“You got all of this information in less than a week? I don’t even know the school’s mascot, and you have everyone’s life story.”
“People like me.” He shrugs. “It’s a gift.”
The warning bell rings, and we both stand.
“Knights,” he says.
“Huh?” I ask dumbly.
“West Point Knights. That’s our mascot.” He winks.
“Noted.” I laugh. “I’ll be sure to file that under Things I Don’t Give a Flying Fuck About.”
Tick, tick, tick.
She says her boyfriend is a ticking time bomb. That she never knows how he is going to show up. Nice and charming, or drunk and violent. I tell her that that’s what you get for dating a junkie and a drug dealer. She doesn’t listen. Gwen never listens.
The thing about my older sister is that she can be my parent and a child at the very same time. Like right now, when I see her lying in a pool of her own puke in the apartment that she shares with her roommate, Shelly, all I want to do is throw her into the bathtub, find the idiot who gave her the drugs, and finish him off.
“What’s his name?” I take her by the arm and lead her to the bathroom. I wish I could take her home with me, but she’ll never come. I wish I could stage an intervention, but my parents don’t want anything to do with her anymore and they’ll never be there. Standing there by myself, pleading her to take care of herself, will only be a reminder to the fact that no one but me cares.
“He’s the best.” She smiles to herself as I turn on the faucet and peel her out of her reeking clothes. She complies. A brother should never see his sister naked. Not at this age, anyway. “He is really sweet, Pierce. He is.”
“Yeah? Somehow I doubt that. He sold you the drugs?”
She shakes her head. “Gave it to me for free. I’m sampling for him.”
“You’re sampling drugs for him?” I repeat her words, dumbfounded. The worst part is that she is a smart girl. Smart girls, I learned with time and experience, sometimes do very stupid things for men. Gwen ran away from California after she went to UCLA. She has a degree and speaks three languages. She could have been a very successful, very happy woman, if she wanted to be. But she doesn’t. Instead, she followed me to Las Vegas and let herself get caught up with the wrong people. The wrong lifestyle.
What she wants is to defy our parents. And what she fails to understand is that they’re not wired the same way as us. They cut all ties to her and moved on. They didn’t care enough to raise us. Why would they care enough to look after us when we’re grown?
“Rehab,” I say, throwing her clothes to the trash. There’s no point in washing them. I’ll just buy her new ones. They’re two times too big, anyway. Gwen has become rail thin and scarily bony the last couple of months. She’s fading, and it physically hurts to watch. “You need to go to rehab, or I’ll go back to California and cut all ties. I mean it, Gwen.”
“Sure.” She laughs. “Leave me. Just like them. It’s not like I raised you.”
“You did raise me,” I agree. “You raised me, and now it’s my turn to take care of you. Something that’s a little hard to do when you’re hell-bent on destroying yourself.”
She laughs more hysterically, bordering on maniacal. I throw her into the bath, and it’s ice-cold, and she deserves it.
“I hate you!” she screams, spitting in my face. I stare at her through leveled eyes.
“That’s fine. Give me his address,” I say. I’m ready to do something stupid, but I don’t even care anymore.
“No.” She crosses her arms over her chest, sitting in the full bath like a toddler.
“Gwen.”
“No!”
“Fuck!” I punch the tiles.
“You won’t take him from me!” she yells.
“Oh, we’ll see about that.”
Ryan Anderson.
I’m sitting in my car, staring at him from across the road as he works, bare-chested, on his motorcycle. I pulled Remington Stringer’s address from the contact list online, and I did just so I could see where he lives. It has nothing to do with Remington and her advances, though I know that, logically, at some point I will need to make sure she knows that she can’t pull that kind of stunt again.