The A-Word (19 page)

And worse, even acting like a jackass, Casey shone. Like Bo Shivers, every attempt to make himself less than what he was now ended up the opposite. My brother couldn’t destroy himself any more than Bo could.

Another coach, one I didn’t know, grabbed for Casey. But Casey ducked out of reach, flopping down on the grass. Then rolled onto his back, flapping his arms and legs.

It took me a second.

He was making a snowless equivalent of a snow angel.

I got it. This was what angry humor looked like. Bad and ugly and out of control. They all shared it: Bo and Amber, too. All the dead people in my life.

Casey rose then, another graceful movement, and maybe he would have stopped too. But Donny Sneed, football
tucked under his arm, loped over. My brother’s hands tightened into fists.

“Son,” said Bo Shivers, striding onto the field out of nowhere, but maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. His voice, a full deep bass, silenced everyone else. He stood facing Casey and Donny. “I suggest you stand down and stop making a damn fool of yourself. And I suggest you do it now.” He didn’t say which one of them he meant, which I felt was decent of him.

I was still holding my cell, and now it vibrated along with the sound of Bo’s deep voice. Amber. “Bo’s here,” I said.

“I know,” she told me, without explaining.

I flicked my gaze to the field, trying to pick Ryan out of the pack of boys. My breath felt constricted. What kind of normal boy would keep things up with a girl dragging around so much A-word baggage that he could never understand?

Amber showed up before I could obsess too much. After that there was a bunch of hollering and a bunch of people shaking their heads—including Lanie Phelps, who to her credit, looked torn about what exactly was upsetting her most.

And then there we were, on the road, the Merc left behind. Me in Amber’s Camaro. Bo and Casey in Bo’s truck, caravanning down the freeway toward Houston and Bo’s loft.

Bo wanted a meeting. He wanted it at his place. And he wanted it now.

So much for my learner’s permit. (Again.) At this rate, I’d be in college before I could learn to drive. Maybe older. I pictured myself with a cane and white hair and dentures, taking the learner’s permit test.

“I need to be back for the Bonfire,” I grumbled. Amber gripped the wheel, breathing deeply through her nose.

I repeated myself. More than once. “Ryan expects me,” I added firmly.

Amber studied me briefly, then trained her eyes on Bo’s truck in front of us. “It sucks,” she said. “I know that. He’s nice, right? To you, I mean? That’s important, Jenna. Girls always think they’ll retrain a guy. Make him into something that he’s not. But it never works. Not really. People are what they are. So you have to know up front. Is this the one?”

“I’m only in ninth grade,” I said.

I did not say what I was thinking. Which was that I really, really liked Ryan Sloboda in a way I’d never liked a boy before and that I wanted to keep at it and see where it went. That I believed the universe was a douchebag for giving me these FEELINGS for a cute boy with spiky buzzed hair and brown eyes and a tiny dot of a freckle above his mouth and writing talent and single-minded adoration of Tony Stark and a desire to GO PLACES other than here and maybe with me. In spite of everything else that was going on, everything I couldn’t explain, which he’d forgiven.

Amber’s lips angled into a tight smile, but she didn’t look at me.

“It’ll work out,” she said.

She wasn’t as good at lying as she used to be. We both knew how these things went.

H
ere is what I noticed as we trooped into Bo’s ridiculously fancy apartment: Two wine glasses on the grey stone kitchen counter, one with pink lipstick. And over in the bedroom area, the bed was all rumpled, the red satin sheets a tangled mess.
Eww
.

“Take you from a date?” Amber asked, following my sour gaze.

“If you want to call it that,” Bo said.

This was disturbing on many levels. Not the least of which was that he TAUGHT AT MY SCHOOL NOW, although this was no doubt a short-term arrangement. But why would I be surprised? Bo was beyond surprise. It was perfectly in character: cutting school during his first week on the job to do whatever it was he was doing in those red silk sheets with whomever had been drinking with him.

Someone who favored a not-that-attractive shade of pink lipstick. The heavy kind, not the pretty glosses in my Sephora kit.

Bo plucked a small remote from his work desk. Pointed toward the fireplace. A screen above it lowered. He clicked again, above him, and a projector turned on. I hadn’t noticed it before, suspended from the ceiling. Another click and something opened on his laptop.

“You bring us here to watch a movie?” Casey asked. He sounded tired and hoarse. Must have been all that screaming on the field. But then just like that, his voice sprang back to normal. “There’s a new
Fast and Furious
I haven’t seen.”

He’d been silent in the elevator ride up, not that any of us had been that chatty. Which was fine. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to hear from him right now, but it didn’t include snot-nosed jokes. Understanding someone’s behavior does not necessarily translate into being less pissed off.

Bo said, “Sit.” He gestured toward the leather couches.

I glanced briefly at that wraparound balcony.

“No worries, Miss Samuels.” Bo’s eyes glittered. “I have no plans to leap.”

“Shame,” Casey said.

Amber winced.

“Listen to me, son,” Bo said, eyes darkening now. “Listen well. I am no martyr and have no need of suffering. They made me what they made me a long, long time ago. I’ve done my time and then some. I’m still doing it. And so will you. I get it, Casey Samuels. I understand. I feel your longings for every damn thing you will never have again. You can screw that little cheerleader—you can make her see God—but you can never love her. You can save your sister here a million times over and it’s not going to change things.
They
picked you.
They
brought you back. Just like me. Just like Ms. Velasco. And all the rest of us. And we do what they tell us, by
their
rules, until
they
tell us not to. We can try to be shitheads, but
we will always fail. Always. If there’s a choice, we’ll pick the right side. Do the right thing.”

My mouth had dropped open somewhere after the phrase “screw that little cheerleader.” But here is what I realized. Casey and Amber weren’t disagreeing with the last part. The angel part.

“Casey, you still toke up,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I even brought it up.

He sighed. “I lost my taste for it, okay?”

“No, you didn’t.” Even to my ears I was sounding ridiculous. I thought of his room and its new and tidy absence of drug paraphernalia. Well, shit.

“He’s one of us now, darlin’,” Bo said. “And he’s attempting to do it the hard way.”

I would have answered, but my brain was whirring in a wheel-of-doom loop. What kind of a person would still pretend to be a weed addict for his little sister? But I already knew the answer. My brother wasn’t a
person
anymore.

Bo turned back to Casey. “Amber here hasn’t exactly explained it all to you, has she?”

Amber’s skin emitted a forbidding golden glow. She was simmering inside. “You said he wasn’t ready.”

“I’ve said a lot of things. A definite error in judgment.” Bo clicked the remote again. The first slide of a PowerPoint presentation appeared on the screen, one of those lame low-budget ones we have at Spring Creek. There were three words in bold.

SOMETHING IS COMING

Of course Professor Bo Shivers would have a PowerPoint.

He looked from Casey to me and then back at my brother. “You’re a bit slow, son. We’re not saints. Management needs us to be what we are. Bastards. Angry. Willing to throw
ourselves to the lions but only so we can rip their hearts out before they can hurt someone else. If we were perfect—some Mother Teresa types, some damn Thomas Aquinas—we’d be no good to them.”

Casey shook his head, his jaw tight.

“You’re putting a spin on things, Bo,” Amber snapped, but the glow had faded. “You’re no different than Casey.”

Bo just smiled. “Amber, this is for Jenna’s sake. And maybe you could stand to learn something, too.” He tilted his head at me, the way he did when I first met him, and his dark eyes bored into mine.

“Look around you. Your fellow humans—we’re an ugly bunch. Oh we’re noble now and then when it suits us. But when people talk about evil, they need to give it a name, a face, with some demon or devil.” He growled, deep in his throat. “They don’t see it in themselves. It never ends what we do to each other. Massacre after massacre. Men. Women. Children. Crucifixions. The Crusades. Babi Yar. Leningrad. Bergen-Belsen. The Killing Fields. Suicide bombers. Attempted hit-and-runs.” Here he paused. “It never ends. Manny and Renfroe, they’re just the tip of the proverbial iceberg—”

“Manny and Renfroe?” I gasped. “What do you mean?”

“Pay attention,” he said, and clicked the remote. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. It still hurts a little to remember, but here’s what happened, in PowerPoint form:

The next few slides were a jumble of economic flow charts and world events and drug cartels and a final thought of,
good masquerading as evil but really, what was the difference?
But at that point I was too cloudy to absorb it all. When I snapped out of it, the screen was blank.

Amber and Casey had pulled Bo away from me. Everyone was breathing heavily. Bo shook my brother and Amber loose. The three angels stared at me, waiting for a question.

The only one I could manage was, “What the hell did you do in the sixties, Bo?”

Bo apologized for putting his memories in my cranium. He rambled for a minute or two about some guy named Hunter Thompson, who was something called a “gonzo” journalist, which basically meant he made no judgments even while
he put himself in the thick of things he was reporting. This seemed to include a certain amount of “experimentation” (Bo’s word) with drugs like LSD. I supposed that explained how Bo’s memories painted psychedelic circles in my brain.

After that, Bo explained how everyone had hated President Nixon, but that as I could see, Nixon didn’t have a lock on evil or corruption. Or something like that. I was still sort of giggly from Bo’s flashback. The politics escaped me. In any case, whatever was going on, it was bigger than Dr. Renfroe’s poisoning of my family. And the European conglomerate that ran Oak View was probably part of it. Bo could have said just as much rather than give me a history lesson.

I was feeling a little winded. But I was ready to make nice and move on.

Casey was still full-on pissed off and in Bo’s face.

“You like to hear yourself talk, don’t you?” he hissed. “That’s what this is, right? You talking and name-dropping and expecting us to believe it. Telling us the same old same old about something I’d see in some straight-to-video spy movie—”

“Casey,” Amber said. She held up a hand. A warning.

Something dark and frosty crossed my brother’s face. He kept his eyes on Bo. “I’m sorry you had to break up that shit back at school. I did it. I own it. According to you, that makes me more valuable. Well maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. But my sister needs to leave. She has a function to attend. And as I don’t have my damn car, one of you will need to drive her.”

I wanted to hug him. I wanted to shout hooray.

Instead, I found myself asking Bo, “If Manny and Renfroe are the tip of the iceberg, then who are the bad guys? Like, the bad guys we saw in
FREE WILL PART I
? Our family
was ripped apart and Casey’s my guardian now—in every way not just the angel way—but we still don’t know jack, do we? Not anything. Not even how Amber died and I bet that’s important.”

Bo just smiled. He didn’t turn away.

“You put all those images in my head, so I know you can do all sorts of things, can’t you? So here’s what I think. I bet you don’t want Amber to know why she died. It makes no damn sense, but I think that’s the truth. I know you saved me, too, but now I’m wondering if you didn’t somehow make our father bump into us in Austin so we’d stop investigating. How do I know you didn’t do that?”