She handed us a key and instructions for the alarm code in case we wanted to leave the house. I narrowed my eyes at her – it was an insane amount of trust to place on two kids she’d literally just met the night before. Trey looked equally skeptical as he climbed out of the car and Deborah showed him how to put the dogs on their leads.
“Why are you doing this?” he demanded, the question coming out as an accusation.
Deborah looked us both straight in the eye. “You’ve both been let down by people who were supposed to care for you. I don’t want you to judge the rest of the human race by their standards. I think you’ll find outside the walls of Derleth Academy people like you for who you are, not what you can do for them.”
With that, she backed out of the drive and sped away, leaving Trey and I with the keys to her house and three very excited dogs tugging at their leads.
“What do you want to do?” I asked Trey as we watched Deborah’s car round the corner of her street. Above our heads, birds sang in the trees like there wasn’t a cosmic deity threatening the world.
A sly smile tugged the corners of Trey’s cruel mouth. “I’ve been trapped inside that cursed school for twenty years. I want to party.”
* * *
It turns out that Trey’s version of ‘partying’ was walking the dogs around the forest trails near Deborah’s house. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he stopped to sniff flowers or admire the birds while a sedate Leopold and Loeb ogled him with wide-eyed adoration. Behind them, I struggled with the overexcited Roger who wanted to chase every leaf that blew in front of his face.
“When you said you wanted to party, I pictured us knocking back shots in a dive bar,” I said as I dragged Roger away from a particularly enticing pile of deer crap. “Maybe find cocaine and hookers.”
“I did all that stuff at school,” Trey said. “Our parents made sure we had any alcohol or drugs we wanted. Anything to keep us distracted so we’d continue to do their dirty work.”
“If you could have a future, what would you want to do?”
“My parents would make me go to Harvard to study business, like every other male in my family. Then I’d go to work for my dad and—”
“That wasn’t the question. What doyouwant to do?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“Again, not the question.”
Trey sighed in exasperation. “Fine. I’d study engineering and go into renewable energy and cleantech. The way we burn fossil fuels and generate electricity is inefficient and wasteful. We only do it like that to make a bunch of asshole friends of my dad even richer – remember, Dad only took in Ayaz to get access to his family’s oil fortune. But it would be a big scandal in my dad’s circle if I went into that field, which is why it was pointless to dream about it even when I thought I could go to college. I try not to think about it. Right now I want air and light and dogs and ice cream and—whoa!”
A squirrel darted across the path in front of us. Leopold’s eyes widened, and he galloped after it, yanking Trey along behind him. Trey’s feet slid out from under him, and he ended up face down on the muddy path.
For a moment, he lifted his mud-smeared face and his eyes were filled with cold fury, but then he burst out laughing. A wild giggle escaped my throat as I bent down to help him up.
Trey dusted mud from the front of his t-shirt and glared at me. “Don’t you tell anyone you saw me like this.”
“Don’t worry. This is going all over social media.” I dug into my pocket for my phone to snap a picture, before remembering that I didn’t have a phone. Mine was back in Ms. West’s hands again. It was funny how an old habit like that stuck around.
It felt weird to be laughing with Trey about such a mundane thing. It was like hanging out with Dante again, only better because we had dogs, and also because I didn’t feel as though there was this power imbalance between Trey and me anymore. I’d been crushing hard on Dante for years, but he either refused to see it or he chose to ignore it for reasons that he took to his grave. Trey might be seven-million social classes above me, but he’d taken a massive risk to defy his father and find me. Even though we hadn’t talked about what happened between us, I knew the feelings I had for Trey were at least somewhat mutual.
With his mud-splattered thrifted t-shirt, ill-fitting jeans, and the wide grin he wore as he got the dogs back under control, it was easy to believe Trey was just a normal teenager. I got the feeling that Trey had never felt ‘just normal’ in his life. And then Roger barreled past them, knocking my arm against the heavy stone inside Trey’s backpack, and I remembered that neither of us was normal.
This peace we felt right now – it was an illusion. But it was something I’d had before and Trey had never experienced, so I let him have it.
After another hour or so, Trey decided he wanted to see the town. I thought it was risky since we were still so close to Arkham, but I couldn’t refuse Trey anything today. On the main drag, Trey made a beeline for the ice cream parlor we’d seen from the bus window. I stood outside with the dogs while he agonized over flavors. He came out with a big grin and two double cones groaning under the weight of multiple scoops and toppings – nuts, candy, chocolate sprinkles, seven wafers, cookie crumbs… he’d gone crazy.
“Did you leave anything in the store?” I accepted the cone with incredulity.
“A couple of wafers and some flavor called ‘rum & raisin’ that sounds awful.” Trey’s eyes closed with bliss as he licked the full length of his cone. Heat pooled between my legs as I thought of other things he’d licked like that.
As I licked a drip of chocolate ice cream off my hand, something occurred to me. “Trey, how did you pay for these ice creams?”
Trey flashed me a black card. “With my money.”
“But you don’t have money. You’ve lived locked away in that school for twenty years. That card can’t possibly work anymore.”
“This is the kind of card that doesn’t expire,” Trey slipped the card back into his pocket. “There’s so much money in this account I could buy a house if I wanted to. It was my expense account from happier times. I checked it in a machine at Arkham and the money’s still there. Dad hasn’t touched it.”
