Raze (Riven 3)

The room was very quiet, some of us riveted, some zoned out. I blinked dry eyes, wishing I had my notebook so I could write down every word she’d just said.

She met my eyes, open and confident, and nodded at me just once. I nodded back. I thought she could see that the gift she’d just given me had been received.

Chapter 14

Felix

I shoved a change of clothes into my backpack and caught the BoltBus to Baltimore, where Riven had a show.

Of course it wasn’t until I got to the hotel and asked for Sofia’s room at the front desk that it registered: she was a rock star now. I received a cool gaze and an “I’m sorry, sir, there’s no one by that name here” from the man behind the front desk, who seemed to take his job extremely seriously.

“She’s my sister,” I said. “I get that she’s like…going incognito or whatever, but if you could just call up to her room she’ll tell you who I am.”

“I’m terribly sorry, sir, but I cannot call someone who isn’t here.”

“Okay, wow, never mind,” I muttered.

I stepped away and called Sof’s cell. She answered right away.

“Jesus Christ, Felix, I’ve called you like a thousand times. What the hell!?”

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m here, at your hotel.” The man behind the front desk tried to pretend he wasn’t desperately curious whether I was really Sofia’s brother. “I was gonna surprise you, but you’re famous now, so they’re pretending you don’t exist. Can I come up?”

“Well, I guess it’s good to know the security measures work. Yeah, come on up. It’s 736.”

I tipped my nonexistent hat to the man behind the front desk and made for the elevator. I’d only ever spent time in one hotel: the Day’s Inn I’d helped my mom clean back home. The two were so dissimilar, it was hard to believe the same word even described them.

The ceilings soared and the lobby was an open expanse of marble. The elevator was wrought iron formed into curlicues and flowers. And there were real flowers in huge arrangements on marble tables as I stepped out of the elevator, and more at intervals in the hallway. Huge white things that might have been lilies, but I didn’t know anything about flowers. This was Sofia’s life now.

But the person who opened the door was still my sister, even if she was wrapped in a huge, fluffy hotel robe. She grabbed me and pulled me inside and proceeded to yell at me for scaring her.

I threw myself onto the huge bed and lobbed a pillow at Sofia when she started in again.

“Can you shut up for a sec?” I asked mildly. “I need to tell you something.”

“What’s wrong?” she said immediately, clambering onto the bed to sit across from me. “Is Mom okay? The kids?”

“It’s nothing like that. Can we talk?”

“Yeah, of course.”

I took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry I ignored your calls the last few days. I was mad and hurt. I…I had this huge fight with Dane, and right after that I sent you the insurance info but you didn’t even have a minute to talk to me about the fight, and I took it really personally, like you don’t have time for me because you don’t care. And I know that’s not true. I just…”

I took a deep breath.

“I miss you so much, Sof. I feel like you disappeared on me all of a sudden after being together our whole lives. It feels bad. Really bad. No, let me finish. It’s not bad just because I’ve missed you. It’s like…I always thought we were in it together. So it was okay to spend hours shuffling our paycheck money from envelope to envelope because it was for us. Because when it worked out, it felt like we were winning. The way Mom used to make it a game to come up with lunches from the food we had around near the end of the month. And because we always talked about the future like it was something we were gonna figure out together.”

She bit her lip and looked down at the snow-white coverlet. I knew she was remembering all the evenings we sat around the living room or on one of our beds, dreaming of how things would be in a month, a year, five years. How when our neighbors next door moved out and told us to take whatever we wanted from the stuff they didn’t want to lug to their new place, we crept around their rooms like treasure-hunting children, holding things up, wide-eyed but not wanting the neighbors to see how much we wanted them. How we took those things home and waved thank-you to the neighbors, then closed our apartment door and squealed with excitement as we found homes for all the things we’d been doing without.