Stepdad and His Friends Bred Me During the Birthday Blackout novel · Chapter 9 of 48

Chapter 9: Her Rules

I sat up on the basement floor with dust on my back and my mother's phone number in my head.

Then I remembered.

The day I passed my journeyman exam, I was twenty-two.

I photographed my new card on the hood of my car in the testing center lot and texted it to exactly one person.

Proud of me?

She wrote back four hours later. That's nice, baby. Can you pick up my dry cleaning?

"She's had my card number for two years," I told Rand. "I sent it to her myself."

He didn't say it wasn't my fault.

He just picked a cobweb out of my hair and handed me the second burrito.

I started on that panel the same morning.

Every new wire went around the gray box.

I came up out of the basement at nine that night with copper dust in my braid and found Abram alone at the bar.

The ground floor was dark except for one copper lamp.

He poured me a Coke without asking and slid it down the bar.

"It hasn't tripped once tonight," he said. "The kitchen's been running both ovens."

"I know. I was listening."

"You can hear it?"

"I can hear when it's happy."

I turned on the stool and looked at the old brass elevator in the corner.

Three buttons. G, 2, and a third one with no number, just a small copper star.

"What's on three?" I said.

He didn't pretend not to understand me.

"The Third Floor," he said. "Private rooms. Members' nights, first Friday of every month. Adults who want to be seen, or watched, or left alone, by people who keep their mouths shut."

"Masks?"

"Optional."

"And you started it."

"The three of us did. Fourteen years ago." He turned his glass a quarter turn on the bar. "There's one rule. It's on a brass plate by the door."

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