The A-Word (10 page)

I nodded, not knowing what else to say. A thought fluttered: Mrs. Gilroy was old. Bo Shivers was older. This disturbed me in more ways than my brain could handle.

Eventually, I went inside.

I showered. I got in bed. I texted Maggie. She called and I told her everything about Ryan’s kissing. It made me feel less bad about not telling her all the other stuff.

Here is what I did not do: fall asleep. My brain was whirring with Ryan and his lips and the fact that I had a BOYFRIEND now.

By midnight I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to sleep.

By 2
A
.
M
. I was positive.

I got up. I peeked into Casey’s room. He was still gone.

This is how I decided that I would sneak outside and surprise Mrs. Gilroy by painting the rest of those tombstones. She’d left the Halloween lights on, so it was pretty damn bright out there.

I was putting the finishing touches on
BELOVED AUNT MATILDA, FELLED BY AN OAK TREE
(which I thought was a
nice addition, to add the cause of fake Aunt Matilda’s demise) when Amber Velasco trotted out of the darkness. I tried not to jump.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Painting gravestones,” I said.
Wasn’t it obvious?
“It’s two in the morning. So now I’ll ask you the same question.”

Amber glanced at Mrs. Gilroy’s yard, then back at me. She didn’t answer.

“Where’s Casey?” I demanded.

She didn’t know. At least that’s what she said. Suddenly, I suspected that he might be at Bo’s. There was more to Bo’s role in things, I knew, and so did Casey, and there was only so much he could take before he went and did something dumb. Since there was nothing I could do about it, I decided not to obsess over it.

Amber chewed on her lip for a bit, then said, “Sorry I left … like that.” She stopped there. Apologies weren’t Amber’s strong suit. “I hope it went well with Ryan.”

“He brought cupcakes,” I said. “We’re going out now,” I added. I left out the kissing. She hadn’t apologized enough for that.

“Oh,” said Amber. “Well, good.” She looked at her boots.

“Want to do one?” I held out the second paintbrush. Terry’s necklace was framed on her chest in the V from the open buttons of her shirt.

We painted in silence for awhile. Amber came up with:
SULLY ANDERSON: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
.

I did one that said:
FIDO. BEST DOG IN HEAVEN
.

Every now and then, Amber would reach up and touch that silver and turquoise cross, as if to make sure it was still there.

“You know,” I said, dipping my brush in the paint to start
another stone. “Just because someone gives you something, doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Doesn’t mean you owe them anything.”

Amber moved to the last unpainted tombstone. “Your brother gave you your life,” she said, so soft I almost didn’t hear her. “But you’re absolutely right. I need you to remember what you just told me.”

It took a minute for all that to sink in. Because she had just told
me
that I didn’t owe Casey anything. “You ever gonna tell me what really happened to you?” I whispered. The words were out and I had no way of pulling them back in. Truth: I didn’t want to.

Amber was silent again, for so long that I began to think that either she hadn’t heard me or she was not going to answer, which amounted to the same thing.

But then she said, “I can’t,” after which she added, “Because I don’t know.” And the way she said it, I knew she was telling the truth.

“Bo knows,” she said.

I
had never been one for schemes. Before the AI (Angel Incident), I didn’t have a need for plotting and planning. I went to school. I hung out with Maggie. I watched TV, and I listened to music, and I annoyed my brother—and a long time ago I went with my dad to taste food at restaurants when he was writing his BBQ trail book.

Even after things went bad and then worse, even after he disappeared and Mom spaced out and stopped working or caring, I didn’t think, “Hey, I’m going to dig into this. I’m going to solve this.” (Not even when I first got so sick because of the poison. Granted, I could barely function.) We looked for Dad, of course. We hoped that he would come back. It’s not like we didn’t DO THINGS. But eventually, I moved on. He was still missing, but I put it in the back of my head where it whirred like the guts in Casey’s laptop—eating up brain space and making me feel sad. But really, what could I do about it? Back then I was dying, and Mom was fading, and Casey was hanging out with Dave and smoking weed and
working two jobs and actively failing most of his classes even though he was whip smart. That’s just the way it was.

Until the AI, I kept things on automatic. I got myself up. I got myself to school. I kept up my grades. I kept up appearances that we WERE FINE. Since we definitely were NOT, that particular job took a damn lot of energy. I ate the occasional stray snickerdoodle from Dave’s Mamaw Nell. Things like high school—or a social life or a boyfriend—seemed far off, like Mars or Uranus, or Pluto, which wasn’t even a planet anymore. If I thought about the future, it was this fuzzy thing, like static on a broken TV.

Now, thanks to my brother, there was a future. Except that he was technically dead and there was this ENTIRE WORLD that no one else knew existed except for me. A world of glowing dead folk with Spidey senses that might work and wings that
did
work and an Angel Management System that had more loopholes and secret rules than the US tax system.

Maybe that’s why right now, I felt different. I might not have my learner’s permit yet—although hopefully Casey would cart me over there on Monday—but I had helped catch an actual bad guy last year. It hadn’t gone that well, but I had done it. I had helped my brother solve the mystery of what had happened to our family. I had always been a strong Texan girl, but I was stronger now because of it. Now when I took care of myself, it was conscious, not just going through the motions. I knew what was out there. And I knew that I had to BE AWARE. Plus, I had kissed Ryan Sloboda like I’d always imagined a kiss should be! Better, even!

If I could manage all those things, I could certainly help Amber Velasco figure out what had happened to her five years ago. Because no one should be in the dark about their own truths. Even people who sometimes annoy the hell out
of you. That is what I figured when I woke up, after Amber had left and after I heard Casey stomp into his room around four. And that’s why I needed a scheme. So:

B
y one in the afternoon, here is what I had discovered about Amber:

This did not surprise me, since both Casey and I had tried looking her up before on personal stuff like Facebook or Tumblr. Casey said Management did their best to wipe out reference once you were no longer exactly human. I guess the A. Velasco had slipped by them somehow. I had no problem believing this was possible. My brother still appreciated a toke of weed now and then to settle himself, so I knew the A-word community wasn’t all-knowing.

Terry McClain, on the other hand, was all over the web. For starters, there was his blog: Of Mice and Men. He hadn’t posted in over a year, but back five years ago he was writing up a storm. Stuff about Comic Con—he favored
Star Trek
over
Battlestar Galactica
, although he rattled on for so long that I think I fell asleep with my eyes open—and a series of posts that talked about his work testing drugs on mice.

This gave me pause. I remembered how he experimented with the tainted vitamins that Renfroe was giving Mom. He fed them to his mice, and they forgot to look for cheese. Of course that hadn’t happened yet when he was blogging.

Another series proclaimed his undying love for the South Congress doughnut truck. For each day that week, he talked about doughnuts. Sweet. Savory. Weird. In Houston we had normal doughnuts: glazed or jellies or what have you. But in Austin you could get doughnuts with fried chicken on them. Or ones with habañero peppers. Terry’s favorite was a maple frosting and bacon doughnut which sounded disgusting, but who was I to judge people’s food preferences?

Only one article about the robbery quoted him. “My girlfriend was terrified,” he said. Once again, Amber’s name was left out.

I wondered if I could ask her about that. Was it Bo who’d
finagled the silence? Or did the police want to protect her identity because the criminals were still at large?

All I could say for sure was that I was now craving doughnuts in the worst way. It was time to take a break. Plus, Maggie was coming over to discuss wardrobe options for Homecoming. I figured this would be quite the project. Especially since she had requested a more detailed play-by-play of the kissing with Ryan. Which I was more than happy to recollect.

U let him put his tongue in ur mouth?
she’d texted.

Maybe
, I’d texted back.

Unfortunately I couldn’t mention my specific craving to her when I opened the door. Because how could I explain about the doughnuts if I didn’t tell her about Terry and Amber and everything else including that my brother was an angel now? I had never been good at keeping things bottled up. Now I was the world’s biggest expert. It sucked.

“You hungry?” I asked instead, generic-like, a picture of that maple bacon doughnut wandering my brain. I was beginning to think it was less disgusting and more potentially tasty.

“I think you are compensating for wanting to kiss Sloboda some more,” Maggie informed me.

I had to laugh. I remembered how he slipped his hands in my back pockets and set off rockets in my brain. It also distracted me from the secrets. Also it was probably true. Kissing Ryan Sloboda was better than any doughnut I could imagine. Maggie had a read on things like that.

She tugged at the hem of her grey sweater dress. It was really more sweater than dress, except she was wearing tights so that took care of the peekaboo factor. Maggie was a churchgoer on Sundays. I’d gone with her now and then, mostly to get out of the house, but not since the accident. I, on the other hand, was wearing my Sunday-morning-pointless-Internet-research
sweatpants and an old Ima Hogg T-shirt. Not exactly signature outfit material. The #76 mustang head necklace Maggie had given me did give things a certain flare, though. At least in my opinion.