Of course, Cary hired me. I was his little cupcake, after all. He’d probably do anything—short of emerging from his cave—to make me happy.
Including hiring me for a job I pretty much invented and probably wasn’t even qualified for.
Producer’s Assistant. Whatever the fuck that was.
My friends approved of this move, because it would keep me here, with them, instead of leaving for college. My three closest girlfriends were all older than me, all lived here and weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
My parents also thought it was wonderful.
My mom and dad wanted me at university, in law school, making them proud. But no one had ever made them prouder than my rock-star-turned-brilliant-music-producer brother. Why not put off university for a year to work with him?
It’ll be an exciting new adventure for both of you!
Yeah, right.
Working for my brother, in his empty house, would be the last thing from an exciting adventure.
And yet… even working for him didn’t seem like enough. I needed to be as close to him as I could.
Therefore, I was moving in.
I sold it to my brother as:I’d love to hang out by the pool over summer anyway.The pool was nice and all, but really, I wanted to keep an eye on Cary. If he knew it, he didn’t let on. I was pretty sure he’d let me hang around as long as I wanted to.
Didn’t mean he’d let me into his lair.
Two different things.
I didn’t even acknowledge to myself, until I’d withdrawn my enrollment from university, how much I’d wanted to withdraw. How desperate I’d been for a way out.
I’d thought Ihadto go to school, so I’d been trying to accept it.
But the truth was, I didn’t want to go.
I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Just because I’d done well in school, got excellent grades—and I’d followed the court case after Gabe’s death so carefully and showed an interest in that—didn’t mean I wanted to go to law school. I’d never wanted to study law, or even go to university, particularly.
That was what my parents wanted.
I’d sold this all tomyselfthat this just bought me more time to figure my life out. But I already knew what I wanted to do with my life, and it had nothing to do with law school.
It had a lot more to do with that secret photo album I kept stashed in the closet.
But either way, here I was.
Some girls from my school were traveling Europe for a year, or getting ready to head off to their posh colleges.
I was moving in with my brother, to avoid going away to school and starting down a path I did not want to travel. And I was “working” a job that didn’t exist, because I loved Cary too much to leave him in the dark.
I was here because I felt like my brother needed me.
My parents would never understand that.
They were far too in denial about my brother’s… issues. Dad kept waiting for Cary to just “buck up” and act likehedid—like everything was normal, even when it wasn’t. As if that would magically make it normal? Mom was worse. She acted like she actually believed everythingwasnormal.
They’d always been so unwilling to see their son as he really was.
I mean, they didn’t really see me as I was, either.
But I was determined to see Cary.