The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky: Chapters 11–15

“They’re merely that—check-ins. I’ll still be here. But a therapist can give you the kind of focused attention you need. They can help you get to the bottom of why you’re eating as you are, and they’ll have the expertise to help you. One of my jobs is to facilitate this sort of arrangement.”

But this isn’t what the Condor boys would do, even if they dared tinker with Professor Verist’s Time Twister, which is kept under strict lock and key at Constellation Corps’ headquarters.

Sure, he plays the part of oblivious overworked dad pretty well, giving Reed and me a great deal of personal latitude to live our best lives, but his liberal approach is actually a well-thought-out choice, not a sign of neglect.

Not sure the approach has done Marcus any favors, what with Reed’s history of troublemaking and my penchant for sneaking out in the middle of the night, but let no one accuse Marcus of not caring.

This is why I know Reed is in for a fresh lecture on expectations—and that he’ll be signing one of Marcus’s “responsibility contracts,” a non-legally-binding and therefore essentially meaningless document—when Marcus walks into the kitchen and hits the play button on the answering machine.

Reed checks the machine daily in an effort to delay Marcus finding out about his myriad acts of delinquency—a pointless endeavor because after failing to reach Marcus on the landline, the school invariably calls his cell—but Reed must have been too distracted this afternoon.

Sure, Marcus acts like a grown man when he has to, but he’s still as obsessed with video games and WWE as we are, so these little windows of time are usually raucous, spent packing in quality dad time before Marcus has to leave for work. 

Reed quietly navigates our island, his avatar decked in full competitive wrestling gear, fishing aimlessly.

“It’s not that big a deal. You know Ricamora and I go way back. He thought the whole thing was kind of amusing, actually. I’ve got lunch detention for two weeks, which is nothing, and I had to surrender the keycard. Turns out keycard usage is logged by the evil Skynet, so he knew that’s how we got in.”

I shake my head, resigned.

We emerge from the stairwell into a room of painted brick, an eclectic space characterized by hand-me-down furnishings that might once have resided in rooms aboveground.

I imagine the squishing sounds as a box of Bagel Bites is reduced to the size of a fifty-cent piece, the crunching noise as a box of Cookie Crisp sees its untimely demise.

The circle recites that famous mantra about God giving you serenity and helping you change some things and accept other things.

I know what’s real and what isn’t, that I’m being fanciful.

The incongruence leaves me feeling even more unsettled.

I want to tell him that hate isn’t a strong enough word for how I feel about myself, that I don’t know the just-right word, that I need Evelyn because she would know; she’d have at least five just-right words for how loathsome I’ve become.

I’m not sure what I regret more: that I’m too impulsive to maintain the silent treatment for even five minutes, or that the words sound almost soggy.

She flips to a page containing several lines of scrawl.

This was our modus operandi for the first several weeks when she started pulling me from fifth period.

I want to ask for more information, but I know Ms. Finch won’t expound.