Mom nods and slides off the stool. She staggers a little and grabs the male cop's arm. “Oopsie daisy,” she says.
I watch as she walks them to the door, weaving slightly. She waves goodbye and trills, “Toodles” as they get in their cruiser. Then she shuts the door and strides back to me. Her back is straight, her footsteps steady, her voice clipped and precise.
“What have you done this time, Eric?” she says.
I'm not one of those girls who writes in her journal every day and dreams of being the next Stephenie Meyer or whatever. I never read anything unless I have to for school. Mom says that when I was little, I loved books, but somewhere along the way I stopped. She thinks it was because I got so serious about dance. I think it was because all the books we had to read for school were completely lame. I still get good marks in English though. So writing a few essays shouldn't be too hard. Especially if it will get me out of here. I push away the thought that it might not.
I get a pen and a pad of paper out of the drawer and sit down at the table. Which sin should I start with? I look at the letter again. Lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, envy, wrath, pride. The Seven Deadly Sins don't sound all that deadly. If I think about lust, I'm going to think about Eric. I wish we hadn't fought. I wish I'd left the party with him. I wish that chick Shawna had left me alone. No, I don't want to write about lust. Maybe sloth would be good. The image of a weird animal hanging upside down in a tree comes to my mind. That's not the kind of sloth I'm supposed to write about, I'm pretty sure. I doodle on the pad for a minuteâa daisy with two leavesâ then start to write.
Sloth is another word for laziness. When I was little, Beth was always the one Mom called lazybones. Beth's not a morning person. I am. Mom says Beth and I are like our births. Beth took forever to come out. I tried to be born early. Beth moves slowly. I move fast. But Beth's not lazy. Not really. She just takes her time doing things. Like spreading peanut butter on her toast in the morning. Or getting dressed. It makes me crazy. But she's not lazy. Especially now, when she has to go to physio three times a week. And do exercises every day, probably for the rest of her life. She has to work so hard just to get from point A to point B.
No, the lazy one in my family is my dad. I remember him coming home from work and parking himself on the couch with a beer and a book. Even though she worked full-time too, Mom would still make dinner, do the laundry, help us with our homework, read us bedtime stories and make our lunches for the next day. Dad was supposed to take care of the yard and the house. You know. Mow the lawn. Clean the gutters. Let's just say that when they sold the house after the divorce, it was listed as a fixer-upper. Lazy. Slothful. That's my dad. Funny and smart, but not a ball of fire. Mom told me once that she fell in love with Dad because he was so laidback and fell out of love with him for the same reason.
The real reason Mom fell out of love with dad is because his laziness almost got Beth killed. She was at a party one night and she called home for a ride, because the girl she went to the party with was too drunk to drive. Mom and Dad had always said,
Call for a ride. No questions asked
. Mom was asleep, and Dad answered the phone that night. He told Beth to call a cab, because he was too lazy to get off his ass and go get her. He told her he was “really into” the book he was reading. She got a ride with her drunk friend, who ran a red light and got herself killed. They had to use the jaws of life to get Beth out of the car. Her right leg was smashed. She had a concussion. Her pelvis was broken. All because Dad was too lazy to get out of bed. So, I guess you could say sloth kills. It doesn't sound like a deadly sin, but it can be.
I've filled a page, and I don't have anything more to say about sloth. I do know which sin I'm going to tackle next. It's the one I'm feeling right now. Wrath. I'm so angry, I figure I can tear the fridge rack apart with my teeth. Not that I'm going to try. Mom would kill me if I wrecked my teeth after she spent so much to have them straightened. I try again to pull the rack apart, but all I manage to do is bend it a little. I slump over the table and rest my head on my arms. I'm so tired, but before I go to sleep, I need to find a weapon. And I need to “mail” my essay. I fold the paper in half and slide it through the slot in the door. I press my ear to the slot, but I can't hear anything, not even the sound of the paper falling to the floor on the other side.
I go into the bathroom to wash my face and pee. When I flush the toilet, I have a sudden memory of Dad telling me how to stop the toilet from running. Mom had been asking him to fix it for months. Jiggling the handle had stopped working.
“Take off the tank lid and lift up the rod and float for a few seconds. That should do it,” he said. Thanks for being a lazy bum, Dad.
When I open the tank now, I find a metal rod attached to a float. If I take it apart, the toilet won't flush. If I don't take it apart, I won't have a weapon. I separate the rod and the float as carefully as possibleâI want to be able to get it back together when I need to. The rod isn't long or sharp, but I feel stronger holding it. Less afraid. Before I go to bed, I take the pen and scrawl a big
DAY 1
on the wall across from the bed. Beside it I write the word
SLOTH
. Then I draw a tree with a sloth hanging from one of its branches. With the rod clutched in my hand, I crawl into bed. The pot lights dim and I sleep.
My mom really should have been an actress, not a CEO. That whole flirty, “oopsie daisy” thing with the cops? Totally fake. She's not even tipsy, let alone drunk. And she's definitely not helpless. Or stupid. She just wanted the cops to think she was. She does that a lot. People (mostly men) underestimate her. They usually regret it.
This is a woman who started a dogwalking business when she was in high school and built it into a hugely successful company. There are DLD franchises all over North America. In case you were wondering, DLD stands for Donna Loves Dogs, the name she picked when she was sixteen. And yes, there's a heart in the logo. Mom hasn't touched a dog in years though. Won't have one in the house. She just sits up in her office and manages her empire. And plays tennis with Axel/Mike.
Now she's glaring at me as if I've made a mess on the carpet.
“Do I need to call Richard?” she asks.
Richard is Mr. Franks, the lawyer she keeps on retainer. I'll admit he's come in handy in the past. But she hasn't had to use his servicesânot for me anywayâin a long time. He read me the riot act when he got me off on the whole assault thing. Which was all a huge misunderstanding. But I listened. And Amy has made it pretty clear she doesn't date losers or criminals. So I'm not that guy anymore. No matter what Mom thinks.
I shake my head. “I haven't done anything wrong, Mom. Really.”
“So you have no idea where Amy is?”
“Nope.”
“And you last saw her at a party? In a bad neighborhood?”
I nod. For the first time, I start to feel really afraid. For Amy. For myself. This isn't a game or a joke. This is real. Mom must see the fear in my face because she stops glaring and puts her arm around me.
“When was the last time you ate?” she asks.
I shrug. I honestly can't remember.
“Time for brinner then,” she says. When I was little we used to have brinnerâbreakfast for dinnerâall the time. Just her and me, sitting in front of the
TV
in our old house. Watching reruns of old shows like
Gilligan's Island
and
F Troop
. We haven't had brinner together in years. Not since her business took off and we moved.
I sit at the counter and watch her fry the bacon, scramble the eggs, put bread in the toaster. She looks over at me and smiles. “Just like the old days, huh,” she says. She was always good at reading my mind.
I nod and say, “Have you called Dad?”
She shakes her head. “Should I?”
I shudder. The last thing I want is for Dad to take charge. That's what he does for a living. Hostile takeovers. He'd have Mr. Franks over here in a hot second. “No. Not unless I get arrested.” I manage a weak laugh.
“Not funny,” she says. “And those cops were idiots anyway.”
“Even idiots can make an arrest.”
“Not without evidence they can't,” she says. She puts a plate of food in front of me and starts to eat scrambled eggs from the pan. “So what's your plan?”
“I've been trying to find this girl named Shawna. She was with Amy at the party. She isn't calling me back though.”
“That's it?”
I take a bite of toast and watch her while I chew. She has a bit of scrambled egg on her chin, but otherwise she looks the way she usually does. In control. I'm sure if I asked her to hire a private detective, she would do it.
I'm sure she wants to. But I want to find Amy myself. I want to be the one.
Not some stranger.
“It's a start,” I say. “And there's this guy named Devon. The party was at his house.”
“Okay,” she says. “How aboutâ”
I cut her off. “Remember what Mr. Franks said last year? That I had to start taking responsibility for my actions?”
She nods.
“Well, let me do it then.”
“But you just told me you're not responsible.”
I get up, leaving most of my brinner untouched. “You know what I mean, Mom.”
She turns away from me and runs some water over the frying pan. “I suppose I do,” she says. “But this is serious, Eric. If the cops come back, I'm calling Mr. Franks. You are not to talk to them without both of us there. Do you understand?”
This is starting to feel like an episode of
Law & Order
. The kind where it turns out that the boyfriend chopped his girlfriend up and put her in the freezer. Except, I didn't.
Before I go to bed I try calling and texting Shawna again. No answer. No reply. Just before I fall asleep, my phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number.
Devon saw something.
I text back.
Who is this?
Cara. Devon's sister. Come by tmrrw morning.
K.
I reply.
The screen goes dark. My dreams are full of chainsaws, blood and bones.
In my dream, a skeleton dressed in a cheerleading costume is repeatedly poking me in my right breast with its bony finger. For some reason, this makes me laughâat least, in my dream. Then I open my eyes and realize I am still in the white room. I am lying on the toilet rod. Being jabbed doesn't seem funny anymore. I'm going to have a bruise for sure. The only good thing is that no one tried to kill me while I was asleep. And I must be losing weight because my skirt feels loose. That's a bonus.
When I get up and go to the bathroom, it suddenly occurs to me that there might be hidden cameras. I wonder if someone is watching me pee. I put down the lid of the toilet and stand on it, peering into every corner. I don't see anything out of the ordinary, unless there's a camera in the showerhead. Just in case, I unscrew the showerhead and run water over it. I've already decided not to take any showers. I need to be able to hear what's going on at all times.
Then I check the main room. Slowly. Carefully. I consider the pot lights. The ceilings are, like, twelve feet high. And a camera in a pot light would just show the top of my head anyway. And only when I was underneath it. The only thing that looks remotely like a camera is a peephole high up on the door. I stand on the recycling bin and look out. Or try to. Nothing. It must only work in reverse. I climb down, tear up some paper and wet it at the sink. When it's turned into mush, I climb up again and stuff it into the peephole.
Even that much exertion makes me feel weak, so I sit at the kitchen table and eat an apple. Every bite makes me gag. I have no idea what time it is. It's daytime. That's all I know. And I have to write another stupid essay. I look over at my wall drawing and smile. For some reason, it makes me feel good to have decorated my prison. I got in trouble when I drew on the living-room walls when I was about six. It wasn't scribbling, exactly. It was a mural depicting a magical kingdom where I was a princess and my family and friends were my loyal subjects and I had a pet unicorn. I thought it was an excellent addition to the room. I'd never seen Mom so mad. She had just painted the room a lovely sky blue. I think that's what got me started. The blank blue canvas.
Thinking about how mad Mom was that day reminds me that today's essay subject is wrath. I get the pen and paper and start to write.
Are wrath and anger the same thing? Wrath seems much more serious. Biblical, almost. Not that I believe in the kind of god who smites people with his wrath. Although it would be totally okay for him or her to smite whoever has put me in this room. I hope to have the chance to do some smiting myself. I used to have a really bad temper.
When I was little, I was always having hissy fits about one thing or another. The temperature of the milk on my cereal (very cold). The arrangement of my stuffies on my bed (alphabetical, if you can believe it). I sat through a lot of time-outs. I still don't take criticism well. Never have. But I figured out in about grade seven that if I wanted to get away with stuff, I needed to stop freaking out all the time. I needed to be agreeable. So I stopped. And it worked. I got away with murder. And I was a lot happier. So was everyone else. And happier parents aren't nearly as alert. Trust me.
Once in a while I still get really angry. When it's the right thing to do. Like when I caught my old boyfriend, Gabe, kissing that slut Jasmine. I went off on them like a cherry bomb on the fourth of July. Haven't talked to either of them since. Not one word in three years. Silence is golden, right?