Chapter 8
Andy
My phone feels like dynamite in my hand as I fidget with it, waiting for my father to demand an update. I release it to the counter and only feel marginally better.
Yeah, I’ve seen Sloane a few times actually, and now I can’t stop thinking about her, would be the truth, but instead I’ll have to just tell him no. Whenever he finally asks.
The rich aroma of coffee spirals out of the moka pot through the air of my mom’s apartment, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think Luis was at the stove doing it himself. Instead, I see Carmen standing on a stool, pouring milk into the bottom of a Peanuts mug.
“Carm—no stoves! What the hell?”
“I’m making her coffee,” she shoots back, eyes wide with disgust at my bad attempt at anything close to parenting. “Mom let’s me. Take a breath,” she laughs, modeling an obnoxiously deep breath as she tips the moka pot into the mug.
Jesus.
In my mind, my sister’s still the same kid who’d need her chicken cut into tiny bites, or would only drink water if it was in a Minnie Mouse cup.
Watching her pull four waffles out of the double toaster and finishing plating lunch that looks a lot like breakfast for her and our mother has me realizing she hasn’t been that girl in a long time.
She’s self sufficient in ways she shouldn’t be, and I make a mental note to try harder.
“What a nice surprise!” my mom sings, rounding the corner of the only hallway in the cramped apartment in her diner uniform.
She presses a warm kiss on my cheek and ruffles my hair with an endearing grin on her face.
Her hair, a longer, lusher version of mine, is braided to the side this morning, so I can see the exhaustion that’s been painted on her face for the past four years. “Don’t you have the gala tonight?”
Astor Hill Athletic’s annual charity gala is a hot bed for Boston high society, and Coach knows it. Our attendance is mandatory, and our play time in the upcoming season is suspiciously linked to how many donors we pull in.
“Yeah, tonight. Just wanted to bring these,” I tell her, resting the Rodgers and Hammerstein DVD collection I snagged at the thrift store just outside of campus.
Carmen rushes over at the sight of Julie Andrews on the cover of the boxset. “South Pacific? This is like, vintage.” She holds the set up, inspecting it like it came from an archaeological dig.
“DVDs aren’t that old,” Mom says between bites of Eggos, drenched in too much syrup.
“I never threw away your old player,” she says to me, a nostalgic look flitting across her face.
I know she’s imagining a very different life, the one we had in San Diego with Luis, Carmen’s dad.
The life we had before fire stole it from us.
“I figured you could watch these today, since I can’t be around,” I tell my sister, her eyes glued to the single sleeve of State Fair as she kneels precariously on a chair, elbows on mom’s old wooden table. Carmen peeks up, brows furrowing.
“Why?” she asks, and guilt coils around my gut the way it always does when I have to disappoint her. She’s had so much of that already.
“I’ve got this thing tonight, and I gotta get ready. I just wanted to bring you this.” I hop up from the table, helping myself to coffee in order to avoid having to see her be let down. I catch the nod of her head and watch as her inky black waves shift. “But…I did get tickets for the show.”
She squints before her eyes light up with recognition. “Wait—really?”
The community theater on the south side is putting on Matilda in a few months, but they’re notoriously hard to get tickets for. Lucky for me, it’s only a few buildings down from the club, and one of our door girls is in it.
My phone lights up with a text from Josiah, and I regret the moment I look at it.
Sloane, on some god damned bar top, in a black, velvet dress with fringe that cuts off just beneath the swell of her ass, with this caption:
Atlanta socialite Sloane Fielder seems to have joined ranks with her twin for the fall season, wasting no time learning the lay of the land. Will Boston have a new princess ruling our concrete jungle, or will she follow the suite of her notoriously private grocery heir brother?
JOSIAH
No way she’s related to Grant
Irritation strains at my temples. The papers in this town love to run old photos and pass them off like they were from the night before.
It happens to Will constantly, the only difference is when it happens to him it doesn’t piss me off.
I rub the bridge of my nose, reminding myself to get a grip.
She’s not mine and I’m supposed to be spying on her.
For fuck’s sake. I momentarily contemplate passing the article along to my father.
Maybe if the majority of Bostonians believe this crock of shit to be true, so will he.
“Earth to Andy? Earth to loser?” Carmen playfully shouts, jumping off her seat. “Can Will come?”
I shake my head, trying to forget how we danced at the party last night. “I only got two tickets, kiddo. But maybe we can all hit the diner this week,” I tell her, giving her a smile that’s only half the consolation she’s looking for.
“Good. He owes me a Labubu,” she says low, squinting her eyes suspiciously.
“A what?” I laugh, rifling through the bills piled on the kitchen counter. Water, electric, the phone bill—her car note. Past due. I stuff it into my back pocket and make another mental note to call the lender later.
Carmen runs off without answering, her door slamming shut a few minutes later. My mom’s lost in thought, gazing down into her coffee.
“Did she fuck it up?” I joke, quirking a smile.
“Language,” my mom says, flicking a gaze up toward me that’s only a fraction as lethal as the sentiment.
She was never strict; she left the discipline up to Luis, but even he was as soft as they come.
“No, she actually makes a really good cup.” She shrugs this tired smile, one laced with memories she’d rather let torture her than forget.
“I can give you a little more this month,” I tell her, hoping that’ll bring a smile to her face. Instead she scowls, her deep brown eyes sparking with frustration.
“We’re fine.”
I pull in a deep breath, deciding not to push back.
It’s a dignity thing—I know that. But they’re not fine.
If she knew how I afford giving her five hundred, six hundred, sometimes a thousand a month, she’d be even worse.
She needs the help; she’s barely making ends meet, forgoing paying the car note to pay for Carmen’s activities.
And that girl deserves the world, not a small life in the confines of a tiny apartment.
She deserves the life she had before her dad passed.
Hell, she deserves the kind of life my dad black mails me with every day—and that is why I do it.
That is why I take his money, even as the strings attached to them grow tighter and tighter.
“I wish you’d stop worrying about us. You should be…
studying abroad. Taking trips with those fancy friends of yours,” she chuckles, the corners of her eyes creasing in a way that feels distinctly hers.
The warmth in that gaze, and the way her eyes wrinkle when she’s happy, are tattooed on every good memory I have.
“Away games—” I start to argue, but she tilts her head.
“Don’t count. I’m serious, Andy. Carm’s fine. You can relax,” she gives me a look that says she knows better. “Stop holding on to us so tight.”
I want to tell her that this is what you do when loss is etched in your cards; you hold on to the things you have and you stay grateful for the good.
You don’t hope for more. She thinks hope is this universally good thing, that it makes everything better.
She doesn’t know the sacrifices I’ve had to make, that every shred of my own hope is now permanently entangled in the lies I told to make it possible.
Not just for me but for them. I’d never tell her that though, never let that crease of worry between her brows deepen even further because I know that whatever I think I’ve sacrificed, whatever hard decisions I think I’ve made, it was harder for her tenfold.
She’s the one who was left alone with an infant, a single mother at nineteen.
She’s the one who was widowed at thirty-six.
Despite it all, she lets hope live behind all that heaviness; she looks at me like the world is mine for the taking.
So I don’t say this to my mom. I bite my tongue and keep it in, like I always do.
Instead I say: “It’s two forty-five.”
She juts up from her seat, mumbling a poorly hidden shit as she wraps her apron around her waist, hastily tying a knot as she slips on her diner shoes. “Carm,” she shouts, and my sister lazily rolls out of her room. Her brows flick up, a half eaten candy bar in her hand.
“Where the hell did you get that?” I ask her, imagining a secret stash piled high under a laundry basket.
“People,” she says at the exact moment my mom rolls her eyes and says, “Will.”
Third mental note of the day: remind Will not to bring chocolates from the front desk of the athletic’s center.
He doesn’t realize she’s already had two cavities this year, but he means well.
Picks up my mom’s grocery order if I can’t and she’s still at work.
Has shown up with me to support Carm at the theater.
Discreetly, of course. Somewhere along the way we’ve decided that the people we are out here—in the city, with my family—are only for out here.
Within the confines of Astor society, there are different roles we need to play, neither of which reveal who we truly are.
As much as I’d like to believe my friends wouldn’t think less of me for being the kind of guy without access to a black card, I know they would.
They’d stop inviting me out; they’d have different kinds of conversations.
They’d pity me. Going to Astor is a leg up in the world because of these friends.
Without them, I could’ve just gone to state school, pocketed the excess scholarship funds they would’ve handed me and given them to Mom—cut ties with my real father years ago.
Will’s different, though. The first time he came home with me was after our gala freshman year. He’d only been dating Liv for a few months, and she was a fucking storm cloud. Her best friend had just passed so it was understandable, but Will would have these moments where he’d need to step away.
Booze flowed that night; everyone had a fake but it didn’t matter, the bartenders weren’t ID-ing.
At some point, Liv was bawling on Ian’s shoulder on the balcony, and Will was in a quiet conversation with Gen, which didn’t end well.
I could see them arguing from inside the ballroom and knew this was my shot.
The opportune moment to deliver on what I thought would be my father’s only request in exchange for my full ride at Astor, this was a moment I could use to get close to him.
It was opportunistic and…slimy, but once I got to him, I wanted to help. He looked tortured; he was tortured.
I offered to take him home with me and when he looked up from the concrete floor, there was barely controlled agony warring in his gaze.
Once we stepped off campus though, you could physically see the change, levity breathing life back into his shoulders as we both wolfed down an egregious amount of McDonald’s.
We pulled up to my mom’s and I had that nervous swirl in my stomach, my body trying to make out what the lie was.
Was I just pretending to take this guy in, be his friend and if so why bring him to my moms that first night? Why pull him in closer than anyone else?
“Lock up when you leave please,” my mom says, interrupting my thoughts as she slides her purse over her arm and rifles around for her keys.
“See you this week? Maybe we can do dinner one night if you don’t have practice.
” She pulls my sister to her, squeezing her tight as she plops a kiss on her raven hair.
“For sure,” I tell her, smiling tightly as she shuts the door.
“What’s up with you?” Carmen says from beside me and I quickly turn my head because even at eleven Carmen can read me like a book.
“Uh…nothing,” I huff a laugh. I steal away the half eaten Cadbury bar and break off a piece for myself. “Tax.” I chew the bar hard, a physical reminder that Will’s friendship is real, that even if my dad didn’t instigate our first interactions we would’ve found each other.
She yanks it back. “Rude. And not nothing.” She walks a half circle around me, eyes narrowing like she’s a human x-ray machine. “You’re like…busy. In your brain.” A pause, then a rueful smile. “You know, I like Sloane.”
I glare back, ignoring her and gathering the bills on the counter because for the first time in the past few days I wasn’t thinking about her but now that Carm’s brought her up she’s back at the forefront of my brain, taking up all the space as if her limbs have physically wrapped themselves around it.
“Don’t open the door for strangers. Don’t use the st—”
“Okay, okay,” she moans, rolling her eyes. “You know I can fend for myself. I have pepper spray.”
“Pepper spray?” Alarm shoots through me and I shut my eyes. Let go, I tell myself. “You know what? That’s probably really smart.”
“Thank you. Mommy thought so, too,” she beams up at me, like my approval is a lunar eclipse. “Now go, so I can lock up,” she grins, and I do as I’m told, jogging down the stairs when I realize how little time I have to get ready for this damn gala.