Chapter Nine

I jolt awake Saturday morning, and at first I’m not sure why. As Tru can now attest, I am not a morning person.

I’m more of a noon person.

Stopping for coffee has become our regular ritual. Before that, I am barely intelligible.

Then I hear it. The faint buzzing ring of my phone. It’s buried in here, under the covers…somewhere… Ha! Found it!

Dad’s face stares up at me from the screen.

“Dad! Hey, what’s up?”

“Are you still in bed?” he asks. “At ten o’clock?”

I squint at my phone, trying to make my blurry eyes see numbers. Clearly I’d been out on the roof sketching until the way-too-wee hours last night.

“No, it’s an hour earlier here,” I say when I can finally see them. “Not later.”

“Oh, sorry.” He sounds distracted.

Best guess? He’s on his way in to work.

“Sorry I haven’t had time to call,” he says. “The project deadline is coming up and it’s making everyone at the office extremely tense.”

“I understand, I—”

“Large coffee, two Splendas and a splash of half-and-half,” Dad says. Obviously not to me. “Sorry, sweetheart, what were you saying?”

“Just that I know you’re busy.”

That hasn’t changed. Dad is always busy. Why would I think that, just because I’m halfway across the country from my entire life, that his has changed in any way? Even Mom is job hunting, so she’ll probably end up just as busy and not around. As always.

“Tell me about school,” he says, then, “Thank you,” to the barista. “How’s Texas?”

“Gross,” I say. “Hot. Humid. Boring.”

He laughs. “Sounds like the Texas I know. What about the school?”

I flop back onto my pillows. “School is school,” I say. “It goes.”

There is a long silence. I can picture Dad navigating his way from the little coffee shop in the ground floor of his high-rise office, through the security checkpoint, to the elevators. If I don’t make my plea soon, I’ll lose him to the signal.

“I want to come home,” I say plainly.

“I know you do, sweetheart. I miss you, too.”

The sounds of footsteps on marble echo through the phone, and I know he’s crossing the lobby. Even on a Saturday morning, the building bustles with the energy of a never-sleeping multi-national corporation.

I resort to begging. “Dad, please. You can talk to Mom,” I plead. “You can convince her to—”

“It isn’t only your mother’s decision.” The phone gets silent, and at first I think he’s stepped onto the elevator and I’ve lost him. But then he says, “What you did was reckless and dangerous. Better that you spend your senior year somewhere you hate than in jail or worse.”

“Come on, you’re being a bit overly dramatic.”

“The rules aren’t changing,” he says. “No trespassing. No guerrilla art. No staying out past curfew. No—”

“Tash. No disobeying a direct order. No skipping class or not turning in homework or getting called to the office. I know.” They’re burned into my brain. If it weren’t against one of The Rules, I would get them tattooed on my forearm.

Okay, so I’m not explicitly forbidden from getting any skin art, but it’s definitely implied.

“Mitchell, wait up.” Dad’s voice is muffled, like he’s holding the phone to his chest. “We need to run the new numbers for accounting.”

Mitchell’s reply is equally muffled. “I was just on my way up to do that.”

“I have to go,” Dad says. “We’ll talk again soon.”

“Okay Dad. Bye, I love—” The phone goes dead before I can finish.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Dad never says it back.

“Love you, too,” I say to the ceiling.

I know that he does. He has to, right? He’s biologically obligated.

But sometimes—okay, most of the time—it feels like he loves his work more. Is it any wonder I’m such a mess when it comes to love and relationships? See: Daddy, issues with.

Morning sunlight streams in through my window. All I really want to do is pull the covers over my head and sleep until noon.

I yank up the comforter. But instead of closing my eyes, I find myself staring at the way the light glows through the fabric and feathers. A chaotic pattern of translucence and shadow. I can’t stop staring.

“Why am I not asleep?”

When no answer—and no drowsiness—comes from the void, I flip the comforter back and roll out of bed. If I’m going to be up this early, I should at least have a cup of caffeine to show for it.

I shuffle downstairs, into the kitchen, and stop dead in my tracks when I see Mom standing at the stove. Cooking breakfast.

And not just a toaster waffle breakfast.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” she says with an uncharacteristic smile in place.

“What are you making?” I ask, completely in shock.

“Pancakes.” She casually flips one over, revealing a perfect golden finish. “Apple cinnamon.”

I can’t speak, can only blink for several seconds as she flips three more perfectly cooked pancakes. The closest thing Mom ever came to non-frozen breakfast was bringing home doughnuts, croissants, and the occasional cronut.

“Do you want juice?” she asks.

I jerk myself out of my shock. “Coffee.”

She gives me a look, and I can feel the lecture coming.

I hold up a hand to stop her. “I am awake and up before noon on a weekend,” I argue. “I deserve coffee.”

To my continued shock, she smiles and says, “Fair enough.”

What’s going on here? It’s almost like old Mom is back—and better than before. I am immediately skeptical.

While she flips pancakes onto plates, I make myself a cup of coffee from the single-cup machine I had to convince her to buy in the first place. As the caffeine juice brews, I inhale a deep scent of hazelnut-flavored perfection.

“Come on,” Mom says, carrying a tray containing the pancakes, two glasses of orange juice, and a bottle of maple syrup to the kitchen table. “We can have our first real breakfast in our new house.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say something snarky about the house, or at least its location and/or temporary nature, but the lure of maple syrup on pancakes wins. I slide into the seat across from her and take a sip from my steaming cup of coffee.

“Maybe we can make this a regular ritual,” she says, placing one of the plates in front of me. “Mother-daughter time on Saturday morning.”

I half snort. “Until you get your job.”

As soon as she does, it’ll be back to normal. No baking, no breakfasts, and certainly no mother-daughter time on a morning when she could be at the office. Which is pretty much every morning.

I stuff a big forkful of pancake into my mouth. It is maybe the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Seriously, I feel deprived that for the first seventeen years of my life, Mom never cooked. That’s a tragedy.

“That’s not true,” she says, placing her napkin in her lap. “In fact, I’ve already found a job, and here I am.”

We’ve only been here a few days, and already she’s found work? Maybe part-time, temporary attorneys are in high demand.

I finish chewing my pancake and wash it down with a swig of juice.

“What’s the job?”

“Legal advisor to the Museum of Classical Art Austin.”

“Wow, that’s…”

“Cool, right?”

“I was going to say big.”

And by big I mean real. That’s a real job. Not just something temporary to fill her time while we’re stuck in Texas. Not some part-time, filling-in gig.

Not the kind of job you find in less than a week of job hunting.

The hair on the back of my neck tingles.

“You didn’t just start looking for a job, did you?”

She looks down at her plate. “I started putting out feelers just before summer started,” she says. “Right after…”

The Incident.

My blood starts pounding in my ears, and I have the sudden urge to sweep my arm across the table, sending every dish and tasty morsel flying.

Great. Good to know that, even though she and Dad sprang the whole surprise-you’re-moving-to-Texas thing on me totally last minute—as in barely a week before we left, hence the disastrously packed boxes—it wasn’t really quite the spontaneous decision they made it out to be at the time.

It also means that they kept it a secret from me all summer. What did they think I would do? Run away?

Maybe I would have. Maybe I should have.

“Nice.”

I push back from the table, leaving my pancakes mostly untouched. I wouldn’t want to heave apple-cinnamon chunks on our mother-daughter ritual. Coffee in hand, I head for the stairs.

“Sloane, wait,” Mom calls after me.

I don’t stop to hear what she has to say. She can’t possibly have anything to say that I want to hear. When I get to my room, I make sure to slam the door as hard as possible. Hopefully she gets the message.

Three seconds later, I know she didn’t.

My door flies open without a knock.

“Mom!”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but you can’t just storm away from every situation that bothers you.”

Bothers is a huge understatement.

“It’s not the situation that bothers me,” I spit out.

Mom crosses her arms over her chest. “Look, I know you don’t want to be in Austin. But we’re here, and you have to deal with it.”

Wrong thing to say.

“You know what?” I jam my fists onto my hips. “I really don’t. I’d rather be anywhere but here. I’d rather be living on the streets of Alphabet City than spend one more night in this house.”

I dig my suitcase out from under my bed—I didn’t want Mom to see I still hadn’t unpacked, but now I don’t give a care.

“What are you doing?” she shouts.

“Leaving!”

I toss my suitcase on the bed so I can stuff in what few personal things I’ve unpacked.

“No!” She places her hands on the lid so I can’t open it.

She is breathing hard. So am I. My blood is throbbing in my ears, pounding with adrenaline and anger. Betrayal.

“No, wait,” she says, her voice no longer a shout. “Sloane, please. I’m sorry. Let me explain.”

I don’t look at her, but I take my hands off the suitcase.

“I didn’t keep it from you because it was a secret.” She releases the suitcase and sits on the edge of the bed. “Making this move was complicated. There were a lot of pieces that had to fall into place. As soon as I knew for certain it was going to happen, that’s when I told you.”

I glare at her as I sit on the opposite side of the bed.

“This has been hard for me, too,” she says. When I open my mouth to argue, she holds up a hand. “Not in the same ways as it has for you, I know. But still hard. Your father and I—”

She shakes her head, looks like she wants to say more, but doesn’t.

Yeah, I know. She and Dad were afraid I’d end up in prison if I kept down the imaginary path they saw me traveling back in New York. They wouldn’t listen when I said it was a brief detour, not a delinquent direction.

“I don’t know what I can do besides say that I’m sorry,” she says softly.

When I don’t respond, she gets up and walks out of the room.

As she closes the door behind her, I whisper, “You could mean it.”

I toss my suitcase back onto the floor. I don’t care anymore if Mom sees that I haven’t unpacked. I want her to see it. I want her to know, every time she looks in my room, that I am ready to leave at any moment.

What a great start to my day. A half-assed call from Dad and a bombshell fight with Mom. Just a typical morning in the Whitaker family.

I’m not going to let those things derail the rest of my day. I have a Graphic Grrl comic to color and publish by tomorrow night. Might as well get on it.

After setting up my laptop on my desk, I get to work. I import the sketches into my photo-editing app. Clean up the feathery pencil marks around the primary line work. Start layering in color on top of the finished drawings.

I lose track of time, lose myself in the work. I’m content to drown in the world of Graphic Grrl forever. At least until my hand starts cramping.

Using the trackpad on my laptop is not the easiest on my wrist. I need my mouse.

The only problem is that I haven’t seen it since we left New York. It isn’t in my laptop case or hiding in the bottom of my backpack. Which means it can only be in one place. A box.

I guess that’s technically a dozen small places.

I lean back in my desk chair with a groan.

The state of my packed boxes is enough to make a tornado run in terror. But since my options are limited to either buying a new one—which means going downstairs and asking Mom to take me—or doing without—which means crippling wrist and finger cramps—I have no choice.

Twenty minutes later I’ve opened half the boxes with no mouse in sight. I seriously don’t remember throwing half of this stuff in.

I’d been in such a fury, I kind of rage-packed. Seriously, I found tissues in one box and a half-eaten sleeve of Oreos in another. It’s entirely possible that I didn’t even pack the stupid mouse.

I rip open another box. This one is full of clothes—at least on top. I pull out the first tee that Tash made for me freshman year. A closeup graphic of a unicorn head shedding rainbow tears on a navy blue long-sleeve.

My favorite. If I weren’t committed to my mourning blacks, I would wear it to school on Monday.

I lift out the clothes and—

“Ha!”

Sitting there, like a shiny white diamond in the clutter, is my mouse.

“There you are,” I say, lifting her up to press a kiss to her sleek surface. “I knew you had to be…”

My mouse love trails off as I see what lies beneath her in the box.

To anyone else it would look like nothing. A little square of flimsy red plastic. But I see something much bigger. I see the words Art Saves Lives writ large on the shell of a construction project.

In a flash I’m back to that night.

Tash and I had met up with Brice and one of his buddies for a late-night coffee. I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be a setup, a blind double date of sorts. Brice’s idea, probably trying to make me forget that he and I were an almost item.

That more than anything is probably why I did it. Why, when Tash said, “We should do something epic tonight,” I had replied, “We totally should.”

An hour later, the pity-date had disappeared and the three of us had rolls of sheet plastic pilfered from the SODA basement supply shelves—Tash somehow acquired a key sophomore year—and were scouting a location worthy of our statement.

“I know a site,” Brice said. “It’s perfect.”

We stood at the base of the half-built skyscraper owned by Brice’s family, a towering beacon of scaffolding and steel beams. It only took us a few minutes of recon to see that security consisted of a single guard in a tiny booth who was really absorbed in his phone.

We snuck by without a sound.

It took four hours of work to arrange the plastic. To make sure it formed the words of our message. To make sure it was stable enough to survive until sunrise.

Back on the sidewalk, we stood looking up at our work. It was, in a word, awesome. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so proud.

Tash and Brice celebrated by making out against the wall that surrounds Central Park.

Rather than risk throwing up all over them, I walked around the corner. Right into a pair of cops. Despite all common sense, I ran. I think making them chase me only made them mad.

The next thing I knew I was being handcuffed, hauled to the station, booked. Released on bail. Sentenced.

If Mom knew that Tash had been there with me, that she’d participated and gotten off without a blemish on her record, Mom would have dragged my BFF in for a citizen’s arrest without a second thought.

She would kill me if she knew I had stopped Tash from turning herself in. No good could have come from her sacrifice. It wouldn’t have lessened my punishment, and it would have destroyed her family. Brice’s parents may have had enough money and pull to keep him from even the mildest of punishments, but the legal fees would have drowned Tash’s working single mom and two little brothers.

Besides, the cops seemed content to think I had done it all myself. And I think a tiny corner of my ego wanted them—and the world—to believe that.

The only good thing that came out of The Incident is that they had to photograph the art for a police report, and to do that they had to keep it intact until morning. Half of New York saw my installation.

Now I’m not so sure that I didn’t pay too high a price for the exposure.

And not just me. Mom and Dad and Dylan have suffered, too.

So did the worker on the crew that came in to clean up after us who fell from the platform. Luckily he was wearing a safety harness, or he would have suffered way worse than a dislocated shoulder and a torn rotator cuff.

And the security guard we snuck past—a single widower with a baby at home—who lost his job.

I’ve memorized every detail of the consequences of my actions.

Overwhelmed by memory—and maybe regret—I cross to my window and pull it wide. Several deep breaths of damp air and I start to feel in control again.

I stand there for a while longer, my hands braced on the window frame, drawing in calming breaths. I’m surprised to see the sky painted red and pink with the setting sun. Had that much of the day flown by already?

No wonder my wrist started to hurt.

A crashing sound, the faint echo of breaking glass, reaches my ears. Followed by a shouting male voice. I tilt my head, trying to discern the origin. Definitely coming from next door.

I can’t make out any words—and I should be ashamed that I actually lean out the window to try—but the voice is definitely Mr. Dorsey. There is another, softer sound. Almost like sobbing.

Part of me can’t help but wonder what the fight is about. But another part of me—the bigger part, apparently—knows it’s an invasion to even try to hear.

Mom and Dad don’t fight like that. There are no shouting voices or screaming fits. They fight with the cold shoulder, the silent treatment. The freeze-out. Going to work without saying good-bye, going to bed without saying good night.

I can’t help but think that maybe Mom and I wouldn’t be here in Austin right now if Dad had stood up and fought for me. Fought for our family.

Like that would ever happen.

I pull myself back inside, slide the window shut and, just for good measure, let the blinds drop into place. I have enough problems in my own life. I don’t need to be sticking my nose into anyone else’s.

With my mouse in hand, I get back to work.