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Parker said, “Remember how we used to look up at the stars? Up here and on the picnic tables?”

Persephone sighed. “Are you going to give me the details now?”

“There’s a reason why you’re here, Funny. There’s a reason why your friends are here—”

“Yeah. You asked me to come.”

“OK, but you brought John.”

She was beginning to wonder if she’d made a mistake. “Is he the one you actually needed?”

“Come on, now. When you put it like that—”

“It sounds like the truth.”

Parker dipped his head. “OK, that’s fair. But you can help me fix this, Funny. I wouldn’t ask if there was any other way,

I really wouldn’t.”

“Fix how?”

“Sixty-eight large?” His brown eyes were so damned earnest.

“Uh, sixty-eight large what ?”

“Sixty-eight large, please?”

Persephone slapped his shoulder. “Parker, what the hell is going on that you need sixty-eight thousand dollars?”

“ Shh! You wanna tell the whole neighborhood?”

She felt sick to her stomach. But what kind of help had she expected he wanted? Moral support? It was her fault he always

fell into something. And if it wasn’t all her fault, it was at least half. Troubled adults were almost always troubled teens,

and Parker’s trouble started when he stuffed Persephone’s stolen camera into his shirt and took the fall for it. Because she

let him. “Parker, I don’t have that kind of money—”

“Come on, I see you in those magazines!”

“I don’t get paid to be in them! They’re like, for visibility—”

“Your boyfriend has it,” he said quietly. “He does, and you can’t tell me he doesn’t. He’s fuckin’ loaded .” Parker jabbed a finger toward the ground to drive his point.

“Honestly I don’t even know how much money he’s got. He’s—he’s...” With the True Water endorsement, with the appearances

he’d done when he first appeared—there had to be at least a few million in John’s account. “No. That’s his hard-earned money.”

“Like it’s so hard to pretend you’re the Second Coming.”

Persephone punched Parker’s arm. “He does not.”

“I’ve seen him on TV.”

“That’s because he’s being ‘on.’ But five minutes around him is enough to know he doesn’t.”

“You’re right. I take it back. Just sayin’ he has plenty to spare. He wouldn’t even miss it.”

“Since when do you feel so entitled? That’s not even your style.” She paused. “Were you betting everything on the chance I’d

bring him?”

“Come on, Funny. You ignore my calls for two years.” His voice rose the way it did when he got upset. “Practically give Mama

a heart attack and she got barbecue sauce all over her favorite sandals.”

She rolled her eyes. “We just went over this.”

“Well, some things bear repeatin’.”

Persephone looked down at her toes. Dusty, ashy. He was right. There may be a lot wrong with this conversation, but Parker

wasn’t trying to take advantage. He wouldn’t ask if he didn’t really need it. She nodded. “So lay it out.”

“I told you, I got into some trouble. Some real trouble. Just gotta... figure my way outta this thing.”

“Tell me, Parker.”

He sat silently.

Was there anything she, or rather, John, could do? In her heart of hearts, Persephone knew she’d do anything for her big brother.

He’s a failed person because of me. It was that simple. She’d let him down before and she couldn’t let him down again. Not that he’d ever say it. But Persephone

always wondered if, on the quietest of nights, perhaps thinking back to evenings they sat up here with their red cooler beneath

a marquee of stars, Parker ever regretted taking the fall. She leaned over, pressed into his shoulder. “If you tell me what’s

really going on, I might be able to help you. But you have to tell me the truth, and you have to tell me everything.”

“Funny—”

“ Everything. ”

So Parker did.

At least, he told Persephone what she thought was everything. What she hoped to God was everything, because she couldn’t imagine it being much worse.

9

“A credit card scam?” Ruben sounded confused, and John couldn’t help looking at Parker more closely, as well.

Parker moved the curtain to check on his motorcycle, which was parked just beyond the motel room’s window. “I don’t handle

any of the transaction-type stuff. My job is— was —ripping the numbers from the machines.” He whipped out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, and tucked it between his lips.

“Still smoking?” Persephone made a face. “I thought you quit.”

“Don’t worry, Funny,” Parker said as he held a lighter to the dangling cigarette, “I’ll quit again one day.”

Persephone snatched the slim offender and stalked to the bathroom. There was the sound of water. John was relieved to see

it go. The so-called smoke-free room already reeked of cigarettes, so much so that the stale odor was one of the first things

he’d noticed when they’d initially entered—that and the cigarette holes in the high-traffic rug and thin quilted comforters.

Parker exhaled and glanced out the window again and John wondered if maybe it wasn’t the bike he was looking out for. He remembered

what Hannah said about family. Something about a goddamned buffet line.

“Look, John,” said Parker, “all I need is the sixty-eight K now. That’ll get these guys off my back and I can start working

on paying you back.”

Were Persephone and Ruben safe here? Perhaps leaving Bean behind, for their sakes, had been a mistake.

“You say you’ll pay it back,” Persephone said, “but you haven’t even been able to pay back the money you stole from your friends.”

“Not my friends.”

“Your crew, then,” John said. He found it difficult to trust someone who stole from his own partners in crime. Parker had been setting aside credit card numbers for himself and had skimmed fifty-six thousand dollars from the takings. It turned out the extra twelve thousand was interest.

“John,” Persephone said. She looked afraid. Afraid for her brother, afraid John might not give Parker the money.

“Out of curiosity,” said Ruben, leaning back into the sofa cushions and stress-eating through a bag of M&M’s, “what happens

if you don’t pay those guys their sixty-eight thousand?”

Parker leaned against the wall. “They gave me two weeks to come up with the money. That ends tomorrow night. If I don’t pay

them, that’s it. I’m finished.” He looked at Persephone. “Seriously, Funny. If I don’t pay them back, I’m a dead man.”

This was for John’s own benefit, of course. Persephone already knew the story, as Parker had relayed everything to her earlier,

and this made John appreciate Parker even less.

Ruben lifted a hand. “I swear I’m not trying to get on anyone’s nerves, but Parker, what would you have done if John wasn’t

here to maybe help you out?”

Persephone turned to her brother. “How much were you able to pull together?”

Parker hesitated before replying. “Fifty-five hundred. But there were Mama’s blood-pressure and diabetes prescriptions and

some bills and food and...” He sighed. “I don’t know, I really don’t know. They already extended me once.”

“Parker,” Persephone whispered sadly. She turned to John. “He shouldn’t have stolen from those guys, he knows that. He knows

he shouldn’t have stolen from anybody . But we’ve got to help him, right?”

“What Would John Do?” Ruben mused to no one in particular.

John said, “I’ll give you the money—”

Parker pumped his fist. “ My man .”

“I’ll call my business manager and have him transfer the money to my checking account. Tomorrow morning Persephone can come with me to the bank to withdraw the cash. I’m assuming your friends won’t take a check.”

Parker put his hands on his hips and exhaled loudly. “I seriously doubt it, compadre. Good lookin’, for real. You don’t know

what you’ve done for me.”

But John hadn’t really done it for Parker, he’d done it for Persephone, who looked back at him with a gratitude so vast it

was painful...

10

... because it hadn’t been entirely not out of self-interest that John gave Parker the money. He disliked greatly the idea of Parker ending up with two busted kneecaps

as a best-case scenario, but Persephone had previously made it clear she’d undergo no further Overlays.

Yet here they were, one Overlay down and sitting together looking, again, for a portal.

Because John had agreed to give Parker the money.

The curtains were drawn against the twilight sky, and between the three burned a single candle. John listened to the steady

sounds of Ruben’s and Persephone’s breathing and waited... and waited...

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He presses his ear against the plaster wall and breathes the scent of fresh-laundered linen and pine.

Around him, stacks upon stacks of linens and towels and unsleeved pillows.

One of his tormentors, the freckled ringleader, sits in the room opposite this wall, speaking quietly.

He holds his breath and between the heartbeats thumping in his ear listens to the bully tell the woman who writes down everyone’s thoughts all about how, at the home in which he had temporarily stayed, the husband struck him with wire and burned his arms with cigarettes when he was too slow to tend to his chores.

There is silence and then a few choking sounds and his own eyes widen and sting and, like the boy on the other side of the wall, he cries for a time.

Inky plumes of blue-black fog seep up through the floorboards, dark and ominous. Glass shatters, wood splinters. The very

air in the Grey House swirls its complaints, sending fog whirling, but is the House for or against him? He’d never had to ask such a thing. From the fog the Grey Man coalesces, emanating rage and resistance, and John braces

for pain. There is none.

And then—

It’s as if he’s been forced into freezing water and held there. He is drowning, asphyxiated by every terrible sadness, every

fright, every ounce of self-loathing he’d ever felt in his living life. He cries out, and somehow, he understands that it

is the Grey Man’s doing, and what the Grey Man asks is this:

Is this what you really want?

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