Page 8 of Sin

I have less than two hundred dollars in my bank account and no place to go if Gideon and my mother kick me out. I promise myself I’ll pick up as many tutoring gigs as I can manage this semester so I can save up to move out and sever my association with anything to do with the Citadel.

Except for Sin. I don’t know if there’s any severing of the connection I feel to him.

Speaking of Sin, I’m not sure where he disappeared to. In the middle of the service, he stood up and strolled out the door, seemingly uncaring of his father’s glare from the pulpit, or the fact that every eye both inside the Citadel and the ones watching on their televisions and computers watched him as he left.

I’m just about to reluctantly ask my mother for a ride back to the house when I spot Sin outside.

He’s leaning against the wall of the church, looking like a model with his cool and distant stare, Berluti sunglasses hiding his eyes. “Need a ride?” he asks, his voice flat.

“If you’re going back home, I’d appreciate it,” I answer gratefully, not wanting to be stranded here with Gideon and my mother.

He doesn’t say anything, just pushes himself off the wall and takes off for the car, which is still parked in front of the main church entrance.

I follow after him, and once when we’re both in the car, I turn to him. “Is everything all right?”

He doesn’t answer, just blasts his music and peels off, racing through the twisty private road that leads back home. I try to yell over the music a couple of times, but he just looks straight ahead, jaw clenched. I finally give up and spend the rest of the journey going over the whole day from the moment I woke up to now, trying to figure out what happened to make him go so cold toward me.

Isn’t that what always happens,a cynical voice in my head whispers to me. He draws you in and then shoves you away.

He pulls into the garage, a huge structure that houses both Gideon’s and Sin’s collections of expensive cars, and slides into his parking space.

I release my seatbelt and start to open the door so I can put some distance between us. I don’t want Sin to see how much he hurt me—again. I click the door release, but just as I do, he hits a button locking me in. My head swivels toward him. His expression is blank, and he’s still wearing those damned sunglasses. “Let me out,” I shout over the music.

He pushes another button, and suddenly the car is silent. “Let me out,” I repeat.

He turns to me. “You and I need to have a little conversation first.”

I throw my hands up in exasperation. “I tried talking to you the whole way here.”

He doesn’t acknowledge my frustration. He just stares at me through his sunglasses and begins speaking. “You came home. You saw your mother. Now it’s time for you to leave.”

“Leave?” I repeat, his words creating a sick kind of déjà vu of three years ago. “Your father already hijacked me from Belmore and enrolled me at Thurston. I can’t go back to Massachusetts. It was a super-competitive program. I’m sure they’ve already filled the opening.”

“I don’t mean go back to Massachusetts,” he corrects me. “I want you to disappear.”

“Disappear?”

He nods. “I’ll have a car here for you tonight to take you to the airport. From there, you can get a ticket to wherever the fuck you want as long as you go no contact with our parents or with anyone you know until after your birthday.”

“I don’t have enough money for bus fare, let alone a plane ticket.”

Sin reaches behind him and pulls out his phone from his back pocket. “I created a Venmo account for you earlier.”

“I don’t need one of those.” It’s true, I don’t have enough money to need an app like that.

“You do now.” He turns his phone around. On the screen is his Venmo account, and it’s authorizing a transfer to me for sixty thousand dollars. He holds it out to me. “All you have to do is hit send.”

I just stare at his phone screen and all those zeros.

“That’s just to tide you over until you turn eighteen. After that, I’ll pay for you to go to college and then med school, wherever in the fuck you want to go. All expenses paid.”

The enormity of what he is offering me is huge. I’ve always known that realizing my dream to be a medical scientist will come with a hefty load of financial debt that I’ll have to carry through most of my life, because research is not one of the more lucrative medical fields. That’s not what hits me the most about his offer, though.

“You hate me bad enough that you’re willing to bribe me to go away?” I ask in a voice that holds competing amounts of incredulity and pain.

“You need to be gone from here,” is all he says.

Gone from being anywhere near him. Gone from his life for as good as forever.

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