Chapter Twenty-Four
From the outside, Max’s place is double the size of most homes in DC: free-standing, white-painted brick, with a porch attached to one of the long sides of the house.
The walkway extends up two flights of stairs, leading to a portico and double front doors that are set with abstract, stained-glass panels.
At the sound of the doorbell reverberating within the house, I knot my fingers into the knit of my chunky sweater, trying to calm my nerves.
I know Austin Taylor is only in England until the gala, which means this is possibly my one chance to dig through his stuff and try to find his spell book, or some other lead on the specific curse he put on my mom. If I can manage to shake Max somehow.
Max answers the door looking flustered, his red T-shirt hiked up just far enough on one side to reveal a pale hip.
I glance away from it quickly. ‘Hi!’ I practically scream, my nerves making me jumpy.
Max’s eyes widen. ‘Hi,’ he shouts back, half laughing.
‘Sorry.’ I swipe a hand across my forehead and try to laugh too. Calm. Normal. I can be both. Max steps aside to let me in. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever actually met anyone that lives in Woodley Park,’ I say.
‘Me neither,’ he says. ‘We only moved here a couple years ago, and as you know, I went to school in Arlington, so that didn’t leave a lot of time to explore the neighbourhood.’
Max’s house looks even bigger from the inside.
It’s almost three times the width of my home, and at least twice as long.
The front is split into three parts: in the middle is an airy foyer crowned with a chandelier that could’ve been on the Titanic, and a massive staircase that leads to at least two upper floors.
There’s a dining room with a table made for twelve people or more on the left, and then on the right, a living room with two enormous white leather L-shaped couches.
It looks almost like a show home, all the soft grey throw blankets tastefully arranged across the upholstered surfaces, the tall pillar candles that’ve clearly never been lit stacked neatly atop a dust-free glass coffee table.
On the far wall in the living room is a painting whose bright colours would be enough to dominate any space, much less one so muted.
The canvas is broken into four panels, each showing the same smiling face but with different highlighted colours that distort the image ever so slightly.
The person in the painting is Marilyn Monroe.
For a second, it looks like one I’ve seen in my sixth-period art history class.
I frown. ‘Is that—’
‘Yeah,’ Max says, tracing my gaze. ‘My dad got into art collecting a couple years ago.’ He scrubs a hand through his hair and looks down, his cheeks stained pink. ‘He’s got a couple more Warhols upstairs.’
Of course he does. Leave it to Austin Taylor to have such a classic rich bro flex smack people in the face the second they walk in his house.
Max leads me towards the back, past a massive kitchen gleaming with stainless steel. None of it looks like a place you’d hide an incredibly powerful magical tome, but maybe I’m old-fashioned. We walk down a slightly smaller staircase that descends into the basement.
‘And, this is where I live,’ Max says, flipping on a light.
Other than its lack of normal-sized windows, Max’s basement is nothing like mine.
For starters, it’s broken into four large rooms, and has its own kitchen.
Instead of mouldy-looking washing machines or boxes of old toys my mom swears she’ll get rid of ‘when the karma’s right’, there’s a much cosier brown leather sofa in the living room, along with a wiry, bright-yellow coffee table and a spikey cactus so tall, it almost scrapes the ceiling.
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘The F’resh Prince has his own wing.’
Max groans. ‘Please don’t ever call me that again,’ he says.
I follow him to the kitchen – smaller and a little darker than the one upstairs, but still impressive – where he pours us each an orange soda in Mason jars with handles.
‘Food should be here in like fifteen minutes,’ he says. ‘I hope you haven’t eaten in the last ten years ’cause I basically ordered the entire menu.’ He lifts his glass of soda to his lips but pauses, his eyes lighting on me.
Instinctively, I wipe my nose with the back of my hand, but there’s nothing there. ‘What?’ I say.
Max laughs softly. ‘Nothing, it’s just … I’m not used to seeing other people here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well.’ He shrugs. ‘My dad’s been in the UK for the last two months.’
What he’s saying dawns on me. ‘Wait, have you been here alone for two months?’
‘No,’ Max says quickly. ‘My dad came back for a weekend, and then the cleaners come once a week, but that’s usually when I’m at F’resh.
So, still, not totally alone.’ He presses his lips together in a self-conscious smile.
Max gestures back towards the living room.
‘Come on, I’ve got something I wanna show you. ’
We head back out of the kitchen and into the living room.
His space, though tidy, is much more lived-in than upstairs.
There’s a pair of plaid slippers, the heels worn thin, in the doorway to his bedroom.
A paperback of Animal Farm resting on the couch’s arm.
Max slides his laptop out from the bottom tier of the coffee table and opens it on his lap as we both settle into the couch.
I’m careful to leave at least six inches of space between us, lest my brain get any more ideas about what me being here with Max actually means.
But he promptly closes it as he shuffles over to show me the images on his screen.
I recognise the Instagram grid for Tyler’s band, the four guys Tyler’s age with scraggly, blondish-brown hair all around the same length. Sam absolutely lost her shit laughing when she found out their band was called Regret.
‘Bands get in fights all the time,’ Max says, pointing at the screen. ‘What if one of these guys put the curse on Tyler?’
I breathe in deep, try to focus on this latest crazy theory, but my brain is too fixated on the exact spot where my thigh presses up against Max. He clicks over to Regret’s website and their events page, where there’s a small list of venues around DC.
‘They’re playing a few shows in a couple weeks,’ he says. ‘We should go to some, start asking around about how things between them all are. Being discreet, obviously. And then in the meantime, we can find out where Tyler’s boss lives, see if we can somehow break into his house.’
This is enough to snap my focus back to him. I use this as an excuse to shift away, levelling Max with an incredulous look. ‘You want to break into this guy’s house?’
Max’s investigative techniques have always been chaotic, but this is tornado status.
‘Well, yeah,’ Max asserts, as though I’m the unreasonable one. ‘It’s the next most logical place after Breakneck if we want to find clues about the curse.’
My mouth drops open. He has a point; it’s supposedly why I’m here, sitting in his house, at this exact moment.
And yeah, we set a precedent with sneaking into Breakneck’s office – it was necessary, though, to keep Max engaged.
Easy, and harmless – not to mention pointless.
But Max breaking into some random guy’s house, where he could get in serious trouble?
It’d not only be pointless, but way too risky.
‘I mean, maybe,’ I say uneasily, eyes darting to the small white candle on the coffee table. It’s called SWEET DREAMS. ‘But maybe let’s try some less illegal investigating first.’
On the couch between us, Max’s right hand rests only an inch or so from my left.
I stare down at it, breath trapped in my throat.
If I moved my pinkie just slightly, I’d be touching him again.
Instead, I reach for my phone, tucked in my pocket.
The food should be here in five minutes or so. It’s time to act.
I jump to my feet. ‘Show me the other Warhols, rich boy.’
We head upstairs and then up another level to the second floor.
The landing alone is huge, dominated by a comic book-looking painting I know I’ve seen before in my art history textbook.
At the top of the landing is a room whose door is slightly ajar.
Max nudges it open and leads me inside. I know immediately that I’ve hit the jackpot: we’re in Austin Taylor’s office.
It feels just as airy as the living room downstairs, two of the walls dominated by floor-to-ceiling wraparound windows. The other walls are painted a bright white, a giant black metal desk anchored in the middle of the honey-coloured wooden floor.
‘There’s this one in here,’ Max says, tugging on the long, bobbled chain that hangs down from the lamp in the corner.
Light falls across the room, casting a warm, off-white glow on the framed painting of a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.
But I’m not really looking at it, my eyes instead scanning the dark grey filing cabinets behind the desk, a mustard-yellow locker that doesn’t look all that different to mine at school, except crystal bottles of some brown liquor sit on top of this one.
The room is the exact opposite of anything in my house: clean, neat almost to the point of methodical.
There are no tacky tapestries, rows of crystals, incense cones.
Nothing even slightly suggests witchcraft or anything to do with magic.
Although, what did I actually expect? An antique armoire with a blood-written sign that says Spells, Cauldron, Witch Hats, Etc?
Having the room seem as ordinary and non-magical as possible would make sense if you were trying to hide the fact that you’re a curse-casting supervillain.
The light clicks off again, drenching the room in darkness.
‘And then the third one is in my dad’s bedroom.’