THE DEBT BOX SET by O'Keefe Molly

Author:O'Keefe, Molly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

3

Still that night

But it isn’t The Wife coming up the stairs.

It’s Carissa in her pale pink pajamas. The moonlight coming through our bedroom door turns the long butcher knife in her hand to silver.

“Open the door,” she whispers, all murderous business. Well, as much as a fifteen-year-old half-Chinese girl in a pair of pink pajamas could mean murderous business.

Which is a lot, actually.

I do the circuit with the keys until I have one left that could only be for the office door.

I lift it in the air. “Got it!”

My words are practically silent, that’s how low we are whispering.

“I’m out,” Rosa breathes, her hands over her stomach. And none of us blame her. She is four months pregnant and seventeen years old. She doesn’t need anything else on her plate.

She and Carissa hug briefly and Rosa is gone like she’d never been there at all.

“Give me the knife,” Tommy says to Carissa. “I’m bigger.”

Sure, he’s bigger than Carissa. But he is way smaller than The Pastor. I have the sense not to say that out loud, but we are all thinking it.

I can tell by our faces we are thinking how bad all of this could go.

“I’ll get Beth,” she says and Tommy nods. The two of them co-conspirators in murder. Murder? Are we planning on murder?

I’ve been down this road. It doesn’t end well.

“You can’t kill him,” I say. Because someone needs to say that. Needs to make that clear.

“I can’t?”

“You’ll go to jail.”

“Dude,” he sneers, “I’m going to jail anyway. Now or years from now, it don’t matter.”

“Yeah, but murder?”

“You don’t want to do this, fine. Go back to your books. No judgment, Simon. For real. You helped a lot. But me and Carissa can do this on our own.”

Carissa has been at St. Joke’s for years, and she runs this shit. There isn’t a thing that happens in these walls that she isn’t fully on top of.

And she stands next to Tommy at this door like she has no plans on bailing.

Because what is happening in that office isn’t right. Not by a mile.

They are badass. There is no other word for it. And I am on their side.

Because their side is right.

There is a thump on the other side of the door and I swear under my breath. No part of this is good. But it is, somehow, right. And the distinction has never been so clear in my head. Sometimes you have to do some bad shit for the right reasons.

My fingers are rock solid as I put the key in the lock and slowly, silently, turn it. The door pops open and then eases forward.

There is this very still place in the center of my brain where I understand what I might see on the other side of the door. Where I think I know what I am going to see. But there is no place in my brain or my body where I can understand the sight of a teenage girl fighting against a grown man double her size while he pulls up her nightgown.

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