His father held up a hand, cutting him off. “Just stop, son. You’re only embarrassing yourself. This conversation is over.” He closed his eyes for a long moment, exhaling slowly out his nose. On the stove, the bacon was starting to smoke. He nodded to the pan. “You’re burning your dinner.”
“I made enough for both of us,” Shawn said quietly.
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
Shawn stood frozen in the kitchen as his father ascended the stairs. He waited until he heard the bathroom door close and the shower turn on, before driving a fist into his leg, over and over, biting back the urge to yell until the throbbing in his thigh drowned it out. He’d have a bruise later, but it didn’t matter. No one would see it.
For a second, he just stood there, relishing the ache in his leg, breathing in the sharp stench of burning grease as smoke stung his eyes.
Ten more months.
Forty-three weeks.
Three-hundred-something days.
He could make it ten more months. Then he could leave.
Taking a deep breath, Shawn turned off the stove, picked up the spitting pan, and threw it in the spotless sink.
Chapter Five
JUSTIN
“Why’d you say you’d go if you didn’t want to go?”
“To piss Dave off,” I say, dropping my keys on the kitchen counter and opening the fridge, then the pantry. Ugh. How do we never have any food? Grabbing a pad of Post-its off the counter, I start making a list of things we need from the store.
“You know what would piss Dave off even more?” Alyssa says as I add milk, bread, peanut butter to my list. “Actually going.”
“Yeah, but then my night would suck.”
Pasta sauce
Vegetables???
Aluminum foil
“You don’t know that. It could be fun. Besides, we’re seniors. This is the last bonfire we’ll ever have.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
The door to the basement opens and Stan emerges, balancing a stack of dirty dishes in one hand as he leans heavily on the railing with the other. “You’re home from school,” he announces gruffly, as if I didn’t already know.
“No shit,” I mutter under my breath. I cross vegetables??? off the list and replace it with ramen.
“Hey, Stan,” Alyssa says with a smile, taking the dishes from him and depositing them in the sink.
“Hey there, sweetheart,” Stan says, grinning at her like the creeper he is. “Draw anything new today?”
Her eyes light up, and a second later, her sketch pad is in her hand. She flips through it to her assembly sketch of me and holds it out for Stan’s evaluation. Alyssa has always thought Stan is charming. It’s the one thing she is consistently wrong about.
Stan is kind of hard to explain. He’s my grandfather’s cousin, or cousin’s cousin, or something, and the only member of our family who still talks to us. My grandmother—Mom’s mother—was an only child, whose parents died just a couple of years before she did. That left my grandfather’s side of the family, who took Mom in and raised her after my grandparents died in the high school fire. But they cut off all contact with her after she got pregnant with me, the result of a one-night stand with some guy she met at a party her sophomore—and final—year of college.
The way she tells it, the pregnancy was just an excuse. They were convinced that if my grandmother had never gotten pregnant with my mom, then their son wouldn’t have married her, and he would still be alive. They’d only taken Mom in out of guilt, and jumped at the chance to kick her out.
Anyway, not long after that, Stan showed up, saying he’d heard about what had happened through the family grapevine. While he couldn’t mend things with the rest of the family, he offered to help out however he could. He even bought this house for her so we could all stay together, one big happy dysfunctional family.
Mom was so grateful that, when I was born, she named me after him. Justin Stanley Warren.
I know this makes Stan sound like some kind of saint, but he’s not. He’s grumpy and mean and has probably never had a single moment of fun in his entire existence. He’s always there for Mom, making excuses for her every time she gets fired and picking her up at three in the morning when she’s too wasted to drive home, but can’t be bothered to care about my life, unless it’s to tell me what a screwup I am or how I’m being unfair for expecting her to act like an actual adult.
Stan finishes examining Alyssa’s drawing—he proclaims it incredible, a word that apparently applies only to pictures of me, but not actually me me—then shuffles toward me. He looks over my shoulder at my shopping list, his nasty old-man breath brushing my cheek. “Oreos.”
I lean away. “Oreos are expensive, Stan.” I’m arguing mostly because I’m allergic to agreeing with Stan on anything. Oreos are delicious.
“Here,” Stan says, digging a crumpled twenty out of his pocket and handing it over.
“Ew,” I say, wrinkling my nose at the softened bill. “Where’d this come from, your mattress?” Stan deals almost entirely in cash. When I asked him why he doesn’t just get a credit card—or even a debit card—like a normal person, he gave me a long-winded speech about our society’s overreliance on technology, which I tuned out after about fifteen seconds.
He shrugs. “If you don’t want it, give it back,” he says, holding out his hand.
“Not if you want your Oreos,” I say, shoving the bill into my pocket. It may be a gross bill, but money is money. And maybe if I get him his stupid cookies, he’ll forget to ask for the change.
“You talk to your mom today?” Stan asks me, getting himself a glass of water from the sink before lowering himself slowly into a chair at the table. He’s moving more stiffly than usual. His bad knee must be acting up. Some injury from when he was a teenager that left him with a gnarly scar that looks like a smiley face. Probably means it’s going to rain.
I shake my head. “Why? You think she got fired again?”
Stan sighs. “You know you’re allowed to text your mother just because she’s your mother, right, Justin?”
“I could lick the crust off all the dirty dishes in the sink just because it’s food. Doesn’t make it appealing.”
“Do you have to act like such a brat all the time?”
“Nope, I do it special just for you, Stan.”
Alyssa elbows me as she walks by, mouthing stop it when I look up from my list to meet her eyes. I roll my eyes, but resist the urge to keep messing with Stan. For now.
He just makes it so easy.
She sits across from him at the table and folds her hands. “You need anything else from the store? We’re getting ready to run out.”
“That’s sweet of you, dear, but I think I’m good,” Stan says, patting her arm.
Alyssa smiles, placing her hand over his and giving it a brief squeeze. I consider making gagging noises but decide against it, since I don’t want to piss off Alyssa. Even if her affection for Stan is super gross. “Well, you just let us know if you think of anything, okay?”
“Will do.”
For the life of me, I cannot understand why she likes him. He spends about 80 percent of his time in the basement with his weird old-man hobbies that he keeps trying to rope me into, 20 percent of his time parked in a recliner watching The Young and the Restless, and zero percent being even slightly normal or cool. Once I asked her what she saw in him, and she said he was “cute,” and I had to resist the urge to vomit.