To the entire family’s surprise, the penne with tuna, peas, and shredded parmesan that they ate by candlelight in the dining room actually tasted pretty good. Jen had made plenty of it, and the food seemed to improve everyone’s spirits except Dan’s; he couldn’t help fixating on their dwindling food inventory. To put the meal together, Jen had used the last of the peas and parmesan, most of the pasta, and one of their two remaining cans of chicken soup.
Dan had been the sole beneficiary of the soup, which his wife had insisted he eat for medical reasons. The oatmeal scrapings floating in it did not improve the experience, but he blamed his own poor breakfast decision making for that. In any case, the taste concerned him much less than the fact that the soup did nothing to improve his physical condition. His shivering had turned to chills, his runny nose had metastasized into severe sinus congestion, and he feared he might be suffering from the early stages of pneumonia, or whatever it was that had killed the nineteenth-century president who died after delivering a two-hour inaugural address in freezing rain.
Was it William Henry Harrison? Or Millard Fillmore?
Dan kept the trivia question to himself. He didn’t want to worry the others, who were preoccupied with debating Chloe’s disturbing proposal for a hostile takeover of the Blackwells’ house on Mountain Avenue.
When did my daughter start breaking into other people’s homes?
It wasn’t just Chloe who was acting out of character. Dan had come home to a very different Jen, about whom the most optimistic thing he could say was that she didn’t seem drunk, at least not on alcohol. She was carrying herself with a kind of pirate swagger that might’ve seemed appealing to the point of being sexy, except that she kept compulsively picking up Marty’s gun, which was not sexy at all. It was terrifying, especially since his wife had even less firearms experience than his boss did, and look how that had turned out.
For her part, Chloe couldn’t understand why her suggestion that they squat at the nicest house in town until the crisis passed wasn’t meeting with instant approval from the rest of the family, especially after Mom had soured their immediate neighbors on them by threatening to shoot both the Stankovics’ kid and their dog.
“We can take baths with the pool water!” Chloe pointed out. “They’ve got this huge gas stove, and it still works, and there’s a ton of giant pots we can use to heat up the water. Can you imagine how awesome a hot bath would feel? I bet they’ve got really good soap, too.”
“It would be nice to take a bath,” Jen admitted, drawing her finger across the thin film of oil that had accumulated on her forehead. “I feel gross.”
“Right? We’re disgusting! And it’s not like the Stankovics are going to let us get water from their pool anytime soon.”
At her daughter’s mention of the Stankovics, Jen reflexively glanced back at the assault rifle resting atop the sideboard. Until she’d liberated it from Jordan’s weaselly little hands, she never would’ve guessed that a gun could be such a powerful source of emotional comfort. Even now, a couple hours into her custody of the weapon, just the act of holding it—one hand cupping the ribbed handguard below the barrel, the other wrapped around the serrated grip with her index finger resting against the trigger guard—still flooded her brain with a dopamine rush of well-being.
The sensation was so empowering that she’d begun to wonder why therapists didn’t prescribe AR-15s instead of SSRIs. Thanks to the gun and the residual exhilaration of her standoff with Kayla, Jen was no longer suicidal. She wasn’t even homicidal.
What she felt instead was something like omnipotence. Nobody—nobody—was going to fuck with her when she had a gun like that in her hands.
Now, looking over her shoulder at the weapon, she had to resist the urge to stand up and retrieve it from the sideboard. Chloe had already started making fun of her for carrying it around, and its presence in the house seemed to unsettle Max.
Which was ironic, because how many hours of her son’s life had he spent pretending to shoot people in his video games? Getting worked over by the little Stankovic shit had really done a number on her poor son’s head.
“What if we go to the Blackwells’, and those private school dickheads are still there?” Max asked Chloe. The afternoon’s events had at least temporarily converted him to pacifism, and he wanted to avoid any situation that might result in physical conflict.
Chloe shook her head. “There’s no way they moved in. They’ll go home at some point. If we get there early enough in the morning, they won’t be there yet. And I took the only key—we can lock them out.”
Dan winced. “Chloe . . .”
“What?”
Instead of finishing his sentence, Dan withdrew a half-used Kleenex from inside the sleeve of his wool sweater and blew his nose on it.
Max was still worried about the Lincolnwood Academy kids’ competing claim on the Blackwell homestead. “What happens when they show up, and we’re inside?”
“They won’t be able to get in. I have the key!”
“What if they just break a window?”
“Then we’ll shoot them.”
“Oh my God,” Dan moaned.
“What if they have guns?” Max wanted to know. As far as he was concerned, the baseline assumption from here on out should be that everybody had a gun.
“Buddy, don’t sweat that,” his mother told him in a soothing voice. “We can handle a couple of snot-nosed Academy punks.”
Chloe couldn’t help smiling. She hadn’t felt this close to her mother since they’d read the Twilight series together over summer vacation when she was twelve.
Likewise, Jen was beginning to appreciate her daughter’s cunning. There were clear advantages to squatting at the Blackwells’. Not just the obvious ones, like the water in the swimming pool, the food in the kitchen, and the lack of blood feuds with the neighbors. From Mountain Avenue, it’d be a much shorter walk down to the AA meeting at the church. And on the other side of that coin, Pete Blackwell probably had a phenomenal wine cellar. As long as those teenage twits hadn’t emptied it already.
“So is everybody on board with this?” Chloe asked. “We go to the Blackwells’ first thing in the morning?”
“It’s not a bad option,” Jen agreed.
“If we move to the Blackwells’,” Max asked, “can we get a dog?”
The women both eyed him with sympathetic befuddlement.
“You realize that makes no sense, right?”
It made sense to Max, in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way: gun beats dog, but dog beats human. Depending on the dog. Also, dogs provided affection, which was good for emotional support.
He saw no point in trying to explain any of this to his family.
“The Blackwells had a dog,” Chloe noted. “So there’s probably a ton of really expensive dog food somewhere in that house.”
“Not to get too dark,” Jen warned her, “but we might want to hang on to the dog food in case we have to eat it ourselves at some point.”
“We’re not going to the Blackwells’!”
Startled by the force of Dan’s eruption, the other three turned to stare wide-eyed down the table at him.
He’d startled himself, too. Somehow, his wife and daughter had retained a capacity for decisive action that he himself had lost amid the indignities of the past three days, and he could feel the center of political gravity in the household shifting away from him.
But Jen’s and Chloe’s moral compasses had become utterly fucked, and it was up to him to set them right.
“Are you out of your minds?” he scolded them. “We’re not breaking into their house! That’s not who we are! We’re not going to shoot anybody, we’re not going to rob anybody, and we’re not going to march in and take over somebody else’s home!”
He put so much energy into the denunciation that he gave himself a brief coughing fit, during which the rest of the family meditated on the substance of his objection.
“Dan, you robbed a Whole Foods,” Jen pointed out as his coughs subsided.
“That was a fucking Whole Foods! It wasn’t people! The Blackwells are people! They’re our friends!”
“That’s kind of overstating it,” Jen replied. “They’re really just acquaintances.”
“And aren’t they, like, crazy rich?” Max asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dan declared. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Daddy, we’re not breaking in,” Chloe told him in a quiet but firm—and, frankly, kind of patronizing—voice. “I have a key.”
Dan glared across the table at his daughter. “Chloe: you stole the key! Don’t you see the difference? Does Dartmouth have an honor code? This is not who we are! We don’t screw over other people!”
Chloe’s lower lip quivered slightly as she met her father’s stare.
“What if it’s us or them?” she asked.
Before Dan could reply, there were three loud knocks at the front door.
They all turned to stare in the direction of the foyer.
“What the hell?” Jen wondered aloud. The others were thinking the same thing. It was still pouring outside. Whoever was pounding on their door had braved a monsoon to reach them.
The knocks resumed, more forcefully this time.
Jen leaped to her feet and grabbed the AR-15 from the sideboard.
“We need a plan.”
Moments later, they were arrayed in the foyer, each with their assigned roles: Dan would fling the door open, Jen would cover the entryway with the rifle, and the kids would shine flashlights into the intruder’s face from a low crouch.
“Ready?” Dan had one hand on the doorknob and the other on the deadbolt.
Jen tightened her grip on the gun. “Do it.”
The person on the other side of the door began pounding again just as Dan twisted the deadbolt and pulled the door toward himself.
“Freeze!”
The flashlight beams lit up a bearded young man in a yellow rain suit, who reflexively squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head against the sudden explosion of light. Intuiting the presence of a gun despite his temporary blindness, he threw his hands up in surrender.
“Don’t shoot!” he yelped. “It’s Kevin Leary!”
Jen lowered the gun, her shoulders slumping as the tension left them. Dan peered around the corner of the door. Chloe and Max lowered the flashlight beams away from the young man’s face.
The last person they’d expected to see on their porch at that moment was Chloe’s ACT tutor.
“Sorry I scared you!” he told them through a grimace, his eyes still squeezed shut and his head turned away as he kept his hands above his head. “But I have a seven o’clock with Chloe.”
“Kevin. Right. Sorry!” Jen’s eyes traveled from the tutor, to the weapon in her hands, then back again. “Really sorry. It’s just, uh, been a weird couple of days.”
“I know, right?” Kevin tentatively reopened his eyes, then pulled the hood back from his head and unzipped his coat to reveal the straps of a backpack underneath. “How’d that last practice test go?” he asked Chloe. “Did you take 73C?”
Chloe’s parents turned to her for a reaction. She looked chagrined. “I didn’t have a hard copy. I started one from the book. But I didn’t finish. ’Cause . . . I didn’t think there’d still be an ACT?”
Kevin nodded, conceding the point. “Yeah, the Saturday test’s probably a little up in the air right now. Lot of uncertainty out there.”
“Totally,” Chloe agreed.
“There really is,” Jen chimed in.
“Sooo . . . are we still doing the session?” Kevin asked.
Everyone looked at Chloe again. She peered over Kevin’s shoulder at the deluge outside. “Can I, like, take a rain check? I guess literally?”
Kevin slowly nodded again. “Okay. But, uh, the thing is? I have a twenty-four-hour cancellation policy? So I’m going to have to charge you for it. Hope that’s cool.”
He looked to Jen and Dan for confirmation. They looked at each other.
“Will you take a check?” Dan asked the tutor.
The young man frowned. “I’d really prefer cash.”
“I think we all would, Kevin,” Jen told him.