Free Rooms by Lauren Oliver

felt nothing but a sharp surge of resentment.
    Fucking Trenton. The house belonged to him now. And Trenton would go on believing their dad was some kind of misunderstood saint, and feeling superior to Minna for hating him. Maybe she should tell him about Adrienne Cadiou; she had found at least one card with Adrienne’s name on it from the stash Trenton had located earlier, and though the messages weren’t romantic, the fact that her father had kept them obviously was. She’d been hoping, after the reading of the will, that there might be some other explanation, like maybe her dad had mowed Adrienne down with his car and now she was paralyzed. Hush money.
    Stupid.
    She had stuffed all the cards and that disgusting lock of hair deep into a trash bag and taken it out immediately to the garage, as if it might contaminate the whole house.
    “I don’t hear anything.” Minna stepped over him, nudging him in the ribs accidentally-deliberately with her foot. But he didn’t even flinch.
    “I think—I think this house might be haunted,” Trenton said.
    “Are you high?” Minna said. “Or just dumb?”
    When Trenton blushed, even his pimples got darker. He sat up clumsily, and Minna remembered what the doctors had told her mom: that he would never have the same range of motion as before.
    “Sorry,” Minna said. “Mom’s blotto. I’m a little stressed out.”
    Trenton nodded, but he wouldn’t look at her. He picked at a spot on the carpet with his thumbnail. Minna, realizing that the ache had spread from her stomach into her whole body, sat in the chair the lawyer, Dennis, had vacated. The chairs were still arranged in a little circle, like the room had recently hosted a group therapy session.
    After a long minute of silence, in which Minna ran an inventory of everything that hurt, from her shoulders to her knuckles to the small, calloused little toe of her right foot, Trenton looked up.
    “So you don’t believe,” Trenton said.
    “Believe in what?” Minna said.
    Trenton looked embarrassed. “Ghosts.”
    Minna couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “What is this about, Trenton?”
    “We don’t know, ” he said, and then she knew he wasn’t joking. “Nobody knows. You said yourself someone was murdered here.”
    “That’s just a story I heard,” Minna said. “I don’t know if it’s true. And I never said she was murdered.”
    “And Dad—” Trenton began.
    “Dad died at Presbyterian Medical,” Minna said.
    It was like Trenton hadn’t heard. “But he could be,” Trenton insisted. “He could be, I don’t know, stuck somehow—”
    A sharp pain went straight through Minna’s head, like a flash going off. “If he’s stuck anywhere, it’s somewhere hotter than this,” she said, and then regretted it.
    Sometimes, it felt as though the words came out of her mouth without looping in her brain first. Trenton looked so pathetic, and she had a sudden memory of little Trenton, baby Trenton, before his bones had distended his body and made it gawky and puppetlike. She remembered him crawling into her lap, accidentally putting his knee in the soft space between her ribs, just below the two mosquito-bite boobs newly formed, wrapping a fat fist around her hair, saying “Mama.” And Minna, nearly thirteen years old, had not corrected him.
    “You hated him, didn’t you?” Trenton looked up at her. His eyes were still the same as they had been then: a blue that was startling against his other features, like coming across a lake in the middle of an expanse of concrete.
    Minna pulled her right foot into her lap and began to knead it with her fist. “I didn’t hate him,” she said.
    “You didn’t love him, though,” Trenton said.
    “I’m not sure,” Minna said. “Probably not.”
    She didn’t know anymore whether she had ever loved her father. She must have. When they lived in California, he had taught her to swim—remembered the feel of his rough warm hands around her waist as she paddled