Leontes Button had been dead,murdered, for around twelve hours now, according to the coroner’s estimate, and Octavius Button was taking the news as well as any seventeen-year-old musical prodigy would.
He was lying on the floor of his bedroom, face down, while a medley of old ABBA songs flittered through the vintage car-shaped radio on his bedside table.
“Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” filled the air as the muffled sound of knocking rudely disrupted the chorus. He turned the volume down with his remote.
“Octavius Button, open the door this instant!” His sister’s tone told him that she was royally pissed off about something.
He slowly dragged himself up from the soft surface of the ground, feeling like he was a necromancer raising his own corpse from the dead as he trudged forward, tugging at the doorknob and throwing the door wide open.
Fola’s face was screwed up, but her irritation quickly morphed into shock when she took in Octavius’s appearance.
“Tavi,” Fola started. “What on earth are you wearing?”
After Chief Waxler had declared his father’s murder to a roomful of suspects, Octavius had decided he’d much rather be anywhere elsebutin the morbid company of everyone else. So he decided to sneak off to other parts of the Manor, where he could be alone with his thoughts. His wandering took him to his siblings’ bedrooms—specifically their closets, where he found an array of clothes to try on. Now he was wearing one item from each sibling.
Bilal’s bright orange sweatpants, paired with Perdita’s denim miniskirt, one of Fola’s many cropped blazers, and Romeo’s feather boa from the year hewent as Perry the Platypus for Halloween. Along with the sunglasses he’d found in someone’s drawer (he couldn’t quite remember whose at this point, though there was a possibility that they were actually his).
“You look ridiculous. Like, more ridiculous than usual,” Fola continued.
He thought he looked great, but then again it could be the grief talking.
“I look grea—Wait, what do you meanmore ridiculous than usual?”
Fola did not dignify his question with a response. Instead, she moved on. “Why did it take me shouting at the top of my lungs for you to finally hear me? I called your name a total offifty-seventimes.”
“I didn’t realize it was you. I thought it was the walls talking,” Octavius said with a shrug.
Fola’s face returned to straight-up annoyance. “Why would the walls be talking? Walls can’t talk, you know that, right, Tavi? Are you high or something?” Fola loved to state the obvious sometimes. Of course he knew walls couldn’t talk. Though he reckoned if his walls could talk, they would scream.
“Unfortunately, no, not high, just hungover,” he replied, rubbing his temple.
She rolled her eyes. “Well, you better start sobering up at some point. They want us in Eden, stat.”
“Do they always have to send you to fetch me? You know I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.”
Fola gave him aseriously?look, wordlessly gesturing to his clothes. If it wasn’t for the fact that hestillhad an earsplitting headache, he would have defended his ability to look after himself. Not that he could remember most things from the past twenty hours. For all he knew, he might’ve publicly humiliated himself, thus proving hishatersright about his presumed inability to take care of himself.
Though some hours had passed, Octavius was still piecing together the events of the night, trying to rearrange the fragments of memories floating about the wiry mess that was his brain. All while Waxler’s announcement that his father had been murdered ricocheted through it all.
“Let’s get going, then.”
Fola placed her hand on his chest, stopping him from stepping any farther. “You’re not seriously going down dressed like that, are you?”
“I am, why? You don’t think I look pretty?”
Fola gave her brother her most lethal glare, which only made him smile.
“As I said before, you’re ridiculous. I hope the other prodigies make fun of you.” She muttered the last part as she dropped her hand, letting him exit the room in his clownish garb. He didn’t really care if some fancy scientist from NASA or a fourteen-year-old genius flutist mocked him. He didn’t care what anyone thought.
“Why are we being summoned to Eden again, anyway?” he asked. The lyrics from “Dancing Queen” warbled out of the speakers as he closed his door behind them both.
She didn’t respond for a while, just kept marching forward through one of the longer hallways.
“Fola?” he said.
She sighed. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t run off at a very crucial moment, you would know why.”
He stalked behind her. “I didn’t want to be around everyone after… you know.”
