I smile back automatically. I bet those fat pearls she’s got in her ears are real. If I asked politely, she’d probably let me wait on her porch. Maybe even make me a sandwich.
My stomach grumbles. I ignore it. After another moment she goes back inside, the screen door slamming on my chances for lunch.
The trees shake with a sudden gust of wind, and a few still-green maple leaves fall around me. I toe one with my booted foot. It doesn’t look it, but it’s already dead.
The cab pulls up, the driver frowning when he sees me. I slide into the back and give him directions to the garbage house. Happily, he doesn’t ask any questions about picking up a kid three blocks away from a high school. Probably he’s seen a lot worse.
He drops me off, and I hand him the cash from a few recent wagers. I’m low on funds and I’m spending money that I don’t really have. An unexpected dark horse bet coming in could clean me out.
I head up the hill toward the old place. It looks ominous, even in the day. Its shingles are gray with neglect, and one of the windows in the upper story—the one to Mom’s old room—is broken with a bag taped over it.
Barron had to know I might come here. He had to think I might hide the body, now that he warned me that he knows where it is. But whatever surprises he left for me must be in the basement, because the kitchen looks identical to the way I left it on Sunday. My half cup of coffee is still sitting in the sink, the liquid inside looking ominously close to mold.
The coat is right where I left it too, in the back of the closet, gun still rolled inside. I kneel down and pull the bundle out just to be sure.
I picture my mother, pressing the barrel against Philip’s chest. He couldn’t have believed she’d shoot—he was her firstborn. Maybe he laughed. Or maybe he knew her better than I did. Maybe he saw in her expression that no amount of love was worth her freedom.
But the more I try to imagine it, the more I see myself in his place, feel the cold barrel of the gun, see my mother’s smeary lipsticked mouth pull into a grimace. A shudder runs down my back.
I force myself up, grab a knife from the block and a plastic bag from under the sink. I need to stop thinking. I start chopping the buttons off the coat instead. I’m going to burn the cloth, so I want to make sure any hooks or solid parts go into the plastic bag with the gun. After that I plan on weighting it with bricks and sinking it in the Round Valley Reservoir up near Clinton. Grandad once told me that half of New Jersey’s criminals have dropped something down there—it’s the deepest lake in the state.
I turn the pockets inside out, checking for coins.
Red leather gloves tumble onto the linoleum floor. And something else, something solid.
A familiar amulet, cracked in half. At the sight of it I know who killed Philip. Everything snaps into place. The plan changes.
Oh, man, I am an idiot.
I call her from a pay phone, just like Mom taught me.
“You should have told me,” I say, but I understand why she didn’t.
On the cab ride back to school, I get a text from Audrey.
I remember how there was a time when that would have thrilled me. Now I open my phone with a sigh.
mutually assured destruction
meet me @ the library tomorrow @ lunch
I have been too busy worrying about my immediate problems to really consider who to tell—or even whether to tell anyone—that Audrey threw a rock through Lila’s window, but Audrey raises an interesting point. If I report Audrey, then Audrey reports seeing me in Lila’s room. I’m not sure which crime they’ll think is worse, but I don’t want to get tossed out of Wallingford in our senior year, even if I get tossed out with someone else.
And I do know which one of us Northcutt thinks is more trustworthy.
I text her back: i’ll be there
I’m exhausted. Too tired to do anything more than drag myself back to the dorm and eat the rest of Sam’s Pop-Tarts. I fall asleep on top of my blankets, still in my clothes. For the second time that day, I don’t even remember to take my boots off.
Wednesday afternoon, Audrey is waiting for me on the library steps, red hair tossed by the wind. She’s sitting with her hands in bright kelly green gloves, clasped in the lap of her Wallingford pleated skirt.
Seeing her makes me think ugly thoughts. Zacharov’s story about Jenny. The words scrawled on the paper. Shards of glass shining at Lila’s feet.
“How could you?” Audrey spits when I get close, like she’s the one with a reason to be angry.
I’m taken aback. “What? You threw a rock—”
“So what? Lila took everything from me. Everything.” Her neck has gone red and blotchy, like it always does when she’s upset. “And then you’re there, in her room, in the middle of the night like you don’t care if you get caught. How could you do that after what she—what she—”
Tears stream down her cheeks. “What?” I ask.
“What did she do?”
She just shakes her head, incoherent with weeping.
I sigh and sit beside her on the steps. After a moment I put my arm around her shoulders, drawing her shaking body against me. She tucks her head into my neck, and I inhale the familiar floral scent of her shampoo. I know that she’d probably hate me if she knew what I was really like or what I could really do, but she was my girlfriend once. I can’t help caring.
“Hey,” I say softly, meaninglessly. “It’s okay. Whatever it is.”
“No, it’s not,” Audrey says. “I hate her. I hate her! I wish the rock smashed her face in.”
“You don’t mean that,” I say.
“She got Greg suspended, and then his parents wouldn’t let him come home.” She gives a wet gasp. “They saw those stupid pictures your friends took. He had to beg for his mother to—to even listen through the door.” She’s crying so hard that her breaths are more like big hiccupping gulps of air. She fights to get words out between sobs. “So they finally took him to get tested. And when they found out he wasn’t a worker, they decided to enroll him at Southwick Academy.”
Audrey stops trying to talk at that point. It’s as though she’s possessed by grief, as if something other than herself has hold of her body.
Southwick Academy is famously anti-worker. It’s in Florida, close to the Georgia border, and requires all student applications to come with a copy of their hyperbathygammic test. A test with clear negative results. If the student is accepted, then he or she is retested by the on-staff physician.
Sending Greg to Southwick means that his reputation, and presumably the reputation of his parents, is saved. I’d feel bad, if I didn’t think he’d enjoy being at a school where everyone feels the way he does about workers.
“We’ll all be out of high school in less than a year,” I say. “You’ll see him again.”
After a few moments Audrey pulls away and looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes. Then she shakes her head. “He told me about Lila before he left. How he cheated on me. That she worked him to make him want—”“That’s not true,” I say.
She takes a long, shuddering breath. Then she wipes her cheeks with her kelly green gloves. “That just makes it worse. That you want her and he wants her and no one was forced and she’s not even nice.”
“Greg’s not nice,” I say.
“He was,” she says. “To me. When we were alone. But I guess it didn’t mean anything. Lila made it not mean anything.”
I get up. “No, she didn’t. Look, I get why you’re pissed. I even get why you smashed her window, but this has to stop. No more rocks. No more slurs.”
“She cheated on you, too,” Audrey says.
I just shake my head.
“Fine,” she says, standing and dusting off her skirt. “If you don’t tell anyone what I did, I won’t say that you were in her room.”
“And you’ll leave Lila alone?”
“I’ll keep your secret. This time. I’m not promising anything else.” Audrey stalks down the steps and across the quad without looking back once.
My shirt is still wet with her tears.
Classes go about as well as usual. Lately, I can’t seem to get it together. Emma Bovary and her basket of apricots blur together with information asymmetries and incomplete markets. I close my eyes in one class and when I open them, I’m in another.
I walk into the cafeteria for dinner and pile food onto my plate. Tonight’s main course is chicken enchiladas with salsa verde. My stomach is so empty that even the smell of the food makes it churn. I’m early, so I have a few minutes at the table alone. I use them to shovel food into my face.
Eventually, Sam sits down across from me. He grins. “You look slightly less close to death.”
I snort, but most of my attention is on watching Lila walk in and pick up a tray of food. Looking at her brings a hot flush of memory to my skin. I’m ashamed of myself and I want to touch her again, all at once.
She and Daneca come to the table and take seats. Daneca looks over toward Sam, but he’s staring at his plate.
“Hey,” I say as neutrally as I can.
Lila points her fork at me. “I heard a rumor about you.”
“Oh?” I can’t tell if she’s teasing or not, but she’s not smiling.
“I heard that you were taking bets about me.” Lila rubs her gloved hand across her forehead, pushing back her bangs. She seems tired. I’m guessing she didn’t get any sleep last night. “Me and Greg. Me being crazy. Me being in a prison in Moscow.”
I glance quickly at Sam, who is wearing an expression of almost comical surprise. He’s been helping me keep the books for bets, since his stint running the business, so he knows what’s come in and what’s gone out. He knows we’re busted.
“Not because I wanted to,” I say. “If I didn’t, I was afraid people would make too much of it. I mean, I take bets on everything.”
“Like who’s a worker?” she asks. “You’re making money off those bets too, aren’t you?”
Daneca narrows her eyes at me. “Cassel, is that true?”
“You don’t understand,” I say, turning to her. “If I suddenly pick and choose what bets to take, then it would seem like I knew something—like I was protecting someone. I sit with you three; everyone would assume I was protecting one of you. Plus people would stop telling me what’s going on—what rumors are being spread. And I couldn’t spread any rumors of my own. I wouldn’t be any help.”
“Yeah, and you’d have to take a stand, too,” Lila says. “People might even think you’re a worker. I know how much you would hate that.”
“Lila—,” I say. “I swear to you, there’s a stupid rumor about every new kid that comes to Wallingford. No one believes them. If I didn’t take those bets, I would basically confirm that you and Greg—” I stumble over the words and start over, not wanting to piss her off any worse than I already have. “It would make everyone think the rumor was true.”
“I don’t care,” Lila says. “You’re the one that’s making me into a joke.”
“I’m sorry—”, I start, but she cuts me off.
“Don’t con me.” She reaches into her pocket and slaps five twenty-dollar bills down on the table. The glasses rattle, liquid sloshing. “A hundred bucks says that Lila Zacharov and Greg Harmsford did it. What are my odds?”
She doesn’t know that Greg’s never coming back to Wallingford. She doesn’t know that Audrey hates her guts. I look automatically toward his old table, hoping that Audrey can’t overhear any of this.
“Good,” I force out. “Your odds are good.”
“At least I’ll make a profit,” she says. Then she gets up and stalks out of the dining hall.
I rest my forehead against the table and fold my arms on top of my head. I really can’t win today.
“You gave back that money,” Sam says. “Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Not all of it,” I say. “I didn’t want her to know that they were betting on her, so I just took whatever envelopes people handed me when Lila was around. And I did take bets on who was a worker. I thought I was doing the right thing. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I was just covering my ass.”
“I took those bets about who was a worker too,” says Sam. “You were right. It was the only thing we could do to have any leverage.” He sounds more sure than I feel.
“Cassel?” Daneca says. “Wait a second.”
“What?” Her voice sounds so odd—tentative—that I look up.
“She shouldn’t have been able to do that,” Daneca says. “Lila just told you off.”
“You can love someone and still argue with—,” I start to say, and stop myself. Because that’s the difference between real love and cursed love. When you really love someone, you can still see them for who they are. But the curse makes love sickly and simple.
I look in amazement toward the doors Lila walked through. “Do you think she could be—better? Not cursed?”
The hope that blooms inside of me is terrifying.
Maybe. Maybe she could come out of this and not hate me. Maybe she could even forgive me. Maybe.
I cross the quad, heading back to my dorm room, Sam next to me. I’m smiling, despite knowing better. Despite knowing my own luck. I’m dreaming dreams where I’m clever enough to weasel my way out of all my problems. Sucker dreams. The kind of dreams con artists love to exploit.