Busted (Stacked Deck Book 11) Read online

  It’s not like it’s cold out, but sitting in an empty room all by myself for more than a minute gives me the heebie-jeebies. And he knows it. He knows I like the contact. So he makes sure we touch almost always.

  Rob’s not my boyfriend or anything. He’s more than that. He’s my friend-soulmate.

  Somewhere, in another world, another time, there’s a factory that stores and selects souls for humans down here on Earth. The twins and I were in our mothers’ stomachs at the same time. My mom was eight or so months along with me when Luke and Rob’s parents found out about the twins that were coming. So for that month or so that both women were pregnant at the same time, the soul-selectors were hard at work. They chose one, tore it in half, and because the guys’ mom and my mom have been best friends since forever, they figured Why not? They sent half of the soul to me, and the other half to Rob’s mom. There were two boys in that one womb, but the best boy got the other half of my soul.

  Rob has it, and he feels this soulmate thing the same as I do. We’re family. We’re inseparable. And though I love Luke too – I really do – he’s more like a pet for us. It’s not the same. Not even close to the same.

  “Why are you in here?” I ask Rob and let my hand slide across my page as I draw his lashes in. So long, so dark and perfect. “What did Luke do?”

  “Why do you assume it was me?” Bored with my moving hand, Luke steps away from my table and instead searches through a side cupboard for what I know will be a Bunsen burner.

  He’s the moth… he always has been.

  “We were in woodshop,” Rob rumbles and lays his arm and cheek on the cool tabletop. Where most people might close their eyes and rest, Rob leaves his open so I can study and draw. “He drilled a hole into Laura Grey’s bird feeder.”

  “It needed a door!”

  “He drilled it into the bottom,” Rob chuckles. “He was flirting with her, told her he could help, and because she had a lapse in judgment, she let him. But then he ruined it, and the bird feeders are supposed to be our final submission for the year.”

  “She couldn’t turn the feeder up the other way?” I ask. “Make it a sunroof instead of a hole in the floor?”

  “That’s what I said!” Luke grabs the Bunsen – called it – and brings it to the closest table with a gas tap. He fixes the tubing, then turns away and goes in search of a flame. “I told her it ain’t so bad. Plus, birds can fly, right? So even if the bird falls out the hole, it can just fly back in.”

  “He was using the hole saw, his finger pressed all the way down, but he wasn’t holding the bird feeder.”

  Images of the feeder spinning, then flinging away play in my mind. “Oops.”

  “Stupid thing went flying across the room,” Rob grumbles. “Mr. Mason wasn’t watching, so all he saw was the broken window.”

  “You broke a window?” My eyes shoot over to Luke. “Pukey! That’s so naughty.”

  He chuckles. “It was an accident. But now Mom and Dad are gonna whip me for breaking another window.”

  “So why are you here?” I go back to drawing. Back to staring at Rob’s sparkling eyes. “What did you do?”

  “Ya know that game hustlers play in the street – they got three cups, they put a prize in one cup, then people bet to guess which cup has the prize?”

  “Right?”

  Rob lifts his chin toward his brother. “Well, he grabbed me like we were cups, and mixed us up. Told Mason to guess which one was which.”

  I snort so hard that spit lands on my page. I swipe it away with the meaty part of my forearm, and continue working. “Got you both in trouble.”

  “Story of my life,” Rob grumbles as we both ignore the foot-high flame Luke now has burning, four desks away. He’s like a sorcerer standing over his cauldron. A Jafar-type villain laughing about his evil-doings. “Why are you here?”

  “I flunked another math test. Got one out of sixty right.”

  Rob’s brows furrow so deeply that a wrinkle forms above his nose. “But you’re good at math. You’re better than me by a long shot.”

  Knowing this to be true, I smile, wide and victorious. “It was all part of my plan. I’ve been working at it all year.”

  He lifts his head from his arm, sits taller so his large chest widens. “What plan?”

  Two months later, the first day of school…

  “Welcome back, class.” Mrs. Alesi – whose first name is Laine, and just so happens to be a sort-of-aunt to me – stands at the front of her classroom with a friendly smile not at all like Mrs. Crab’s. “Emma,” she gives a gentle, knows-too-much shake of her head. “Welcome back to the seventh grade. I hope you’re going to focus and try to learn from me.”

  “I’ll be on my best behavior, Miss.”

  I take out my pencil case, a notebook, and my water bottle, and set my things on my desk. Then looking to my left, I smile for my bestest friend in the whole wide world.

  I couldn’t breathe while Rob was in another part of our school without me. So I fixed the problem. I dumbed myself down, got myself booted out of my grade, and now, all is right again.

  “I swear,” I tell our new teacher. “I intend to pass with flying colors. You watch.”

  Rob

  Boys and Girls Can Be Best Friends

  Fifteen Years Old - Sophomore Year

  I share a bedroom with Luke – always have, and until we’re old, I suspect we always will. It helps that my brother is as cool as he is, as funny, as stupid and fun-loving. Because there are some rumors floating around that perhaps I’m a little too serious for my own good.

  I guess the universe knew that about me; it knew I would be stern, in a family of crazy. Quiet, in a family of rowdy. So when my mom and dad decided to procreate, the universe said, Here, have two, so they can balance each other out. But I guess Luke’s crazy didn’t outweigh my penchant for safety and normalcy, because then it gave us Emma too. Try and out-bore both of them, the universe dared. Try it. You’ll lose.

  So instead of trying to stop their bullshit these days, I tend to act as supervisor. I keep them safe, and their felonies as harmless to future college and job prospects as possible.

  But the problem with this solution is that I’m always at the scene of the crime. So whatever bad rap follows them, tends to stick to me too. And in my family, we don’t snitch, so it’s not like I’m gonna tell everyone it was Luke who jet-packed the homemade go-kart we made, and then rode it over the halfpipe in our driveway. Nor would I tell the world that it was Emma who broke her grandmother’s favorite vase. She didn’t mean to do it. There was no malice. But it was me and Luke they looked at as the perps, and we damn near lost our heads because it.

  It’s just the way things are.

  “So, I stopped by the tattoo shop the other day.” Luke lays on the bottom bunk, his head resting against the wall, his feet digging into the bottom of my mattress, because I guess he’s literally incapable of laying down like a normal person. “Ian kicked my ass out,” he laughs. “But I got a quick look at his prices.”

  “Okay…”

  I lay on my back and stare up at my ceiling. It’s littered with sketches, lead pencil drawings of myself, of Emma, of our uncle’s dog Annie. You’d think it would be hard to draw a black dog and make it look like something other than a blob on the page. But EmKat is more talented than any other person I know. Even with it being dark outside, our main light switched off, and reading lights being the only illumination we have, I still see Annie’s individual streaks of fur. I see the silver-gray streaks in her muzzle, the sparkle in her eyes.

  “Rob?”

  “Yeah.” Turning to my side, I dangle a little over the side of our bed and meet my brother’s eyes. “So what? Ian’s gonna snitch to Mom and Dad, for starters. Second, we can’t get anything done for years. No way is Ian gonna ink us while we’re in high school.”

  “But you admit you’re gonna get ink?” He pushes his feet up, lifting the end of my mattress, and grins when I drop back down aga
in. “We can go on our eighteenth birthday. Get Ian to draw something good for us.”

  Scoffing under my breath, I turn back and stare up at the ceiling. “No one is drawing my art except EmKat. No way.”

  “Why not?” he asks and almost – almost – drowns out the sound of something tapping on our window. “Ian is boss.”

  “Because when you have access to the best, why go someplace else?”

  “The best,” he laughs. “What do you expect to get from Em? Unicorns and love hearts? She’s a chick. She’s gonna make your art chick-ish.”

  “You’re an idiot.” I push up to sit on the edge of my bed, and when another tap sounds against our window, I drop to the floor and make my landing as gentle as possible. Mom and Dad are downstairs, and the second they hear something going down, they’re gonna come looking.

  I pull a pair of sweatpants over my boxer shorts, but leave my top half bare, then unlatching the lock my mom swings into place every single morning, I lift my window and smile at the face that stops just a foot from mine.

  “EmKat?”

  She’s blonde and beautiful. Rounded cheeks, glistening white teeth, but her incisors are a little pointier than usual, so sometimes I think of her as a vampire… vampiress? She’s dangerous like the literature says of the mythical creatures, does most of her work in the dark, and she has this way, this succubus quality that draws me in, even when I know I’m bound to add to my rap sheet because of her.

  I shake my head. “You know you could just knock on the front door, right?”

  “Or text,” Luke adds. He doesn’t get out of bed, nor does he give any reaction to the girl climbing through our window – she’s been doing it since she was seven or so, so it’s nothing new to us. Instead, he remains laid out in his underwear, and because EmKat is so used to him, she barely notices. “We still have our walkie-talkies too,” he says as I help her through the window and close it when she’s in. “Get us new batteries, and we’ll be all set for you to sing us to sleep again.”

  “I don’t do that anymore.” Making herself at home, Em brushes past me and moves toward my bed. She doesn’t climb up; she merely rests her forearms on the mattress, and folds her neck back to study her artwork. “I was losing too much sleep,” she continues, even as she tilts her head to the left, then the right. “And you weren’t even saying thanks like you should have.”

  “‘Cause you’re a crappy singer,” Luke chuckles, only to squeal and fold closer to the wall when Em brings her knee up to hurt him. “You know you’re a bad singer!” he insists on a laugh. “Even Rob says so, and he basically never talks smack about you.”

  I stand back at the window, rest against the sill, and fold my arms as I watch them. “He ain’t wrong,” I murmur, and grin when she turns back to smile for me.

  Sometime in the last few months, Em developed some… uh… bodily assets. She was always tall for her age, one of the tallest in her grade, and even more so when she jumped ship and came to my grade. But she was tall and flat – no butt, no boobs, no nothing. Then, last summer, that changed, and now she’s got a little something-something filling her clothes out. And it just so happens that I’m a guy who now notices that sort of stuff.

  Not that I’m specifically looking at her lumps. Just girly lumps in general. And Em happens to be a girl who hangs out with me around the clock. It was inevitable I would notice.

  Right?

  “What ain’t he wrong about?” she challenges. Because that’s who she is; they forgot to add meek when they created Emma Katherine Kincaid. EmKat is all things sugar and spice, but there ain’t a lot of everything nice in there. “You’re saying I’m a shitty singer, too?”

  “Are you saying you’re a good singer?” I tilt my head, and bring a hand up to rub the spiky hair that started to grow on my jaw this past summer. I guess she and I are both in a time of change. “Because last I checked, you weren’t a liar. Not even when you’re trying to talk yourself up.”

  She snorts and goes back to studying her art. “I can’t sing for shit. But you can’t tell me you didn’t like having walkie-talkies. They were the best idea ever.”

  “Yeah, for conspiratorial shit,” Luke jokes and brings that annoying fucking foot of his to her thigh. He and I are barely a smudge off six feet already, but we’re skinny, gangly, too much limbage for our bodies, so as he brings it to her thigh, he looks a bit like a grasshopper readying to jump. He waits her out, tests her, but when she won’t move, he extends his leg and sends her sprawling several feet away. “You two need to go away. I’m tired as fuck, so you can’t sit in here and gossip.”

  Em – unbothered by Luke’s roughness – looks into my eyes and slays me with her questioning grin. “You sleepy, Fart? Wanna go for a walk?”

  The answer is no, I’m not tired. And yes, I wanna go for a walk. Even if it’s a lie. Because if Em’s on a mission to sneak around in the night, she needs me to follow along, otherwise she might get hurt, dead, or end up in prison. It’s inevitable, and way too much to risk.

  “Nope.” Mock-sighing, I make my way to the closet and grab a shirt – Rollin On branding, for the gym our families, hers and mine, co-own. Shrugging it on and reaching up to run a hand through hair I’ve always kept fairly short, I snatch a hat and make my way across the room. “To the fort?”

  “To the fort,” she agrees, taking my hand when I reach out and lead her to the window.

  She entered my room with empty hands and no backpack, but I know she’ll have stuff waiting on the grass below, so I glance back to Luke and lift my chin in farewell – he does the same in return – then I open my window and climb out first.

  EmKat has never fallen, not one single time in all these years, but I always go first, just in case she slips and needs the help. As her best friend and protector, it’s my job to be the cushion in everything she does in life.

  I step outside onto the tile roof that shelters our porch and overlooks our front yard, and when Em swings one leg over my windowsill, and then another, I take her hand and lead her across the roof to the tree that long ago grew taller than our house. There’s only a one-foot gap between a strong branch and the roof, so I make my way across, use one hand to hold the limb that hangs above my head, and with the other, I keep hold of Em’s while she steps across.

  She wears jeans tonight, tight enough her dad might send her back to her room to get changed, but she’s sixteen now, and she comes with a heavy dose of ‘I’ll do whatever the fuck I want’, so Bobby and Kit learned long ago to choose their battles. Dictating what she can and cannot wear isn’t one they choose. Especially not when their main goal is to raise strong women with a stronger sense of self and confidence.

  “It’s dark out tonight,” she murmurs as she moves, and chews on her bottom lip to concentrate.

  Just because she’s never fallen before doesn’t mean she hasn’t nearly fallen. Slipping feet, scraped hands and arms, a single sharp scratch along her chest when she was twelve. Em knows to be careful as we shimmy along the branch to the center of the tree. Then she lets me twine our fingers together as I hug my other arm around the thick trunk, and crouch so she can move to the next lowest limb.

  “It’s supposed to be a full moon,” she continues with a glance up for me.

  Her eyes are brighter than any full moon could ever hope to be, and sparkling blue, just like her mom’s. She’s got the single dimple in her cheek, just like the others who take after that side of the family – her mom, her sister, her uncle – but it’s subtle. The only time that sucker pops is moments before she’s about to break the law.

  It’s her very own bat signal. Or, ya know, warning system.

  We make our way down the tree, past the limbs that once used to be sharp and scratching as we’d pass, but are now growing in a slightly newer direction – the result of our constant traffic and bending of the limbs.

  It’s almost silent out, closing in on midnight, so most of the lights in our estate are out. The television flickers in my m
om and dad’s front window, since they tend to stay up later than most others. A habit, I suspect, from my mother’s years of working the night shift at a local club. She was slinging drinks, he was acting as her security, and because of that routine that lasted a long, long time, they’ve developed this night owl existence that few others have.

  Em’s house is dark and silent except for the window at the front – her brother’s room. He’s just like Em – or, well, Em is just like him. Adrenaline junkie, troublemaker, and zero respect for the law. The difference is, Em has me, her shield, who takes the fall for most everything she does wrong.

  To the adults, she’s a good girl with a daredevil best friend; I should be thankful to have her because she keeps me outta trouble, blah blah blah.

  Don’t get me wrong. I am thankful to have her. I fucking adore her, but the reputation she and I have… I have to control my urge to bark out a laugh every single time she and I are around the adults. The lie they believe, that she’s such an angel… it’s all so heavy, so ridiculous, that it’s funny.

  If only they knew.

  The problem with Em’s brother – Bry – being the same, is that he has no shield. No cover, no alibi. So everyone knows he’s crazy, and he has no desire to rectify that reputation.

  He wears it like a favorite coat.

  Finally, as we approach the second-to-last limb of the large oak tree, Em jumps with ten or so feet to go. She could have kept climbing down, but she’s incapable of being normal or safe. So she jumps with an almost silent squeal of delight, drops to the grass with a muted thud, then she tucks and rolls, and snatches the backpack I knew would be down here as she goes.

  Shaking my head, I climb to the last branch, and drop down with much more finesse, then when she spins out – her hands in the air, her face turned up to the cloud-covered moon, and her smile enough to make my stomach jump – I snag her backpack and swing it onto my shoulder, grab her hand and pull her close before she triggers one of the million motion sensors on our families’ estate.