If We Survive The Night

Distraction

Jaden

I wouldn't call Casey a bad guy, but he's just...meh. He hadn't even been around all that long, having only moved in a few months ago, because he'd be starting college this fall. He'd lived with his mother before that, Mr. Clark's first wife, which was all I knew about him from Hazel when I stumbled upon him one morning in the living room. I came in with the vacuum cleaner, and there he was, sitting on a couch, scrolling on his phone, a young guy about my age, his dark overgrown curls partly obscuring his eyes. As I approached, he looked up with a hint of curiosity, but then Mrs. Clark got up from her armchair, apparently seeing this as an opportunity to strike a conversation with her stepson.

"Oh, hi, Jaden! Casey, this is Jaden. He's the son of Marie, our cleaner. He helps her sometimes."

"Hey," said Casey, returning his attention to his phone, the word 'cleaner' apparently killing what curiosity he'd felt for a moment. Cleaners weren't interesting to him.

"How's your mother?" said Mrs. Clark, coming closer, smiling. She had a nice smile, but it never seemed like she meant it, so I much preferred her looking right through me, as she usually did. On that day, though, she apparently was intent on showing Casey how good she was with her housekeeping staff. "I haven't seen her in a week or two. Is she well?"

She hadn't seen my mother in months, but I wasn't going to tell her that. At first, my mother had been the cleaner, then I had started helping her, and now, it was just me. With us being so transparent and interchangeable, the Clark couple didn't seem to notice. The mansion was clean, and the paycheck kept arriving at my mother's bank account to which I had access, so it was all good.

"She's got the flu," I said.

"Oh..." Her smile didn't slip, but she added a touch of sadness to it. "I hope she takes good care of herself. Please tell her I wish her a speedy recovery."

"I will."

She nodded, still smiling, and floated out of the room. Casey remained, engrossed in his phone

"Hey," I said. "I need to vacuum here."

"I don't mind the noise," he said.

I waited until he looked at me, and then, following my gaze, at the carpet, on which his feet in white sneakers rested. With a sigh, he pulled them up, and lay down on the sofa, holding the phone in front of his face. My mom would have slapped the shit out of me if I ever tried lying down like that without removing my shoes, not even on our shabby sofa, but this kid looked like he'd never been slapped for anything inhis life, so he behaved accordingly.

"Why don't you go to your room?" For some reason I didn't like the idea of cleaning while he was here. I didn't mind the rest of the family—they were as transparent to me as I was to them—but this guy was new, and my age. Working for his parents felt like working for him, which added a touch of humiliation to what I normally considered a perfectly fine job.

"Nah," he said, not looking.

So, I just vacuumed with him there. He didn't even look my way when I left the room.

I've seen him around the house a bunch of times since then, but we almost never talked, and when we did, it was always kind of awkward. Like that one time when I found the bottle of milk on the kitchen island and put it in the fridge. Before shutting the fridge door, I paused, just marveling at the shelves stocked with all kinds of delicious things. That food could last me a month, easily.

"Hungry?" said Casey, walking into the kitchen. He had apparently struck a bond with Hazel, who allowed him to sample her cooking and turned a blind eye when he sneaked things out before supper. She even told him about her grandkids every now and then, which made me irrationally jealous, because she rarely told me such stuff. "Help yourself."

I shut the fridge door. "I wasn't going to take anything."

He sneered. "I bet you weren't." He grabbed a few cookies from the jar on the table and was gone before I could think of an appropriate reply. My cheeks burned as if I got caught doing something illegal. I'd really had no intention of taking anything, but him thinking otherwise bothered me. For a while after that episode, I even stopped accepting the leftovers from Hazel, but eventually she called me stupid and pushed a Tupperware box into my backpack, and things went back to normal.

Even when I wasn't seeing him, I thought about him sometimes. Maybe it was him being my age, a constant reminder of what I could have been if I'd been born into a different family. Not that I had anything against mine. Mom had always been good to me, but the difference in starting points for me and this pampered, well-dressed, absent-minded kid was hard to ignore. I kept thinking of him as a kid, even though he was starting college, but there was something about him that just felt immature. Maybe I simply liked to think about him like that, to imagine maturity as something that, for a change, I possessed, and he didn't.

There was also that time when he suddenly decided to comment on my clothes. I wore blue jeans and a red T-shirt that day. I passed him in the hall, minding my own business, when he said, "Are you cosplaying Spiderman or something?"

"Come again?" I said, turning, infusing my voice with a bit of threat, because I was, by then, quite annoyed with him constantly moping around the house and getting in my way.

He didn't seem threatened. Frankly, he looked like someone who wouldn't recognize a threat if it stared him in the face. He just shrugged and said, "Red and blue don't go together."

"Says who?"

"Common sense?"

"My common sense says no such thing."

"Only colors that come together in nature look good together," he said, patronizingly. "Like, blue and yellow—the sky and the sun, and so on."

"That's bullshit."

He snorted. "Whatever. I guess some people just have no fashion sense."

"I wear what I have," I said curtly.

"Oh... you know what?" He snapped his fingers. "I could give you some of my clothes. I have too many, anyway. We're about the same size. Your shoulders are wider, perhaps, so my oversize will look good on you." His gave me a slow, evaluating look-over that made me uncomfortable. "Seriously, they're good. Some I never even wore."

He was probably trying to be nice, or maybe he was trying to humiliate me, it was hard to tell. Anyway, I kinda felt like slapping him, so I couldn't trust myself to continue with the conversation. I just turned away and started walking.

"Just trying to help," he called out, to which I didn't reply.

There were more encounters like that, short awkward exchanges. I found myself avoiding him and, at the same time, looking out for him. I didn't mind seeing him when he didn't see me. He liked to read, that's what he was doing on his phone, and when he did, he looked okay, kind of detached and unguarded. Then he would look up and notice me and say something and ruin it.

There was also that one time when I entered his room. I wasn't supposed to clean there, but he got into a habit of leaving his shit around the house, and so I found his sweatshirt on one of the sofas downstairs, and I took it upstairs, intending to just put in his room. I entered without knocking, that's true, but how was I supposed to know he wasn't alone? Anyway, that's too embarrassing to remember.

Bottom line is, Casey is not my friend. So, if something happens to him—it's none of my business.

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