Oh really? He better kill all that noise. “My grandma’s in the hospital,” I say instead. “I need to keep it close for updates.”
Joshua’s jaw flinches ever so slightly. He wants to tell me and my phone to shove it, but grandmas are a sensitive topic for everyone. “Just try to limit checking it to your breaks, ’kay?” He gives me a pat on the back like a caring and empathetic manager is supposed to, then walks away to annoy someone else.
A crash comes from the frat guys’ table. Dude Bro’s out of the booth, has one of his lackeys in a headlock. An actual damn headlock. They spin around as the lackey tries to pull away from him, crunching piles of nachos underneath their feet. The third idiot leaps up about five seconds too late to pry them apart.
“Chill out, Liam!” Third Guy pleads, finally detaching his friend from the blissed-out clutches of their leader.
Dude Bro pushes his hair out of his pink and sweaty face. He scopes out his friends, who huff and puff across from him. Fists clenched at their sides like they don’t know what he’s going to do next. Dude Bro shifts his eyes down to his pulverized food, then smirks up at me. Smugness washes over any anger on his face as if he was just reminded that he’s the one with the power—and I’m the one with the broom.
“I’m not hungry anymore. Let’s get out of here,” he orders. He makes sure to step on another pile of nachos before heading out to his obnoxious ride. Lackey No. 1 and No. 2 glance at each other, asking a hundred silent questions. Still, they follow behind Dude Bro like they’re supposed to.
“Glad they left before things got out of hand,” Joshua Kim says from behind me.
I stare down at the rubble of their order on the floor. Before things got out of hand?
“Make sure to clean that up before more guests come.” He slaps me on the back to motivate me.
I take a deep breath and push my broom over to their booth. Try my best not to push it up his ass.
Forty-five dollars. That’s how much money I made for my five-hour shift at Taco Bell. That’s not including what Uncle Sam was going to take from me by the time payday rolls around. I had to spend five hours of sweeping up taco shells and plunging toilet bowls and dodging smirks from high frat guys with too much time on their hands to not even crack fifty dollars. Now it’s creeping toward eleven o’clock and instead of climbing into my bed, I have to cram for a Math Analysis test.
I yank off my polo shirt as soon as I unlock my front door and hurl it onto the couch. I reach for it to clean up my mess before MiMi gets here, but then the memory of her unconscious in her hospital bed hits me like a fist. So, I take my actual fist and ram it into the couch pillow. It barely leaves a dent, which pisses me off even more. I’ll show this goddamn couch. I use all the breath in me to grab the couch by one of its ends and attempt to flip it over, but the wall’s in my way. A grunt rips out of me as I ram the couch against the wall, over and over again until they both feel my anger. Until I feel anything but anger. Soon, my arms start to buckle, so I release the couch. It slams against the floor and I slam down right next to it. I rest my back against it and scrub at my hair. Wish I had dreads or something I could grip onto just to pull it all out. That’s what I need. To just let everything out.
There’s a loud knock at my front door. I blink and climb to my feet. It’s late as hell. Probably Miss Claudine asking me to quiet it down. Her boys have to sleep for school after all. Never mind that they play Fortnite loud enough for the neighborhood to hear every weekend. I snatch the door open, ready to tell her just that if she comes at me the wrong way. The girl standing outside my door wears a red-and-gold track suit with matching Converse sneakers.
“Riley?” I say, frowning so hard that I give myself a headache.
She gives me a meek smile. “Hey, Jay. Somebody order a pizza?” She laughs and a snort escapes her mouth. “That was a joke. I mean, obviously I don’t have a pizza—though that does sound good right about now.” She looks me up and down. “Did I . . . did I catch you at a bad time?”
I look down at myself and remember that I’m only in my white tank top. That I had partially stripped down during my temper tantrum. I fold my arms across my chest, suddenly feeling naked. “What are you doing here? Isn’t it past your curfew or whatever?” I peek out in the hall and nobody else is there. Riley Palmer showed up to the Ducts, after dark, without any backup. Brave girl.
“I may have . . . embellished my whereabouts. And by embellish, I mean I waited to hear my dad snore before tiptoeing out the back door.”
“Wait—you snuck out?” Okay, what’s a word more impressive than brave? “Why?”
“Okay, I know you told me to stay out of it, but I couldn’t sleep, Jay. You seemed so surprised by Nicole taking off with Kenny, that she had to have left you something, right? Some kind of hint of where she took off.” She pushes past and enters my living room.
I blink after her. “Sure. Come in.”
Riley scopes out my living room and if I didn’t feel naked before, I certainly do now. I close the front door behind me, hug my bare arms again.
“Were you searching for clues out here?”
I glance over at the couch cushions strewn across the floor and scratch my ear. “Yeah. Yeah I was.” Shove my hands in my pockets. “Didn’t find anything, though.”
“What about her room?”
I smirk. “Of course I checked out her room.”
“I tend to do better on papers after someone else takes a look at them. Fresh eyes can catch more, you know? Where’s her room?”
“Riley, I told you. I looked in there more than once. I’m her brother. I’d know where she’d hide something.”
Riley starts making her way toward the bedrooms as if she has an all-access pass.
“Ay! I didn’t say you could go back there!”
“What’s the worst that could happen, Jay? I find nothing, you prove me right. I find something, you get an answer. You win in both situations, right?” She points to the closed bedroom door with a picture of Lizzo taped on it. “I take it this is her room, right? Unless you like them BBW.”
I frown at her again. My chin almost hits the floor.
“Big beautiful women,” Riley says to me, all slow like she’s explaining the theory of relativity.
“I know what it means. I’m just trying to figure out how you do.”
Riley shrugs. “I rarely ever get enough credit.” She pushes Nic’s bedroom door open, and I reach out to stop her. But my hand never connects. Maybe she’s right. There could be something I missed because I keep looking in all the same places. Maybe looking in the same places got my eyes all bleary.
So far, though, Riley covers the same territory. Nic’s drawers, Nic’s closet. Under Nic’s bed. The same areas I’ve scoped out so much that I could draw a sketch of what’s in them.
“See?” I say, after a couple of minutes past. “Nothing.”
Riley lifts up Nic’s trash can and another snort leaves her mouth. “Obviously, you weren’t thorough enough. Check this out.” She bends over and picks up something off the floor. A wrapper. A small one, like it used to cover a sucker or something. But the picture on it’s all artsy and custom, some smiling face with a tongue hanging out. Not the standard Blow Pop I could grab from the corner store. I look up at Riley, whose smile looks like she ate one too many Blow Pops.