Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 77793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
I look where she points after and realize Granny was prepared.
“She obviously thought you’d accept her offer.”
“That means she climbed up here all on her own and put it up,” she points out.
“Granny is quite nimble.” She never acts like a gorilla without bananas but more like a monkey who would throw poo at you and delight in it. Never ornery and always full of surprises. I guess that’s what I’m going for here.
“Thanks for helping me with my suitcase.” Echo sits on the thing since there aren’t any chairs in here. She crosses her legs at the ankles, and I try not to look at her feet in her flats or any part of her shapely legs in the skin-tight skinny jeans with the rips all over them.
“Yeah, no problem. Anyway, um, Granny said to come down for breakfast. She promised she wouldn’t burn the bacon, and she makes a mean scrambled egg.”
“A mean one, hmm?”
“You’d be surprised by how an egg can get messed up. I’ve had scrambled eggs that are charred, that taste like the inside of a trash can, and that are so dry that you can’t get them down. Anyway, yes, scrambled eggs can be seriously ruined. Don’t even get me started on powdered eggs.”
“Hey, I happen to like those kinds of eggs. They’re excellent with salsa and hot sauce.”
“Yes, but if you douse them with that, are you really tasting the eggs at all?”
She shrugs. “So, how did you get into hacking?”
It’s a fair question. I asked her the same thing after all. I guess I’m just well-trained at going stiff as a board at things like that—questions about my former life. “You…you already know part of it,” I answer woodenly. It’s so strange to be able to tell someone the truth. Strange and freeing. Did my brothers feel like this when they told their significant others the story of their past? Not that Echo is my significant other. She’s probably almost lawfully not by this time, although I’m sure the mail and court people and legal office don’t work on weekends. And was it a real marriage if I got married using a fake identity?
“Did you really mail those papers?” I’m suddenly panicked, thinking that, holy shit, I’m going to get discovered because a fake identity only goes so far even if Granny always covers all her bases.
She nods. “I did, yes.”
“Granny said you could?”
“Yes.” She gives me a puzzled look.
“I was just thinking because I used a fake identity. Does that make me and you married, or is it a marriage with someone who never existed?”
She rolls her eyes. “I don’t know. But you or fake you, the divorce is going to be officially official right away anyway.”
I feel like a moron, especially when Echo looks out the window I just opened and not at me. It’s like she wants to look there and not at me, so I search for safer ground, something we have in common. Hacking, you poo mountain. Hacking.
“It’s a long story. The hacking thing, I mean. My mom was…um, well, she tried, but she wasn’t expecting to have a child, let alone twins. She did the best she could, but she was also…she was an addict. I guess there’s no nice way to say it. We were taken away from her when we were six and put into the system. We bounced around from home to home, and all of them were actually alright. Nothing shady ever went down or anything. Did we receive good, proper care? No. Were we ever abused past missing a meal now and then and getting ignored? Not really. I know we were lucky in that regard.”
“Jesus,” Echo curses. “At least my mom had the decency to wait until I was almost legally an adult to leave because then, no one would notice.”
She’s not looking at me, so I don’t worry about composing my face or shrugging off something that’s still very painful for me. “She did the best she could. I really believe that. We found out later that she became clean, but we haven’t tried to look her up. That was the decision we made together, Atlas and me. I’m glad she’s doing okay. Maybe one day we’ll try and reconnect. I…I would like that, actually. Everything turned out okay, so I can’t look at those things from my past and feel bitter about anything, even the parts that were hard. I was a bit of a punk when I was younger. I also wasn’t always a big kid before I hit my growth spurt at sixteen, but I did have a big mouth, and I thought I was tough. I liked to fight more than I should, so I kept getting expelled from different schools for fighting. My foster parents liked the cash we brought in but not the problems. I was going to be moved to another family without my brother, but Atlas was all I had. He was all I ever had. In the end, he got himself expelled, too, so we wouldn’t get separated, and we ended up getting a new placement together.”