Jasper dumps his backpack with a seismic thud and stares at the food, then at me—upright, showered, coherent—then back at the food. He eats two slices of sausage-and-pepperoni in showy silence, chewing with the expression of a young god weighing an offering at his altar. Eventually he grants me a measured “Thanks.”
“Sure.”
He rubs cheese grease on his jeans. “So. You’re back. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I say, and burst into tears.
I wasn’t planning to. I had a whole set of slick lies about how I’d finished my contract at Starling House on good terms but then Lance Wilson gave me mono and I was really sorry I’d been so out of it, but I can’t get the words out around the sobs.
The mattress dips and Jasper’s arm settles over my shoulders and I know I should push him away and pull it together because kids shouldn’t have to take care of adults, but somehow I don’t. Somehow I’m smearing snot all over his shoulder—Christ, when did he get so tall—while he gives me tentative pats and says “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay” even though it obviously isn’t.
I don’t stop crying so much as run dry, hiccupping into silence. “So,” Jasper says casually, “what’s up?”
My laugh is gluey and wet. “I got fired, I guess. A couple of times. And then I quit? It’s complicated.”
“Did you find a dead body? Or like, a murder dungeon?”
“God, I let you watch too much creepy shit when you were little. No, nothing like that. He just—we just—” I can’t think of a succinct or sane way to say we fought an eldritch beast and briefly made out before he ruined everything by revealing his complicity in our mother’s death so I finish, “Disagreed.”
“He’s a real asshole, huh.”
“The worst.” I straighten up and tuck my hair behind my ears. “He’s rude and weird and his face is all”—I make a violent twisting gesture in midair—“and you know I like tattoos but there’s an upper limit. And he’s so full of shit, and so arrogant about it, like he knows what’s best for everybody else—what?”
“Nothing,” Jasper says, but he gives me the sideways, shit-eating smile of a kid who’s about to break into the K-I-S-S-I-N-G song.
I jam my elbow between his ribs and both of us lose it, laughing in the abrupt, overloud way you do when you haven’t laughed in a long time. I have a split-second vision of an alternate world, where monsters aren’t real and Starling House is just a house, where Mom never died and I never dropped out and my brother and I were allowed to be dumb kids together.
When we stop laughing, I say, quietly, “Hey. I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t hurt. You’re like, super weak.”
“I mean for being such a baby about everything and for ignoring you earlier and for—before. For not telling you what was going on.” There’s a whole lot more I could and probably should tell him, but I chicken out. My whole body feels raw and weepy, like a skinned knee.
Jasper sobers. “It’s okay. I mean it’s not, but it is.” An unfamiliar weight drags at the corners of his mouth, a hint of confessional guilt. “Look, Opal, I . . .”
He draws a deep breath and I’m struck by the suspicion that he’s going to say something heartfelt, that he loves me or forgives me, and I’m too dehydrated to do any more crying. So I say, “Been working on any new videos?”
He closes his mouth. Opens it. “No.”
“Why?”
“Just over it, I guess.” Jasper shrugs. I’d would call it his tell, except his entire body is comprised of tells. He looks out the window; he fidgets guiltily with the wrapper on the peach can.
A sudden thought knocks the smile off my face. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Baine, does it? She hasn’t been bothering you?”
A sharp look through his lashes. “No,” he says slowly. “She hasn’t. And she won’t, because you don’t have anything to do with that house anymore.”
“No. Yeah, I mean, I don’t.” It’s not even a lie. I’m through with Starling House and its Warden, with Elizabeth Baine and her cut-glass eyes, with the whole ugly mess of debts and desires, sins and stories.
I just can’t swear they’re through with me. Gravely blood. “But call me if you hear from her, okay? And”—I reach into my back pocket and withdraw the copper penny I stole weeks ago, which I never quite managed to sell or give back, because I liked the feel of it, the round print it left on my skin—“take this, will you?”