“Where’s Julia?” Nick asked Marta.
“Watching TV in the family room. Emily just left a little while ago.”
“And Luke?”
“In his room. On the computer, maybe. He said he can’t stay for dinner.”
“Oh, that right? Well, he’s going to stay for dinner,” Nick said, icily. Christ. The whole suspension thing-they would have to have a Very Serious Talk. Which probably meant a Perfect Storm of an argument.
Just not tonight.
Nick took Cassie over to the family room, where Julia was engrossed in Slime Time Live on Nickelodeon.
“Hey, baby,” Nick said. “I want you to meet my friend Cassie.”
“Hi,” Julia said, and turned back to the show. Not rude, but not exactly friendly. A little cool, maybe.
“Cassie is going to be joining us for dinner.”
Julia turned around again. “Okay,” she said, warily. To Cassie, she said, “We usually don’t have company for dinner.”
Then she turned back to the flickering screen. Someone was getting doused with green slime.
“Don’t worry,” Cassie said. “I eat like a bird.”
Julia nodded.
“Two and half times my body weight in earthworms,” Cassie said.
Julia giggled.
“Are you a baseball fan?” Cassie asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” Julia said. “You mean my jersey?”
“I love the Tigers,” Cassie said.
Julia shrugged dismissively. “The girls in school keep calling me ‘tomboy’ because I wear it all the time.”
“They’re just jealous of your jersey,” Nick put in, but Julia wasn’t listening.
“You ever been to Comerica Park?” Cassie asked her.
Julia shook her head.
“Oh, it’s amazing. You’d love it. We’ve got to go there some time.”
“Really?” Julia said.
“Definitely. And listen-I got called ‘tomboy’ when I was a kid too,” said Cassie. “Just ’cause I wasn’t into Barbie.”
“Really? I hate Barbie,” Julia said.
“Barbie’s kind of creepy,” Cassie agreed. “I was never into dolls.”
“Me neither.”
“But I’ll bet you have stuffed animals to keep you company, right?”
“Beanie Babies, mostly.”
“Do you collect them?”
“Sort of.” Julia was now looking at Cassie with interest. “They’re very valuable, you know. But only if you don’t use them and stuff.”
“You mean like, never take the label off, and put them on the shelf?”
Julia nodded, this time more animatedly.
“I don’t get that,” Cassie said. “The whole point of Beanie Babies is to play with them, right? Do you have a lot, or just a couple of them?”
“I don’t know. I guess a lot. You want to see my collection?”
“Really? I’d love to.”
“Not now,” said Nick. “Later. Right now it’s suppertime, and we’re having company.”
“Okay,” Julia said. Then she yelled, “Luke, supper! We have company.”
As Nick took Cassie back to the front hall, she said, “She’s a sweetie, isn’t she?”
“A regular Ma Barker is what she is,” Nick said. “For sweetness and light, we’ve got Lucas Conover.” He took her upstairs, gestured toward the hallway. There was no need to specify which was Lucas’s room. From beneath the closed door, thrash music pulsed, an avalanche of noise with someone shouting at the top of his lungs over a thudding bass beat. Something about outta my mind, something about ashes to ashes, something about all pain, no gain. A lot of incomprehensible screaming in between.
“As you can tell, he’s a huge Lawrence Welk fan,” Nick said. He decided against knocking on the door. Let Marta get him downstairs. Lucas responded better to her anyway.
“How do you know so much about Beanie Babies?” Nick asked.
“My knowledge of Beanie Babies is limited to what I read in Newsweek. Am I busted?”
“You sure got Julia believing you’re a Beanie Babies expert.”
“Hey, whatever works, right? Though I get a feeling your son isn’t into Beanie Babies.”
“He’s a hard case, my son,” Nick said, not wanting to dwell on it. “I’m going to change, meet you downstairs in a few.”
When he came back down, Cassie and Julia were deep in conversation in the family room. “And there was blood everywhere,” Julia was saying in a hushed, serious voice.
“Oh no,” Cassie breathed.
“And it was Barney.” Julia’s eyes were moist.
“My God.”
“And Daddy said he would protect us. He said he’d do whatever he had to do.”
Nick cleared his throat; it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to encourage. “Hey, girls,” he called. “Suppertime.”
“I’ve just been hearing about what happened to Barney,” Cassie said, looking up. “Sounds horrible.”
“It was rough,” Nick said. “For all of us.” He tried to sound a little brusque, to let Cassie know he didn’t want the conversation to continue.
Luckily, Marta emerged from the kitchen just then and announced that dinner was ready.
“All right,” Nick said. “Let’s go, girls. Marta, would you go upstairs and ask Sid Vicious to join us?”
As Marta went upstairs, Julia asked, “Who’s Sid Vicious?”
“You know the Sex Pistols?” Cassie said to Nick, smiling.
“I think I saw part of some movie about them before I walked out,” Nick said. “I’m not a total geek, you know, no matter what my son thinks.”
“But who’s Sid Vicious?” Julia asked again.
Lucas’s heavy footsteps thundered as if a crate of bowling balls had been upended at the top of the stairs. At the landing he looked around, taking in Cassie’s presence with an unblinking stare.
“Luke, I’d like you to meet my friend Cassie Stadler,” Nick said.
“Cassie Stadler?”
The way he said it made Nick’s blood run cold.
“That’s right,” he said quietly. “She’ll be joining us for dinner.”
“I have to go out,” Lucas said.
“You have to stay here.”
“I have a homework project I need to do with some kids in class.”
Nick refrained from rolling his eyes. A science experiment, no doubt, designed to study the effect of Cannabis sativa on the psychophysiology of the American sixteen-year-old. “It isn’t up for discussion,” he said. “Sit.”
“I like your music,” Cassie said to him.
Lucas looked at her with something just shy of hostility. “Yeah?” His tone of voice made it short for: Yeah, what of it?
“If you call that music,” Nick said, feeling protective of Cassie. He gave her an apologetic shrug. “And when he isn’t listening to this kind of noise, it’s that gangsta rap stuff.”
“Gangsta rap stuff.” Cassie’s mimicry was perfect, and devastating.
Lucas half snorted, half chortled.
“You’d prefer it if he listened to the Mamas and the Papas?” she asked. “Like some kind of Stepford son?”
Hey, no fair, Nick wanted to say. “I didn’t even listen to the Mamas and the Papas,” he said.
Cassie wasn’t paying attention. She was focused on Lucas. “I’m curious. How long have you been into Slasher?”
“A few months,” Lucas said, surprised.
“Not a lot of people your age even know about Slasher. I bet you have all their albums.”
“Got downloads of some stuff they haven’t released yet, and some bootleg demos, too.”
“Slasher would be a rock band,” Nick said, feeling obscurely excluded. “Tell me if I’m warm.”
“‘Slasher’ is what they call Dad, you know,” Lucas said, pleased.
“I’ve heard. Anyway, Slasher’s cool, but John Horrigan’s kind of a jerk, I gotta tell you,” Cassie said, taking a step toward Lucas.