Read Online The Family You Choose by Deborah Nam-Krane - Free Book Online Page A

hugged him. Usually it was heavy with hard liquor, or at
the very least wine. The first time he’d sipped a drink, the smell
had reminded Michael of his father.
    He remembered, although it seemed incredible
to him now, how bad he’d felt for Richard when they were younger,
before his parents died, because Michael wasn’t sure how much of
Aunt Lucy’s love Richard had gotten. Maybe he imagined it, but he
thought that Richard enjoyed his company back then, as if he could
experience being a normal child through him.
    Sometimes, when Richard forgot to be angry
with Michael, when he forgot that he had to take care of Jessie,
when he forgot about how much Miranda couldn’t stand him, Michael
thought that Richard did, truly, want him around. Maybe it was just
the memory of having done so once, but sometimes that was enough
for Michael to feel like a real person with a real family and not
the boy who lived in Alex Sheldon’s house.
    Remembering anything about Alex was usually
enough to end any happiness for Michael. When his dad ran away and
hid, he hid with Alex. Alex had been his dad’s refuge. Alex, Alex,
Alex. And dad would come back even more drunk than before. And his
mother would look like she wanted to cry.
    But that wasn’t why he hated Alex. It was
that very last memory of his father, and one of the last of his
mother. It was burned on him. Only one of the adults had noticed
what happened, and he knew it too. But it didn’t matter, because
his parents were gone forever. And it was Michael’s punishment to
bear, Michael who hadn’t done anything except be a child, that he
should be with the only other person who survived the ordeal. But
there were other punishments that he could dole out, and soon
enough he would.
    If only...well, he really needed to put that
behind him.
    Michael realized that he’d walked down to the
basement. When Richard’s parents had lived here—although it seemed
like Lucy had spent an awful lot of time in her apartment even
then—the two boys had played hide and go seek down in the basement.
Inevitably, the game had degenerated into a search for the most
obscure items. One day they’d happened upon a secret room. With a
little bit of lock-picking—Richard had been surprisingly
resourceful even then—the boys finally opened the room. They’d
found a bunch of old clothes their grandfather had left there. They
played dress up, looking in the old, gilded mirror, then flopping
down onto some of the old furniture laughing until they cried. It
had been their secret place.
    Michael found the room again, but to his
surprise, it was locked. Now he was curious. It hadn’t been locked
in years. He went upstairs and grabbed the tools from Richard’s
workroom. In fifteen minutes he had the lock picked open. His plane
would be leaving soon, but he didn’t care.
    He opened the door, its creaking on its rusty
hinges. All that was there now was the couch and the mirror.
Michael almost left until he saw a clear piece of plastic sticking
out behind the mirror. It was so hard to see in the dim light that
he wouldn’t even seen it if the light hadn’t caught it just so as
he turned.
    He walked behind the mirror and carefully
slid the box on the floor. He knelt down and opened it, then gasped
when he realized what he was looking at. When had Richard developed
that habit?
    He picked up the bottles. Ritalin. Roofies.
Anti-depressants. Really—all of them? There were more drug names,
but none that he recognized. Then he looked at the names of the
patients on the bottles. None were for Richard. And all of them
were from different pharmacies. What the Hell was this?
    Jammed under a bunch of vials was a little
book. He picked it up. It was filled with names and numbers in
different handwriting. Sometimes little notes about who liked what.
Michael closed the book, baffled. These didn’t belong to a user.
They belonged to a dealer. But...Richard wasn’t a dealer, no matter
what was in front of him. Who did