Ace of Spades

by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

  “Gonna head to class,” Jack says quietly, before leaving me by the entrance, alone. I watch him disappear down the hallway, feeling less safe now that he’s gone.

  The pulling in my stomach begins, like it has been doing all week, as I trek down the hallway. Aces has made me as noticeable as a guy with a face tattoo, and the annoying squelching of my sneakers against the marble doesn’t help my case.

  I rush up the stairs to the music rooms.

  “Hey, Devon,” Mr. Taylor says with a smile as I enter.

  This gets the attention of the other students, and I get more disapproving stares.

  “Hey, Mr. Taylor,” I say.

  The toast I ate for breakfast wants to lurch out as my stomach squeezes and squeezes.

  I walk over to my station, feeling tired as I sit down heavily, then switch on my keyboard.

  “Yo, Richards, what’s up?” a voice says. I startle.

  It’s Daniel Johnson: quarterback, brown hair, brown eyes, typically “handsome” face. Daniel Johnson, who has never in his life spoken to me.

  “Yo, Johnson. The sky,” I respond.

  He pauses, looking up, then realizes—sooner than I thought he would—and laughs. “You’re funny.”

  There’s another pause, and then he’s sitting himself down next to me.

  “So listen, it’s the twenty-first century. No one hates gays no more.”

  I didn’t get the memo.

  “So, like, I’m cool with it—as long as you don’t crush on me or anything, you dig?”

  “I dig,” I say.

  He pats my back, then pauses with a wink. “No homo.”

  I want him to gather his things and bother someone else. But he seems determined to piss me off.

  “So what’s Scotty like? The guy acts like he’s a god. But, like, trust me, I know what godly is. Girls tell me daily, you know?”

  Daniel seems all philosophical about his dick game, shrugging in what I’m sure he thinks is a humble way.

  “But none of his conquests tell me things. I tried asking Chiamaka—because even though he’s gay, who wouldn’t want to hit that?”

  I wouldn’t.

  “So, what’s Scotty like?”

  For someone so big on No homo, he’s really making me wonder …

  I sit back, looking up like I’m thinking about it.

  “Scotty is a god, Daniel,” I say, realizing only after that he probably doesn’t get any form of sarcasm.

  He bobs his head slowly, processing my words carefully.

  “Wow, maybe I shouldn’t have doubted him,” he says.

  “Maybe.”

  Daniel turns and pats me on the back again. “You’re actually an okay dude, Devon.”

  I think that’s meant to be a compliment, but I’m not sure how complimented one can feel by Daniel. At last, it seems my prayers are answered and Daniel moves away.

  My phone buzzes. A text from Unknown. Bold, bright text beaming at me.

  Just in. Our favorite alleyway lurker, Jack McConnel, has a drug problem. Let’s just hope his straight A record doesn’t suffer because of it and his brand-new friends …—Aces

  The message creates this emptiness inside. Like all my organs have been removed and I am just this shell. Jack would never touch that stuff. His ma died because of drugs, his dad got incarcerated because of drugs, and he has brothers to look after.

  He’d never do something that idiotic or risk his scholarship like that.

  I go to my messages and hesitate.

  Jack’s name in all of this makes even less sense than Chiamaka’s. At least with Chiamaka, I could link us both back to Scotty, but now none of this makes sense.

  I text: Are you ok? I know the rumors aren’t true.

  Within seconds, his reply vibrates in my palm.

  Do you?

  The hollowness gets deeper, like there’s an invisible man digging a hole in my stomach.

  I study his words, then reply:

  The Jack I know wouldn’t do something like that.

  The Jack I know swore over his ma’s grave that he’d never go near any of that shit. As they lowered her into the hole, tossed dirt on her wooden casket, he promised her dead body he’d stay away.

  Maybe you don’t know me that well.

  I’ve known Jack for as long as I’ve known myself. The invisible man in my stomach stops digging and stabs my heart instead.

  I look up again, turning to survey the class. A girl looks at me, then covers her mouth and swivels back around in her chair, her shoulders vibrating as she lets out a quiet laugh. I feel eyes on me, and I catch Mr. Taylor staring. He gives me a smile.

  My fingers are still wrapped around my phone, a part of me waiting for Jack to say he’s joking, that Aces is wrong about him. The screen dulls, darkens, then locks. The other part of me knows that the text is never coming and that despite how much I want to push the thought away, maybe I don’t know Jack like I thought I did.

  I sit and stare at my keyboard. The invisible man whispers in my mind, Even your best friend doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t want you around; no one does.

  I’m alone, with no other friends at Niveus to confide in. Every day, I feel Jack pull away from me. It makes me feel like something is wrong with me. If Pa was here, he’d shut my thoughts up. Tell me things will work out with Jack. Or that I’ll get other friends—eventually.

  I dream about Pa coming home someday. We go out for pizza and he just tells me a bunch of life lessons. We catch up on missed time. I imagine talking to him about Aces, this anonymous bully who hates me for no reason, and he’ll know the answers because that’s what dads are for. They are meant to know all the stuff you don’t. I dream about Ma not being so busy, having time to just listen, to talk, so I can tell her all the shit I’ve been hiding from her for years.

  In my dreams she listens, and still loves me afterward.

  But I know dreams are dangerous; they give me too much false hope. I know, I fucking know that even if my pa wasn’t in prison, he wouldn’t be here for me anyway.

  I close my eyes, squeezing them shut as my heart spasms. Dreams are toxic.

  I know I’d still be alone.

  I think about texting Dre, asking him if I can come over tonight or something, but I’m scared about what other things he’s been told about me. What else could get out.

  I wipe my eyes quickly and pocket my phone. I need to focus on something else.

  I shakily play a note on the keyboard, starting my warm-up, letting the noise block more thoughts from spilling through the cracks.

  12

  CHIAMAKA

  Thursday

  “Malarkey.”

  “Watch your language, Chi,” Jamie says with a grin.

  “Seriously, that is malarkey.”

  Jamie bites into his sandwich, shaking his head. “It’s not, trust me. Billy told Maggie, who told me that Cecelia Wright and Mr. Peterson are screwing.”

  I roll my eyes at him. When I told him I wanted to talk about “anything,” I didn’t mean this. I do question, though, why Aces reports random stuff about me and those boys but not this—which is way more interesting, in my opinion.

  We are at Lola’s, in an empty classroom near the cafeteria. I came here mostly because I wanted an excuse to be away from everyone else. Especially people like Ruby, who would love to see the beginnings of my downfall play out.

  And I wanted to talk about something more pressing—who Jamie thinks Aces is, for example.

  I take my phone out, checking it for new alerts.

  Zero. I sigh.

  “Checking to see if Aces has exposed another secret?” Jamie asks, wrapping up the remains of his sandwich.

  “No.” Yes.

  “I hear that if the secret is about you, you don’t get the message.”

  I narrow my eyes at him a little. “No shit, Sherlock. I kind of figured that out already … But are people talking about it? Like who it could be?”

  Jamie shrugs. “I
guess so. I don’t really pay attention.”

  Usually, I know everything going on in Niveus. Usually, I’m in control. I’ve got ears in all classes, and people always tell me things. But this week there’s been radio silence. I feel like everyone knows more than I do, and for some reason, they are keeping me out of the loop. First, there was Headmaster Collins’s resignation, then there was everyone apparently knowing Jamie and Belle were a thing, and now, Aces. Not knowing who’s next, what’s next, has been making me really anxious.

  “Let’s head out of Lola’s. Belle wanted to sit with us at lunch today.”

  I try not to let the annoyance show on my face. “Sure.”

  We exit the room, looking around to make sure no teachers see us leaving, and then we walk back into the cafeteria. Jamie heads straight over to Belle, who’s sitting at the jock table in the center with some of the girls from the lacrosse team and some guys from the football team. I follow, wrinkling my nose as I look at everyone eating what seems to be today’s special. Green pasta. I notice Scotty sitting at the end, twirling the pasta with one hand while texting with the other. I’m surprised to see him here; he usually hangs around the drama kids.

  I wonder who he’s texting.

  Another reason I prefer eating lunch alone with Jamie is because the jock table is always so loud, filled with what are meant to be grown men in blue letterman jackets flinging food at each other.

  I catch up to Jamie, wanting to tell him that Belle clearly seems busy eating vomit. But he’s too fast, moving toward her like a magnet, kissing her softly. I look away, pulling a chair out and sitting opposite them.

  “How was Lola’s?” Belle asks. I take out my small tub of carrot sticks.

  “Fascinating as always,” Jamie says, mouth filled with sandwich again. He’s somehow managed to unwrap it in the time between kissing Belle and sitting down.

  There is silence between us, and I look up, noticing Belle staring at me with expectation.

  I stick a carrot in my mouth, smiling wide as I chew. “It was great, I always love hanging out with Jamie.”

  Belle rolls her eyes, and I raise an eyebrow. Did she just roll her eyes at me?

  I hear a text tone and my heart jolts. Belle takes her phone out, glancing at my face.

  “That was just my sister,” she says.

  My heart starts beating steadily again, but I’m annoyed at myself that I let my insecurity show.

  “What does she want?” I ask, a little too harshly, to cover it up.

  Belle hesitates. “Just a joke about politics … when can we watch another one of those mutant films?”

  “What joke?” I push.

  She squints at me.

  “Does it really matter?” Jamie answers for her.

  I open my mouth to tell him yes and make up a reason for why it matters, but he interrupts yet again.

  “X-Men?” he asks, bringing the conversation back to mutants, because that’s clearly more important.

  “Yeah! I’m … really interested in them,” Belle says.

  Jamie looks at me.

  I force a smile. “Sure. Not like it’s already someone else’s tradition or anything—”

  This time my phone cuts me off as it buzzes. I scramble, quickly unlocking it and scanning the screen for signs of humiliation. But it’s just my mom sending me another article on death by phone charger.

  “Thought it was Aces, didn’t you?” Jamie asks with a loud laugh, clapping his hands like this is funny.

  “No.”

  “Maybe Aces is really the boogeyman,” Jamie says. I glare at him.

  “It’s not funny, Jamie,” I say.

  “It kind of is.”

  “It really isn’t,” Belle says, putting her fork down, annoyance pressed into her soft features.

  “C’mon, I was just joking. Chiamaka is being sensitive.”

  Belle looks unimpressed. “Sensitive?”

  Why is Belle acting like she suddenly cares about me? I need a break from this table and this conversation. I don’t want to speak to Jamie when he’s in asshole mode.

  “I need fresh air,” I say, standing abruptly and causing the chair to scrape loudly against the floor. Some of the guys look up, Scotty included. I lock eyes with him briefly, and—I swear I’m not imagining it—he smiles. Then without waiting for a response from Jamie, I leave.

  * * *

  I don’t care about them, I tell myself. But I look at them again anyway—the texts from Aces. I rest my head against the wall of the bathroom stall I’m in, taking in the words. They’re private. Really private. The type of rumors that could follow people after high school. The ones about Devon.

  I wonder how Devon’s coping. I think I’d die if stuff that personal came out about me. If I feel this sick all the time, this anxious, over trivial stuff, I can only imagine how he’s feeling.

  What if darker, more invasive secrets of mine were released? The stuff that could ruin everything … college … my career … my life.

  The memory of blond, bloodied hair stains the inside of my eyes as I shut them. The image is a constant reminder of how I just left her there to die.

  Every evening for weeks after the accident, I’d call every hospital in the city, asking if a young woman with blond hair had been admitted. I stayed up every night, searching for news articles on every local news site, every message board—searching for a sign, a message about a hit-and-run, a girl left by cowards to bleed out and die.

  The selfish part of me is terrified by the thought that she survived and wants to find us, find me, and tell everyone our terrible secret.

  What keeps me up more than anything, though, is the night after that. I’d visited the spot where it happened, this street cars barely pass through, about two hundred miles away from where I live, and the road was completely clear. I searched the entire stretch of it for signs of her. I drove up and down, convincing myself I’d memorized the place wrong. But there is no way I did. I have it permanently carved into my memory.

  There was no body. No glass from the headlight that shattered when we crashed. No blood. Nothing. Like it was all a figment of my imagination.

  But I know it happened. The tree we hit was proof enough. Bent out of shape, with bark torn from where the car slammed against it. The tree remained unchanged, while everything else from the crime scene was seemingly swept away.

  I brought the accident up with Jamie weeks after it happened, when my insomnia had gotten particularly bad. When I asked him, Jamie looked scared, lost even. Like he could cry. I could tell he wasn’t sleeping much either. I remember how pale he got, like he might throw up.

  But he changed the subject of course, then ignored me for an entire day.

  Jamie doesn’t even care about college, and the Fitzjohn family name would be enough to get him out of something this big. I’m pretty sure his family has ins with half the judges around here. But their name is not only powerful; it’s a heavy burden to carry and needs to be upheld. Jamie’s always telling me how much his father’s respect means to him, and I know he would lose it all if this came to light.

  I tried mentioning it again once, weeks after that. I still wasn’t sleeping, and my panic attacks had gotten more and more frequent. I needed a friend. I needed to talk about it—what had happened and what I’d seen.

  He straight up denied it, asked me what I was going on about. Looked so confused, the fear I’d seen the first time I’d asked completely gone. After that I never brought it up again. Knowing who his dad is, and what would happen to Jamie, I figured it was something he fought to forget and this time had succeeded.

  I’ve met Mr. Fitzjohn a handful of times, at formal parties and in passing when I’ve been at Jamie’s house; the tension in the air of that place is so constricting. Even his mother seems to crumple under the pressure of a loveless marriage and the perfect family image she’s been upholding. I know from Jamie that they sleep in separate bedrooms, and she’s always “taking something” to help her sl
eep and distract her from the man she’s married to. Not that anyone would ever talk about that; it’s all brushed under the marble flooring. To outsiders, the Fitzjohns seem perfect, but all of them are messed up in their own way. Jamie’s more like his father than he realizes.

  My family doesn’t have any of this, though. No legacy here in America. If our secret comes to light, I have no way out. Everything is at stake, and while Jamie might appear calm on the outside, he must know that he could be next on Aces’s list of victims.

  Maybe outwardly seeming okay, rationalizing things, is how he copes with the possibility of being Aces’s next target.

  I wish I could be like that right now.

  I sniff, but I can’t hold back the stream of tears. I let myself cry uncontrollably now, let the aching from the tension in my brain ring, not caring about my mascara or the prospect of anyone in this bathroom hearing me.

  Every single night I dream of her. The girl.

  But now, before those nightmares, I ask myself, Who is doing this? What will they reveal next?

  “Chiamaka?” I hear a soft voice say, along with the subtle creak of the bathroom door.

  I stay quiet, seated sideways on the ground of the stall, looking at my blue plaid skirt spread over my outstretched legs, the thick gray socks that cover most of my thighs, and my brown-heeled brogues pressing against the wall.

  “It’s Belle,” she continues. The bathroom stall next to mine opens and my heart races a little. I hear a slight rattle as Belle pulls at my locked door. She raps at the door three times. I can see her gray suede heels and white frilly socks.

  “Are you in there?” she asks. I say nothing. I’m not sure why she’s going to such great lengths to be nice. Maybe she’s trying to prove a point to Jamie that she’s the perfect girl. But I doubt Jamie would notice how Belle treats me, let alone care.

  Belle is still and silent, and I almost think she’s going to walk away, give up. But then I hear a scraping noise.

  I watch the door as the lock slowly starts to turn. There’s a sharp clink and the door opens.

  Belle looks down at me with wide eyes and a frown. She unzips her bag and hands me a folded tissue.