Chapter 1
Found Family
This story takes place before Retool.
I opened the freezer. Inside, next to the bags of vegetables, and the carefully wrapped meals Indira had made in advance, and, most importantly, the cartons of ice cream (I spotted an untouched Moose Chunks that I hadn’t known about), the ice maker glittered.
“See?” I asked.
“I see a freezer,” Bobby said. There was a tone. I think it was because he didn’t appreciate that I’d made him get his gun, which he held low at his side.
“The ice maker,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Every time I open the freezer, it spits ice cubes at me.”
Bobby let out a slow breath.
“Well,” I said, “not this time. Obviously.”
“I’m going to lock up my gun.”
“Bobby, I’m not joking. I think it—” I eyed the ice maker and lowered my voice. “I think it knows.”
“Okay,” Bobby said. “I’m definitely going to lock up my gun.”
Shutting the freezer door, I said, “I’m telling you: that ice maker is possessed.”
“It’s not possessed, Dash. Just like the TV wasn’t possessed last week after Fox changed the password on their Disney Plus account.”
“That was a misunderstanding,” I said. “This is the real deal.”
“You’ve been reading way too much Stephen King,” Bobby said. “You told me the Pilot was possessed because it ran out of gas so fast.”
“It did run out of gas suspiciously quickly!”
“You kept driving to Portland for mochi!” With what must have taken an effort, Bobby smoothed out his voice. “You can’t keep saying anything you don’t like is possessed.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “That sounds like something someone would say if they were possessed.”
Before Bobby could—or had to—respond to that, Keme came into the kitchen.
“How was school?” I asked. (Because he hates it when I ask.)
Keme made a face and pretended to lunge at me.
I knew it was pretend, so I pretended to dart backward. And then Bobby had to pretend to catch me.
“How was the last day?” Bobby asked. “Everything go all right?”
Go all right was a code for asking: did you pass all your classes so you can graduate?
It was August, and Keme had spent a miserable eight weeks in summer school, redoing (of all things) 9th-grade Language Arts and Pre-Algebra.
(He’d taken those classes before The Last Picks made it their unofficial goal to help him graduate.)
“I passed,” Keme said. He dropped his backpack on the counter, fished out a folder, and said, “Do you have a box?”
“What kind of box?” I asked.
Did you know that sometimes, asking a teenager even the simplest of questions can confirm in their mind that you are a complete and total idiot?
“A box,” Keme said.
“How big?” Bobby asked. “What do you need to put in it?”
Keme tossed the folder on the counter and reached into his backpack again to take out his lunchbox.
(It looked very manly and professional, and Millie got it for him, and from what I understand, adults with real jobs take their lunches to work all the time.
But I liked to bring up the lunchbox in conversation as much as possible because a) it made Keme sound like a little kid, and therefore b) he went bonkers.) After the lunchbox came a pair of bent and battered spiral-bound notebooks, a handful of mechanical pencils, one really good pen he’d stolen from me, a rubber band, and more gum wrappers than I could count.
“Junk,” Keme said.
A piece of paper had slid out of the folder when it hit the counter. Fancy lettering and a flourish caught my eye. I opened the folder.
“Keme, this is your diploma.”
He was digging around in one of the backpack’s front pockets now, coming up with packets of hot sauce.
“Keme!”
“Yeah,” he said in that you’re-too-stupid-to-live tone. “I know.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“Mr. Gates gave it to me.” And then, in the tone, he said, “I literally just told Bobby I passed all my classes. Do you even listen to me?”
I was smart enough—barely—to realize this was a trap, so I said, “Wait, he gave it to you? Today?”
“See? You don’t listen to me.”
“That’s great,” Bobby said, clapping Keme on the shoulder and drawing him in for a one-armed hug. (Note: this would have gotten me eviscerated.) “Congratulations, Keme. I’m really proud of you.”
“You graduated?” I said.
“You’re supposed to say you’re proud of me,” Keme said. “Like Bobby.”
“What? I mean, I know! I am proud of you.”
“If you’d really been proud of me, I wouldn’t have to tell you to say it.”
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.
“Take it down a little,” Bobby murmured. And then, to me, “He’s been taking lessons from Fox.”
For a moment, Keme’s eyes brightened with amusement. Then they went back to their flat, killer stare.
“But what about graduation?” I said. “When’s the ceremony?”
“It was in June,” Keme said. He turned the backpack upside down and shook it out over the counter. A lot of crumbs sifted down, followed by a single, miraculously intact peanut-butter cracker. (The orange kind.)
“What do you mean it was in June?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“Take it down,” Bobby said again a little more firmly.
With a hint of a blush, Keme said, “They only do the ceremony in June. So, I just get a diploma.”
“But that’s not fair,” I said. “That’s not right. Graduation is a tradition. That’s part of growing up. You get to walk at graduation.”
“Not everybody walks at their graduation,” Bobby said.
“Right, I know, but—”
Nothing came to me.
After a couple of seconds, Keme said, “Box?”
“We’ll get you something for long-term storage this weekend,” Bobby said.
“Dope,” Keme said and headed for the stairs.
“Are you going to clean this up?”
“In a minute,” Keme called back.
As soon as he was out of the room, I said, “Bobby, graduating high school is—it’s a rite of passage.”
“He did graduate high school. That’s the important part.”
“But he needs all the stuff that goes with it. He needs to do all the dumb, expensive things that everybody has to do because that’s what you do when you graduate high school. Like a yearbook ad.”
“I think it’s too late for a yearbook ad.”
“Or senior skip day.”
“He had, like, thirty of those. Indira had to bribe Dr. Xu to write Keme a note.”
“Or senior sunset! Oh my God, Bobby, senior sunset is so special.”
Bobby nodded, but then he said, “Babe, I love that you want this for Keme, but, well, it’s a little late.”
Then I knew what I had to do. I squared my shoulders. I looked Bobby in the eye. And I said, “It’s never too late to right a wrong.”
Bobby looked like he was engaging Maximum Patience mode.
“How does that sound?” I asked. “I think I’m going to have Will Gower say it.”