Page 52 of Bad Neighbors
Gale scoffed. “Parameters. Speak English.”
“I just mean… Are we going to switch days or—”
“No,” Baron said, the word firm and uncompromising. “We are not scheduling her damn time to make sure it’s all fair. We’re not eight years old.”
“I agree.” Gale met my eyes. “I finally figured out— she wants and needs us for different things. We’re not interchangeable to her. I say we let Jude take the lead on what she needs from us.”
As I nodded, the door opened, and Jude walked in. Her face was carefully blank, but I could discern a barely visible pinch of worry. I shot a glance at Gale. What the hell had he done?
Gale turned to look, and I saw his body tighten as he stood. “Hey. Everything okay?”
I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone wring their hands before, but Jude did exactly that, linking her fingers and twisting.
“We need to talk,” she said.
The words fell like stones between us, and for a second, we all simply looked at each other. Then Gale roused.
“Sure. Come sit.” I could see the anxiety blooming in his features. Theoh, shitfeeling he was trying to control. He gestured to the couch beside him and Jude glanced around the room.
“No… I need to sit away from you...all of you.” The glimmer of a smile touched her lips and then was gone. “You’re too distracting when you’re close.”
“Here, then.” Baron pulled a chair out at the head of the table and she sank down in it. Baron sat back down in his seat across the table from her and Gale leaned against the back of the couch, a few feet away. I stayed where I was. Here, I was close to the door of my room if I needed to escape. I was good at seeming confident and easygoing—perhaps because I always had been with females—but I was anything but where this girl was concerned. My feelings for her were crazy, even to me, and I knew I wouldn’t handle it well if she told us she’d changed her mind.
We were all silent, readying ourselves, I guessed, for whatever Jude was about to unload. “Talk to us, Pinky,” Baron said.
“I... I got to thinking,” she said. “I started thinking about this...all of us...how we were going to make it work, I mean...and I got scared. There’s a lot I haven’t told you guys, a lot I probably should before we take things any farther.”
“You can tell us anything,” Baron said. He was the soother, the voice of comfort and reason. I was glad, and was sure Gale was, too, that he was here. Gale was too hot headed for anything heavy, and I always needed time to process.
“So, I told you, Baron, a little about my family. I didn’t tell you everything, so I’ll just start at the beginning.” She folded her hands together on top of the table, and even from across the room I could see the white of her knuckles.
“I grew up rich. Like, really rich. My father did something on Wall Street… I never bothered to figure out what, precisely. Maybe if I had been the slightest bit curious where his money came from, it might not have been as big of a shock as it was when he was arrested this past January.” She gave a little shake of her head, as if the memory was baffling. “He was into a lot of shit, but it was primarily money laundering for an organization I’d be hard pressed to call anything other than mafia.”
I raised my hand to brush over my mouth, trying to hide my expression. The fucking mob? Money laundering? This was Hollywood shit, not people I knew.
“He probably would have been fine, but he got greedy. Started embezzling. I’m not sure why, but they didn’t kill him. Instead, they made sure he went to prison. Maybe they wanted to make an example of him? I don’t know. All I know is it was this very public scandal. We lost everything. Our tuition—me to Columbia, my younger sister to a prep school—was paid through the end of the school year, so we were able to stay through May. After that, though… everything was gone.” She stopped and looked down at the table.
“How’d you end up here?” Gale asked. His voice was curious rather than condemning. He had some experience with the darker side of things, I guessed.
“My sister was fifteen at the time. Since I was in college, with no job, no home, social services placed her with our only living relative. He’s an uncle… lives in Cold Spring.” Cold Spring was a small town, mostly rural community around two hours from here.
“Okay…” Baron prompted.
She swallowed. “He’s awful. I… I don’t trust him with my sister. The way he looks at her…” She broke off with a shudder. “I have to get her out of that place. So I applied here, got a scholarship, got a job...I found a cheap farmhouse and a little land I was able to purchase with what remained of my trust, just a little ways away from her, and I just needed to finish school and get a job closer to her high school so I can get custody. Everything was falling into place.”
“What about the dorm?” I wasn’t connecting the dots, so far. Everything she’d told us revealed a lot about her motives, what drove her, but I couldn’t figure out how we fit. Or what she was fearful of.
She looked at me and I saw the little line between her eyebrows that signaled worry. “This was the only university with a classics program close enough to keep an eye on the situation with Eleanor. The first place I found a job was Sugar Babes. I’d get up in the morning, drive the two hours here, go to class, stay all day, and then work in the evening. Drive the two hours back home. I was waking up at five to get here on time for class and not getting home until between midnight and two a.m., depending on how late I worked.
“After the first week, I knew I couldn’t handle much more of that. I’d end up in a ditch. So I applied for the housing grant and somehow was placed here, with you guys.” Her eyes were pleading. “I’m sorry. I should have told you from the beginning, but I just...couldn’t.”
Gale’s eyes were narrowed. “It’s okay, baby. But I don’t understand why you’re so worried, now. Surely you don’t think we’re going to kick you out or something.”
“No! Of course not. The problem… I can’t believe none of us have really considered this…”
“Appearances.” It was Baron that slid the last piece into the puzzle, and Jude looked at him gratefully.
“Exactly. I have to be so careful. I feel like I’m walking a freaking tightrope. The grant and the scholarship are both already contingent upon maintaining my grade point average. If it becomes public knowledge that I’m in a polyandrous relationship, I could be denied custody on moral grounds.”
