Page 42 of Undercover
What? Water dribbled down from my hair, getting in my eyes, and I shook my head to clear it. “Gabe?” Dave demanded. “Are you there? Did you hear me?”
“What’s going on? Are you okay? And are you on speaker? You sound all echoey.”
A short pause. I thought I heard something else in the background, but even though I strained my ear, I couldn’t tell what it was. “Yeah, I’m on speaker. Wanted my hands free so I could do some stuff in my office. I’m fine. But I need you to come out here. Bring Alec, you know, your date from last night? I need a hand—” He broke off again, and there was another little burst of background noise. I thought I heard a voice, maybe. “I need a hand moving some furniture. He’s a big guy. I’m sure he can move furniture, right?”
Okaaay.
My brother didn’t have a significant other and lived alone, or I’d have hung up on him and called them up to see if they’d noticed any empty, alien-looking pods out back that morning.
Dave didn’t have a drug habit, right? He couldn’t. Didn’t drugs make addicts nicer at least part of the time? Or was that just weed?
He obviously didn’t smoke weed, by that criterion.
And—since when did Dave move furniture? He hired people for that. Actually, I was pretty sure his secretary delegated the task of hiring furniture movers to someone even farther down the company food chain, that’s how important Dave thought he was.
“Dave, I’m seriously—did you just call me in the middle of Saturday to ask me to come out there and move furniture? With the guy you met and totally didn’t like last night? After you told him how I got kicked out of school?Seriously?”
“I didn’t tell him you got kicked out of school!” He sounded honestly baffled, and even more stressed. What the fuck was going on here?
“Of course you did! How the hell else would he have known? And he told me you told him!”
“I don’t know how he knows what happened with that bullshit degree you were getting—”
“Excuse you! ‘Bullshit degree’?” My voice had gone up a really unattractive octave, and I knew I’d be screeching in a second. “Because it’s not a fucking, what, an executive MBA or whatever that was that mostly involved you taking trips to Martha’s Vineyard with Dad’s old Princeton buddies—”
He cut me off mid-screech. “Forget my fucking MBA, Gabe!” That stunned me into silence, because I could count on one hand the number of times I’d ever heard Dave use a word stronger thandamn. He said it was vulgar. “Fuck, how hard is it for you to just do me a favor, all right? Get Alec, and come out to the factory. Quickly. I need your help.”
Okay, and that had been a note of genuine desperation. Goosebumps rose all down my arms, and even though I hadn’t dried off all the way, it wasn’t a chill.
“Look, if something’s wrong, just tell me. I’ll help. But since when do you move furniture? Are you fighting with Dad? Did something go wrong with the business?” I didn’t know a goddamn thing about the business, but—fuck, in the end, family was family. And I hadn’t heard Dave sound this weird and freaked-out since he thought he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant in their freshman year of college.
“Yeah, it’s—look, are you going to come, yeah, you and Alec—” I frowned, pressing the phone closer to my ear.HadI heard someone else interrupting him? What the ever-loving fuck was going on? Dave went on with, “Both of you, okay? Come out here. I need your help. I’m hanging up now. Show up, Gabe.”
“I need more of an explanation than that!” But he’d hung up.
For God’s sake, for once, just once, couldn’t Dave let me finish a goddamn sentence before he hung up on me? He’d been doing that all our lives.
All our lives. I couldn’t stand him most of the time, but I had a framed picture on my wall of a grinning five-year-old Dave holding newborn me, cradling me on his lap with an unusual amount of care for a boy that age. And then there’d been that time my first boyfriend broke up with me, right before junior prom. I’d hoped he’d actually go to it with me, as a couple. Instead he went with Sally Franklin and pretended he didn’t know me.
Dave had picked me up early when I didn’t have the guts to call our parents, taken me out for ice cream, and then sneaked me a drink out of Dad’s liquor cabinet. He hadn’t even complained when I threw up the Scotch and the ice cream all over the bathroom floor and left it for him to clean up.
He actuallyhadcleaned it, since if the maid had done it, she’d have told Mom and Dad. That was probably the only time Dave had ever held a sponge, come to think of it.
Fine. He could be a douchebag, but he was still my brother. Whatever the hell he had going on, I’d show up.
I wasn’t ruling out a pod-person having taken his place, though.
I threw on the first clothes I could find, some jeans and a t-shirt and an old hoodie. I had to rummage for clean socks, which gave me time to run over our conversation in my head for the third time.
My brain kept snagging on how he claimed not to have told Alec about my expulsion.
Why would he lie? For that matter, why would Alec lie?
One of them had lied. If it was Alec, then that prompted another and kind of more disturbing question: How had Alec known? And if he had known, why hadn’t he simply admitted it, instead of making up the weird story about Dave telling him?
And if Dave hadn’t told him, and Alec had been lying to me, then I really didn’t have the right to be quite this angry with my brother.
Who wanted Alec to come with me, for unspecified reasons that I knew, at least, one hundred percent had nothing to do with moving fucking furniture.
