Chapter 1
Paul
The VanMarches go Marching One by One, Oh No!
“Wake up, Jackie,”I said before tossing a bucketful of lukewarm water on my youngest brother’s face. He jerked up, sputtering as if I had just accosted him with water filled with chunks of the iceberg that had taken out the Titanic. Reality was far from that, of course, considering I’d used the leftover water in his empty champagne bottle holder.
“What the hell, Paul?”
“Rise and shine. You’re going to be late.”
“Late for what? We’re not in school anymore, goddamn!”
“No, we aren’t, but if you want to be treated like a grown-up, perhaps you should act like one.” Some would think it harsh, but they weren’t thirty-three years old and having to wake up their twenty-five-year-old youngest brother because the baby of the family couldn’t be trusted to be responsible foranythingoutside of throwing a decadent rager. Normally, those words wouldn’t fit together, but Jackson VanMarche had made an artform out of it.
“Dude, this is ridiculous, even for you. I’m going back to bed.”
If I was Luther, my eldest brother, I might have given him a soft but firm lecture about the responsibilities that came with our rather cushy lifestyle. If I was Chris, my second eldestbrother, I might have just flipped his bed. But I wasn’t either of them. I was Paul VanMarche the Third, so I figured a middle ground was the best way to go.
I picked up the next closest champagne bucket and emptied it on him too.
“DUDE!”
“I think, brother, that perhaps you are forgetting something.”
“What could I possibly be—the charity!”
“That’s right, the charity. The function you insisted on, saying no one else had a way with the people like you do. And now, all those disadvantaged children are waiting on you to make their toy drive shine at this rather huge event, which—and I cannot stress this enough—youscheduled.”
“Paul, Paulino, Paulski-dono?—”
God, I hated when my brother went on one of his bouts of verbal diarrhea. He thought he was hilarious or particularly blessed with the gift of gab, but to me, it came off as him trying too hard to entertain instead of being himself. Although, sometimes it was tempting to believe that he was purebrain rot—one of the few and yet very useful internet phrases I bothered to learn.
“I know you’re, like, all intense about everything, and constantly trying to prove yourself, but you gotta chill. That event is tomorrow. I’ll spend the whole day sobering up to make sure each one of those kids gets the best birthday or Christmas or whatever that they could ever dream of.”
Normally, I would have let out a long-suffering sigh, but we didn’t have the time for it. “While I would never question your wolf’s ability to heal you from all the no doubt healthy things you ingested, you are mistaken. The charity event is today. Monday. A weekday was chosen because the donation boxes are at multiple schools, especially in the more advantaged areas of the city.”
“Today isn’t Monday.”
“Today is Monday. Name originating from the Old English wordmonandæg, meaning Moon Day, andcoincidentally,just so happens to be the exact day thatyouorganized this charity drive.”
My brother blinked at me. It was a bit uncanny to have my mother’s green eyes make that expression at me. I always thought it was a tad unfair that the one VanMarche child who had never gotten to meet our mother had so many of her features. Really, all of us had a piece of her. Luther had her reddish hair, as did Penelope, although hers was more auburn. Christopher had green eyes as well.
Really, the only one that didn’t have any of her traits wasme. I’d inherited my father’s dark hair and eyes, the same strong chin and jaw, accompanied by the strong VanMarche nose. Sometimes it made me feel a bit alien among my siblings. They all could see our mother in their reflections, but I resembled the man I could never quite fully please.
At least I didn’tdispleasehim. No, that was Jackson’s habit, and sometimes his delight.
“Shit,” my brother murmured, and for a moment, I felt bad for him. I didn’t hate Jack; I didn’t even dislike him. But sometimes I resented the amount of work he often made for me. Apparently, being the middle child meant it was my job to babysit or wrangle any siblings younger than me.
Yee-fucking-haw.
“Shit is right. Now, on your feet. You’re going to take the quickest shower you can while still managing to make sure you don’t smell like the backside of a bar, you’re going to get dressed in the clothes I laid out for you, and then you’re going to go make this the best toy drive this side of the equator in a decade.
“I dunno?—”
But I was already pulling him to his feet and frog-marching him across his penthouse to his bedroom. Then, with a (very loving) kick to his rear, I sent him into his ensuite.
In truth, I could have never woken him up, never bothered to show up to his place. It was no skin off my nose. But I knew he’d be incredibly disappointed with himself. Although my baby brother was, for all intents and purposes, afuckboi, he was really passionate about helping kids. Maybe it was because he never got to meet Mom; maybe it was because he and Father were like oil and water. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t stand by and let his impetuousness and inability to look at a calendar ruin things for him. Maybe I was enabling him.