Page 14

Eleven Years Ago, June

It all happened quickly: A week after Cody approved my SADEP, I had the money to pay for my mom’s first treatment, and a week after that, we were in a hospital in Naples and she was receiving infusions.

She’d asked where the money had come from—of course she had—and I’d told her it had come from Dad, which was the same thing I’d told Rosa and anyone else who asked. I’d also fabricated a story about his not wanting Mom to know, so that she wouldn’t try to reach out to thank him.

Any qualms I had about lying to her were erased after the first week of treatment.

Her energy had improved after only a few days, and by the time we left, she was the closest I’d seen to her old self since her cancer had reappeared a year ago.

Her hair had started to grow back in a soft fuzz of silvery brown, her coloring was better, her eyes less sunken. She looked alive.

In the car on the two-hour drive home, we listened to all her favorite eighties bands—Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, Madonna—and she sang along, her face upturned to the sun.

Whereas chemo had left her unable to eat, the new treatment made her ravenous, and we stopped for burgers at a roadside diner, taking milkshakes to go when we were finished.

My phone dinged with a message as we were pulling out of the parking lot, and my mom saw Tyson’s name pop up on the screen. “Doesn’t seem casual,” she said with a smirk.

“We’re just hanging out,” I protested.

She laughed, shaking her head. “Hormones and pheromones.”

“We have things in common, too,” I protested.

She held up her hands. “Enjoy your youth, honey. I of all people know it won’t last forever. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I know,” I said. I gave her what I hoped was a convincing smile. “You don’t need to worry.”

Tyson and I hadn’t talked about what would happen at the end of the summer, but he regularly made references to our future together, and he’d reached out every day I was gone to check on me.

I was excited to tell him about my mom’s progress, so once I’d put her to bed that evening, I biked over to his house like we’d planned. But when I arrived, I found the house empty and the doors locked.

“I’m at Ian’s,” he answered when I called. “Come over.”

I sighed. I was far too worn out to be around people tonight. “I’m only coming to get the keys.”

Leaving my backpack on the porch, I pocketed my phone and went out the back gate.

The sun was setting as I followed the path through the long grass and around the muddy pond to the mobile home, where Ian’s old pickup truck was parked next to the beat-up Corolla I now recognized as belonging to the girl he was dating.

What looked to be a generator was making a loud noise on one end of the trailer, and some kind of pump contraption was humming next to the warped wooden steps up to the front door.

As little as I wanted to be there, I’d never seen inside Ian’s place and was curious.

I could smell the weed through the door as I knocked on the fogged glass.

After a moment, the door swung in, revealing my boyfriend, a joint in one hand and Coors Light in the other, his eyes at half-mast. He pulled me close, planting a kiss on my mouth. “How’s your mom?” he asked.

“Better,” I said. “She ate a double bacon cheeseburger for lunch and sang ‘True Blue’ all the way home.”

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “I missed you.”

As he released me, I took in Ian’s eclectic décor: plastic-framed posters of Che Guevara and Steve Jobs hung on the walls above a stained La-Z-Boy and a floral-patterned couch that must have belonged to Tyson’s parents, engineering textbooks piled on the side table.

An empty microwave box served as a coffee table, on which was an ashtray filled with at least fifty cigarette butts.

Either he wasn’t a very successful drug dealer, or he was investing his money elsewhere, because he certainly wasn’t spending it on his décor.

Ian was on the couch eating a piece of pizza out of the open box that rested on the makeshift coffee table. “There’s pizza if you want it,” he said, gesturing to the box.

“I just ate,” I said. “I’ve had a long day. I can’t stay. I’m just grabbing the keys to the house.”

At that moment, the door at the end of the hallway burst open and the girl stumbled out, rubbing her eyes as if she’d just woken up. She was mouselike, petite and pale, her dark hair cropped to chin length, a fringe of bangs falling in front of her eyes.

“The motor’s making a funny noise,” she said to Ian without moving from the doorway.

There was a twang in her voice, a flatness to her vowels. Australian, maybe?

“What kind of noise?” he asked, peeking through the blinds over the window behind the couch.

“I don’t know, like grinding or something,” she said.

Yes, her accent was definitely Australian. I wasn’t sure why I was so surprised, but I was.

Ian sprang to his feet and pushed open the front door, bounding down the steps into the gloaming. Tyson trailed behind him, the joint still burning between his fingers.

“Keys,” I reminded Tyson, following.

“I’m coming with you, I just want to see what he’s got back there,” he said as we reached the bottom of the steps.

“What is all this shit?” I whispered, gesturing to the pump contraption.

“Water filter,” Tyson said, starting along the path around the trailer.

“Do your parents know about it?”

He shook his head. “Whatever, it’s stopping them from spending money on a plumber to fix the pipes.”

Curious, I followed them out to the back of the mobile home, where two plastic kiddie pools filled with water were connected by a series of pipes and pumps, one of which was indeed making a grinding noise.

“Fuck,” Ian said, bending over it. “It’s a snake.”

“Where?” I jumped back instinctively.

He shone the flashlight of his phone up inside the machine. “It’s dead,” he said. “It must’ve slithered up there and gotten stuck in the motor. Now what’s left of it is clogging the filter.”

“What is this thing?” I asked.

“Gonna be hydroponics if I can get the brine to power the system.”

“Brine?” I asked, blinking at him. Somehow, between the drug use and the squalid living arrangements, I’d forgotten how smart Ian was.

“The leftover mix of salt and chemical rejected by the membrane.” He pointed to a bucket filled with sludge beneath the contraption where the snake was caught.

“Does it work?” Tyson asked.

“Partially,” Ian said.

Tyson squatted next to the filter pump, inspecting Ian’s work. “I didn’t know this was back here.”

“Dude,” Ian said, seeming to remember Tyson was his landlord. “Please don’t make me move it. I’m getting rid of the chemicals so they’re not hurting anything, I swear.”

Tyson considered him just long enough to make him squirm, then grinned. “Shit, man, just give me a bag of that weed, my lips are sealed.”

Ian relaxed. “Sure thing.” He flipped a switch and the grinding noise stopped as the machine powered down. “It’s too dark for me to deal with it tonight. Andie and I are gonna head to Starfish if you guys wanna come.”

“Is Andie Australian?” I asked.

He nodded, lighting a cigarette as he led us to the front of the trailer.

“Where’d you meet her?” I asked.

“School.”

“But you’re both…taking a break?” I asked.

He nodded. “She’s on a student visa, so she’ll need to reenroll in the next few months if she doesn’t want to go back to Australia.”

“Or you could marry her,” Tyson ribbed.

Ian exhaled a line of smoke, shaking his head. “If you’d grown up with my parents, you wouldn’t ever wanna get married either.”

Andie opened the door of the trailer and poked her head out. “We gotta leave in fifteen,” she said.

I opened my mouth to introduce myself, but before I could get a word out, she’d let the door slam shut.

Ian went into the trailer, disappearing from our line of sight for a moment before returning with a gallon-size bag of weed.

He handed it to Tyson, who opened the bag and inhaled deeply.

“Sweet,” Tyson said. “Lemme know when you get that hydroponic system up and running. Maybe we could go into business together.”

Ian nodded as he mounted the steps to his front door. “Cool,” he said as he slipped inside. “See ya.”

“He always was a fucking smart kid,” Tyson said as we walked the path through the long grass back to his house.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But you are not going into business with him growing pot.”

He shrugged, lacing his fingers through mine, and I could see the gears turning in his brain. “It’s a lucrative business—”

“No,” I said, giving him the side-eye. “You have too much to lose.”

He elbowed me playfully. “Not all of us can be as brilliant as you. The rest of us have to keep our eyes open if we want to start a multi-billion-dollar company someday.”

“That’s a kind of brilliance too, though, isn’t it?” I said, pushing open the gate. “Thinking in terms of multi-billion-dollar businesses?”

He spun me around so that my back was against the wall and pressed his body into me, running his hands up beneath my shirt. “Talk to me like that, we’re not gonna make it to my bed,” he growled into my ear.

“You like having your ego stroked, don’t you?” I teased.

I was laughing, but I realized as I kissed him just how much truth there was to it.

Tyson’s liberal compliments were boomerangs, designed to retrieve praise to inflate his delicate ego.

That delicate ego was why he needed to show up his brother at every turn, why he constantly craved credit for his ideas.

It was basic psychology: His parents may have given him cash, but they certainly hadn’t given him enough attention, so he sought it elsewhere.

Perhaps that realization should have rung a warning bell somewhere inside me, but as he lifted me and carried me across the pool deck to the covered patio where we tumbled to the couch in the dark, I had other things on my mind.