Sons of the 613 by Michael Rubens Page B

did she leave? She drove all the way out here and just left?”
    â€œDefinitely infatuated,” says Darrell, nodding his head and grinning.
Meteor. Bear. Frozen shitcube from a passing airplane. Anything.
    â€œJosh, why did she leave?”
    â€œShe just left.”
    â€œWhat did you say to her?”
    â€œWhat did I
say
to her? What’s it to you?”
    â€œWhat, it’s like she’s his friggin’ girlfriend or something,” says Craig to Josh with a hopeful smile, waiting to be rewarded for his great joke. Instead Josh turns his head and just looks at him, a deliberate, blank-faced, dreadful moment that makes Darrell hurriedly interject, “Craig, whyn’t you come over here for a bit?” For a few seconds I almost feel a glimmer of affection for my brother.
    â€œOkay,” I say, “I jumped off the stupid cliff. Can we go home now?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
INVESTIGATION
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    M ERIT B ADGE : E LECTRONIC E SPIONAGE
    We say our goodbyes at Taylors Falls and leave Darrell and Craig there. Josh doesn’t say anything about my jumping, like it didn’t count. It’s a long way to drive in tense silence. After a while I fall asleep.
    We’re cold and formal with each other during haphtarah practice. I don’t mention anything about the day, and he doesn’t bring it up. We might as well be unrelated, Josh just a grimly professional hired tutor.
    When he gets up to use the bathroom, he leaves his cell phone on the desk. The instant he is out the door and down the hallway I grab the phone and start scrolling through his call history. Outgoing, outgoing, outgoing, outgoing, to someone named Trish. Lots of them—days of them—with only a few incomings from her.
    Lots of incomings from Lesley, especially over the past week. A few outgoing.
    I pause and listen for Josh. I don’t hear anything.
    I go to his text inbox, but it’s empty, and so is his outbox, everything scrubbed clean. There’s one text in his drafts file, a fragment of a message to Trish—“Unfair? How bout u? Y can’t u”—and then it stops.
    There are other calls, names I don’t recognize. The most recent call from Lesley was at 3:23 P.M. today, one of a cluster that he never answered.
    I get up and go to Josh’s doorway and lean out into the hall. The bathroom door is still closed. I step back into the room and stare at the phone, at Lesley’s unanswered call.
    What I should do is put the phone back down. Instead I press the call button.
    Lesley answers.
    â€œI hope you’re calling to apologize.”
    I nearly drop the phone in a rush of terror and excitement and jab the end call button, then race back to put the phone on the desk, hop away from it, and stand frozen in frightened-squirrel pose, arms hugged close to my sides, fists together under my chin. From down the hall comes the sound of the toilet flushing and then hand washing.
    The phone rings. I jump. More frozen squirrel.
Ring.
I scurry back to the desk and stand over it, dart my hand out, pull it back, repeat, then snatch up the phone and hit end call. The phone falls silent midring.
    I put it down. The phone and I regard each other, neither moving.
    It beeps. New text.
    WHAT RU DOING? it says.
    The bathroom door is opening. Here he comes. I fumble with the phone and accidentally hit reply, then have to work my way back to select Lesley’s message and figure out how to delete it. Josh is coming down the hall, three steps from the door. I highlight the message, delete it, put the phone back in its place, and leap into my seat just as he is rounding the corner into the room.
    â€œDid my phone ring?” he says as he sits down.
    â€œYeah, but they hung up,” I say.
    He picks up the phone, sees who it was, makes a face, and puts the phone down again.
    â€œAll right, let’s keep going,” he says.
    Â 
ISAAC, SERIOUSLY, YOU HAVE TO CALL ME BACK BECAUSE WE WERE