“So how does it work?”
“Not the way you say it does. I can’t just push back.”
“Why not?”
“He loses his temper.”
“Does he hit you?”
Her spoon clinks against her bowl. “No.”
“But he shouts at you.”
“Yes. Can you stop asking me these questions?”
I let out a slow breath, look briefly toward the door, then back at Dee. She looks haunted by these questions, and is no longer meeting my eyes.
“Dee,” I say, and I tap her foot under the table with mine. I see the flash of a smile, but otherwise nothing. “Dee,” I say, doing it again.
“What are you doing?” she asks, failing to hide the same smile. She kicks my foot back.
“There’s been something on my mind.”
“What?”
“It’s going to sound weird.”
“Just as long as you don’t ask me about Dad anymore. I’d rather not think about him.”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“It’ll make me look stupid.”
“How do you know you don’t already look stupid? After all, you climbed into that car with Dad.”
“Ouch.”
She lifts her spoon, points it at me. “Don’t play with fire, I’m your only ally in this house.”
There’s a certain truth to that, I’m sure.
“Well, go on, ask me.”
“How exactly do you spell your name?”
There’s a space, just a pause of time where we grin at each other, where our eyes meet, and it’s like we’re transported somewhere else.
At least, that’s what it feels like to me.
And then she looks down, laughing a little, shaking her head. “I forgot about that.”
“Did I get it wrong?”
“Very wrong. It’s D-E-I-D-R-E.”
“Huh,” I say. “I would never have guessed.”
“That’s what you get for skipping school.”
“It’s not exactly the most common name.”
“Common enough,” she fires back, “To know how to spell it.”
At that moment Glass bursts back into the room, and at once blankets the mood with his own.
“Get up, Duncan.”
I frown. “Why?”
“I’ve got some things to handle tonight, so I need to get your measurements and vitals down first. You can have dinner later.”
I consider resisting, but when I see his angry eyes flick to Dee, I immediately say, “Okay, Glass.”
I get up, leave the room, cast one last look at her.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, and she starts to sip soup from her spoon, as if eating alone in the large dining room is completely normal for her.
Maybe it’s just me who is abnormal. Back in the home, we never ate alone. It was fifteen or twenty boys spread down a long steel table, each guarding their food, wolfing it down as fast as possible. In Thailand the whole village ate together in a communal dining hall.
I don’t think I can remember the last time I ate alone.
That image of her, by herself, somehow unnerves me.
I realize I’m standing in the doorway looking at her. Glass has walked off toward the gym, and Dee is paying me no attention.
“Don’t keep him waiting,” she says. “Trust me.”
“You eat alone a lot?”
She shrugs. “Pretty much every night.”
“What about Frank?”
“Dad doesn’t invite him in much.”
“You mean he waits outside in the car?”
“Yeah.”
I lick my lips. “What are you doing after dinner?”
“Homework, and then going to bed,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing ever.
I nod.
“You?”
“Probably get some weights in, then go for a run.”
“So your own homework.”
I grin. “Yeah.”
Glass’ voice booms through the house: “Duncan!”
“Go,” she says.
It’s so hard to drag myself away from her, but I do, jog toward the gym.
When I get there, Glass is waiting. He’s set up a bunch of testing equipment and measuring equipment. Height, wingspan, vertical jump, standing reach, weight, body fat percentage by caliper – which is unreliable – blood pressure, heart rate, and some other machines I don’t recognize.
“I’m going to need to take blood,” he says.
“Why?”
“I want to see your resting oxygen saturation.”
I realize there is a lot I have to learn, and for now, I hate to just have to blindly trust him. I don’t much like that.
“What do you need all this for?”
“You’ve got a great body but it’s not mature yet,” he says, patting me on my chest. “You’re hard, I know, low body fat, that’s good. But we need to get more weight on you, especially here,” he says, and he slaps my ass, and then my thighs. “You need lower body strength.”