“You can’t stay,” he said, speaking slowly. “There’s no door.”
“The landlord can fix it.”
“Do you mean the landlord who hasn’t fixed the elevator in five years?” he asked, and yes, that was the same person. “Nah, this is dumb.”
“It’s dumb,” Lyra agreed.
“Excuse me,” I said, and I sounded just like my mother. “Please don’t speak to me that way. But you’re right that I can’t stay hereuntil the landlord makes some repairs. And I probably won’t want to stay here after that,” I acknowledged further.
“Great. Lyra, let’s pack.” The little girl nodded like she was on it, but then she shrugged. I would have bet that she’d never needed to fill up a suitcase herself and had no idea where to start.
And, by the way, the two of them weren’t going to start on anything. “Excuse me,” I repeated. “No one needs to pack for me. I can do it.”
“We won’t leave you here alone,” Silas said, and I saw Lyra shrug again, as if maybe she was ready to leave me exactly like that. “You can come to…” He looked over at his sister. “Ly, can you go into the bathroom for a sec?”
“I don’t have to pee.”
“I need to talk to Camille without you hearing me,” he explained, and she obviously wasn’t happy but she did stomp her way to the bathroom. I noticed that she didn’t totally close the door.
So did her brother, because he took my arm and directed me into the other room, where we stood next to the shredded couch. “I have another idea. It’s a good one so don’t say ‘excuse me’ until I get it all out.” He waited for acknowledgement and I nodded. “Ok, you should come live with us.”
I didn’t say anything, but my face must have expressed my skepticism.
“Yeah, it would be good and it would work out for both of us. I need the money,” he told me. “You would pay me rent and you could drive to the grocery store, because getting there and backis a real pain in the ass. We live in a great neighborhood, safe and with mostly nice people because my grandma chose well. You’d be around Lyra all the time so she could pick up more good shit from you, like how she shouldn’t be swearing. And I would be there in case your spaghettini-dick ex-boyfriend and his pissy little posse tried to stir up more crap. There’s no way in hell that he’d come over and do this to my house,” he said, looking at the trash bags that held my ruined possessions. Then he turned back to me. “Ok, now you can say ‘excuse me.’”
I had something else to tell him. “I can’t live with you and Lyra. It’s a terrible idea.” But I suddenly thought of the movies I liked so much, the ones I had watched on the TV that now had several jagged holes in the black screen. This scenario, with the female protagonist moving in with the leading man, could have been how the two of them got together, and then—
I had started shaking my head, both at his idea and at my own thoughts. My life wasn’t a movie. In the hundreds of hours that I’d watched, I didn’t remember ever seeing the character of an angry younger sibling, and I also didn’t recall any subplots that included an ex-boyfriend who wrote “fuck you” in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. I had wiped that off before Lyra saw it, because she was a good reader and didn’t need to get any ideas about additional ways to cuss.
Silas didn’t seem to hear my objection. “I’m actually impressed by myself,” he mentioned. “I dropped out of ninth grade but maybe I should have stuck around there longer. This is a great plan and I’ve come up with a few of them in the last twenty-four hours.” He smirked in a way that did look proud.
“What the hell is taking so long?” Lyra yelled from the bathroom, and he lost the smile.
“We’ll need a written agreement,” he said. “You have any paper?”
“Silas, think this through. Think about having a tenant in your home, a stranger around your sister.” And I thought about living in his pretty house with the two of them, about sharing a kitchen, about trying to help her, about hearing his heavy footsteps, and about the lack of a lock on the bedroom door. “That won’t work.”
“I wouldn’t charge you much so you’d save money on rent,” he noted. “All of your furniture is destroyed but I have some, so you won’t have to buy new crap for yourself. And you’d be helping a little girl who needs you while staying safe from your ex-boyfriend, who’s a card-carrying member of the International Society of Jackoffs. Judging from what he did to this apartment, he might even be the president.”
“Guys? What the hell?” Lyra called again, and I winced. Of course, I was still willing to be a mentor, but it was ridiculous to think that living with them could be a solution.
“Maybe I said it wrong before,” Silas told me. “I think you have a real problem with Dax Miststuck. The shit he did here isn’t the same thing as writing a stupid song and it’s not the same as him telling everyone that his ex is on medication that makes her have sex with strangers.”
“What?” I gasped.
“This is serious,” he told me. He picked up one of the couch cushions and shook it so that foam wafted to the floor. “This is violent.”
“Silas!” his sister yelled. “I’m coming out to be with you.”
I looked at him and he looked back, and I got ready to tell him “no.” No, I would say, no but thank you for the offer of protection. No, that won’t work and I need to leave now to get a hotel room so I can remove this dress and then I’ll need to find someone with a burn barrel to take care of it, my bra, and these shoes. Good luck with your sister, I would tell him, because I understood all too well how hard it was for a little girl in her position. But I could mentor her from afar. Dax seemed to be getting violent—maybe, if he had been the one to do this to my apartment—but I would probably be fine.
No. No, and that was final.
Chapter 5
“Camille, what is this I hear from HR? You have a new address? You’ve moved?”
I sighed inwardly but on the outside, I already wore my “serious and focused” expression. “Excuse me?” I asked Octavia. I looked pointedly at my monitor so that she would understand that she was interrupting my work by stomping up to my office and yanking on the door. I had seen her coming, of course, since the walls were glass—but I still wanted her to take in how rude that behavior was.
