Then Shaw heard what he’d said. He froze.

North’s hand froze.

“North, I—”

“You need a shower. And then we need to get going. Unless you’re not feeling up to it?”

Shaw couldn’t bring himself to look up from the buckwheat where he was burying his face. “North, that was a million years ago, and I wasn’t—”

North’s Red Wings stomped toward the stairs so hard that the whole house seemed liable to fall. Then down the stairs. Then through the galley kitchen. Stomping like he meant to test every floorboard’s structural integrity.

“Shit,” Shaw whispered into the pillow. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

And then he threw up once more in the popcorn bucket.

Chapter 6

On his way through the kitchen, North almost crashed into Pari. Today she wore a baggy sweatshirt with iron-on cat faces, and she was in the process of microwaving eight burritos at the same time.

“Somebody’s in a mood,” she said.

“One burrito, Pari. One is plenty.”

“Don’t food shame me.”

“You weigh like twenty pounds. What are you going to do with eight burritos?”

“Geez, what’s your problem?”

“You know what? I don’t even want to know what you’re doing with eight burritos. Eight. But will you at least wash the fucking plate when you’re done with them?”

He had almost made it to the door when the plate in question—and all eight burritos—flew in front of him, barely missing his head. The plate shattered, and the burritos splattered, and North stood still, his cheek stinging where hot specks of bean filling clung to him.

Pari had her hands on her hips, and a wisp of dark hair curled in front of her eyes, and she blew it away and said, “Do you want to try that again?”

North didn’t even know what to call the noise he made—a growl, maybe, but a little too much like a scream—and stomped his way out of the house.

He jogged around to the side of the house, moved the loose brick behind the downspout, and found his cigarettes. He smoked two, replaced them, replaced the brick, and was leaning against the Grand Caravan by the time Shaw emerged: wet hair tied up in a bun again, another of those fucking Lululemon shirts, and a pair of hemp pants that made North want to roll his eyes so hard they might fall out of his head.

“So, umm,” Shaw said.

North knew what was coming: hours and hours of Shaw talking. Shaw loved talking. He wanted to talk through everything. He wanted to process things. He probably wanted the two of them to process whatever the hell it was that had just happened upstairs. And North didn’t get why Shaw couldn’t just understand that sometimes you just needed to be a total shit until somebody threw a plate at your head, and then you could smoke and cool down, and it was over. The end.

So instead of letting Shaw ramp up anymore, North produced the printouts.