In her mind, Indy has always translated anger to movement: her father's ceaseless pacing in sock-feet across the living room floor as he was on the phone with a difficult client, her mother furiously scrubbing every speck of grime from a porcelain plate, all the while spouting off a mounting critique of Indy's or her brother's behavior. Even her older brother Sterling, calm, level-headed literary genius that he is now, becomes a whirling hurricane when the current takes him, leaving overturned bookshelves and piles of disorganized papers in his wake.
She never knows what to do with Percy's stillness. It unnerves her, like she can sense the overwhelming buzz of potential energy pouring off of him, like he could explode at any second and none of them will be able to guess the right time.
"Percy," Indy says. She is watching his back, the dark silhouette of it against the window, finger on his chin and eyes trained at nothing. "You promised."
"I'm not angry," he says, but it sounds more like he's trying to convince himself.
"Sure you're not."
"I'm not angry at you," he says, and whirls at last, only to make eye contact with Jude. The drummer is leaned against the wall closest to the door, as if he's preparing himself to exit the moment things go south. "This was supposed to be a trip to see your grandma or something. Wanna tell me how it is Indy ended up with that cut in her leg?"
Indy glances at the cut in question, a long slice through her tights and across the skin of her upper left thigh, left behind by the remaining shards of the wooden window barricade Jude kicked in. The adrenaline dulled most of the pain immediately after it happened, but now that they've escaped, now that they're sitting still, the wound burns with a stinging heat, throbbing dully in time with Indy's pulse.
"I can speak for myself," Indy snaps before Jude can even begin to answer. "I got another clue from Dobbs as we were leaving. I decided it was best to check it out, and it took us to this warehouse I think, but then a car pulled up in the drive. This happened as I was running away."
"I get it," Jude says quietly, the quietest she's ever heard him speak, at all. His voice is still polished, but rough around the edges, a precious geode of sound. "I was supposed to look after her. I'm sorry, man. I was...I should have been paying more attention."
Indy sighs. "Judeâ"
"Damn right you should have," Percy says. He steps toward her, footsteps heavy as they slam against the aging wood. "I should have gone with you. I knewâI knew I should have gone with you and now someone might have seen you poking around thereâwherever there is, andâIndy. We can't keep doing this. This has to stop."
Indy shakes her head, not even considering it. "You gave me until the deadline. I still have time."
"If this is how things are going, how do I know you're even going to make it to the stupid project deadline?"
"So you're just gonna abandon Lamar Pine like that? You saw how he looked at us, Percy. We gave him hope for the first time in forever. You're just going to snatch it away from him now? I thought you believed in this."
"I do," Percy says, and again, quieter: "I do. But I don't believe in the way we're going about it. There's no structure to it, you keep putting yourself in danger, and you're bringing in unknown variables we haven't properly vetted yet."
Jude raises a timid hand. "I'm an unknown variable?"
Percy glares at him. "Obviously."
Jude lowers his hand.
"If you keep going like this, the shit's gonna hit the fan eventually, even more so than it already has I guess. That's what I'm saying, Indy. Can we justâcan we think this through?" says Percy. "That's all I'm asking."
He looks at her, really looks, before he goes for something in the corner of the room. Indy discovers after a second that it's his backpack; he digs through it until he recovers a small plastic box, white with a bright red plus on the top.
As Percy kneels beside her and sets the box down by her hip there is a part of Indy that wants to be embarrassed. Percy Mitchell, a reckless, exuberant star so bright he's prone to overheating, so bright Indy fears he'll one day implode on himself and there will be nothing she can do, telling her to think something through. The irony to it is nearly as funny as it is biting, and it leaves Indy speechless.
Percy's focused now, unwrapping an antiseptic wipe from its paper square, the stinging, sterile scent of it clinging to Indy's nostrils. Indy senses movement by the door, and looks up to find Jude making his escape, slipping like a specter into the corridor.
"Chernenko," Percy says, and Jude halts.
"Don't come back here unless you're really planning on helping," Percy says without looking up. Some of the exasperation has entered his voice again, lending it a sharpened edge, keen as a blade. "If this is nothing more than something to occupy your time, forget it. Forget Sylvia ever even talked to you."
A look passes his face then, and though Indy has not known him long it strikes her as a very un-Jude-like expression to make. He's struck her as the sort of person who finds joy in things that have no direction. For this brief moment, however, he looks authentically lost, and in a place where he doesn't want to be.
"Jude," Indy starts, but all he does is nod at her before he slips out. She listens to his thick rubber soles pound the stairs as he fades away.
Her gaze returns to Percy, his thick eyebrows furrowed intensely, eyelashes long and black up this close. She tells him something she's sure he already knows: "You scared him off."
"Good. Like I said. Unknown variables. Bad."
"You're still thinking in calculus terms, aren't you?"
"No I'm not. Told you, I flunked it," Percy says, and looks up at her briefly. "This is gonna sting. Get over it."
"I'll try my best."
He's right; it does sting, but Indy grits her teeth, killing her urge to squirm as he cleans the last of the blood from the cut, crumples the wipe up, and sets it aside to search for a well-fitting bandage instead.
"Good news," he says once he's done, laying the bandage flat with his finger, and standing up again. "I think you're gonna live."
"Thanks, Doc," Indy says, also getting to her feet, pulling her jacket tighter around her shoulders to shut out the chilly draft pressing in around them. She's struck by a diluted but nonetheless persistent sense of déjà vu, and she's reminded that yes, this is how it's always been, Indy falling and falling again but Percy always there to lift her head from the dust.
She taps the back of his leg with the toe of her shoe. "Percy?"
"What?"
A pause. "I know a good math tutor. Do you want me to call her for you?"
He laughs, and it's like an early sunrise. "Oh, fuck you."
A line of red text scribbled in all caps in Indy's agenda marks the deadline for Dr. Clover's paper. Though she has more than enough information to answer the vague, base level questions required for the assignment, none of it forms the answers she really wants, and as she toils away the next day in the libraryâbandage on her leg entirely hidden beneath brown slacks thrifted from the men's section of a secondhand storeâshe finds her eyes threatening to roll back in her head from sheer boredom.
It is a frigid Tuesday and frost hugs the aging windows, a sleepy shadow cast over the library's still-life chandeliers, antique writer's desks, and towering bookshelves. The strings of Chopin sing in Indy's ears as she nibbles on the edge of her scarf, stopping when she notices she's doing it, only to fall right back to it a moment later.
Chopin is interrupted by a fervent and ceaseless buzzing. It takes Indy probably far longer than it should to realize her phone is ringing. Once she realizes it's Sterling, it takes her even longer to recover from her shock and actually answer it.
"Indy," he says once she does, in a way from which she cannot tell if he's pleased or not that she picked up after all. Sterling has always been a walking enigma of a person, an eldritch being in the place of an older brother. He never says how he feels or puts such feelings on display; whatever anyone knows of himâor thinks they doâis gleaned from close observation only. And he hardly lets anyone get close. "Hey."
"Hey," she answers, mimicking his laconic speech perfectly. "Mom mentioned you're in Nepal right now?"
"I was. I left already, though. Thought I'd see what Kazakhstan has to offer."
"I see. Did she tell you to call me?"
A pause. "Does it matter?"
"No," Indy says. "I mean. A little bit."
"You know I'm justâbad at this stuff," Sterling says with a sigh, perhaps the most expressive noise he ever makes.
Yes, Indy wants to say. He is bad at this stuff, at remembering he has people down here on Earth while he spends his time in the clouds, at remembering to call his parents when they just want to know he's still alive. Indy's much better at these things, but it's still Sterling their mother will talk about the most at all the charity galas. It's a battle Indy's already more or less surrendered. She ran out of people to blame.
The concern in Sterling's voice is at least genuine when he asks, "How's school going?"
Indy squints at the text document open before her, glances down at the mishmash of barely legible notes filling her notebook beside her. The gathering was almost never the hard part; it was the assembly of it all.
"It's fine, I guess," Indy says. "I'm working on a project about a cold case. One that happened in the town Mom used to live in, actually."
"Where is that again? Errsville or something?"
Indy stifles her laugh. "Erskine."
"Right. Sounds fascinating."
"It's not, at the moment," she says, a half-truth her mouth releases without her mind's consent, really, as her tired eyes catch on something in her notes, and unfurl into waking again.
Only when her brother says into the phone, "Indy?" does she realize a substantial amount of time has passed without her speaking.
"Sterling, how much do you know about air conditioning systems?" Indy asks, still without tearing her gaze from the page.
Sterling pauses as if considering it. "A bit. I used to help Dad fix ours sometimes."
"Say you're refilling the refrigerant," Indy says. "Is there any time you would need a hammer for that? Don't you just unscrew it the outer plate or whatever, fill the tube, and close it again?"
Sterling pauses for even longer, like he can hear the bated breath Indy's hanging on it, like he's relishing in her distress. She knows he isn't. Sterling is just bad at this stuff.
"No," he says. "You wouldn't need a hammer."
Indy exhales.
She checks the notes she took while talking with Lamar Pine. She checks the police report. She checks both of them one more time.
"Sterling," she says. "I'm gonna have to talk to you later. Have fun in Kazakhstan."
She hangs up, and the next number she calls is Percy's.