Stay Awake Read Online Free PDF Page B

funeral, Brandon and Jodee had both agreed that the best thing to do was to sell the house and split the profits equally. The original plan was that Brandon would live in the house for a few months and fix things up a little to make it more presentable so they could sell it.
    But the house didn’t seem to want to be sold. Things that had never been wrong in the twenty years that the family had lived there together suddenly turned sour when the housing inspector came to check on the building.
    One problem was called “deterioration of the structural roof deck” and cost an enormous amount of money to get fixed.
    Other issues were smaller, and presumably should have been repairable by Brandon himself, with the help of a home fix-it book. These included improper wiring connections, bulges and crumbling spots in the drywall, some plumbing stuff, and so on—but much of this was more complicated than a person would think.
    “But you’re a smart guy,” Jodee had told him. “You can figure it out. I think it’s good for you to have a project to work on.”
    Brandon had spent some time at a couple of different colleges and then finally he had decided to take a while off and earn some money. He imagined that he would enjoy hanging around with some old high school friends, like Zachary Leven and Matty, and he was also kind of looking forward to having his mom do his laundry and so on.
    And actually, Brandon’s mom had thought it was a good idea. She thought that he still needed time to “find himself.” This was right before she and his dad died.
    Jodee was four years older, and she believed that their parents had been stricter when she was growing up.
    “But honestly, I’m glad that Mom and Dad were harder on me,” Jodee said once. “Because now I have a work ethic.”
    Then she hesitated. Brandon knew that she hadn’t meant to be insulting, exactly. Nevertheless, he realized that she couldn’t quite understand how it was possible that he was still living there, still fixing up the house, after almost five years.
    Of course, Brandon was aware that things had probably deteriorated even more than Jodee realized.
    Steadily, he had been relinquishing, withdrawing from portionsof the house, and the actual living quarters had shrunk considerably.
    There was, for example, his parents’ bedroom upstairs, which he was naturally hesitant to enter, and Jodee’s old bedroom, where he had decided to store all of the stuff that he’d eventually sell at an estate or garage sale, such as small pieces of furniture, vintage-esque clothing, his father’s phonograph records and coin collection, his mother’s jewelry and shelves of mystery novels, the boxes of photographs of the trips that they had taken as a family, Disney World, the Grand Canyon, New York City, and so forth.
    There was the second-floor bathroom, which was now off-limits, following a weirdly disastrous attempt to replace the toilet’s ballcock assembly and flush valve.
    And then there were areas that he had started to clean or pack up but then had broken off for one reason or another.
    For example, in the basement “rec room” area, on the upper shelf of a closet, he’d come across a bunch of games that the family used to play when Brandon and Jodee were kids: Monopoly. Yahtzee. Battleship. Which he’d planned to get rid of.
    But then he opened the mildewy cardboard box of an ancient Scrabble game and an enormous number of cockroaches came scuttling out of it. Oh, my God! He chucked the game across the room and it broke open and all the little wooden tiles with letters printed on them scattered across the shag carpet.
    His mom used to love to play Scrabble. He had this image of the four of them sitting at the kitchen table with the game board in the middle. He could picture his mother counting out her score and teasing their father, laughing and flourishing her little dictionary. She had seemed really happy at the time. It was weird tothink that none of them had