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says, stopping in the dark stairwell to breathe in. “Smell that?”
    I smell a lot of things and they’re all disgusting. “Your BO?”
    Garvey laughs. “No. It’s Indian food. She makes it every day at lunchtime. She’s gorgeous, too. She wears these”—he sweeps his arm along his leg to the floor—”wraps. And she has this smirk I can’t interpret.” He shakes his head and keeps climbing, saying nothing about the people through the door on the second floor and the music they’re blasting. It gets hotter the higher we go. At the top of the stairs it’s bright—the sun pours through two big windows—and broiling. He pushes open a door that doesn’t seem to have a knob.
    “Here we are. Home sweet home.”
    It smells like vinegar and wet dirty socks. There’s linoleum, not just in the kitchen but covering the whole apartment, and my sneakers stick to it as if I have gum on both soles.
    “Here. Bring your stuff to my room.”
    Off the short hallway are three rooms. “Deena,” he says, pointing into a tidy blue room with a lime green bedspread and hundreds of earrings, the dangly kind my mother won’t let me wear yet, hanging from ribbons on the wall. “Heidi”—her room is just a pile of clothes and no bed—”and me.” Garvey’s room is all bed— two queen-sized mattresses put together. “We like to sprawl,” he says. “I’ll put one back in Heidi’s room and you can have your privacy in here.”
    “Do Mom and Dad know you live together?” I’ve heard my father rant about Garvey’s generation enough to know he wouldn’t like this at all.
    Garvey’s eyes widen and he covers his mouth with both hands, mocking me. “Ooooh, don’t tell them. I’m so scared of what ‘Mom and Dad’ think.”
    “They’re not dead. They’re just getting a divorce.”
    “Oh, thanks for the clarification.”
    “They’re still your parents.”
    “They’re my progenitors, not my parents. The word
parent
suggests something a little more hands-on.” He starts to drag one of the beds toward the door. “Besides, they’re both getting more than I am now.”
    “Getting what?”
    He drops the mattress and pats me on the head. “Little babe in the woods. So much to learn.”
    There’s a fan in the corner of the room. I squat down to feel it on my face. My sweat turns cool, then disappears.
    Garvey lies down on the bed by the door. “I’m surprised you let Mom escape for an assignation with her paramour.”
    I have a bad feeling about what he’s just said. “Do you mind speaking English?”
    “You let Mom go off with her boyfriend.”
    “She just went to Sylvie’s. I’ve been there before.”
    “She went to Sylvie’s. But Sylvie’s in France. And so a guy named Martin is going to be there with Mom. You are definitely not the sharpest tack in the box.”
    Tears rise and the fan blows them toward my ears.
Say hi to Sylvie for me
, I just said to her in the car before she dropped me off.
I will
, she said.
    “You really didn’t know?”
    I shake my head. When I find my voice, I say, “Is he from Ashing?”
    My brother laughs, loud because he’s on his back and because he loves it when I’m stupid. “Shit, no. God, Daley, do you think she’d ever have anything to do with the warmed-over corpses in that town?”
    “But that’s where we
live
. We’re moving back there on Monday. I’m starting sixth grade. Mom found an apartment downtown on Water Street.” I say all this to make sure it’s still true.
    “I know. And that’s all for you. For your benefit. Mom outgrew that town a long time ago.”
    “So who is Martin?” I can barely move my lips. I forgot how bad my brother could make me feel when he wants to.
    “I don’t know. That’s what I was trying to ask you.”
    If my mother lied about who she was with, she could have lied about where she was going, too. It makes me woozy to think of a whole weekend of not knowing.
    At least I know where my father is. On a Friday night at