Starbird Murphy and the World Outside (24 page)

“Um, no, I haven't. Do you want some chai?”

“You have energy drinks?”

“No.”

“I'll have what you said.”

“Chai.”

“Yeah, chai.”

I sat Ben at the desk while I got another chair from the café and crammed it in beside him, clearing a space in the clutter for our tea. In that time, he sketched a picture of the alley behind the café, and our back door with the sign on it. He was talented. He could draw a lot more than birds.

“I have to do bills and payroll.” I opened the ledger book and put it in front of him. “And I only have two hours.”

“Why are you the one doing payroll?” Ben was still shading in his drawing.

“It's a family business and my, um, uncle is in the hospital, and my . . . sister is really overwhelmed. I'm the only one in the family who's good with numbers.”

“These bills are overdue.” He said as he fanned out the notices on the desk with one finger. “That's a big pile and I don't see any sorting system. My dad would lose his mind. Did you do the math homework already? I thought of you because it's word problems again, and I thought about calling you, but you have my phone number. I don't have yours, so I was glad and really surprised when you called me. Cheez Whiz, this is a lot of bills. I'm talking a lot.” Ben took a deep inhale and seemed to be fighting to keep his lips pressed together. “I had, like, three Red Bulls today.”

“Is that some kind of burger?”

“Burger. That's funny. You're funny. I kind of knew you would be because of the things you wear. You remind me of the girl who plays bass in that band Tragic, the way she always wears complementary colors together like purple and yellow. Oh spit. I can't shut up. Can energy drinks make your heart explode?” Ben grabbed his drawing again and started coloring in the letters for the café sign.

“Is an energy drink some kind of alcohol?”
This guy is crazy or drunk.
I was so stupid to invite him here. I barely know him. V's going to kill me. So much for impressing the Family.
I eyed the phone on the desk in case I needed to call Beacon House.

“Oh no.” He stopped shading. “They're just full of caffeine, and it's probably really bad for you to drink more than one. Well, it's probably bad to drink any at all, probably. Are those glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling?”

“Here.” I handed Ben the chai I brought him. “We make it herbal without black tea. And it's got cow milk in it.”

Ben took the mug with a shaky hand and smelled it before taking a sip. Then he took another.

After a few more drinks of chai, and once he had the ledger open and a calculator in his hand, Ben seemed to relax, although he was almost working faster than I could watch him. “I do this stuff for my dad all the time,” he told me. For the next half hour, he taught me about payroll checks and tax withholdings, and he discovered the café's version of a timesheet, where Ephraim recorded the actual hours worked on the schedule he had posted. It was in the file cabinet along with the hourly wage for each worker. There was a pretty simple program Ben downloaded that calculated taxes and printed pay stubs.

“Your uncle is still going to have to sign the checks, but he can do that from the hospital.” Ben took the last pay stub off the printer. “You've got a lot of under-the-table workers. You could get in big trouble for that.”

“We've got it under control.”
V wouldn't be happy about this
. “Please don't tell anyone, okay?”

Ben looked at me. His eyes behind his glasses were a milky shade of brown. They reminded me of the thick pools of mud we would get on the Farm by November, which lasted all winter and could easily pull off a rain boot or suck your leg in up to the calf. I felt the red splotches start to sprout on my chest and radiate up toward my face.

“What happened to your hand?” he said.

I looked down at the scrapes on my skin, still red but starting to heal. It had been a week since I got them. “I was closing the barn door. It was an accident. Can you explain the ledger book to me?” The office was so small, our chairs were touching and neither of us could stand up without forcing the other one to move. His long legs barely fit under the desk.

Ben yawned. Whatever nervous energy he had been burning was turning to smoke. “Black and red, income and expenses. The income is listed as food and beverage sales. In this column, you record business costs: payroll, food, supplies, maintenance. It looks like the overdue bills are mostly big-ticket items, maybe from a remodel. Your problem is that the café's expenses are more than the income.” Ben paged through the ledger and tapped a series of numbers into the calculator. “I don't want to say this, but your café is in the red.”

“Yeah, I know. We just need to attract more customers,” I said, shifting in my seat and accidentally brushing my leg against Ben's.

“Yeah, like a thousand more customers a week.” Ben shook his head and yawned again. “What's this payment to Arnold Muller for? It isn't logged.”

“I've never heard that name.” I looked over Ben's shoulder at the ledger, my loose hair spilling onto his arm.

Ben flipped backward through the book. “Here it is again last month on the same day, but it doesn't say what the payment is for. Is he the landlord?”

“No. We own the property.”

“It's the same amount every month in this ledger. None of the payments have a memo, but they were all made on the twenty-eighth. Today is the twenty-fifth, and there's no bill from Arnold Muller in this stack.” Ben pushed back from the table and flipped through the piles of bills again. “Wait a minute, what the pluck.” He picked up the pile of pay stubs. “I thought the name sounded familiar. One of your employees is named Sun Muller.”

“Sun's last name is Muller? Maybe his dad did some work for the café,” I said. I was starting to think we were going too far. Whatever Ben was seeing, he shouldn't see it. Maybe I shouldn't see it. “Anyway, V asked for help with bills and payroll, so I'll let Ephraim worry about the rest when he's back.” I started to put things away.

Ben watched me. “You definitely shouldn't pay anything to Arnold Muller without an invoice. It's sketchy. Plus, it's part of the reason your expenses are so high.”

I glanced at Ben. His skin didn't seem so pale in the light of the office, and his bony fingers were graceful when they punched numbers into the calculator. His spine still seemed oddly twisted, but he smelled good, for a boy. Not like sweat and earth and plants, but like a T-shirt fresh from the wash that had been hung on a line to dry.

I was still smelling that smell when Ben said, “Starbird, are you in a cult?”

 22 

“I
'm supposed to be home by eleven.” I stood up and banged my knee on the desk, sending me back down into my chair.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean it in a mean way,” Ben was saying as I stood up again, pushing my knees against his to make space for my legs.

“How could you say that to me, when I invited you here?” I snatched a paper out of his hand.

“I was double-checking the address online and I found stuff about the Free Family. I was just curious.” He tried to help me gather the papers, but I put my hands on his to make him stop.

“My Family is on the Internet?”

“There's . . . stuff. I have a freaky religious family, too. I didn't mean to insult you.”

“We're not freaky religious.” I turned around and hit my head on the low-hanging ceiling light. “I need to go home.”

“I'll drive you.” Ben stood up, too, and then we were both trapped in the cage of our chairs. “Sorry,” he said, bumping into me, and then, “Sorry,” again, without touching me.

“It's fine,” I lied.
I can't believe I was starting to like you
.
Your graceful fingers and your stupid puddle eyes. Indus understands about EARTH and the Family. Indus is my Family. You're just some guy
.

I wanted to walk home for the fresh air, but I promised V I wouldn't, so I relented and let Ben drop me off, even though he wouldn't stop apologizing the whole way.

He let me out down the street from Beacon House to keep V from seeing us. Before I got out of the car, he said, “I was so sheeping stupid tonight. I couldn't shut up and then I said that cult thing. Will you just please let me tell you about my family sometime?”

“I don't think that sounds very relevant, but thanks for your help with the payroll.” I slammed the car door.

V and Io were still up, sitting in the living room when I walked in. Ephraim wasn't home from the hospital, but he did talk to V on the phone to assure her that “It's all good,” in between coughs. One thing was good: Ephraim didn't appear to be at risk for a heart attack. But his doctors were going to run tests on his lungs. There was a crease between V's eyebrows that wouldn't soften. I did a loose, sloppy job on my homework before crawling exhausted into bed.

 
 

I faked my way through history Monday morning, but I hadn't done the reading. Things didn't become horrifying until second period, when I had to hand my math over to Ben. He had glanced up when I walked into class and then looked back down at his paper. “Hey,” he said as I slid into my seat, giving me a casual half wave.

My body turned into a thing that didn't belong to me. My rogue left arm knocked my math book on the floor, and my right elbow bumped into Ben's head as he bent to pick it up. I was a marionette in a windstorm, and red splotches covered my chest like clouds.

But the worst part was when Ben had to hand me back my homework with only five marked right out of ten, and a drawing on the margin. It looked like a rock show poster, the kind people hang on our bulletin board at the café. A giant caveman was stepping over the Space Needle with a club in his hand, about to smash into it. In block letters, it said,
Free Math Tutoring
, and then in smaller letters at the bottom, it said,
Ben's lunch table. Cafeteria.

It was a fantastic drawing that made me sick. I didn't want to be mean to Ben, but I also didn't want to have lunch with him. I forced myself to smile and whispered, “Thanks, but I can't,” and got an F on the homework.

 
 

I sleepwalked through the rest of the day, zoned out while Cham and his friends talked at lunch, and ignored the mean girls in horticulture, where we took a quiz on soil testing. Rory sat next to me again, and then we walked together to history club.

She was right in the middle of telling me about how she moved to Seattle from Kansas at the start of the year and her parents couldn't pick her up until five, so they gave her the choice of either school clubs or taking the bus to the YMCA, except that she hated swimming. “Do you have the app called Smash? You can follow my blog on your phone.” She pulled a small black device out of her bag and started tapping it with both thumbs while she walked.

“I don't have a phone,” I said.

“My parents wouldn't get me one until we moved here,” Rory said. “Just say you don't feel safe being out of contact, and yours will get you one.”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Wait, have you heard this song by Blue Scholars?”

Rory stopped walking and held out a slender white cord that split in two pieces and had squishy nubs dangling from each end. I heard something coming from inside the nubs. Leaning my head down toward them, I held them an inch or two from my ears.

“You are such a space alien,” Rory said, watching me. She grabbed the nubs and stuck one in each of my ears.

The music. The strange, swelling melody and the hard beat. It wasn't coming from a stereo somewhere or from instruments being played in the room. The sound was inside my head, inside my body, filling up the whole world. What instruments even made these sounds? There were voices too that could have been next to me, not singing but talking to me intimately, right in my ear. The sound was somehow wild, something strange, something new and miraculous.

I looked at Rory, who was smiling and mouthing, “Isn't it awesome?” just as a boy with bad skin wearing a leather jacket swept her off her feet, yanking the music from my head and down the hall with Rory and her phone.

“Jerk!” Rory yelled, dropping her phone with a clatter.

“Sorry.” The guy waved his free arm out toward me, the one that wasn't wrapped around Rory.

Struggling away from him, Rory picked her phone up off the floor. “You're lucky it's not broken, idiot,” she sniffed, winding the white music cord around it and stuffing it in her pocket. Then she turned toward the guy, grabbed him by the back of the neck, and kissed him for a solid two minutes.

Rory dropped her book bag on the floor as she stood on her tiptoes making out. I started inspecting the lockers, wondering if I was supposed to keep walking or wait for her to finish.

Finally, they unsmacked their lips and Rory pointed to him and said, “That's Sergeant.”