“ANTHONY,” I scream as I walk through our front door, before I even drop my suitcase. “Anthony!”
Then even louder, “Anthony!!”
He runs out of his room and looks at me.
“What’s going on?” I say, waving the paper in the air. Very slowly he comes down the stairs and looks at me with the darkest, angriest expression I have ever seen on his face.
“Frankie turned.”
“I found that out on the front page, Anthony. Why didn’t anyone call me? Did you forget you have a sister?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Anthony!”
“It just happened. We didn’t want you to freak.”
Frankie has worked for my dad for as long as I can remember. The feds were after him, everyone knew that, but we thought of him as family. He’d been taking me to school for years and he was at every family dinner on every holiday. Now, after he nearly died at our dinner table and he’s back on his feet after we paid for thousands of dollars for nursing care, he turns?
“Why?”
“Why? To save his ass. They were close to putting him away for life on ten different charges, that’s why. And the feds had tapes where dad was mad and said shit about him and what a dick he was. And they played those for him and it must have convinced him.”
I watch him clenching his jaw. “What are we going to do now?”
“Who the fuck knows.”
“But Super Mario is on it, right?”
“What do you think, Gia?”
I drag my bags up to my room and instead of a homecoming, it feels like a wake. My mom is at the church, probably afraid to leave, and my dad is out somewhere hunched down with his associates, and stupid me actually thought it might be possible to escape for an entire three weeks without family stuff flying in my face.
I now know for sure that my head is screwed on wrong and that I live in a dream world.