Chapter 24
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 else but in 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 he went 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 mean more 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 of fifty-seven times.”
“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 a seriously? look, wordlessly gesturing to his clothes.
If it wasn’t for the fact that he still had 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 his haters right 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.”
“I do know,” she said. “But we’re all finding it hard, Tavi.” She paused to look at him. Her eyes were glazed over with a sheen of unshed tears, but her face remained stony. He’d seen her earlier, how stressed she had been. Now she had her game face on, like there was no time for her grievances.
“I’m sorry for leaving, Fola,” he said.
“It’s fine,” she replied as they turned right instead of left.
“Where are we going?” he asked. He hadn’t been gone so long that he’d forgotten the way to his father’s office. They turned once more, and standing there, in different degrees of dishevelment, were Romeo, Perdita, and Bilal.
“Thank you all for waiting while I got Octavius,” Fola said as they joined the others in the specific dead-end corner that their father used to refer to as Paradise Lost. He had called it that because it was the place they were sent to when they misbehaved as kids.
Their “paradise” (playtime, which they rarely got) being temporarily “lost.” Here they were forced to polish all of the animals on the walls for hours and hours until each and every tusk, horn, and antler was spotless.
That didn’t make the animal heads any less uncomfortable to be around now.
Octavius felt a hand on his shoulder and looked to find that Romeo was holding on to him like he might float away. He gave his brother a confused look, but Romeo only responded with his sad glassy-eyed gaze.
“Are you sure we’re allowed to be here? Mr. Waxler said we were meant to all stay downstairs,” Perdita said, her eyes red rimmed. She’d clearly been crying.
“It’s fine. Henry summoned us to Eden, so it shouldn’t be an issue with Waxler,” Fola said.
“So why are we here and not in the office?” Bilal asked bluntly.
“Well … I just, wanted us to talk, before we went in. This morning feels like something straight from a nightmare and I … I wanted to make sure we were all okay, or at least as okay as we can be in these circumstances,” Fola said, her voice breaking on the last syllable.
The space around them was heavy and tense, filled with unuttered anguish and grievances.
She wiped her eyes and continued. “Listen.” Her voice was quiet and brittle.
“I know we aren’t the type of family to braid one another’s hair and talk about our feelings.
But we can’t not acknowledge it. We need to speak to one another, know what we’re all thinking, put on a united front.
So many people are out to get this family—the past day has been proof of that, between the real journalist who tried to break in today and that fake journalist from yesterday who actually did manage to break in and threaten Father.
We can’t take any chances. We need to stay on top of this, make sure the police are focused on the right people.
I’m going to ask Henry to speak to Chief Waxler about looking into that woman from yesterday.
At the very least, we need to stick together and—”
“No,” Bilal interrupted, his eyes squeezed shut.
“No? ” Fola replied, staring at Bilal like he’d grown a second head.
“I can’t deal with all of this right now,” he said, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache. Just from looking at him, Octavius could tell Bilal was at his wits’ end.
“What do you mean you can’t deal with all of this right now? All that matters is this. And right now is the only time we have. Do you not care about us? This family? Dad is dead. We have no one left in the world, and we need to think about our futures. We need to plan.”
“No. What we need to do right now is follow Henry’s instructions and head to Eden.
We don’t need to be standing here talking about a situation that can’t change, that won’t change.
The police are dealing with it—you can’t take over from them like you do everything else.
You have to let things run their course.
” Bilal’s expression hardened, though Octavius could see the remnants of dried tears on Bilal’s cheeks.
“So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave this alone and let Waxler deal with it.
I’ll see you guys in there,” he said, and then pushed himself off the wall and limped off down the hallway in the opposite direction.
Octavius silently agreed with Bilal, it was probably best to let this nightmare play out the way it was meant to play out.
But he was not about to tell his sister that.
Fola looked like she might actually cry or scream, or both.
“He’s so …” Her voice trailed off, as she peered down the hallway Bilal had already disappeared from.
She blinked and a single tear rolled down her cheek, which she quickly wiped away.
“I’m still going to tell Henry about getting Waxler to look into the journalist,” she continued in her quiet, stubborn voice.
No one else contested or agreed with her.
“We should head over, I think, before they start looking for us,” Perdita suggested finally, breaking the tense silence.
“Why was Henry calling us, anyway?” Octavius asked, hoping that someone would fill him in since Fola hadn’t before.
“We don’t know,” Romeo replied. “He didn’t say much.”