” he reminded them.
Candace pulled a lopsided grin. “True. She’s far away in San Antonio, getting bugged by Grace’s bratty little brothers.”
“But you,” stressed Paolo, “you can get out all you want. Who’s to stop you?”
Grace nodded. The edges of her senses were already fuzzy, tingling. “I know. Suddenly, it isn’t as much fun.”
Paolo sniggered. “I’m glad you said it.”
“I didn’t pick you for a giggler,” Candace remarked. She batted her eyes at Paolo, sophisticated disdain. For a second, Grace thought, she looked just like her mother.
Candace continued. “You never can tell who’s going to be the type to giggle when they smoke,” she said. She paused lengthily, for obvious dramatic effect. “Personally, I prefer men who can still keep their cool.”
“That’s a great impression of your mom, Candace. I can just see her saying that to the Dope Fiend. I liked you so much better before you giggled, dahhhhling.”
Paolo burst into laughter, joined after a second by Grace.
If Candace was annoyed, she hid it with consummate skill, and ignored the comment entirely. “Don’t get me wrong. The whole emancipation thing. It rules.”
“Yeah,” Grace said. “It totally does.”
“But I hate laundry. And having to whine at people to clean up after themselves.”
Paolo laughed harder. “Oh, I get it. This is all part of your cunning scheme to get me to do the dishes.”
Candace said, “Yeah, lazy brat, could you do the frickin’ dishes, already? ’Cause you’re something of a disappointment, Mr. King.”
“And there I was thinking I was all about the eye candy for you babes.”
“You and Lucy. You could do your dishes. Like, ever.”
“Okay, okay!” Tears came to his eyes. “Can we be serious for a second?”
“What makes you think we’re not being serious?”
“No, but really.” He managed to bring his chuckles under control. “Look, you guys must have an opinion: Does Lucy like me?”
A little too quickly, Grace answered, “No.”
He sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
Candace said, “Did she ever act like she likes you?”
“No. Kind of the opposite.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “There’s your clue.”
“I guess.”
She continued. �
��I hope you don’t want to be a detective when you graduate.”
“It wouldn’t be my first choice.”
“Okay, good,” Grace said. “I’m just saying. I mean, I assumed you’d be sticking with the tennis.”
He shook his head firmly. “I’m gonna be a lawyer.”
Grace peered at him, surprised, amused. “Really? What kind?”
“Human rights.”
Grace knew her amazement was showing on her face. For a moment, she couldn’t speak. Paolo went on. “Yeah. I’m real interested in all the abuses that go on in our own country. You know, we’re so worried about, like, Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and all, but we don’t think so much about the shitty stuff that happens right here.”
Candace interrupted. “You mean Gitmo?”
“That’s not here, but yeah, that, too.”
“Gitmo’s not here? Then where?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s in Cuba.”
Candace stared in disbelief and then snorted with hilarity. “For a minute, you had me.”
“No, seriously! Google it. Anyway, I’m talking about stuff that happens to poor people, immigrants, people on death row.”
Grace could hardly believe her ears. Wordlessly, she took the joint from Candace. “You’d do that? Work your butt off to qualify as a lawyer and then work with people like that?”
Paolo turned to her. “I think so.”
Grace decided to keep playing devil’s advocate. “Why?”
He seemed taken aback by the challenging note in her voice. “Because . . . because it matters. There are too many lawyers, that’s what my dad always says. Clogging up the system, making work for themselves so they can get more clients. We don’t need that, for sure. But I’m interested in how the law can be used to protect people. The innocent. The vulnerable.” He gave her an intent look. “Don’t you think?”
“I guess.” Grace blew the smoke softly into his face. If he was faking it about the law stuff, he was managing to come across as remarkably sincere.
With an air of finality, Candace said, “I’m gonna leave you two to put the world to rights, and go check up on the triple room.”
Paolo said, “The hookup room? I thought we agreed it was private.”
Candace interjected, “No, Grace and I decided. One of us has to check in every so often to make sure no one’s getting, you know, forced to do anything they don’t want to do.”
“Jeez. You girls. You think of everything.”
“Yeah, well, we like living here,” Grace told him. “Don’t you? But there are people who think we shouldn’t be allowed to. Like Miss Olivera, the counselor at school. If anything horrible were to happen in this house, everything would change. Candace’s mom would throw the rest of you guys out. She’d make us live with, like, med students; someone she thinks sounds respectable.”
Candace pouted. “True.”
“That’s good thinking,” Paolo said.
Candace pulled a tight smile as she disappeared downstairs, saying, “Glad you agree.” She reappeared on the staircase after a couple of minutes. Grace thought she could detect a slight blush. Candace lowered her eyes and headed for the balcony. Paolo and Grace watched her approach, leaning on the stair rail.
Paolo turned to Grace. “Is it just me or did you get a little weird with me just now?”
Grace inhaled slowly, rolled her back along the concrete wall until she was facing the front of the balcony. She gazed out past the tall palms and to the ocean beyond. “Define ‘weird.’”
“It’s like you don’t approve of my plans to be a lawyer.”
Grace snorted. “More like I think you’re bullshitting us.”
“What?! Why would I?”
“To get us to say something good about you to, oh, I don’t know, maybe Lucy?”
Paolo looked genuinely stunned. “Is that what you think?”
Grace shrugged.
“It’s not a lie,” he said, a little indignant.
“Not saying it is. Just that I know something about death row prisoners. Maybe it’s given me an oversensitive BS detector.”
“What do you know?”
“I write letters to them,” she said.
“No shit.”
“I’ve been doing it for years.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded. “Yep.”
“Why?”
“Because. Someone needs to.”
“Why you?”
“I . . . I guess I don’t like to talk about it much,” Grace said. “It can get stressy.”
“I’ll bet. Like, when it gets right up to the date and you think one of them is gonna . . . you know.”
“What?”
“You know,” he said, making quotations marks with his fingers. “Get ‘iced’?”
Grace felt the familiar cold steel in her chest at his question. She wanted to brush it off but the weed had swept away the controls she’d constructed around the idea. He asked and all she could see in her mind for a few seconds was the one place in the world she never wanted to see—the viewing gallery of the execution chamber.
Paolo seemed momentarily stunned. “Grace,” he was saying, “are you okay?”
Grace watched his eyes travel from her face to the joint in her hand, which she was carefully extinguishing against the concrete wall. A cool wind blew in from the ocean. It rustled the palm fronds. It felt chilly against her bare legs.
She handed him the joint and tried to smile. “You take it. I think I’ve had enough.”
JOHN-MICHAEL
THIRD FLOOR, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28
Candace was the first to wake, but only because of her alarm. It set the cell phone under her pillow buzzing like a mosquito. Next to her, on the floor and arranged over three pillows, John-Michael gave a soft grunt and stirred.
“Goddamnit, Candace.”
“Shhhh—go back to sleep! Grace and the others still are.”
Impossible. Once awake, there was no going back to sleep. The room was already fairly light, even with the shutters closed. Those shutters weren’t much of a barrier to the rising sun. He guessed that they were there mainly to stop people looking in than to keep the morning light out.
John-Michael squinted around at the general dishevelment. Behind Candace, Grace lay peacefully dozing on her side, having spent the night on her stepsister’s bed. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a fully dressed boy-girl couple lay back-to-back on her bed, with the comforter twisted around their legs.
He couldn’t even remember how he’d ended up in Candace and Lucy’s room.
Now he remembered. He’d spent the last hour of the party evading a guy who he’d looked at for about a microsecond too long. Okay, maybe he’d been staring at him. But in truth, John-Michael had merely zoned out. Then he’d come to, pupils suddenly focusing on a guy with sandy hair and blue eyes, with a stubbly beard. The music had changed and the dude had begun to dance. Hideous, horrible dancing. Bad shoulder-shimmying, uncoordinated little kicks, and a huge cheesy grin on his face as he began to snake over to John-Michael. His heart had plummeted.
The next couple of hours hadn’t been much fun. John-Michael was terrible at rejecting sweet guys who just didn’t do it for him. He always talked to them for too long, to compensate for the fact that he wasn’t into them. Then they ended up wondering why he wouldn’t get with them. He knew the score, yet he didn’t learn.
Eventually, John-Michael had sneaked out on a trip to the bathroom and snuggled down alongside a couple of stoners who’d fallen asleep on Lucy’s bed. He’d heard his stalker opening the door to the bedroom and whisper his name very softly, breathily, John-Mi-hi-chael, like that.
And John-Michael had held his breath.
He cracked open an eye and looked at Grace. She shifted slowly, waking up. He didn’t budge, playing dead. He heard Grace mutter, “Already?”
Candace took her earrings out and whispered back, “Weekend shoots, baby. The perks of being a schoolgirl TV star.”
She disappeared through the bedroom door into the adjoining bathroom. He heard her turn on the shower.
The instant Candace was gone, Grace moved, not slowly and sleepily as she’d been doing up until that moment, but swiftly, with purpose. She slid across the double bed, neatly avoiding the need to land on the floor and disturb John-Michael. Within a second she was sitting at Lucy’s desk. He peeked upward but the angle was all wrong—he couldn’t see what Grace was doing, only that she was using Lucy’s laptop. Whatever she was doing, it went on for a few minutes. Click, tap, click.
John-Michael closed his eyes until only a narrow slit remained. An electric sense told him that Grace didn’t want to be observed. He was about to say something when Candace stepped back into the bedroom. Seeing her, Grace froze for a second. John-Michael took the opportunity to stir noisily. He opened his eyes in time to see how hastily Grace clutched at two sheets of notepaper that were beside Lucy’s open laptop.
Candace stared. “What the—? Are you looking through Lucy’s letters?”
John-Michael sat up, pretending to be sleep-slow.
“What? Don’t be an idiot,” Grace hissed. But her right hand continued to guard the notepaper.
Candace took one last look. Then, resolutely, she strode over to the desk. She glanced at the handwritten scrawl that covered much of the top sheet of paper. There was an awkward pause. “Oh,” she said flatly. “Right. I’m sorry.”
Grace snatched back the notepaper.
“Anyway,” Candace said in a more friendly tone. “Why are you writing to those prison losers in my room?”
John-Michael caught his breath. The sound of his slight gasp turned both girls’ heads.
“‘Prison losers’?” He looked from Candace to Grace.
Grace frowned. “It’s kind of a private conversation.”
“But it sounds so interesting.”
“Where did you come from anyway?” Candace asked. “Don’t you have your own room?”
“I was hiding from someone.”
“Oh, that blond dancer I saw you with? Aww.” Candace pouted. “I had such hopes for the two of you.” She turned to Grace. “You shouldn’t snoop on people.”