Crashed (Mason Brothers 2)

“This neighborhood is nice,” the woman named Amy said. “There are a lot of older people that have been here for years. And then some of them have started to pass away, like your grandmother. So then you have the younger people, like us.”

“I’m around the corner that way,” the other woman, Jan, said. “Amy is four doors down from me. We like to take our walk after we drop the kids at day care.”

“I organize the community barbecues,” Amy said. She was mixed race, with big brown eyes and a nice Meghan Markle look. “You missed the Fourth of July one, but there’s another one in a few weeks. You can meet everyone there.”

I pushed my sunglasses higher on my nose. I was sweating under my tank top. “Community barbecue, huh? I’m not sure I’m into those.”

Jan looked me up and down, not unkindly. “I guess they don’t have those in L.A. You should try it, though.”

“What about that house?” I said, nodding to the house across the street. I’d noticed it before—a place with a ramp on the front porch to accommodate a wheelchair. “Who lives there? One of the old people?”

Amy and Jan traded a look, and then they both laughed.

“What?” I said.

“Andrew Mason lives there,” Jan said. “He isn’t old. He’s maybe thirty.”

“Oh, shit. And he’s in a wheelchair?”

“A drunk driving accident a few years ago,” Amy said, more seriously. “Left his legs paralyzed. It split the family apart, too. It created some kind of falling-out with the parents. He moved into that house alone, and he’s been there ever since. He almost never leaves.”

I looked at the house again. It was tidy, well-kept. The blinds were closed. There was no car in the driveway. But stil

l, I got the feeling that someone was watching. I was probably just being paranoid.

“That’s sad,” I said. “A young guy getting paralyzed like that. I feel bad for him.”

“We all do,” Jan said, “and then he always goes and wrecks it.”

I looked at her, feeling my eyebrows go up.

“Andrew Mason isn’t much of a neighbor,” Amy explained. “When he moved in, we tried dropping off welcome gifts. Flowers and whatnot. He never answered the door, and we’d find the gifts jammed into the garbage can at the foot of the driveway.”

“He never comes to the community barbecues,” Jan said.

“Halloween is the worst,” Amy said. “We have a lot of kids in this neighborhood, and Halloween is a big thing. Everyone gets into it, but not him. He actually puts a sign up in his window that says KIDS FUCK OFF.”

I couldn’t help it—I laughed.

“You can laugh, but people get mad when their kids see that kind of language,” Amy said primly. “The Masons are some of the richest people in Millwood, so he has plenty of money. But does he give to the annual neighborhood charity drive? No, he doesn’t.”

“And we can’t hate him, because we feel sorry for him,” Jan said. “Also, because he’s good-looking.”

Now my eyebrows rose even higher. “Good-looking?”

The women exchanged another look. “Google him, you’ll see,” Jan said. “My sixteen-year-old daughter saw him in person once, sitting on his porch. Her exact words were—and I quote—‘The legs don’t matter, Mom, because he’s total swoon.’”

I looked back and forth between the two women. “You’re saying that my neighbor across the street is rich, single, good-looking, in a wheelchair, and an asshole?” He sounded like he was very messed up. Messed-up people were the only kind of people who interested me, the only kind of people I understood. “Maybe I’ll pay him a visit.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.” Amy shook her head. “He won’t answer the door. He hasn’t answered it in the seven years he’s lived here.”

She was probably right. But the idea stayed in my head as I drove to the nearest bars and restaurants, filling out applications. It stayed with me as every male manager I met let his eyes crawl up and down me like he had a right to it. It stayed with me as I sat in front of my laptop in my pajamas that evening, unable to sleep in the heat, looking up local modeling agencies who might find me some catalog work.

I got myself a bowl of fat-free ice cream from the freezer, peeking out the window on my way back to my grandmother’s sofa. The house across the street was dark except for a single light behind one of the blinds. Nothing moved.

Picking up my laptop again, I downed a bite of ice cream and opened my browser. I Googled Andrew Mason Millwood Michigan.

The results came up right away. There were articles about the accident from local papers, because as Amy had said, Andrew Mason’s parents were well known in town. There was a photo of a handsome, smooth-cheeked teenager with dark hair, smiling at the camera with the caption Andrew Mason was known as a talented young man with a lifetime of success ahead of him.