How did James die? she wondered. Who is Ford so angry at?
As she drifted off to sleep, lulled by the sound of his heartbeat, she saw a faint image of a skein of golden rope curling slowly downward, and had the strangest idea that if she could just grab it she’d have her answer.
CHAPTER 7
Dude, your breath is foul. Get off!”
Who said that?
Sadie came awake in an instant. Her eyes and Ford’s snapped open simultaneously, giving them both a close-up view of Copernicus’s big wet nose and lolling tongue.
Pushing it aside, Ford lurched to the bathroom, relieved himself, and started brushing his teeth without washing his hands in between.
Good morning, Sadie said to him politely.
He looked in the mirror and grunted. Still brushing his teeth, he turned left and right, inspecting his profile. Finally he smiled with a mouth full of toothpaste foam, and for a moment he resembled the guy in the graduation picture, goofy and carefree. He spit out the toothpaste, rinsed his mouth, wet his hair to slick it back, and stood up, and the boy with angry eyes was back.
From purely scientific motives she was glad when he removed the T-shirt he’d slept in, providing her first glimpse of any part of him unclothed. In the mirror Sadie observed that his shoulders, arms, and chest looked like something from the ancient Greek wing of the Detroit Institute of Art, while the scars and cuts crisscrossing his knuckles and forearms told of a more recent history. Together they gave him the appearance of a kind of epic hero fighting against long odds.
Which he’d adore, she thought, since as far as she had seen, Ford had done nothing but purposely create conflict with every person he came into contact with except his sister. The Me vs. Everyone Else paradigm apparently appealed to him, and she wondered if some of his more antisocial behaviors—
At least put the seat down, Sadie called as he left the bathroom without showering.
—could be attempts to deliberately antagonize people. That way he could always feel like others wronged him, and never have to take responsibility for his own actions.
Subject in above average physical condition but emotionally stunted, Sadie recorded in her mental notebook, because “looks like a hot guy, behaves like a five-year-old” didn’t sound very scientific.
He got dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing the previous day, had “breakfast”—cold water poured over a packet of instant coffee, which he drank down with the unmixed globs of powder still floating on the surface—and headed down two flights of stairs and out of the apartment building, the anger from the previous night banking around the surfaces of his mind like a trapped fly. Unlocking his bike from beside the DO NOT LOCK BIKES HERE EVER!! sign he pedaled the wrong way down his street toward the busy intersection at Bob’s Burger Boulevard.
As he rode, his mind unfolded into an old-fashioned map, roads and buildings appearing like they’d been sketched out in front of him. His imagined streetscape had some of the same buildings as the one he was riding through but without most of the graffiti, and often with different signs, so that Cha Cha’s Liquor-n-Things and Time 4 Pawn were merged together on his mental map into one building marked SUPERMARKET. A church with broken glass in the windows and a sign in front proclaiming OUT OF SINESS appeared spruced up in Ford’s mind with a sign that said INDOOR SKATE PARK (LASER TAG TOURNAMENTS MONTHLY). There were other buildings on his “map” too, older looking, as though he was simultaneously picturing the streets as they had once been and as they could be.
He rode like he was in a fantasy world of his own design, treating stop signs as optional and the rules of the road as something best avoided. As he jumped his bike onto the sidewalk to avoid the posted twelve-minute wait time at the intersection of Calm Colon Avenue and H3O Purified Water-Style Beverage Way, his phone buzzed with a text. In violation of the hands-free-only laws he pulled it from his pocket and read it without slowing down or braking. It was from Cali, and it said, “I’M SORRY. YOU WERE RIGHT. I SHOULD HAVE TOLD YOU. FORGIVE?”
Sure, babe, he thought. Later.
Why later? Sadie demanded. What is this stupid game that boys play? You know you’re going to write back to her, why don’t you just—
She interrupted herself. She’d heard “Sure, babe. Later.” Heard the words. In his head. For the first time, she’d been able to hear what he was thinking.
Naturally, it had been something annoying. But she was still excited.
Now that she was aware of it, she began to hear other thoughts. It wasn’t easy and primarily she got fragments, but it was clear that most of the sounds in his head weren’t just noises, they were actual words. Some looped in and out, like can’t be late, while others appeared only once. She heard him think something that sounded like burger for lunch, and then a series of blurred dots became his wallet with the two dollars in it and she caught a hint of the stickiness again before it was consumed in a flare of anger.
It was like watching the gears on a clock. A thought triggered a memory, which triggered an emotion, which triggered—
A dozen horns honked, brakes squealed, and a delivery van shuddered to a stop inches from Ford’s back tire as he went speeding across Chef’s Best Lasagna Avenue against traffic.
—action.
Idiots, he thought, as though the commotion were everyone’s fault but his, and Sadie was torn between laughter and dismay.
At five minutes to eight he parked his bike in front of an enormous stone building with a sign that said, THE FORMER ST. CLAIRE APARTMENTS IS BECOMING CLAIRE FARMS! ANOTHER MASON BLIGH COMMUNITY ASSET. Distracted by the effort of holding back his anger, Ford didn’t see the tall, red-headed guy standing on the front steps of the building until he’d plowed into him, nearly knocking him to the ground.
The guy regained his balance and turned to see what had happened. “Are you okay?” he asked Ford. He was skinny and gawky with pink cheeks, red hair, and big green eyes behind round tortoiseshell glasses. At least that was what Sadie noticed. What Ford saw was a guy with four inches on him in height but ten pounds lighter, built like a wimp, around twenty-three years old.
Ford said, “You should watch where you’re standing.” Like it was the guy’s fault Ford had walked into him. Sadie realized he was itching for a fight.
The man, looking a little dazed, blinked. “You’re right. Sorry.” He held out his hand. “I’m—”
Ford walked right by it, into the black-and-white-checked marble hall. An older man wearing jeans and an ironed plaid shirt stood leaning against a fluted wood pillar with a clipboard in his hand.
“Winter, you’re late,” he barked when he saw Ford.
“According to my watch I’m exactly on time, Mr. Harding.” Ford held up his right wrist, pointing to Mickey’s two hands on the twelve and the eight.
The foreman shook his head. “You’re all the way back, with Nix.” He poked a thumb to his right. “And no need to saunter—I want this floor picked clean as a turkey carcass by lunch.”
Ford spotted a sign in the far back corner of the once-grand lobby that read LAUNDRY ROOM, and Sadie heard him think, Nice work, Nix. But when they reached it, she couldn’t see the appeaclass="underline" There were long channels ripped through the baseboards and across the ceiling and strips of floral wallpaper rolled up from the middle of the walls like chocolate curls on a wedding cake.