31. Lilah
31
LILAH
I pulled Matt into my room and closed the door, then asked him if he was hungry, if he wanted to take a shower or use the bathroom.
He shook his head and sat on the end of my bed, looking around the extravagant room. I saw him take in the sleek expensive furniture, the wall of windows, the door open to the attached bathroom.
“What is this place?” he asked. “Who are those guys?”
My heart thudded in my chest. “I’ll explain all that.” I sat next to him on the bed. “What happened?”
He stood and paced the room like a caged animal. “She’s just so… hard. Like I try to do everything right, try to follow all the rules, but sometimes… sometimes I just can’t, and then…”
“She makes you pray,” I said. “She gets worse.”
I remembered: how every infraction made her more strict, more convinced we were being tempted by the devil, more sure the answer was to isolate us with nothing but her and the Bible.
“It was my fault this time,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair. It was longer than usual, like he hadn’t had a haircut in a long time. “I can’t even say it wasn’t.”
“It’s never your fault.” I watched him with alarm. This wasn’t Matt. He was the calm one, the one who didn’t push against our mom’s boundaries, the one who defended her. Now he was stalking around the room coiled with energy that had nowhere to go. “Just… tell me what happened.”
“I was watching porn, okay?” I flinched, but not because my sixteen-year-old brother had gotten caught watching porn. His cheeks were bright red, his eyes bright. He looked a little crazy, and I had a flash of my mom when she was on a roll, talking about God and the devil and damnation. “I was watching porn and she found out, so yeah, this time it really was my fault.”
My mind spun. We weren’t exactly the kind of family — the kind of siblings — that talked about sex. I mean, I hadn’t been allowed to date at his age so porn had probably really sent my mom over the edge.
I swallowed my discomfort, tried to think about the right thing to say, the thing a good big sister — one who hadn’t been taught that literally every human feeling was something to feel guilty about — would say.
“It’s totally normal to be curious about sex and stuff,” I said.
His cheeks flamed and he covered his face. “Oh my gosh, Lilah! You’re not really going to talk to me about… about that, are you?”
Sadness washed over me. Matt was sixteen. In another life — with another mom — I would have had to worry that he might get someone pregnant, that he might not know how to treat girls with respect, that he might not understand the emotional parts of sex (something I was just starting to figure out myself).
He would have been talking with friends about sex, sliding into the DMs of girls from school, hoping he might get lucky at prom. We lived in a society that talked about sex like it talked about grocery shopping, like it was no big deal, but here we were, both of us struggling to even look at each other.
“Well… somebody has to,” I said. “Right? I mean we can’t just be freaks who never acknowledge the fact that sex is a thing people do, a thing people think about.”
“Yeah, when they’re married!” He was practically shouting, and his eyes had taken on a feverish shine.
“That’s…” I struggled to find the words that would connect what we’d been taught — what Matt might still believe — to the truth. “That’s just not always true. It’s not the 1800s, Matt. People have sex, see it as a normal thing to do to feel good or…” I was really struggling here. “… show their feelings for someone.”
“Please stop,” he said, covering his face again.
I knew this wasn’t ideal. Matt and I hadn’t been close over the last couple of years. Obviously he would feel weird having this conversation.
“I just don’t want you to feel… sinful for something that’s normal.” I tried to switch gears. Rome wasn’t built in a day. “What happened after she found out?”
“She wanted me to go to the closet and pray and I… I said no.”
“Oh boy.” I could guess what had happened next because I’d said no once or twice too.
“We had a huge fight. She told me I would go to hell if I didn’t repent. She tried to drag me to the closet, Lilah. But I got away and I locked myself in my room and then she sat outside and did that casting-out-of-demons thing she does when we’re being tempted by the devil.”
“That’s not what was happening though,” I said, determined to keep making the point. “You were just curious about a part of life that every teenager is curious about.”
He scrubbed his face. “Lilah!”
“I’m sorry! I just feel like I have to keep saying it.”
“Well, you don’t.”
“Fine. What happened then? How did you get out of the house?”
“I crawled out my window.” I was relieved when he laughed a little. “She was still praying when I left.”
I laughed. “I bet she was.”
“I just walked for a while, hoping I’d cool off, want to go home,” he said. “But I… I just didn’t. So I called you.”
I took his hand and squeezed. “I’m glad you did.”
He met my eyes. “Your turn. Who are these guys? Why are you living here?”
I tried to think about the shortest way to explain what was going on without overwhelming Matt, who was already pretty overwhelmed. “They’re… friends.” I couldn’t even begin to analyze the weirdness of calling the Bastards friends, let alone feeling like it was true. “I had a thing with my boss. It got out of hand and I needed a place to stay for a while. Nolan, Jude, and Rafe offered to let me stay here.”
I was relieved when their first names didn’t trigger a memory for Matt. The more he’d told me about what had happened between him and our mom, the less convinced I was that he needed to know my roommates were the same guys who’d leaked my nudes in high school.
It had nothing to do with Matt. All he needed to know was that we were both safe here.
“What kind of thing with your boss?” Matt asked.
“I found out he’s into some shady stuff and he… kind of came after me.”
Matt’s eyes widened. “He came after you?”
I nodded. “It isn’t safe for me to be at my apartment right now.”
“Can’t you go to the police or something?”
I shook my head. “It’s not that kind of thing. It’s… complicated. Look, the important thing is, I’m safe here and so are you. There’s plenty of room, and the…” I caught myself on the word Bastards , which had somehow started to feel less like an angry nickname and more like an affectionate one. More fodder for therapy if I ever had health insurance. “… the guys said you can stay as long as you want. The room next to mine is empty. You can stay there, but Matt, you have to text Mom and at least let her know you’re okay.”
He looked down, tugged on a loose thread hanging from his red basketball shorts. “Okay.”
My mom monitored Matt’s cell phone just like she’d monitored mine when I’d lived at home, which meant she knew he’d called me, knew where he was even if she didn’t know who owned the house. “Just tell her you’re staying with a friend from school. Ask her to drop off your backpack at the principal’s office. She won’t want you to fall behind just because you had a fight.”
I tried not to think about the possibility that she’d show up on the Bastards’ doorstep.
“What will I do about school?” he asked. “I don’t have any of my stuff and I don’t think this place is in the same district.”
“You can take tomorrow off,” I said. “We’ll go out and get you some things to tide you over. I can drive you to school the next day.”
It would be my first day at my new job. I could drop him at school on my way in.
“I don’t… I don’t have any money,” he said. “I only brought my phone.”
“It’s okay, I’ve got it.” It would be the last of my savings, but at least I had my new job, and one thing I’d learned from living on the edge was that you had to ride the wave in front of you before you looked at the ones coming from farther away.
“What if she calls the police?” Matt said. “I’m not eighteen. She can make me come home.”
I sucked in a breath and exhaled slowly. The possibility had been thrumming in my temples like a toothache. My mom wasn’t exactly a reasonable person.
“I’ll… I’ll call her,” I said.
I read his skepticism in the lift of his eyebrows.
“I know we’re not on the best of terms.” I hadn’t spoken to my mom in two years, since we’d had a fight about the way she treated Matt. I’d texted on her birthday and Christmas, trying to keep things civil, but she’d never once responded or reciprocated.“But I’ll try, tell her you called me and it’s temporary.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.
“Then we’ll deal with it.”
He nodded and sighed. “Okay.”
I was relieved that he let it go, that he’d let my relationship with the Bastards go, probably because it had been eclipsed by the news that my boss had come after me and it wasn’t safe to stay at my own apartment.
I was on overload, overwhelmed by the responsibility now in my hands, not just of taking care of Matt — that part was easy in the short-term thanks to the Bastards — but about the ramifications for Matt long-term, and for me too if my mom decided to be especially unreasonable.
I wasn’t looking to be arrested for kidnapping a minor.
“Let’s go take a look at the room,” I said, “make sure there are sheets and towels and stuff.”
I thought about my mom, about the fact that I’d have to talk to her.
Tonight.
I didn’t feel ready, didn’t feel equipped, but she was the next wave on the horizon.