Sam hopes he hacks up a lung.
He stalks past Avery, brushing himself off so someone will have a fun time cleaning up. Although from the looks of this place, no one’s cleaned in a decade. Downstairs consists of a kitchen squashed in one corner and a few damaged sofas around an unreasonably expensive TV.
While the De Lainey chaos was all toys and clothes and sewing projects and buckets of seashells, this apartment is mouldy pizza boxes, empty bottles and broken boxes. The coffee table – which has three legs, the fourth being a pile of textbooks – is piled high with laptops, phones and a knot of chargers. Stolen, obviously. The carpet smells like cat piss. A curtain partitions off what probably was the dining room but is now more mattresses on the floor and clothes and spilled rubbish.
Sam rubs the bridge of his nose. ‘Can I please just take a shower?’
‘A shower is not going to fix this.’
Sam closes his eyes. That’s a mistake. All he can see is Moxie’s stupefied expression, her shock melting into terror, her first instinct to be self-defence. Against him. A criminal. A creep hiding in her house. Hot, anxious knives carve his stomach.
Avery finally registers the look on Sam’s face and folds his smirk away. His fingers flap anxiously and he goes to dig clothes out of a broken suitcase. ‘Don’t be mad at me.’
‘I’m not mad.’ He is, a little, but he’d rather lie and skip having to calm Avery down later because he’s terrified of angry people.
‘So what happened? Does this story involve you making out with a clown?’ He grins suddenly.
‘Hilarious,’ Sam says. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’
Avery picks up a shirt and shakes it out. Crumbs fall out of the folds. He shrugs and flips it over his shoulder since Sam didn’t specify clean clothes.
‘What? Oh. Day off.’ But he has too many lying tells. Like how he immediately hunches over, waiting for a blow. ‘Shower’s upstairs,’ he says, fast. Distracting.
Sam sighs and follows him upstairs. The rail is broken in four places – how does that even happen?
‘How many people live here?’ he asks, while Avery slams a hip against the sticky bathroom hinges. There are other closed doors, muted voices behind them.
‘Um, I don’t know? They let me take the sofa and I don’t have to put in for rent.’
‘Um … and why would they do that for you?’
Avery gives him a cutting look. ‘Because I have friends. Good friends. I’m helpful. Sometimes I drive for them at night when they’re doing jobs.’ The hinges unstick and Avery tumbles in. ‘I don’t even always have to sleep on the sofa.’
A sharp pang hits Sam’s guts. What exactly is he saying? ‘But they’re all way older than you.’ They’re using you. They’re bad news. Are you a getaway driver? Please, oh please, do not tell me you’re sleeping with someone. Sammy does not have the energy for that conversation.
Avery dumps the clothes on the sink and roughly clears a spot between bags of makeup and shaving kits and tins of hairspray. ‘Red towel behind the door is mine.’
‘We probably need to talk,’ Sam says, trying to keep his voice level.
‘OK. About what?’ Avery’s face is so open – so naive.
Sam scratches glitter behind his ear. Later. Just do it later.
‘About why you’re covered in glitter?’ Avery says.
‘Never mind,’ says Sam. ‘It won’t happen again.’
It will never, never happen again.
Hot water and soap can scrub out a multitude of evils.
Just not glitter.
Sam spends a good seventy per cent of his time in the bathroom swearing and the remaining thirty per cent raking fingernails over his scalp and always, always coming up with more glitter.
He gives up.
Why couldn’t Moxie have just slapped him? Why did she have to go into the office at all? He needed that fragile paradise. He needed it so he could breathe again.
He hesitates over his glitter-covered clothes – De Lainey clothes. Then he stuffs them into a garbage bag.
Forget it, Sam. It’s over.
Sam has to turn up the cuffs of Avery’s jeans, but the shirt is uncomfortably tight. Meaning – it actually fits, instead of the loose ones he’s been stealing off the older De Lainey boys. Sam likes clothes he can disappear into instead of tight ribbed cotton that shows his bones and sunken stomach. He stomps downstairs, meaning to ask Avery for something else, but Avery sits on the sofa with his legs kicked up on a coffee table. And he’s not alone.
A girl with blood-red hair, expensive clothes, and cool eyes sits beside him. She’s at odds with the trashed house, the broken sofa they sit on, and Avery’s bedhead and half-suppressed hand-flapping tic.
Avery’s put on a shirt, but he still looks dishevelled beside this girl.
They’re both drinking beer.
Avery won’t look at Sam and Sam knows he has to fight this. He tugs the neck of his shirt and scuffs across the room to stand in front of them.
The girl looks him up and down coolly. ‘I’m Vin.’
‘You look slightly less like the glitter apocalypse,’ Avery says. His fingers mess about with screws and a broken hinge to distract him from flapping. Once upon a time, it was little cars.
Sam tucks his hands into his jean pockets. ‘Um, hi … Vin. Well, Avery and I can get out of your hair now.’
‘Avery lives here.’ Vin has a smooth voice, soft and rich, but Sam’s stomach clenches. He’s not sure if it’s because this girl is taking Avery away from him or because her voice is so cold.
‘And you too?’ He can’t imagine Miss Ironed Jeans living here.
Vin smiles and leans back, one arm covered in gold bracelets slung lazily over the back of the sofa. ‘Sometimes.’
‘And how’d you meet?’ Sam says, aware his voice is more accusatory than conversational. ‘Over drinks? Because you know Avery’s barely seventeen, right?’
‘OK, OK.’ Avery shoves himself off the sofa and sets the beer down. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He grabs Sam’s arm, but the skin is still mostly scabs and bruises and Sam snatches away with a muted hiss. ‘Oh,’ Avery says, ‘you still look like roadkill. How’s your side?’ Before Sam can grind out a reply, Avery snatches the corner of Sam’s shirt and jerks it up. The skin around Sam’s left side looks raw from the scalding shower. A few scabs have knocked loose and left pinpricks of blood.
Sam jerks his shirt back down. Avery’s always woeful at personal space, but Sam’s not in a patient mood today.