“Hey, have you seen Lila?” I ask her, my voice strained.
“Not since yesterday,” she says with a shrug.
I clamp my gloved hand on her shoulder. “Do you have any classes with her?”
Daneca stops and looks at me oddly. “She does a lot of remedial stuff.”
Of course. Being a cat for three years might leave you a little behind on your schoolwork. But I’ve been too much in my own head to notice.
I get passed three more envelopes in statistics. Two of them are betting on Lila and Greg. I hand both of those back with such a dark look that no one asks me for an explanation.
She’s not at lunch, either. Finally I walk into her building and head up the stairs, figuring that if I get caught, I’ll come up with some explanation. I count over the number of doors, assuming that, like in my dorm, everyone gets one window to a room.
Then I knock. Nothing.
The locks are simple. I’ve been breaking into my own room for so long that I don’t even carry my keys half the time. Just a quick pin twist and I’m inside.
She’s got a single, which means her father must have made a pretty hefty donation. Her bed is jammed up against the window and there’s a tangle of light green sheets dragging on the floor. An overstuffed bookcase that she must have brought with her sits against one wall. A totally forbidden electric kettle, and a tiny scarab green iPod glittering in an expensive-looking speaker system, wires connecting it to headphones, all rest on top of a low trunk. She’s also brought in a vanity with a mirror that sits against the wall where a roommate’s desk usually goes. The walls are covered in black-and-white photos of old movie stars: Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and Ingrid Bergman. And Lila’s pasted-up quotes near them.
I walk up to the picture of Garbo, smoldering behind a Vaselined lens. The paper near her says, “I’m afraid of nothing except being bored.”
It makes me smile.
I relock the door and turn to go down the steps, when I realize that the dull hum in the background—a sound I barely even registered—is a shower running in the hall bathroom.
I head toward it.
The bathroom is tiled in pink and smells like girls’ shampoos, tropical and sugary. As I push open the door, I realize that there is no excuse that can explain my being in here.
“Lila?” I call.
I hear a soft sob. I stop caring about getting caught.
She’s sitting in the middle shower stall, still in her uniform. Her hair is plastered to her head and her clothes are soaked through. The water is pounding down so relentlessly that I’m surprised she can breathe. It runs in rivulets over her closed eyes and half-open mouth. Her lips look blue with cold.
“Lila?” I say again, and her eyes open wide.
I did this to her. She was always the fearless one, the dangerous one.
Now she looks at me like she doesn’t believe I’m really here. “Cassel? How did you know—” She bites off the question.
“What did he do to you?” I say. I am trembling with fury and powerlessness and sick jealousy.
“Nothing,” she says, and I can see that familiar, cruel smile of hers, but all of its mockery is turned inward. “I mean, I wanted him to. I thought maybe it would break the curse. I’ve never really—I was just a kid when I changed—and I figured that maybe if I slept with someone, it would help. Obviously it didn’t.”
I swallow carefully. “Why don’t you come out of there and dry off? It’s cold.” I put on a fake voice, like I’m one of the old ladies from Carney. You’ll catch your death.
She looks a little less dire, her smile a little less like a rictus. “The water was hot before.”
I hold out a towel that’s lying on a bench nearby. It’s a sickly shade of magenta, covered with purple fish. I’m pretty sure it’s not hers.
She gets up slowly, stiffly, and comes out of the shower. I wrap her in the towel. For a moment my arms close around her. She leans into me and sighs.
We walk together across the hallway to her room. There she pulls away to sit on the bed, dripping onto her sheets. She looks curled in on herself, arms crossed over her chest.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m going to go stand in the stairway and you’re going to get dressed, and then we’re going to get out of here. I’ve got lots of untried schemes for walking out of Wallingford in the middle of the day; let’s try one. We can get some hot chocolate. Or tequila. And then we can come back and kill Greg Harmsford, something I personally have wanted to do for a while.”
Her fingers pull the towel tighter. She doesn’t smile. Instead she says, “I’m sorry I haven’t been handling this—the curse—very well.”
“No,” I rasp. Guilt is closing up my throat. “Don’t. You shouldn’t have to apologize. Not to me.”
“At first I thought I could just ignore it, and now—well—it’s like ignoring made the wound go septic. And then I said that if I came here and at least could see you, it would help. But it didn’t. Everything that I think will help just makes it worse.
“So I want to ask you to do something,” she says, looking at the floor, at a collection of textbooks that I’m pretty sure she’s not actually seeing. “And I understand it’s not fair, but it won’t cost you much, and it would mean everything to me. I want you to be my boyfriend.”
I start to say something, but she talks over me, already sure I’m going to say no.
“You don’t have to really like me. And it will just be for a little while.” She’s looking up at me now, her eyes hard. “You can pretend. I know you’re a good liar.”
I don’t even know how to protest. I’m scrambling. “You said that everything you think will help actually makes it worse. What if this makes it worse?”
“I don’t know,” she says, so low I can barely hear it.
It’s not real or right or fair, but I no longer have any idea what is. “Okay,” I say. “Okay. We can date. But we can’t—I mean, that’s all that can happen. I can’t live with you sitting on the floor of a shower in six months, regretting being with me.”
I am rewarded with her coming into my arms, her clothes damp and cold, her skin feverishly hot. I can see the relief in the sag of her shoulders, and when I put my arm around her, she leans against my chest, tucking her head under my chin.
“Hopefully . . . ,” she says, a hitch in her voice like a swallowed sob. “Hopefully by then I won’t be thinking about you at all.”
She smiles up at me, and I am, for a long moment, unable to speak.
Boyfriends, even fake boyfriends, sit with their girlfriends at dinner. So I’m not surprised when Lila sets her tray down next to mine and touches me briefly on the shoulder. Daneca, however, bristles with curiosity. It’s clearly costing her something not to speak.
When the first person walks over and tosses an envelope into my bag, Lila smiles into her paper napkin.
“You’re a bookie? I thought you were the good brother,” she says.
“I’m good at what I do,” I say. “Virtue is its own revenge.”
“Its own reward,” says Daneca, rolling her eyes. “Virtue is its own reward.”
I grin. “That’s not the version I’ve heard.”
Sam plunks down his tray and grabs for the apple about to roll off it. “You know how Mr. Knight is getting a little bit on the senile side? Like walking past the classroom and having to double back, or putting on his sweater over a winter coat?”
I nod, although I haven’t had Mr. Knight for anything. I’ve just seen him in the halls. He looks like a typical ancient English professor—tweedy, with leather elbow pads and white nose hair.
“Well, today he came into class, and not only had he forgotten to zip up after a trip to the bathroom, he forgot to tuck his junk back in.”
“No way,” I say.
Lila starts to laugh.
“That’s the thing, right? It should be funny,” Sam says. “It’s funny now. But right then it was so awful that all we could do was sit there in shock. I was so embarrassed for him! And he just lectured the class on Hamlet like nothing was happening. I mean, he’s quoting Shakespeare while we’re all just trying not to look down.”
“Didn’t anyone say anything?” Daneca asks. “All those jokers?”
“Finally,” says Sam, “Kim Hwangbo raises her hand.”
I shake my head. Kim is quiet, nice, and will probably go to a better college than anyone else at Wallingford.
Even Daneca is laughing now. “What did she say?”
“‘Mr. Knight, your pants are unzipped!’” says Sam. He laughs. “So Mr. Knight looks down, barely has a reaction, says ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,’ tucks himself in, and zips up. The end!”
“Are you going to tell anyone?” Daneca asks.
Sam shakes his head as he opens his milk. “No, and don’t you, either. Mr. Knight is harmless—it’s not like he did it on purpose—and he’d get in a lot of trouble if Northcutt found out. Or parents.”
“They’re going to find out,” I say. I wonder how long it will take before bets start flooding in about him getting fired. “No one can hide anything for long around here.”
Daneca frowns in my direction. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?” Lila asks, not entirely friendly.
Daneca ignores her question. “We’re going to the movies this weekend,” she says instead. “Do you guys want to come? We could double-date.”
A flush creeps up Sam’s neck.
Lila turns to me uncertainly. I smile.
“Sure,” she says. “If you want to, Cassel?”
“What’s the movie?” I ask. With Daneca, we could wind up going to some kind of documentary on the evils of baby seal clubbing.
“We’re going to see The Giant Spider Invasion,” Sam says. “They’re playing it at the Friday Rewind. It’s a classic Bill Rebane film—the special effects crew created the giant spider by covering a Volkswagen Beetle in fake fur and using the taillights as its red glowing eyes.”
“What’s better than that?” I ask.
No one can think of a thing.
That night I dream I’m in a room of corpses, all of them wearing dresses and lipstick, sitting stiffly on couches. It takes me a moment to realize they’re all my ex-girlfriends, their dead eyes glittering, their mouths barely moving as they whisper a list of my flaws. He kisses like a fish, says my kindergarten girlfriend, Michiko Ishii. We’d meet behind a fat oak tree on the playground, until we got caught by another girl who ratted us out. Her corpse is that of a very little girl; glassy eyes make her look like a doll.
He flirted with my friend, says the girl who ratted us out, Sofia Spiegel, who was technically also my girlfriend at the time.
He’s a liar, says a girl from Atlantic City. The one in the silver dress.
Such a liar, says my eighth-grade girlfriend. I didn’t tell her that I was going to Wallingford until after I left. I don’t blame her for still being mad.
After the party he pretended not to know me, says Emily Rogers, who, to be fair, pretended just as hard that I didn’t exist after we’d spent the night rolling around on a pile of coats at Harvey Silverman’s freshman-year house party.
He borrowed my car and totaled it, says Stephanie Douglas, a worker girl I met in Carney over the summer after I was sure I’d killed Lila. She was two years older than me and could knot the stem of a cherry with her tongue.
He never really loved me, says Audrey. He doesn’t even know what love is.
I wake up while it’s still dark outside. Rather than go back to sleep, I start on some homework. I’m tired of the dead ganging up on me. There’s got to be a problem somewhere that wants solving.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WALLINGFORD PREP-aratory prides itself on getting its young men and women ready not just for college but for their place in society. To that end, students not only have to attend all their classes—they also have to participate in two enriching after-school activities. This year mine are track in the fall and debate club in the spring. I like the feeling of running, the rush of adrenaline and the pounding of my feet on the pavement. I like that it’s just me deciding how far to push myself.
I also like thinking up ways to trick people into agreeing with me, but debate club doesn’t start for many months.
I’m just finishing my last lap when I see two dark-suited men talking to Coach Marlin. He waves me over.
Agent Jones and Agent Hunt are wearing mirrored sunglasses along with their dark suits and darker gloves, even though the weather is still unseasonably warm. I’m not sure they could be more unsubtle if they tried.
“Hello, Officers,” I say with a fake grin.
“Haven’t heard from you in a while,” Agent Jones says. “We got concerned.”
“Well, I had this funeral to go to, and then I had all this extra grieving to do. Really filled up my social calendar.” Although I think I’m managing to smirk like an innocent man, knowing that I’m the murderer they’re looking for really adds an uncomfortable layer of terror to the whole interaction. “There’s been loads going on since last Wednesday.”
“Why don’t you take a ride with us?” says Agent Hunt. “You can tell us all about it.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I’ve got to take a shower and get changed. Like I said, really busy. But thanks for stopping by.”