Freaks

16- Bad Anticipation

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Harper tries her best to ignore the bickering that she hears from her parent's room every time she walks by the door. She anticipates that it's all for a good cause and it is better than them being dead silent like they used to, but it's still hard having to hear it.

She gets to Kenan's room, he sits on his bed with his head raised to his TV and a console controller in his hands. He's playing some game like a ten-year-old. Harper takes a seat at his desk, looking at all of the scattered papers from his classes. She's wasting time because she'd rather not have to listen to her parents arguing in the wall she shares with them in her room.

"Looking for something?" He questions her examination.

"No." She turns tiredly, "Just getting out of my room because...I think you can hear it yourself."

He smiles wearily, "They'll get over it soon." He bends to his right and picks up another controller from his nightstand, "Care to join?"

She ducks her head as she gets up from the chair and sits with him, "You never let me play on this thing so I don't even know how to use it."

"I accidentally raised you to be an uncultured swine, haven't I?"

"At least I'm not as dumb as you look." She smiles quickly as he starts a game.

He scrunches his face and gives a fake laugh.

Katie soon appears with a mildly annoyed face, filtering through the mail in her hands, "Sorry, your father and I saw some crazy bill. Anyways, there's a note for you, Harper." She hands her the off-white envelope, "And some of this looks like school stuff, Kenan." She walks and sets them on his desk as he pays very little attention, "We'll talk about your other payments later."

Harper stands before Katie can walk out, "Who is this from?"

"I don't know, honey. I didn't get a chance to read it. It's probably from your grandparents or something." She squeezes her shoulder before going around her, "Tell your brother to get off of that thing and do some chores please."

"Already did." He mumbles and she leaves down the hall.

Harper stares at the envelope.

"Gonna play or not?" He asks.

She whips her head back to him, "I'll be right back." She turns out and locks herself inside her room. The back of the envelope is only printed with her name written in sloppy cursive. There's not an address or some sort of cute stamp sticker like she would usually see if it were from family. It had to have been dropped off in her mailbox from whoever wrote it.

Her mind goes through everyone, her friends. Malakai isn't a letter type of guy, he would just come over and talk to you. Aster might do something like this but she would make sure you knew it was from her. And Luka doesn't even know how to write in cursive.

Her heart races as she opens the folded piece of notebook paper, everything's written in cursive as well, whoever wrote it was trying to be fancy and mysterious.

:     Harper, I'm sure it's a surprise to you that the warehouse was burnt down. But it's more of a surprise to me that none of you mentioned my father's manager. He has tracked what the detectives have been looking into recently and noticed his name isn't on their list. He and I have worked together and I compromised that instead of me going out and finding each of you, he and I would like all four of you to meet with us. We'd like to talk.

There's an unowned lawyer's office on Lock Street that we want to meet you at on Tuesday, 11 pm.

Bring everyone and no weapons, no cops. Bring anything but yourselves and it won't be so pretty, we have plenty of men who will go out and kill you by themselves to protect their jobs. And they don't have the good morals as my father did.