I give him a wary look. “What’s on your mind?”
“Family problems,” he says under his breath. “Laura’s Manny is a little too controlling for my tastes, and I think he’s brainwashing her.”
“Brainwashing her? About what?”
A couple of the students in front of us are half-turned in our direction, clearly listening in.
“I’ll tell you later,” he mutters. “How ‘bout lunch?”
“Okay.”
“Hey, dweebs!” A pair of black ultra-high platform boots crashes down between our seats, nearly clipping my shoulder. “Talking about your next hot date, huh? More super sloppy happy fun time out in the woods, or more of a casual super sloppy quicky under the bleachers?”
Rhue smirks back at the Gothic wonder. “Again, Mackenzie, you really gotta quit phrasing stuff like that. It’s honestly confusing. I mean, are you hitting on me? Are you suggesting a threesome? Because I might be down, but you’d have to take it up with Madison.”
She gives him a flat, disgusted look. “Not with a ten-foot pole,” she says.
She snatches her feet back and stomps away—I’m not sure if she’s deliberately stomping or if that’s just the only way she can move in those things—to the other side of the auditorium, where she finds some other freshmen to harass.
“What crawled up her ass and died?” Rhue asks. “She’s like—thirty-two percent bitchier than normal, and normal is already pretty fucking bitchy.”
“I dunno—she kind of sounded jealous to me. Since when does ‘how ‘bout lunch’ count as a date worth getting jealous over?”
He grins at me. “Maybe it’s not the meal she’s jealous over—but the mutual sleuthing. Maybe, just maybe, under that Gothic veneer, she has a lady boner for Hardy boys.”
He makes me laugh just as the professor steps out. Not earning any brownie points with that—embarrassed, I put my head down and start furiously scribbling away at my notes. My palms are sweaty, and I can’t even identify why.
I don’t even know if mutual sleuthing counts as a date, but I’m excited enough about it for it to feel like a date—or nervous enough about it for it to feel like a job interview. I haven’t quite figured it out yet; the two feelings are virtually identical,physically, so it boils down to my interpretation. Problem is, I’m not very good at interpreting emotions. I guess I’ll just have to play it by ear—which, for the record, is my least favorite way to play anything.
He takes me to a casual taco place a few miles from campus, where it’s less likely that anyone who knows us by name and face will be around to listen in. Even then, he’s not entirely comfortable, so we get our food to go and end up eating in his SUV, parked at a trailhead overlooking the botanical gardens.
Throughout the whole meandering journey, I’ve had that feeling of being followed, though I’ve been hard-pressed to single out any specific vehicle.
“So,” I begin as soon as we’ve settled in. “Why do you think Steve is brainwashing your sister?”
He pauses for a moment, then looks at me. “You haven’t spoken to her recently, have you?”
I shake my head. “I tried calling her yesterday because I wanted to see if she wanted to have coffee before I left, but I’m pretty sure my number’s blocked on her phone. Before that, Julian was listening in and we couldn’t really have a conversation.”
He nods. “She’s still certain that mom didn’t kill herself,” he tells me. “She’s really insistent about it. She’s convinced that dad did it. And I mean, I get it—mom had all these plans and all these people depending on her to take Julian down—but there’s no evidence. Everybody I’ve talked to—and I’ve talked to a few—is sure that she killed herself. Yeah, they all think he bullied her into it—but it was ruled suicide, and no one is arguing against that except Laura.”
“I don’t know if that suggests brainwashing,” I tell him gently. “She’s a traumatized teenager. It’s hard enough to accept that your mother’s gone—trying to accept that she left you under her own power is a whole other level of acceptance.”
“You’re not wrong,” he says. His gaze is heavy and blank, looking out the windshield. “But she could do it. I know she could—but every time I try to talk to her about it, about anything to do with Mom, Steve gives her these looks and clears his throat and interjects and stuff, like he’s policing the words she says. I think he’s a plant, dad’s little stooge, put in that position to keep her confused and depressed.”
I frown, thinking of the Laura I know, with her beaming smile and rational mind. “Does she seem depressed to you?”
“Not overtly,” he says. “But don’t you think hyper-fixating on one parent’s villainy to protect her feelings about the other parent’s sainthood sort of indicates depression? Besides—I don’t think she’d be quite human if she wasn’t struggling with a bit of depression right now. In the last year, her mother died, she lost the use of her legs, and she discovered that her dad is a rapist. Now she’s stuck doing his campaign for him because she’s too scared to let anyone else do it. She’s depressed. She just doesn’t show it.”
“It is a pretty shitty situation,” I concede. “Maybe Steve’s just trying to keep her from obsessing over it?”
He shrugs uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Maybe. Something about it just sits wrong with me, like they’re keeping a secret she doesn’t want to keep, you know?”
Ugh. That hits me right in the gut. “Yeah. I know the feeling.”
He gives me a long, searching look. “What’s up, Maddie?”
I shift uncomfortably, trying to roll the tension out of my shoulders. “My dad’s girlfriend is a journalist,” I tell him. “She’s doing a story on the election—backgrounds of the candidates, that sort of thing—and she wants my help. She knows I’m ‘close to the family.’ I don’t think she has any idea how close—or what kind of story she’d get.”