Chapter 17: Crash
“You want to crash here?” Instantly, I shook my head. “Look around.”
“It’s not that bad,” Benji said.
“I didn’t mean –!” I gritted my teeth. “We literally have two rooms, and neither is very big. I’m not trying to be a shitheel, Benji, I promise. It just doesn’t make any sense for you and Sandy and Mason to camp out here. What, is your house getting fumigated?”
“Wait,” Lena said, “Sandy and Mason would come, too? All of a sudden I am totally for this plan.”
Lena, who had to spend an hour recharging her batteries after an evening with friends, was going to invite my brother’s entire family to share our five hundred square feet?
And that was just her mundane social anxiety. It didn’t even begin to address the Third Eye weirdness we’d have to explain to people who were just about the last ones I’d expect to be open to it.
I shot her a glance. “You are in favor of having people live with us?”
“I’m in favor of having your super cute nephew visiting for a few days.” She looked away. “It wouldn’t be that weird. Right?”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose.
I noticed Benji was doing the same thing.
Both our hands snapped away from our faces.
“It’s...” He sighed. “... just me.”
“Oh,” Lena said. “Sorry, then, but we’re closed.”
“Lena...” I shook my head. “What do you mean it’s just you, Benji?”
“I didn’t think it was that complicated of a concept, Cameron,” he said. “I, as in me, the person who’s talking to you, need a place to crash for a few days. Maybe, like, a week?”
“That’s more reasonable,” I said, “logistically speaking.”
“Awesome.” He rolled his shoulders and straightened up. “Help me get my shit out of the car.”
“Whoa, wait.” I stepped between him and the front door.
Benji folded his arms over his chest. “What, are you actually going to throw me out on my ass?”
“I’m not saying you can’t stay.” Even though there were so many ways that it could go wrong, and none I could imagine going right. “You understand it comes as kind of a surprise, right?”
“I bet a lot of things come as a surprise to people who don’t read their email.”
“If I go read that email right now,” I said, “is it going to explain why you, and you only, need to crash somewhere? Need to crash with Lena and I, no less, who have a tiny apartment and you’ve barely talked to in years? Not Mom and Dad, who you hang out with every weekend at their house?”
Benji’s jaw worked. “Not... exactly.”
“I think maybe we should hear that,” Lena said. “Like, if you’re on the run from the Mafia, we’re obviously going to be your first choice, because we’re such badasses. But also, no, you can’t stay here.”
He rolled his eyes. “I don’t owe money to the mob, Lena. I can get a loan from a bank like a grown-ass adult.”
“Loan?” I asked.
“Forget it.” Benji chopped the air, which did not make me forget anything. “It’s like this. Sandy’s real pissed with me right now. And I get it. She strongly suggested I should take a ‘business trip’ so she didn’t blow up at me in front of Mason. Which, again, I get.”
Lena and I exchanged glances and waited for him to continue.
At first, he shifted on his feet, but after a moment, his shoulders flexed and he fixed me with a glare.
I returned it. “And you didn’t take that trip to Mom and Dad’s, why, exactly?”
“They are also exactly not the biggest fans of mine right now.” He ground the words out.
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“Jesus, Benji,” I said. “You didn’t cheat on Sandy did you?”
“What the fuck, Cameron!” He took a step forward, then sank back against the counter. “No.”
“Then what actually happened, man?”
“Have you even looked at the family Discord?” he asked. “Not busting on you, I legit want to know how much I have to explain.”
“Explain,” Lena said, “as you would a child.”
I don’t think Benji caught her Galaxy Quest reference. His brow furrowed and he said, “I wouldn’t even start telling a child about this. Kids don’t need to know about savings until they’re old enough to get an account.”
Lena scratched her head.
I, on the other hand, thought I got it. “Are Mom and Dad mad at you because you lost Mason’s college fund somehow?”
“They aren’t happy about it,” he muttered. Confirming it had happened. At minimum.
I swallowed. “What else did you lose, Benji?”
“I didn’t lose it,” he said. “You make it sound like I just took the money out of the bank and put it in a suitcase and forgot it in the airport or something.”
Half-remembered snippets of family discourse, some from the Discord, others from being roped into the occasional holiday dinner, drifted through my mind. “A couple years ago, Mom bugged me about getting in on some kind of investment fund you were setting up. That was actually a thing, right, not just something she wanted to make me feel inadequate about?”
He winced. “Yeah.”
“I take it,” I said, “Lena and I made the right call by not kicking in a little?”
“Did you make a call, or did you just not have any money?”
I scowled. “We would’ve lost it either way, right?”
“Yes, dammit!”
“How much?”
“About two hundred percent of your however many bucks you scraped together.”
“How does that even work?” My eyes widened. “You leveraged a family investment fund?”
“I made a call that seemed like the right one at the time. If I’d gotten in and out a month earlier, we’d have quadrupled the investment. And if the settlement goes through, which it’s gonna, it might still end up being a good move in the end.”
“I’m guessing you got sucked into some crypto scam, then?” I asked.
He gave a tight nod.
I’d always been annoyed by Bitcoin and its relatives. I could never quite tell if it was because they seemed like a scam to me, or because my perception of them kept me from getting in as a kid and eliminating all my subsequent financial worries.
I hadn’t followed crypto markets closely, but I knew they’d boomed alongside just about every tech sector while everyone was stuck at home. I hadn’t heard anybody crowing about a crash, so I assumed that whatever Benji had bought into, it hadn’t been anything mainstream.
“Did you talk to Dane about it?” I asked. Dane was our cousin, about Benji’s age. He was as insufferable a prick as my family had produced, which was saying something, but he had a hell of a head for numbers. Until I met Erin, he’d been my picture in the dictionary next to the word “stathead.”
“Dane isn’t always right,” Benji snapped.
“It sounds,” Lena said, “like he was right about this, though?”
Benji’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah.”
“So,” I said. “You dumped your kid’s college fund and our parents’ savings –”
“And Sandy’s parents’ savings.”
I was past processing it. “– into some fly-by-night coin, against the advice of the one person in our family who’s actually good with money?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the coin! It was the market that turned out to be a big scam. There’s already a class action lawsuit brewing. That’s why I think I’ll get the money back in the settlement.”
“IANAL and all,” Lena said, “but I’m pretty sure lawsuits take way more than a week.”
“I don’t need to stay here until the lawsuit’s over,” he said. “I just don’t want to have a stupid fight with Sandy in front of Mason, and I don’t want Mom and Dad getting their digs in the whole time I crash with them.”
“Understandable,” I said.
“I can get a hotel or something,” he said, “but as you can probably imagine, I don’t really want to spend a bunch of money right now. Once Sandy cools down, I’ll go home.”
“Okay, that makes a degree of sense,” I said. “She’s not going to stay mad forever. It sounds like a lot of money, but in the end, it’s only money.”
He’d only stay a few days, right? I thought I could tolerate that.
Until he shook his head and said, “That’s such a you reaction, little bro.”
Lena snorted. “You’re really selling how great it’ll be to have you here, Benji.”
“Sorry.” He almost sounded it, but I thought he was just exhausted.
It didn’t pacify Lena. She jabbed her finger in the air. “How much did you lose, anyway?”
“About four hundred thousand,” he said. “Plus the debt.”
I sank back against the door.
I glanced at Lena. Her hand fell limp to her side.
Why not? I wasn’t sure how much she’d made in her brief window doing salaried tech support, but that was more money than the two of us had pulled in combined in our five years living together.
I was probably staring, too. Less in disbelief than horror.
When I was younger, I’d wanted to do better with money than Benji. To shut him up all those times he’d smirked as he asked me how my work was going. Better yet, to hear our parents ask him why he couldn’t be more like his brother, instead of saying it to me. I thought it wouldn’t matter to me if I made it big or he screwed up. Not that either ever happened.
Until now.
Looked like I’d gotten my wish. Right from a goddamn monkey’s paw.
Hell with it.
I surged across the room.
Lena and Benji both started.
I clasped the latter’s hand. While he stared down at my grip, I said, “Come on. Let’s get your shit out of the car.”