Chapter 6
I was in the den, trying to write. Keme and Millie were making it difficult.
The scene in question was—well, I wasn’t sure. I mean, I knew my protagonist, Will Gower, was investigating a seedy pawn shop. But I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Was the pawn shop empty? Probably. I mean, otherwise, whoever was in there would call the police—
“Dash,” Keme shouted from the billiard room. “How much does an apartment cost?”
“What?”
“HOW MUCH DOES AN APARTMENT COST?” (Millie providing backup.)
“I don’t know,” I said. “It depends.”
“On what?” Keme asked.
“How many bedrooms it has, where it is, how nice it is. Lots of stuff.”
“Does it matter which floor it’s on?”
“I don’t know.” And then, in case they’d missed it: “I’m writing.”
I returned to my seedy pawn shop. But then—did a pawn shop make sense? What if it were a seedy…butcher’s shop? Or a seedy florist! I’d never read a scene set in a seedy florist. And it wasn’t empty, it was full.
Wait. Did that make sense? Why would all those people be there? Was it a party?
“How many bathrooms did your apartment have in Providence?” Keme shouted from the billiard room.
“Well—” That was actually kind of a complicated question—and an interesting one—so I levered myself out of my writing chair, set my laptop aside, and padded into the billiard room.
Keme and Millie were lying on the floor, looking at Millie’s phone.
“That’s actually kind of a complicated question,” I told them, “and an interesting one—”
“Don’t care,” Keme said. “Already bored.”
“See, I had several apartments in Providence. My first apartment—”
Keme made a buzzing sound.
“—had two bedrooms and one bathroom, and let me tell you, that is not the ideal ratio—”
“What didn’t you get about—” Keme asked, and then he made the buzzing noise again.
“Rude! I’m trying to help—wait, what are you doing?”
“Looking for an apartment,” Millie said, still staring at her phone. “Want to help?”
“An apartment for who?”
“For us. Oh Dash, look at this one! Isn’t it adorable?”
“That’s only three thousand dollars a month,” Keme said. “We can afford that.”
The staggering obliviousness of that statement must have been why my brain went blank.
Objections presented themselves, each one immediately discarded: you’re too young (no, technically they weren’t); you can’t afford it (apparently they could); and then, simply, you can’t.
My mouth switched over to autopilot. “But you live here.”
“Millie doesn’t live here, you donkey,” Keme said. “Show him that one with the jacuzzi.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I barely made it into the hall before a wave of heat rose in my body. It ran up my chest, up my throat, into my face—every inch of me stinging as sweat popped out under my arms. Somehow, I kept walking—I needed to get away.
Somehow, I ended up in the kitchen (talk about running on autopilot). Fox sat at the counter, eating a heaping slice of huckleberry pie, and they hurriedly wiped their mouth and shoved the plate behind the toaster.
“Indira said I could—what’s wrong?”
I burst into tears.
Fox watched me for a few moments. Then they led me to a stool, sat me down, and brought me my own slice of huckleberry pie. They handed me several paper towels, which I used to mop my face as I told them, in broken fragments, about Keme and Millie.
“They’re young,” Fox said—not unkindly, but not terribly sympathetically. “They’re in love. Of course they want to have their own place.”
“But they can’t. We live here. We all live here. Well, not you, but you’re here so much you practically live here, and you certainly act like you live here, like, you had that pallet of old bricks delivered here—which, now that I think about, you really need to take to your studio—”
Fox shushed me. “We’ll worry about that later,” they said, which was exactly what they’d said the last time we’d gone out to brunch and they’d forgotten their wallet. “Dash, they can’t live here forever.”
“I know,” I said. But I almost started crying again. Because I did know that. But there had been this part of me that had hoped it would be years and years before they left. “But they can stay for a while. Save up some money. You talk to them—Keme listens to you.”
“You know it doesn’t work like that.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“You love them,” Fox said with surprising gentleness. “You care about them. Of course it’s hard to let them go.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said. But then I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“It’s hard to see things change. To see one phase of life end so that a new one can begin.”
I didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything to say to that. So I said, “I just don’t want them to leave.”
Fox made a sympathetic sound, but they said, “But they are going to leave, Dash. Eventually.” They waited, as though I might interrupt; when I didn’t, they continued, “If I may offer you a tiny bit of advice, Dash, it would be this: you can either embrace this as an opportunity to deepen your relationship with them, or you can fight it—and, in the process, push them away.”
I pressed my hands against my eyes as tears threatened to well up again.
A voice told me I was being silly. Bobby and I would have the house to ourselves once Millie and Keme were gone, which would be awesome.
No more cleaning up after a teenage boy.
No more arguments about the Xbox. No more walking in on the two of them in compromising situations.
This was a good thing. Obviously. And it was good for them, too.
Good for them to be independent and mature and start building a life together.
But, another part of me said, they’re my family.
“Dash?” Keme’s voice moved toward us from the dining room.
Fox squeezed my knee.
Drying my eyes on my tee, I cleared my throat and did a few quick sniffs. I’d just finished when Keme charged into the kitchen.
“Should we look at apartments that don’t have laundry in them?” he asked. “Millie says no, but my mom and I always just went to the laundromat. It’s not a big deal, right?”
He was still looking at his phone, but it was impossible to miss the excitement radiating off him.
The ache in my chest got bigger, but I found a smile. “Well,” I said, ignoring the faint scratchiness in my voice. “There are two schools of thought about that—”
Keme groaned. “Never mind, I’ll ask Bobby.”
“No, wait,” I said, sliding off the stool to follow him. “I’m the best at finding apartments. Just let me get my laptop!”