Chapter 11: American Pie
The next day. End of school.
Lip caught up to Karen at the front gate, falling into step beside her with the specific energy of someone who had rehearsed an apology on the walk over and was hoping it landed.
"Hey. Karen." He ran a hand through his hair. "About yesterday — I'm sorry. That was messed up. You okay?"
"I'm fine." Karen shifted her backpack and kept walking. She said it without edge, which somehow made it land heavier than if she'd been angry. "How's Ian?"
Lip exhaled. "He's okay. V helped out." Veronica Fisher — neighbor, family friend, and a woman with the particular competence of someone who had seen everything twice — had handled the immediate aftermath with her usual no-drama efficiency. "He's fine."
"Good."
They walked half a block in silence. Lip had the look of someone with a follow-up question that he knew was inadvisable.
He asked it anyway.
"Yesterday, when you — I mean, did Ian..." He searched for a diplomatic construction and gave up on it. "Was there any reaction at all?"
He was still holding out hope. Ian was his little brother. Lip operated on the principle that problems had solutions if you applied enough pressure and creativity, which was a useful framework for fixing engines and passing tests and a deeply counterproductive one for understanding people.
Karen glanced at him. "None."
She said it gently, which was its own kind of answer.
Lip nodded slowly, processing.
"Okay," he said after a moment. He bent down, pretended to check his shoe, straightened back up. "Listen — if you ever need help with Physics again, I'll do it for free. No charge." He paused. "I know that's not — I just wanted to say it."
Karen smiled. It was a real smile, just smaller than her usual ones. Her father hadn't come home last night. The house had been too quiet in the specific way that houses got when someone was supposed to be in them and wasn't.
"Thanks, Lip. I'll keep that in mind."
He gave her a two-finger salute and peeled off toward his own street.
Karen kept walking.
That evening.
Owen told Lisa he was going to a classmate's house for a while, got on his bike, and rode to Karen's. He'd called ahead. She was waiting on the porch steps when he arrived, jacket zipped, arms wrapped around her knees.
She looked up. "You actually came."
"I said I would."
Karen studied him for a second — the same way she'd looked at him across the dining room table, like she was trying to figure out what category he went in.
"You sure you want to go to this thing?" Owen asked. "You seem like you might not be feeling it."
"I'm fine." She stood, shook her head hard once — a deliberate motion, like she was physically clearing something out — and linked her arm through his. "Let's go."
The Schuler House.
It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in one of the quieter North Side pockets — a large craftsman-style house with a three-car garage and the particular well-maintained quality of a home whose owner was frequently not in it.
Steve Schuler's mother traveled for work. A lot. Which meant Steve Schuler had access to one of the nicest houses in the school district, an absence of adult supervision, and enough disposable income to fund a party that started decent and ended as a medical-grade cautionary tale.
Steve was a linebacker — big, fast, the kind of athlete whose physical gifts had been interpreted by everyone around him, including himself, as a personality. He was not, by any measure, a bad football player. He was, by most measures, an exhausting human being. The combination of boundless confidence, zero self-awareness, and a specific kind of meanness that he mistook for humor had gotten him quietly uninvited from most of his teammates' social events.
His solution had been simple and deeply American: if no one invited him to the party, he'd throw the party. At his house. For free.
Nobody turned down free.
By the time Owen and Karen came up the front walk, the cul-de-sac was already half-full of parked bikes and the occasional car, and a steady stream of dressed-up teenagers was flowing through the front door. Owen spotted at least three middle schoolers in the line. Steve, from his position at the door, was running the same assessment — boys got a hard look and a dismissal, girls got waved through.
Steve saw them coming and pushed off the doorframe.
"Well, look at this." He crossed his arms and grinned at Owen with the specific delight of someone who had found something to work with. "Carter. The AP kid. You actually came out of the library long enough to show up to a real party? Everybody come look at this—"
The faces near the door turned.
Karen's expression went flat. Not angry — something colder than angry.
"He's my date tonight," she said. Calm. Clear. The way you state a fact about the weather.
The grin on Steve's face renegotiated itself. Karen Jackson was not the kind of social variable you argued with publicly, and Steve, for all his considerable failings, understood social variables.
He stepped back from the doorframe and swept his arm wide.
"Obviously. Absolutely." He smiled at Karen with the compliance of someone who had done a rapid cost-benefit analysis. "Mi casa, Karen. You know that."
The people nearby laughed — at Steve, mostly, and at the speed of his retreat.
Karen walked through the door without acknowledging the applause. Owen followed.
The inside was everything you'd expect: music loud enough to make conversation optional, the kitchen counter reorganized entirely around red cups, someone's playlist cycling between grunge and R&B without any apparent logic. The furniture had been pushed to the walls. The lights were low. The basement door was open and whatever was happening down there sounded competitive.
"Upstairs," Karen said, already moving toward the staircase.
A trail of stares followed them across the room.
In the kitchen, a cluster of guys who played JV soccer and had been nursing the same cups for forty minutes watched Owen Carter — Owen Carter, who ate lunch alone in the library and raised his hand in AP Calc — disappear up the stairs behind Karen Jackson.
One of them set his cup down.
"I'm sorry," he said to no one in particular. "What?"
"I've been going to this school for three years," said another one, with the hollow tone of a man reevaluating his choices. "Three years."
"Tutoring," said a third, with the same energy a person uses when they realize the answer was obvious. "We should've been doing tutoring."
The first one picked his cup back up. "This is the worst night of my life."
Upstairs, the hallway was quieter. A few couples had claimed the rooms at the far end. Karen led Owen to a small sitting room at the top of the stairs — a TV room, essentially, with a loveseat and a small window that looked out over the cul-de-sac below.
She dropped onto the loveseat and pulled her knees up, and for a moment she looked exactly like she had on the porch steps — smaller than she usually seemed, quieter.
Owen sat beside her.
Below, through the window, he could see new arrivals still filtering in. Music pulsed up through the floor.
"He didn't come home last night," Karen said. She wasn't looking at him. "My dad."
Owen didn't say anything. He let the statement occupy the space it needed.
"He always comes home," she said. "Even when things are bad. He always comes home." A pause. "I kept listening for the door."
Owen looked at her profile — the perfect symmetry of her face, the way she was looking at nothing in particular out the window, the complete absence of the performance she usually ran.
"He'll come back," Owen said. He said it because he believed it — Eddie Jackson was, in the entire Shameless universe, the person most likely to walk back through the door. It was almost the saddest thing about him.
Karen was quiet for a moment.
"I know," she said. Then, with a small shift in her posture: "Don't make it weird."
"I wasn't."
"You were doing the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a face," she said. "It's the same one you made when you explained the vertex thing. Like you know something you're not sure you should say."
Owen looked at her.
The Coefficient of Resonance, he thought, was a genuinely interesting skill.
"You want to go back downstairs?" he asked.
Karen considered it. Then she stood up, straightened her jacket, and shook her head out again — that same deliberate reset. "Yeah. Come on."
She headed for the door. Paused. Looked back.
"Thanks for coming, Owen."
"Yeah," he said.
They went back downstairs, into the noise and the red cups and the bad playlist, and the party closed around them like water.
Chapter Rewards
500 Power Stones = 1 New Chapter
10 Reviews = 1 New Chapter
Thanks for reading!
20+ advanced chapters available on P1treon: DarkFoxx