“What color car are we looking for?”

Connor was peering over the small stream of people exiting the subway station. Their destination in the suburbs had been reached with no issue. Josh had texted his sister to see if she would pick him up. She hadn’t responded, but she never did. It was her primary tactic. If she was asked to do something, she would usually do it without any sort of warning, and without the heads up it would usually not happen. But she would show up and blame however asked her to do it for not holding up their end.

Consequently, no one asked her for much anymore. But Josh wasn’t ready to deal with anyone else.

“Blue. It’s a bug, and she keeps it very clean. You’ll see it.” Josh hummed with a nod. “You’ll see.”

Within mere moments of Josh’s comment, Connor exclaimed, “Oh, dang. I do see it. That really stands out.”

“Yeah. But, please… don’t avoid eye contact. She’s gonna test you.”

“Eye contact with… oh.” Connor paused as a woman established herself from the crowd of people that were exiting the subway and pressed up against him. “Hello?”

“Your boyfriend’s got pretty eyes, Joshy.” The woman said in between the smacking of chewing gum.

Josh, who had expected this sort of stealthy arrival, cringed at the abrupt introduction. “Chelsea… he’s my roommate and he didn’t have anywhere to be for the weekend. Can you not?”

“No, I can’t.” Chelsea sneered. “So how does that work, roommate? Is your situation coed or what?”

Connor, much to Josh’s horror, had a massive grin on his face as he glared down at Chelsea. She’d gotten in close so that they were nearly chest to chest, but the severe high difference forced her to look almost straight up to keep eye contact.

“You remind me of my little sister.” Connor surprised Josh and began talking with calm and gentle sincerity. “You can’t be much older than her.”

Josh winced at the insinuation, but he was impressed. It was a good move. Chelsea had always been short, barely over five foot, even though she was the oldest sibling. And she still looked the same as the last time he had seen her; still painted in all the makeup that made her feel comfortable, still manicured with precision, still donning the same bubbly style of clothes she’d worn in high school. She probably had close to ten years on Connor, but somehow she didn’t seem to be able to express any kind of influence over him.

“You’re right, Joshy. He couldn’t be your boyfriend. His balls are too big.” Chelsea’s voice was a mix of genuine contemplation and an uncomfortable amount of interest. “Get your crap in the car, I need to stop and get some groceries on the way home.”

“You didn’t tell mom and dad I was coming tonight, did you?” Josh asked nervously as he motioned for Connor to follow him and his sister to her car.

“Of course I did. What made you think I wouldn’t?”

“I mean... I asked you not to.”

“Yeah, that was stupid. You shouldn’t just show up places and expect a royal treatment.”

“I already told them I’d be there for the family barbecue!” Josh defended. “Just not when I’d get there. Now they’re going to think something’s wrong.”

Connor had already stowed his thinks in the small blue car but was waiting for someone else to get in first. Chelsea was leaning on the drivers side door and sneering at Josh as he stuffed his things into the small hatch compartment in the back of the car. He had packed light, essentially just the bag he’d taken to stay the weekend at Connor and Sara’s apartment along with a few extra bandages to replace his current ones.

“I have to get in the back seat… don’t I…” Josh said with a sigh.

“Sorry, dude. I don’t really fold in half all that well, and there’s no other way I’m cramming myself back in there.”

It was a fair assessment. Chelsea had chosen her car to be the most inconvenient vehicle possible for other people to use; it suited her own purposes just fine of course, but the moment someone else needed her help, it became a very hostile vehicle.

Josh gave Connor a weak smile as he folded back the passenger seat and climbed in the back with a grumbled, “Don’t worry about it.”

Chelsea follow suit and Connor squeezed in last. Even with the extra leg room of the front passenger seat, he still look far too tall for the car. And throughout the processes of driving around the poorly maintained suburban roads, getting out and back in for groceries, Connor was being jostled around pretty roughly.

It was a few minutes before Chelsea made it back to their family home that she asked the question that Josh knew she was going to save for the most opportune moment. And she had calculated it pretty perfectly.

“So, are you going to tell me what happened to you?”

“What do you mean?” Josh knew exactly what she meant. His bandages were extremely visible and there wasn’t much else standing out.

“You’re covered in gauze and your terrified that mom and dad will think something is up.”

That last part hadn’t been something Josh thought she’d pick up. He hadn’t been subtle about it, but he didn’t think she’d piece the two together. And even though the two things weren’t exactly connected, there was a certain narrative that tethered them together that Josh had no intention of telling his sister. Or anyone for that matter.

“I slipped in the shower and smashed my head on an exposed pipe. The arm is from falling off an electric scooter going fifteen miles an hour.”

“You’re lying.” Chelsea called him out almost immediately. “I can’t tell which one though. You said them differently, so one of them’s the truth and ones a lie.”

Technically, both were lies. One was just more of a lie than the other.

“Is your sister one of those human polygraph people?” Connor laughed. “Because I would have believed it if I didn’t know different.”

“Oh, and do you want to tell me what happened to my little brother, big guy?” For moment Chelsea almost sounded defensive, like she really cared that Josh was hurt. Josh didn’t buy it, but it was tempting to take comfort in it.

Connor chuckled, calm as ever, and answered, “he got poison ivy in the campus gardens… from a specifically labeled poison ivy plant.”

It was a good lie, or it would have been in any other situation. A contagious wound was less likely to be inspected. But Chelsea, to her credit, knew Josh better than Connor. And even though Connor’s tone and demeanor was near perfect, she could tell he was lying.

“Joshy doesn’t get poison ivy rash.” Chelsea growled, frustrated. “And you’re lying for him, so it has to be something really embarrassing.”

“Oh…” Connor frowned, put out by the failure. He looked genuinely disappointed.

The timing of the lie couldn’t have been worse for Josh either. Chelsea had timed her question hoping that it would cause an argument that she would be able to carry into the house and let other people hear. If it was something embarrassing and Josh’s fault, people would be on his case about it… and Chelsea could do anything she wanted and be ignored.

And at that moment, Chelsea was in the process of pulling into the driveway of the Hall family home. She was poised to carry out her little tactic perfectly. But Josh had a far better lie come to mind. More of a truth than falling off a scooter or getting poison ivy, and one he could leverage against his sister in a more personal way.

“Fine. I was going to get a tattoo, but the place I went to tried to shave the arm hair down with a nasty razor and I lost some skin and there’s a big skin infection.” Josh snapped at his sister. “And if you breath a word of it to anyone, I’ll tell them about why you always wear long shirts that cover your…”

“Hey!” Chelsea interrupted. “You swore!”

“Yeah, fat lot of good that does in our house.”

There was silence in the car as it was turned off and no one moved to get out. Connor was clearly very uncomfortable. He hadn’t anticipated it being quite so bad, and he began to fear what waited inside if Josh had elected to have his sister pick them up rather than anyone else. If this was the least bothersome route, the interior of the house may as well have been hell.

“When you’re a lawyer, you’re getting me out of every single parking ticket.” Chelsea growled. “All of them. And if I ever get arrested to setting a future boyfriend’s car on fire, you’re getting me out of that too.”

“That’s very specific. You better not ever do that specific crime because I’ll have to bear witness that it may have been premeditated.”

There was another moment of pause before Chelsea began to snicker lightly, like they had just established some kind of inside joke. “Right. Now get your stuff out of my car.”

There was a not so subtle nod to Connor as she said ‘stuff’ that reassured Josh the topic of them dating hadn’t been dropped. If anything, she was probably going to feed it to the rest of his family as ammunition. But anything directed towards his injuries, she’d deflect if she could. That was the unspoken agreement Josh had created. His blackmail material on his sister was scant, but the secret of her tattoo and the story around it was enough to keep her mouth shut and buy a little bit of camaraderie.

The tactic paid off almost immediately. Josh’s dad had marched out the front door to help Chelsea with groceries, and upon seeing the extra passengers in the car, had stopped at Chelsea’s door to get filled in on what were apparently worthy details.

“Look who I found wandering around the subway station.” Chelsea chuckled. “Mr. Pre-Law and his new boy toy.”

Josh took the initiative to attempt to dispel the attack before it began in earnest. “This is Connor, my roommate this semester. Sorry for not giving you more of a heads up, but I finished all my assignments early and though I could make it out here before it got too late. Connor is tagging along to avoid his old roommate and her mom.”

It was all… nearly true. At least everything about Connor. Josh had spent nearly as many night at Connor and Sara’s as he had at his own apartment, so he was basically their third roommate. And he and Connor were intentionally staying away from Sara and Margot so they couldn’t all be found together and would stay inconspicuous. Of course, if there was a big enough fuss at the Hall household, people would find out they were there anyway. Things could get loud; and that was exactly what Josh was trying to avoid.

“Say no more.” Josh’s dad held up a hand. “We have plenty of food now and your room is empty for the weekend. Your brother decided it was going to be more fun to spend the weekend in Vegas with his new art school friends. So we aren’t saving anything for him when he shows up tomorrow at five in the evening with a raging hangover and no idea why his twenty year old behind got dragged half way across the country by your uncle.”

Josh wasn’t going to ask any questions about that. He knew it was bait. His next youngest brother, Davis, was probably not going to get dragged home by his uncle and his police connections. HE probably was spending the weekend with friends in Vegas, but he knew for a fact that his brother was too timid to drink after all the teasing he’d gone through at home while their dad drank. And the color on his dad’s face didn’t escape Josh’s notice either.

“Sucks to be him then, I guess.” Josh said flatly, trying and failing to deliver a convincing snarky chuckle in response.

“Yeah. Anyway, go introduce your friend to your mom, she’s finishing up dinner. Chels, I’ll grab some bags… did you get the right kind of buns?”

The conversation between Josh’s dad and sister began to ramble as he and Connor made their way towards the house with their things. Josh could tell his dad hadn’t had too much to drink, not yet at least. He rarely had more than a few sips before dinner and controlling his intake was one of the few things his dad was actually good at. He put up an off kilter facade, but he was still sharp underneath. That’s how their house managed to stay together, literally and metaphorically. His dad was a private investigator that did most of his work listening in on conversations while pretending to be drunk.

And the house that got kept together was deceptively serene.

The Hall family lived in an old neighborhood. It was a decent drive from the interstate and any other public transportation connections but close enough to a supermarket to make the odd last minute grocery trip reasonable and convenient. The house itself was a brick and tan panel two story barn style home with a detached garage and outdoor car port. The front yard was crowded with rich and green plants interspersed with rarely tended gardens that still had the beauty of several flowering plants that refused to die on their own. It was placid, all things considered. They had inherited the house from Josh’s mother’s parents. Her father had been a doctor and this was the “summer” home that he had cheated on his wife in. No one else in the family had wanted the property, and they had tried to convince Josh’s mother to sell it and erase the memory of it all together. But she had been charmed by the idyllic visuals.

Josh could hear his mother cooking in the kitchen from outside. She had opened the kitchen door to the screened in porch to let out some heat as she often did in the warmer months. She heard the porch door open and shut first, but she didn’t see who had come into her kitchen until Josh and Connor walked in.

“Oh, hi, Joshy. Your early…. oh my gosh what happened to you?!” Josh’s mom had only caught him out of the corner of her eye at first. But the second she put down what she had been working on and too a proper look at him she saw his bandages.

For all the contention in their home, Josh couldn’t call his mother complacent. She wasn’t the type of mother to brush off injuries, even minor ones, or invalidate problems she was made aware of. She would have been fired from her job as a school administrator a long time ago if that was the case. Rather, the opposite was true. She was very attentive to the needs of her family. Perhaps too attentive. And she made it her job to fix any and every problem her family had if she possibly could.

Josh had to shield his bandages from his mom’s hands. There was a small chance that she’d tried to redress his injuries if she wasn’t stopped. “You know how victims of abuse that don’t want to admit they’re being abused say they’re clumsy? I’m apparently just that clumsy.”

The comment was supposed to be a joke. Dark humor usually played off okay with his mother. But she was still focused on him enough that she didn’t even offer a comment about Connor yet. Josh was sure that she saw him standing awkwardly in the doorway behind him. But she was focused on the bandages now.

“You’ve never been this clumsy before! What happened?”

“I mean… I kind of have been. But this one,”—Josh pointed to the bandage around his forehead—”is not so much my fault. I slipped in the showers and hit my head on a pipe. I think someone left soap on the floor or something. It’s mostly a blur. The other one is from falling off one of those rental scooters.”

“And you got road rash so bad you had to bandage your whole arm?”

“Well, my palm, forearm, elbow, and shoulder. So pretty much.” Josh offered with a shrug.

It felt like the more casually he played it off the more believable it would be. His mom didn’t seem to buy the whole story, but seemed to be satisfied enough to drop it. But then her eyes moved to Connor.

“And who is this strapping young man…”

The deep discomfort that his mother’s comment caused Josh elicited a drawn out groan of disgust. “This is my roommate, Connor. Connor, my mother. My happily married mother that works with high-schoolers that aren’t that much younger than you.”

“Jeez, take a joke Josh.” His mother sneered, but turned a polite face to her guest. “It’s nice to meet you Connor. Please make yourself at home.”

“Thank you misses Hall.”

Connor had been standing by waiting for his signal to be polite and try not to cause more trouble than he already had. It became more apparent with every family member he met, that Josh’s family was a problem uniquely suited for Josh to deal with. Josh had been dealing with them his entire life, after all. And that kind of familiarity with ones family issues was something that Connor understood all too well.

“Right. One your dad and sister get in with the groceries for tomorrow, we can sit down and eat. We’ve got corn on the cob, meatloaf, and cheesy mashed potatoes.”

Josh could feel Connor wince at the mention of nearly every food he couldn’t eat mixed with a taste of things he could.

It was going to be a long day tomorrow.