Page 140 of Hellbent

He flipped through the red notebook he’d recovered from the microwave in the Richmond house. The pages were blank.

Baffling.

Joey looked over at his glass. “Can I have some?”

“No.”

“Oh, I can help steal a shotgun from a cop car, fly on a fake ID, kidnap a kid from a safe house, but God forbid I drink alcohol.”

Evan considered this a moment. He handed her his glass. The room was small enough that he barely had to lean to reach her.

She took a sip.

The taste hit, and she screwed up her face. “This is awful. You actually like this?”

“I tried to warn you.”

She shoved the glass back at him.

“It always reminds me of my foster home,” she said. “The smell of alcohol. And hair spray. Menthol cigarettes.”

Evan set down his glass. He thought about how Jack used to leave silences for Evan to fill, room for him to figure out if he wanted to talk and what he would say if he did. He remembered Mia’s advice: At the end of the day, all they really want to hear? You’re okay. You’re gonna be fine. You’re worth it.

“She always smoked them,” Joey said after a pause. “The ‘foster mom.’” The words came with teeth in them. “We all called her Nemma. I don’t know if that was her real name, but that’s what everyone called her.”

Evan cast his mind back to Papa Z sunk in his armchair, as snug as a hermit crab in a shell, one fist clamped around a Coors, the other commanding a remote with lightsaber efficiency as the boys swirled around him, fighting and shoving and laughing. Van Sciver always reigned supreme, the king of the jungle, while Evan slunk mouselike around the periphery, trying to get by unseen. It was a lifetime ago, and yet he felt as if he were standing in that living room now.

Joey kept her gaze on her laptop screen. “She was a beast of a woman. Housedresses. Caked-on blush. And her favorite phrase.”

Evan said, “Which was?”

“This is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me.” She laughed, but there was no music in it. “God, was she awful. Breath like an ashtray. Big floppy breasts. She had a lot of girls under her roof. She always had boyfriends rotating through. That’s how she kept them.”

She paused, wet her lips, worked the lower one between her teeth.

Evan remained very still.

“I don’t remember much about them,” she said. “Just the faces.” The glow of the screen turned her eyes flat, reflective. “There were a lot of faces.”

For a moment she looked lost in it, her shoulders raised in an instinctive hunch against the memories. Then she came out of it, snapped the laptop shut. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Evan said, “Okay.”

She wouldn’t look over at him.

He got up with his glass and the bottle with its elegant clear stopper. He dumped his drink in the bathroom sink and poured out the rest, the vodka glug-glugging down the drain. He dropped the empty bottle in the trash can, came back to his bed, and returned to leafing through the red notebook.

He sensed her stare on the side of his face.

“That’s why I’m all fucked up,” she said.

“You’re not any more fucked up than everyone else.”

“I’m angry,” she whispered. “All the time.”

He risked a glance over at her, and she didn’t look away.

“Those are the skills you learned to survive,” he said. “They’re what got you through.”