20. Caleb
TWENTY
CALEB
The text Valentín Diamante sent me only reads, “Received.”
I assume that means he’s satisfied with the information I sent, and he’s going to support me and my family in our fight against the Lockwoods.
Seven presses his head against my shoulder and puts his hand over my phone screen. “I thought we were watching tv together.”
I shift so I can kiss the top of his head. “I’ve seen this episode already. Lori made me watch it with her when I was there the other day.”
“Oh,” he says, disappointment evident in his voice. He grabs the remote and pauses it. “I’ll watch it later then.”
“We can still watch it,” I say, setting the phone aside. “You want to stay caught up with Lori, don’t you? You’re always texting her.”
Seven gives me a confused look. “Always texting her?”
I point to Seven’s phone, which is currently on the coffee table. “You tap away on your phone even when Havoc, Vortex, and I are all in the room. Unless you’re texting Connie or one of the backstage staff instead?”
“Oh, Lori had me download a game,” he says, shrugging. “I’ve been liking it.”
“What kind of game?” I ask him.
This time, Seven hesitates for a beat before he replies, “It’s an anime thing. It has some of the characters from the superhero one I watch.”
The way he hedges sends a niggle of worry through me. “Can I see?” I ask. “If it’s good, maybe I should play and get better than both of you.”
He licks his lips then picks up his phone, and he holds it sideways so I can’t get a good look at the screen at first. Then he pulls up an app that has one of the superhero characters on the screen.
“You take turns fighting an opposite team. Sometimes she plays with me, but I usually play on my own.”
I press the screen where it says “light attack ” and watch one of the characters jump across the screen to attack.
“You also have special attacks,” he says. “And the healer is really strong. You just have to time him right, or you waste it and the whole team can die. Do you want me to install it on your phone?”
“Sure,” I say, unlocking the phone and watching while Seven installs the program.
I have no interest in the game itself, but I’ll figure it out if it’s something Seven likes.
Of course, as soon as it starts, I think I understand why Seven likes it.
The game asks me to use my gems to roll for my starting characters. I click a few times, and I get a flashing screen, and a special animation as the “SSR” character introduces himself.
“Oh, lucky,” Seven says. “I wanted that guy. His moves are really strong.”
I tap to the corner where it says “add gems.” It costs 90 “coins” to buy one gem, and I can only buy coins in sets of 100, for $3.99 per hundred. There’s also a discount as you buy more, and it quickly becomes clear that the gem-to-dollars math is complicated and obtuse.
I go back to the character, but he’s gone, and it asks me if I want to roll again. “How do I get a specific character?” I ask Seven. “I want the healer you had.”
“Luck,” Seven says, shrugging. “But you might get a different healer, or a better healer. Or if you get the same character as this one, it upgrades him so he can do better attacks. They do special events, too, where you can get characters from other games.”
“So I have to keep paying gems to get more characters?” I ask. This time I tap the little informational button, which tells me there’s a 0.01% chance of getting the “SSR” character.
I can already imagine somebody paying for another chance of their favorite character, over and over, until they’ve spent far too much on a phone game.
I glance over at Seven’s phone. “Your team is very strong, it seems.”
He looks wary now, but he nods. “I’ve been playing a while, and there are things I can do every day so I get a lot of gems.”
I tap through the game and see the free activities, but when I consider how long Seven has been playing—no more than a few weeks at best—he’d have to have been extraordinarily lucky to get all the things he wanted.
“How much money have you spent?” I ask, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “On the gems or the coins or whatever.”
He squirms, not looking at me. “I don’t know,” he says, his voice very small all of a sudden. “Not that much. A few dollars here and there.”
I rub my brow. “Okay. Next time you spend money, write it down. Write it down every time. Then you can keep track of how much of your salary is going into the game.”
Admonishing him won’t help if I want him to change his behaviors. I know enough about gambling to see that this setup is identical, except the prize is a digital character and not money.
Either way, the only winner is the house.
“Okay,” he says, but he bites his bottom lip. I’m about to ask him what’s wrong when he asks quietly, “Can you help me? I don’t…” He takes a deep breath, obviously having to steel himself, which makes me frown. “I don’t know how to do the math.”
“The math?” I repeat, but I quickly add, “Of course I’ll help you. I just need to know with what.”
Seven won’t look at me. “I don’t know how to add money.”
That sends me reeling, and I have to take a few breaths to calm myself down.
The Lockwoods wouldn’t have bothered educating Seven past elementary school. They kept him locked up in a small room, and it’s lucky he even knows how to read.
“Okay,” I say. I click the phone screen off. “We can do that. I don’t know how much help I can be directly—Vortex is probably a lot better as a teacher than I am—but we can look into an online tutor, and we can buy practice books.”
Seven nods, and the defeated look on his face has my blood boiling all over again.
I reach out to tip his chin up so I can see his eyes, which are glassy with unshed tears.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Why?” I ask, my voice harsher. “It’s not a big deal.
We’ll buy the books and find you tutors and even if you don’t enjoy it enough to become a mathematician, you can learn the basics.
” I stop myself as another thought occurs to me.
“Do you want to become a mathematician? Or anything. Do you want to go to college, Seven?”
He swallows hard. “I want to not feel stupid,” he says quietly. “Everyone knows how to do this stuff. Georgie gives me measurements sometimes. She doesn’t expect me to be good with those, but she doesn’t know that I don’t know how to do it at all.”
I put my arm around Seven and pull him closer. “Then we’ll start there.” I’ll have to find a trustworthy tutor, somebody who won’t make Seven feel worse. I need to check their credentials, do extensive background checks, maybe even make them aware of what the cost of making Seven cry would be.
What a hypocrite I am.
I make Seven cry all the time.
“Once you’ve got the basics down, whether that takes a year or five or ten, we can look into other education for you,” I say softly.
He nods, but he’s too busy biting his lip to say anything to me. When he finally does speak, it’s to say, “I don’t… need to, you know. I don’t need to know math to make you feel good.” He gives me what I know is meant to be a sultry smile, but I see right through it.
“But you need to learn math to make you feel good,” I counter.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel,” Seven replies.
“Of course it matters,” I tell him. The fierce anger I feel toward the Lockwoods threatens to cloud my head, but I force myself to focus on Seven.
He huffs out a disbelieving laugh. “I have better skills. Skills that are useful .” He starts to climb into my lap, but I stop him. He reels back as if I’ve slapped him.
“Do you want to learn these things?” I ask him steadily. “Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear, or what your mother said. Tell me what you want.”
“It doesn’t—” he starts to say again, but I pin him with a look. “I don’t need to learn them. You won’t want me anymore if I do. You already don’t want me.”
My chest tightens. “Why do you think I don’t want you, Seven?”
“You think I’m stupid now,” he says. “And I don’t understand why you want me to learn them. You’ll be just as frustrated with me if I do learn them. Nobody wants a whore to do math for them.”
I clench my fists, and right now, I sympathize with Havoc’s need for sudden violence. “Did somebody call you a whore? Did somebody imply you were nothing to me?”
“Why do you think I don’t know anything?” he bursts out. “Because that’s all I am. No one would want me if I wasted time learning stupid, useless things instead of what I needed to know. It’s what I am .”
I stand up and grab Seven’s wrist, dragging him toward the bedroom. Seven shakes his head and digs his heels in, but another sharp tug has him following obediently.
“On the bed, pet,” I answer harshly. “Clothes on or off, I don’t care.”
His breathing is coming fast, and he doesn’t hesitate before stripping.
Of course he’d strip. Of course he’d assume he knows what I want.
Of course he thinks it’s only sex.
I go for the manacles, and I remember how he’d argued against them the first night in my bed, but I’m seething at the idea of Seven trying to run away. I take his wrists harshly and close the manacles around them.
Seven tries to tuck his arms closer to his body.
“Hands by the headboard,” I snap.
He obeys without question, even though I can see the uncertainty in his eyes. “Master?” he asks, his voice trembling.
I attach the chain to the bed, and there’s enough slack that Seven can still move, but he can’t leave the bed now.
“I’m getting a cane,” I say, stepping away. “Unless you tell me to stop.”
He shivers, but he shakes his head. “N-no, Master,” he says. “Please. Cane me.”
I go to the closet to grab the cane. When I’m out of sight, I stop and take a deep breath. I need to calm down. I can’t hit him while I’m angry.
But the fact that Seven assumes I don’t want him for anything but sex makes something inside me hurt.
He claims I’m not like his mother, but in the end, he thinks of me in the same terms.