Rooms by Lauren Oliver Read Free Book Online

pieces. I’d catch her when she thought I was distracted, drawn close around his crib, singing nonsense songs and whispering to him as though he could hear.
    “Do you remember the Christmas parties we used to have? Your father would sing. And you and Trenton always argued about who got to hang the angel. I remember you played the piano so beautifully . . . ”
    “I hated the piano,” Minna says loudly—so loudly Caroline blinks.
    “Did you?” she says. “But you were so good. Everyone said you would go to Juilliard.” She tries to shake the last remaining drops of liquid onto her tongue.
    Minna glares at her. “Are you serious? You really have no fucking idea, do you? About anything.”
    Caroline widens her eyes. “I don’t know why you’re being so hostile, Minna,” she says. “We’re just having a conversation.”
    Minna stares. “Have another drink, Ma,” she says finally, then slams down a plate so hard it cracks in two, and storms out of the room.

TRENTON
    T renton was disappointed by the gun Minna had found. He’d been expecting something sleek and black. He’d pictured tucking it into his waistband, swaggering around with it for a bit, getting the feel. He’d pictured the kind of gun that would make you think twice about messing with someone—guns evened the score, turned losers into big shots.
    This gun was old, first of all, and it was heavy. He couldn’t even fit it into his waistband, and if he did, he thought he’d probably blow his balls off accidentally. It looked more like something you would see at a museum than at the scene of a crime. Plus he didn’t know if it was loaded, and he wasn’t sure how to check.
    He’d seen a gun only once before, at the disastrous party last winter that had earned him his nickname. It had been, without doubt, the worst night of his life. Most people probably thought the accident had been the worst night of his life, but for Trenton, that had been a kind of liberation.
    Everything afterward—the pain and the pills and the metal rods holding his shins together and the wire in his jaw and the shitty power shakes that tasted like sand sipped through a straw—had been awful. But in the moment of the accident, the sheer blazing terror of it and the certainty, just then, that he would die, he’d found a kind of peace he’d never known, or at least hadn’t felt in years.
    This is it, he had thought, just before the scream of metal on metal and the sparks and then the darkness. And he was, purely and simply, relieved. No more failing, no more fucking up, no more loneliness like a constant pressure on his bladder that he couldn’t piss or sleep or drink away.
    And then he’d woken up. He had never thought about suicide before. But lying in the hospital, it had occurred to him that suicide was the only possible solution. Clean. Elegant. Brave, even.
    Suicide, he decided, had integrity.
    He supposed he could just shove the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fire, but Russian roulette lacked integrity. If you were going to kill yourself, you had to know, in advance, that it was going to work. Chance was for idiots.
    That’s what Derrick Richards had suggested at the party: that they all play Russian roulette. Trenton had kept his mouth shut, like he did at every party, hoping that if he stayed quiet, no one would notice that he didn’t belong. Derrick was dumb enough to do it and his friends were dumb enough to follow along. Fortunately Derrick was so drunk he’d stumbled backward and sent a bullet straight through the window, and after that someone had taken the gun away and everyone had moved on to strip poker, even though it was December and flakes of snow were swirling in through the shattered window.
    From upstairs, Trenton thought he heard laughter, faintly, and shoved the gun quickly into his dad’s desk drawer, where he had found it, where Minna had casually mentioned it would be—almost like she knew what he was planning and was encouraging