She hummed along with the music, which was really all beat
and not much melody. She looked past Anthony. There was a muscular man, black, maybe twenty-five, a gym rat, biceps stretching his leather jacket. He was checking her out. Nothing new there, they all did, but this one, this man, had something different happening. His gaze was professionally observant. He wasn’t just looking at her face, her breasts, her legs, although he was certainly doing that. He was watching more closely. Sober. Thoughtful.
Suspicious. That’s what he was: suspicious. When he glanced at Anthony, there was shrewd suspicion there.
So Jessica watched him back. It became a mutual thing. And then he did something casual but deliberate. He twisted on his barstool and let his jacket fall open. He had a holster and a gun on his hip, not showy, professional.
He was a cop. Some kind of cop anyway.
Jessica disengaged from Anthony.
He turned when he saw her walking away. He followed her as she walked—not sure why, not sure what she was planning—to the muscular man in the leather jacket.
“Hi,” Jessica said.
“Hey,” Anthony said. “Get back here.”
The man said, “Hello.” To Jessica, not to Anthony.
“Jessica, get your ass back out there with me,” Anthony snapped. “I brought you here because you begged me.”
“I like the name Jessica,” the man said.
“Yeah, well, she belongs to me,” Anthony said, and grabbed her arm.
The napalm in her veins caught fire. Suddenly it was as if all of her was burning, burning away the soil that held her trapped. She spun and delivered a stinging backhand to Anthony’s face.
The big man moved with trained speed. He stepped between them, said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s take it easy, right?”
Anthony, though, was not prepared to take it easy. “Fuck off, she’s mine.”
And that’s when Jessica lost it completely. What happened next she would never be able to recall in detail. All she remembered was fists and kicks and screams of rage, and all of it coming from her.
Somehow she ended up out on the street in the cold night air. The man set her down, held her out at arm’s length, and said, “Okay now, relax, ma’am.”
The “ma’am” was as much a giveaway as the gun. Regular people did not call teenage girls “ma’am,” that was cop-speak.
“Take it easy, he’s gone,” the man said. “You’re safe.”
The rage was cooling, but the memory of that sudden explosion filled Jessica with a different warmth. She was sweating and shivering all at once. “Who are you?”
And out came the badge. “Agent DeShawn Franklin, Secret Service.”
She was nonplussed. “Secret Service. Then …You know? About Anthony?”
“Is that your boyfriend in there?”
“He’s not …He’s my …I . . .”
“Take a breath. It’s okay. You’re safe. What is it you think I know?” He made a wry but wary grin. “Look, if you’re holding drugs, that’s not my thing to worry about. Secret Service, not DEA.”
“You take care of the president.”
“That’s one of the things we do, ma’am. Jessica. You want to tell me something, I can see that.”
“Anthony,” she began, then glanced over her shoulder as if expecting him to be behind her. He was nowhere to be seen. “Anthony, I think he did something to me. And I think he’s doing it to the president, too.”
“Plath,” Keats said.
“Sadie. Sadie and Noah. Let’s try that.”
“Sadie.”
They had found a place: the stunted bell tower. The stairs leading up were narrow and rickety, and they’d had to bow their heads and press steadying hands against the wall as they climbed up. But at the top there was still a bell, an actual, old-fashioned bell maybe a foot across at the base. It had not been rung in a very longtime , and spiders had taken it over as an arachnid condo.
The space around the bell was cramped but swept relatively clean by breezes blowing through the low, open windows. They could at least stand upright, and a series of tiny horizontal ventilation slats gave them a sort of film noir view of the world outside.
It was cold. They could each see the other’s breath. A small slice of the brilliantly lit Capitol Dome was visible, but it looked cold, too. “You know what I wish?” Noah asked. “I wished I smoked cigarettes. It would be lovely to stand up here and sort of contemplatively smoke a cigarette.”
“Contemplatively?”
“Of course I imagine a cancerous lung must be a hell of a thing to see down in the nano.”
“All things considered I’m not so worried about cancer.”
“ No?”
“Normal people are worried about cancer.”
“And that’s not us?”
She forced a short laugh, wanting to acknowledge the weak attempt at humor. “Do you think either of us ever was? Normal?”
“I was,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me about normal.”
“What me? Well, Miss McLure . . .”
“Ms,” she corrected.
“Really? All right then, Ms McLure. Here’s my normal. Up early. It’s cold in the flat because the radiator in my room doesn’t work very well, and if I want to be warm then my mum’s room has to be the Sahara.”