Chapter 1

We all think of ourselves as normal. Well, maybe people like Donald Trump and Madonna think they're special. But take away their money and what's left?

Anyway I always thought I was normal. And I thought my family was normal too. I'm not particularly popular at school, but I have some pretty good friends. I'm not a jock, but that's by choice, instead of body type. I like working out, and I like having muscles I'm proud of. But I guess I'm a little lazy too, in terms of not wanting to spend all that extra time in training for football or wrestling or whatever.

I think I look pretty normal. Girls look at me, and I can usually get a date if I want one. Can't afford one, actually. You can't take girls out if you have no money. But it's not like I'm a hunk or anything, and girls fight over me, or will pay for dates just to be seen with me. Don't laugh. A couple of the popular guys at school are in exactly that situation. Sometimes girls can be really stupid.

And that's important - about girls sometimes being stupid - because my sister, Addison, did something stupid that I got sucked into, and my perfectly normal world suddenly got all fucked up.

Well ... I guess it wasn't sudden. But it seemed like it, later on. It's still confusing to me how things ended up like they are.

Maybe I should just start at the beginning, and maybe putting it all down on paper will entertain you and help me figure out how everything happened.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it will entertain you. It entertained the crap out of me while it was happening. I'll admit that. And that's part of the problem. I shouldn't have been entertained. I shouldn't have even done anything. But I did, and now I have to live with it.

But I was supposed to start at the beginning, so here goes.

For our purposes, the beginning was on a September evening, after supper, while we were doing homework. Our parents are funny about homework. I think it has something to do with how they were brought up or something. The rule is that we have to do our homework after supper, and we have to do it at the dining room table. If the computer is required, they got us a laptop, but it still has to be used at the dining room table. If both of us need a computer, Dad loans one of us his. No TV, no video games, no nothing, until homework is finished. Addie - that's what we call Addison for short - was working on biology, which she asked for some help with. That's allowed. We can help each other, but not do each other's work. It was about the difference between DNA, which is deoxyribonucleic acid, and RNA, which is ribonucleic acid. I explained macromolecules, and proteins and carbohydrates and nucleic acids, and how DNA was double stranded, while RNA was usually only single-stranded, and her eyes kind of glazed over. Dad walked through the dining room about then and she stopped listening to me and spoke to him.

"Daddy? Can I get an after school job?"

"What kind of job?" he asked.

That surprised me a little bit. Usually Dad is the one who free wheels and goes along with everything. One of his favorite sayings is "Be an existentialist! Explore life!" He usually says that when one of us has to do something new and is worried about it. Like he said it when I was all worried about going to high school the first day. And then he said it again the first time I went on a date and was all nervous. It was usually my mom who interrogated us and wanted to talk about everything. Her favorite phrase was "Let's examine the options." Maybe Dad adopted her attitude because she was off on an archaeological expedition in Peru and would be gone another six months.

"It's modeling clothes," said Addie.

"Modeling? Really?" He looked surprised. I could understand that, because I was surprised too. Modeling? She was pretty, but she wasn't, like gorgeous or anything. Like me, she had some friends ... okay a bunch of friends ... but I'd never thought of her as a model.

I blinked. I knew guys lusted after her. She was a cheerleader, after all, and all guys lusted after cheerleaders. It was like one of the rules of nature, completely normal. But modeling?

"What kind of clothes?" asked Dad.

She looked at him like he was mentally deficient. That was normal too.

"Clothes, Daddy. You know ... tops? Pants? Outfits? Clothes?" she tugged at the blouse she was wearing.

"What's the name of the agency?" he asked. That word, agency, came out of his mouth funny, like he had just remembered it. Maybe he was trying to restore his station as a non-deficient adult.

She dug into her book bag and pulled out a sheet of paper. She handed it to him.

"Zharkov Photography Associates L.L.C.," he read out loud. "Never heard of them."

"Cindy Jenkins told me about him. She works for him. It's only two or three hours a night, and only a couple of nights a week. And he pays twenty dollars an hour, Daddy. Please? I need to earn some money." Addie was a pro at the puppy dog eyes thing, and she employed them now.

"Why do you need to earn money?" he asked. "If you need something, let's talk about it."

"I can't ask for money to buy you a Christmas present, Daddy!" she complained. "I'm not a little girl any more. And what if I just want to blow a little bit on some luxury? Come on, Daddy. Cindy says it's perfectly safe and Vlad is a nice guy. He employs lots of girls."

Maybe she saw the frown on his face. For whatever reason she rushed to add, "Boys too, Daddy. It's not just girls who model for him. Cindy's boyfriend works for him too, and some other guys."

The way she said that last part was classic Addie for "I think" but she didn't actually say it. I knew her. She couldn't lie to me. But she still pulled it off with the parents now and then.

And Dad had only been half listening, as he read the paper.

"This is a release for a minor to be employed by the company and take pictures which would then be 'sold for public consumption in various advertising and entertainment venues'," he said. "What does that mean? Advertising I get, but public entertainment venues?"

"Cindy says he does some video work for a company that makes video games. I think she called it live action capture, or something like that. She says they turn what she does into the movements a character does in some video game or something. She has to wear all these sensors and wires and stuff."

"I don't know," he said. I reached for the form and he let me have it. I looked it over. It was written in that legal speech that would scare the crap out of anybody ... you know ... with words like "Indemnify" and "shall be held free from all blame" and stuff like that. I would say it looked normal, except I had never seen anything like this, so I had no idea, really, whether it was normal or not.

"Cindy said you get to keep some of the clothes," said Addie. "I wouldn't have to ask for your credit card and go shopping as often."

She knew how to dangle the carrot in front of the plodding mule, I'll give her that.

"Maybe I should call your mother and discuss this with her," he said.

"And he'll hire somebody else and I'll have to flip hamburgers for eight bucks an hour, and work fifteen hours a week and smell like grease and get kicked off the cheer squad," she whined. She was a good whiner, though I had learned how to be impervious to it. Dad? Not so much.

"You can do it under one condition. Your brother has to be with you," he said. "As your chaperone." He folded his arms to show her how serious he was.

She frowned at him, and I saw the thunder clouds building on her face. No girl in high school wants to be chaperoned by her big brother. Even I could imagine the snickers if it got out that she was under my supervision.

"They're not going to pay us both," she complained, unconsciously obviating her argument that this agency hired males too. "Besides, he won't do it. He's a dickhead."

"He'll do it if I tell him to do it," he said, with authority.

He looked over at me as if we had discussed this and I had already agreed that it was a good idea. But I didn't think it was a good idea. Not because I didn't think she should be a model. Somehow I had already gotten used to the idea that she could pull that part off. I just didn't want to be saddled with the whole mess. Even if it was only a couple of hours, that was a couple of hours I could spend doing something fun, instead of babysitting my sister. The problem was that I didn't have an after school job myself, and I wasn't involved in any extracurricular activities. In other words, from my father's perspective, I had nothing better to do with my time than escort my sister to her new job.

And I knew my father. He might be a mild mannered CPA these days, but when he met our mother, he rescued her from a bunch of Taliban who had taken the archaeological team she was working for as hostages. He was Special Forces and she was doing post graduate work, documenting antiquities that the Taliban were destroying. Anyway, she was appreciative of being rescued, and one thing led to another and I was conceived. So, having gotten a hostage pregnant, he got out of the Army and went to college.

One of my father's old buddies, a guy on the same team that rescued my mother, came to visit us a couple years back. He was still in the Army and he looked like he could kill you just by looking at you. He and Dad sat in the living room and slaughtered a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, which my father had had sitting on a shelf ever since I could remember. Mom was sitting in there with them until the guy looked at her and said, "You know, Buck, I never could understand why you cashed in your chips, but seeing Stephanie, here, I get it now. I really get it, Buck."

And my father, who I had never heard say a mean thing in my entire life, looked at his Army buddy and said, "I know what you're thinking, Chuck ... but is she worth dying for? Because if you make a move on my woman, Chuck, I'm going to have to kill you."

And they all laughed. Except he sounded funny somehow, and there was this look on Chuck's face that said, "And I know you could do it," and my mother suddenly got up and said it was bedtime, even though there was half an hour left before bedtime. And pretty soon we heard the front door open and close and we never saw Chuck again. And my dad opened the good Scotch for him!

So once in a while, when our father said something in that special tone of voice he had used with Chuck that night, we didn't ask questions. We just did whatever he told us to do.

"Sure," I said. "No problem."

"Daddeeeeeee," whined Addie.

"Let me hear you ask if I want fries with that," said Dad. "See if you can make me want fries."

She would have stormed off, except we weren't finished with homework. That gave me an idea.

"What about homework?" I asked.

He didn't bat an eye. "On days when she works, homework gets done as soon as you get home from school. Then supper, and then she can go to work. Two hours on those nights, and no more." He reached for the paper in my hand and looked at it again. "And Mr. Zharkov has to agree to all that."

Now she didn't want to storm off. The negotiations had begun.

In the end, this is the deal she got. Since this Zharkov guy ran a business, and might have set hours because the business demanded it, he agreed to let us do homework before or after she worked, or both, if necessary. She also got dispensation for supper, which was usually a sit down meal where everybody who was in the house had to be there. On work days we could "eat out of the refrigerator", as Dad called it. He made us both promise not to tell Mom about that. She was the one who was big on family meals. He said that by the time she got back, it would either have worked out, or "other arrangements would be made," which I knew meant he'd make her stop working, but which she thought meant he'd let us get fast food on the way home.

And I thought all this was stupid, because she didn't even have the job yet, and had no idea what hours this guy might require her to be there.

So it was possible there might not even be a job for her, the first time we went to the house.

Zharkov Photograph Associates L.L.C. was located in the basement of a really nice house in the fancy part of town. It was in Pine Bough Estates, which was where the rich folks lived. The houses were set on two or three acre plots, and there were lots of swimming pools, and nice cars and all that.

Addie was driving. Dad had fixed us up an old VW Bug. We had to actually help him rebuild the engine, so we'd know now much work went into it, and how it worked and how to fix it if it broke and all that. It was part of his explore life philosophy, I guess. Anyway, there was a regular driveway that led to a two car garage at the front of the house, but the driveway also went off to the side, around and behind the house. Addie had been told to go that way, and when we got to the back yard, there was a parking apron big enough for three cars. There was one parked there, and I recognized it as Jerry Thompson's. He was Cindy Jenkins' boyfriend.

There were garage doors in the back too, on the lower level of the walkout basement. They were both closed, but right beside it was a people door, so we went to that. There was a sign on the door that said, "Come in if you've been invited. Stay out if you haven't." I looked at Addie, who looked at the release Dad had signed. While he was signing it he said, "You take care of your sister and protect her from anything bad. That's your job, and I expect you to take it seriously."

I was about to ask if we had been invited, when she reached for the door knob, turned it, and walked in like she owned the place. I couldn't do anything other than follow her inside.

We found ourselves in what looked like a family room, except there were racks of clothes all over the place. They were the kind with wheels that you sometimes see in a movie set in New York City, where people are moving racks of clothing down a sidewalk, or across the street. That seemed normal. At least until I realized some of the clothing looked odd. Like I saw what was undeniably a pirate's outfit, hanging on a hanger, with the pirate hat balanced on top of a shelf built into the top of the rack. I also saw a long white robe, with angel wings above it.

Chapter 2 »