Free Bombora by Mal Peters Page A

me so long, why I’m acting like such a freak. I wish I could tell him, but I know he wouldn’t understand. It’s bad enough I already have no idea how to explain about Emilia and the divorce, the whole reason I’m in California to begin with.
    After changing my clothes, just in case, and rummaging for the bottle of cologne I know is in my suitcase somewhere, I head downstairs to face Phel, face my brother. Part of me hopes they won’t be able to smell any evidence of what I’ve just done, because, hey—I’ve had enough mortification for one day. All the same, a part of me hopes otherwise, hopes that Phel will figure it out. That he’ll take one look at me and know.

3

    Hugh
     
    S OMETIMES I think my brother might be certifiably batshit insane. After an inexplicable delay, Nate slinks downstairs wearing a fresh set of clothes that aren’t enough of an improvement on his previous ensemble to justify changing in the first place, reeking of cologne and looking more shifty-eyed than a kid with a pocket full of stolen baseball cards.
    Meanwhile, Phel has been popping Xanax in front of me like he thinks I won’t notice his shaking hands or quickened breathing. What the fuck? If that isn’t bad enough, the way the two of them glower at each other across the kitchen island puts me in mind of how Nell’s brother used to act around his ex-wife at family dinners, taciturn and silent and using their kids to deliver messages back and forth. There’s not a single freaking explanation I can think of for why Nate and Phel are so frosty toward each other, but after five minutes I feel like I’m about to scream.
    The sad thing is, most of it comes from Phel’s end, which is unusual given the healthy interest he’s shown in Nate before. Maybe it’s because I was never really forthcoming with my answers, always putting them off out of some misguided paranoia that my blabbing would make its way back to Nate. I’d made a promise I felt bound to keep, that no matter how famous I got, I’d always leave Nate and his family out of it.
    As with most things, I blame Stephenie Meyer. Twilight turned the young adult genre into such a gong show that the popularity of my own series went through the roof after a couple of short months on the market. Before I knew it, my books—which are about a couple of white-trash brothers who, in Hardy Boys -esque fashion, solve mysteries and occasionally fight crime—were being translated into dozens of languages and optioned for movie deal after movie deal. Insane.
    Considering the books’ origins, this success still feels pretty damn unprecedented; the series is based on the bedtime stories Nate used to make up about us when we were little. While we were hunkered down in bed, waiting for our dad to come home from a case sober and hopefully in one piece—both if we were lucky—he’d tell me all sorts of crazy tales about how when we grew up we’d travel the country and solve crimes, just like Dad used to do. I forgot all about those guys until I was in college and living away from Nate for the first time, at which point I started writing everything down and printing them as short stories in a local student-run mystery journal. Eventually a publisher noticed, and the rest is history. Now people go bananas for the Manderfeld twins and what kind of shit they’ll get into next, and at the center of all this is me. Hugh Fessenden, regular guy with a dead girlfriend and a house with too many empty rooms.
    I’m grateful for my blessings, but I don’t deal so well with the media circus. When Nell died, shortly after the release of my second book, it was really bad—photographers and entertainment interviewers hounded me, desperate for a word about what the recent tragedy would mean for the Manderfeld brothers. Total lack of sensitivity. And then they turned to Nate, tracked him down in Ohio for the scoop. They were particularly invasive when I was in the midst of my… troubles. I don’t mean