But I just want it to be done. When it’s done, I can get Annie back. We can all leave this behind forever.
“We have to be patient.”
I want to rip out his hair. I want to grab the steering wheel and swerve into oncoming traffic.
I lean forward, clutching my knees to my chest, taking deep breaths. James puts his hand on the back of my neck, warm and steady, and the breathing gets easier.
“I know it’s hard,” he says, his voice so different when he’s being gentle. I don’t know whether I love it or hate it. It confuses me. Angry James I knew. Angry, distant James was easy to love because he was still safe. But this James that is mine feels dangerous.
I don’t ever get to keep the things that are mine.
He squeezes my shoulder. “I promise you, it will all be worth it. The things you’ve done—they haven’t been for nothing.”
I look out the window into the night, not dark here but lit with thousands of glaring eyes, watching everything always. All these things I’ve done. So many things. Please, please, they have to be for something. I’ll make them for something.
“How is your dad?” I ask, needing to get away from the horror movie of my life playing in my head.
“We’re not talking about him tonight. Tonight is about us.”
He pulls over and parks the car illegally, then gets out. I follow. We’re at a building I don’t recognize. It’s closed, dark, locked up for the night. He’s grinning, boyish in his anticipation.
“Well?”
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
I do. Every second of it.
I shrug.
“I broke into an all-girls school and we got drunk together.” He pulls a bottle out of his jacket. I notice the copper plaque above the door, identifying it as St. Mary’s School for Girls. I can’t fight the smile that tugs on the edges of my mouth in response to his.
He closes the distance between us, leaning down, forehead against mine. “I was feeling nostalgic.” I lean up and my lips meet his. I always lose myself in his lips, but it’s the best way of being lost.
“So, what do you think?” he says, hand on the small of my back, pulling me closer. “Should we break into a school and get smashed?”
James is mine. He is my north, and as long as we are together, everything is okay.
ANNIE
Two and a Half Months Before
THE BLOOD IS POUNDING IN MY HEAD; I CAN FEEL IT building pressure behind my eyes. Still nothing. My arms and stomach muscles are trembling; I can’t hold this handstand much longer, even with the help of the wall bracing me.
“What are you doing?”
I startle and fall down, my legs smacking against the wood floor of my bedroom. “Ouch.”
“Are you okay?” Cole asks.
“This is my room,” I snap from my undignified position on the floor.
“Door was open. Dinner’s ready.”
“Not eating.”
“That’d explain the crankiness.”
I flip him off, then stand. I don’t have to put up with crap from someone who obviously hates me and wants me out of the house. Rafael and Adam and Sarah all like having me here. I’m determined to show that I have some value.
Unfortunately, this experiment proved fasting plus making all the blood rush to my head does not a vision trigger. Sucks. Guess I won’t sleep tonight and add extreme fatigue.
“What are you trying to accomplish?” Cole asks.
“Are you still in here?” I grab a throw blanket off the edge of my bed and wrap it around my shoulders. Adam’s way more thoughtful.
“Yes.”
I sigh and flop down on the bed, light-headed. “Sometimes I can make myself see something if I push my body far enough.”
“Doesn’t sound healthy.”
“I need to see . . .” Fia. I need to see Fia. But I also don’t want to. I don’t want to see her trailing after James like a well-trained pet. It makes me sick, makes me angrier than I’ve ever been, that she chose him.
She chose him. Call me, Fia. CALL ME. Tell me why.
I kick a pillow off my bed. “I’m sick of being useless.”
“You aren’t useless.”
I laugh harshly. “Is that why you’re so eager to ship me off?”
He doesn’t respond. I think he’s gone, so when he talks it startles me. “Fia wanted you safe.”
“Yeah, well, Fia’s not here, is she?” I stomp past him and out of the house. I’ve gone on enough walks to familiarize myself with the path down to the beach. It’s late in the evening, the Georgia air still sticky, so there aren’t many people out. I walk in relative silence, guided by the steady pulse of the ocean.
When I feel the ground shift into sand beneath my shoes, I take a few steps to the side and sit, facing the eternal ocean breeze. It doesn’t smell like I thought it would. I spent too many years with those horrible “sea air” candles confusing my brain about what, exactly, a huge body of salt water would smell like. It’s not sweet at all; it’s heavy and cold with the slightest hint of decay.
But breathing it in, filling my lungs with it, makes me feel very, very alive.
Eden was from California. She always talked about taking me there and teaching me to surf. It wasn’t until a year ago I found out she’d never surfed in her life; she’d lived in one of the interior desert cities and had never even seen the ocean.
If Fia wasn’t going to stay with me, why couldn’t she have gotten Eden out so I wouldn’t have to be alone? Eden deserves the ocean.
Then again, Eden never hated the school like Fia always did and like I learned to. She’d laugh and say everything’s relative. I can’t imagine what her “relative” comparison was that the school was preferable, but I don’t doubt it was horrible.
Someone sits next to me and I startle. “Sarah?”
“Cole.”
I roll my eyes. I don’t know why he’s out here, but I’m not going to try and initiate conversation. I dig my hands into the sand, flashing back to that day on the beach in Chicago. That day I thought I knew exactly how everything would feel and turn out. That day they made my sister kill two people. I didn’t see that. I never see enough.
I find a rock beneath the sand. Sarah told me they cart in the sand for the tourists, and that if you go a mile down the beach it’s nothing but rocks. I rub my thumb along the contours of the stone, wonder how long it had to be turned around on the bottom of the ocean, battered and broken, until it came out this smooth.
“Why are you here?” I ask after a few minutes, unable to stand him sitting this close, saying nothing.
“I like the ocean.”
I throw a handful of sand at him. “Here here, idiot. With Lerner. With Sarah. With Rafael. You don’t seem to agree with anything they do, so why are you helping?”
My question is met with silence. I’m about ready to stand and go back to the house when he finally speaks. “My mom was psychic. She didn’t talk about it much. I probably wouldn’t have listened. I left home at fifteen. My father was . . . I shouldn’t have left her there, but I was mad. Mad at him, but even angrier at her for staying. By the time I went back three years later, he was gone and she was sick.” He pauses, the break punctuated by sharp laughing gulls. He clears his throat. “She forgave me. Told me to find a girl she’d been seeing in visions for months. One of Keane’s.”
“Sarah?” I’ve wondered about her. She knows so much that it wouldn’t surprise me if she had worked for Keane at some point.
“No. Her name was Leanne. She was a Feeler.”
For some reason it’s a relief to me that Sarah never was Keane’s. It makes her feel . . . cleaner. “Did you find her?”
“Too late. I don’t know what they made her do, but she killed herself before I could get her out.”
I let my head hang, feeling the weight of the memory on my shoulders. I reach out and find his arm, rest my hand there. “Fia tried . . . she tried to kill herself, too. It�
��s not your fault. It’s Keane’s fault.”
He clears his throat. “Sarah found me at my mom’s funeral. I’ve been helping where I can ever since. I don’t agree with all her decisions, especially not bringing in other people like Rafael, but someone has to do something.” He sounds sad and lost, a quality in his voice I’ve never heard there before.
I squeeze his arm, then let my hand drop.
“Why did your sister go back?” he asks.
I curl up, resting my chin on my knees. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe she wanted to stay with James.” I glower, thinking about him. I hate him. “But who knows? Maybe she has some grand master plan.” I snort, then move so my eyes are against my kneecaps, pushing into them. “Then again, planning was never her strong suit. She probably just felt like it.”
“She loves you.” He states it like fact.
“How do you know?” My eyes burn with tears, and I push them harder into my knees.
“When we took her, you were the only thing she cared about. She was desperate to get back to make sure you stayed safe.”
I gasp a messy snort of a laugh. “I really thought she was going to kill me.”
“And you still showed up.”
“I owed Fia her freedom. And she needed me.”
“As a general rule, when you think someone’s going to kill you, you run the opposite direction.”
“Yes, sir.” I stand, brushing the sand off my pants. He joins me in the walk back to the house and I turn things around in my head, everything mixing together and jumbling up. Cole’s tragic history. Fia’s choice to leave me. Her relationship with James.
The world bursts into bright colors, and I see a girl, a teenager, but tiny. She’s got white hair and black eyes. She’s sitting across from a woman I actually recognize—Doris, from the school—but she looks bored, slouched with one leg draped lazily over the side of her chair.
“Could you please state your name?” Doris says, eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
The girl doesn’t say anything, her gaze steady under one raised eyebrow.
Doris frowns. “Your name is not Katniss Everdeen. Think your name. Your name. The name your mother called you. The name on your birth certificate.” Doris’s face is growing angrier. “This isn’t a joke.”
“No, Doris Robertson, it isn’t. But you are. This whole place is. Do any of you think I haven’t already pulled from your brains exactly what’s going on here? I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to your boss. I should be working for Mr. Keane, not trapped in a school with a bunch of scared brats who have no idea what they can do. What’s his phone number?”
Doris stammers. “I can’t—you—”
The girl sighs and pulls out her phone, dialing a number. “Too easy,” she says. “Hello, this is Mae Rubio. I’d like to speak with Mr. Keane.”
The image shifts, and I see the same girl on a sidewalk, shivering, a wild and terrified look in her eyes. Another girl stands close, holding her by the arm. That’s when I realize—Fia. She’s with Fia. Whoever this girl is, she’s going to be with Fia sometime in the future.
Fia’s holding a broken bottle like a weapon.
And then I’m back in the dark, but not back in reality. I try not to freak out, try to calm my brain down because I’m worried if I get too excited the vision will stop, but it all continues as it did before. The hand in mine. The invisible slide and click of pieces falling into place as vision-me realizes she is in love.
“Annie,” someone whispers, and I want to scream in frustration because if he’s whispering, how can I recognize his voice when I hear it again? But vision-me, caught in the same eternal darkness I am, doesn’t mind. She knows exactly who she is with and how she feels about it, and our racing hearts match pace.
“Annie?”
The sound of Cole’s voice nearly makes my racing heart stop, until I realize with a shuddering gasp that reality has reclaimed me, and I’m back outside with Cole.
“Vision?”
I nod, disoriented. I’m sitting down. I wasn’t sitting down before. “Did I fall?”
“You stopped walking and were pretty gone. I was worried you’d fall, so I helped you sit.”
“Thanks.” I push myself up, Cole’s hand on my elbow turning me toward the house. I take off my sunglasses to rub the bridge of my nose, then settle them back into place.
“What did you see?” he asks, and it takes me a few seconds to process what he’s asking. Visions are so disorienting. And I kind of resent having to dive back into reality right now; I’d like to hold on to the few remaining strands of how it felt to be me in that last vision. I love how it feels to be me in that vision. I want it so much it hurts.
“There you are,” Rafael calls, his voice warm against the chill of the evening. I can hear his smile in it. “You left so quickly I was worried you were upset.”
I shake my head. “No, I’m fine, I—”
“Did something happen? You look flushed.” He puts his hand against my cheek, which means if I wasn’t already flushed, I certainly am now.
“A vision.”
“Really? Come, let’s get you inside.” He takes my hand—for the briefest second my heart flutters at the thought that it could be his hand—until I realize that it’s not. I’d know that hand anywhere now, and it isn’t Rafael’s. There’s a whisper of disappointment in my soul. It would have been so exciting to know it was Rafael. Oh well. He puts my hand on his arm, walking very close to me so that I’m entirely filled with the smell of him. The dark, heady spice of his cologne feels appropriate for how disoriented I am right now.
“There was a girl,” I say, letting the images wash over my memory, relishing the look of the world. “White hair, dark eyes. At the school, being interviewed by a woman named Doris Robertson, a Reader there.” I snort a small laugh. “The girl totally ran circles around her. Her name was . . . Mae Rubio. And then later I saw her with Fia.” I swallow hard against the swelling of emotions. “Not doing anything specific, but it looked like they knew each other. That’s probably why I saw her in the first place.” I don’t mention the broken bottle or how scared Mae looked. Was Fia about to hurt her?
I feel sick thinking about it. I’m glad the vision ended when it did. For once I don’t wish for more information.
“Explain?” Rafael prods. “Why would that make you see her?”
“Most of my visions involve Fia in one form or another. I’m the only person who can see her clearly.” I realize maybe I should have told him this sooner, but I didn’t want to talk about it. “She’s so . . . umm, flighty? She’s hard for Seers to grab ahold of. Clarice could never track her.”
“Who is Clarice?”
I miss a step and he catches me around my waist. We’re suddenly very, very close, but he doesn’t let go or move away. Darn it, vision, couldn’t it have been his hand? “She was my teacher. At the school. But she’s dead.”
“I see.”
Cole’s voice is like a rush of cold night air, bursting the bubble between Rafael and me. “We should find Mae. Talk to her before Keane gets her.” I back up, embarrassed.
“I agree. And I think Annie should be the one to do it.”
“What? Why?” Cole sounds suspicious.
“Who better to warn this poor girl of what her future holds than a beautiful woman who has escaped it?”
“You really think I should?” I ask.
“I do.”
“Okay. I will.” A smile pulls at my lips. I have something to do, and I’ll be able to help, finally. I’ll keep someone away from Keane. I’ll save a girl from the school. Fia would be proud.
FIA
Two Days Before
I COULD WALK STRAIGHT BACK. HE’S IN THERE—PAST that doorway, somewhere in the maze of offices in this gleaming, window-lit skyscraper. Walk straight back. I don’t know what I’d do when I got there. Probably nothing that works with the plan. But my fingers itch to do.
“Don’t,” Pixie says, not looking up
from her magazine. She’s manning the front desk, and I’m sitting on top of it. I’m just sitting here.
She glares up at me. “You’re not sitting, you’re lurking. And you wouldn’t get very far. There’s a buttload of security guards once you get past that door, and you’re on the watch list. So you can’t go back and see James.”
James. Yes. I was thinking about James. Of course that’s what I was thinking about. I want to go back to see James. I want to jump him, throw him across a desk, rip off his shirt and . . .
“SHUT UP, gag, you are so gross.”
I smile and tap my temple, but that was close. I have to be more careful. James asked me again this morning for a verdict he could give his father.
I don’t know if I’m delaying because I like Pixie and worry what will happen to her, or if I’m delaying because I’m worried about whatever job his father would have for me next. But I’ll have to decide soon. Decide what to do with Pixie. Pick her fate. I reach out and brush her bangs out of her eyes.
She doesn’t look up. “Did you figure out who was watching you?” she asks, slowly tearing strips through the glowingly photoshopped face of some pop star.
“Hmm?” I jump off the desk and walk to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. I can see the green beacon of Central Park from here. It’d be nice to be down there today. But I need to be here. Why? I can’t do anything right now. I feel like I need to be here, though.
“Last night, before you left with James. Remember? At the club?”
I shrug. “No idea.” I hadn’t even thought about it. Last night James held me and we laughed, and we dared to talk about a plan, our plan, and a future without all this. Whatever was happening at the club is yet another thing on my endless list of things to worry about or not worry about. I opt not to worry. Why worry about something as stupid as that? If I have to confront it, I will. And I’ll win.
Tap tap tap tap. I win.
“You want to do something tonight? Or do you have plans with Peachy Keane?”
Perfect Lies Page 4