by C. L. Stone
“I didn’t tell Kota about what we found out about his mom,” I said. “Now he’s going to be double mad.”
He stopped grinning and shook his head. “That’s not it.”
I wasn’t so sure. This wasn’t a good day at all.
More footsteps behind us. I turned to find Victor, Silas, and Mr. Buble approaching. They stopped at the doors, too, looking out at the mess of vehicles and the blown up car.
“Are we in trouble?” Silas asked.
“It’s Kota’s car?” Victor asked, squinting a little as he looked out. “Honestly, about time. Someone please get him something new. And brand new? Please.”
I squeaked. Just a little.
It was enough to get everyone’s attention.
Dr. Green grimaced, chuckled just a little and put an arm around my shoulders in a friendly way and addressed the others. “Everyone is going to be very nice to Sang for the next week, okay? It’s been a long day… and a very weird first driving experience… which she totally aced as far as anyone needs to know.”
Mr. Buble’s eyes widened. “You?”
My eyes watered more and I shook where I stood, despite Dr. Green holding on to me and trying to make light of what’d happened. I didn’t want to cry, I was just such a mess from everything going on so quickly.
“Okay, okay,” Victor said instantly, tugging me gently away from Dr. Green. He kept his arm around my waist and half-carried me down the hallway. “Mr. Buble…”
“We’re leaving,” he said quickly. “Dr. Green and Silas—”
“We’ve got this,” Dr. Green said quickly. “Make her have some ice cream. Or whatever she wants.”
I didn’t want anything except for the day to be over and to not ever drive again.
Riff
(A repeated chord progression or refrain)
Sang
Victor and Mr. Buble waited to ask me what happened until after they made me eat a chicken sandwich and a healthy vegetable salad mix he picked up from a local deli while on the way.
“You can have a little ice cream after,” Mr. Buble explained after he placed the order for me at a drive thru. “If you still want some, that is. However, I’d recommend staying away from any sugar or caffeine if you’re feeling this rattled. It might not help.”
He was right. After eating good food and drinking water while riding in the car, I started to calm down. Maybe part of it all was I’d been so hungry and didn’t realize though all the craziness.
I did eventually tell them what happened.
“There is no way that is your fault,” Victor said.
“That isn’t something that you could have done just by driving,” Mr. Buble said. “It would have happened to Luke as well. It was inevitable. It was just the car, not you.”
They didn’t mention anything about the fact that I was driving a car without a license or any experience. Either they weren’t going to tell me off about doing so right then to be nice to me, or they weren’t surprised that it was happening. It was hard to be sure.
“Are you still up for one last job?” Mr. Buble asked. “It’s not difficult. And then we can go home.”
I nodded. I would have rather gone home, but I wanted to prove I could work through being a little scared and still keep on task.
What kind of Academy person would I be if I quit just because I was so embarrassed and rattled?
“This last job,” Mr. Buble was saying to us on the way to downtown Summerville, “is the only thing we have on our minor list before we’re clear to focus on moving. Let’s finish this task.”
“It’s easy,” Victor said from the rear seat. He’d insisted I get into the passenger seat next to Mr. Buble.
Third job for the day. It was getting close to sunset. We’d eaten and waited until now, supposedly the perfect time, for Mitch. They explained a bit about what was happening.
I’d never switched jobs so much and had a full day like this. It was no surprise now why North kept on people to keep them healthy, why Kota managed the group and made sure we had what we needed. The more I worked with them, the more I understood: why they worked with teenagers heavily, why we had two team leads to a group, the favors… it all was falling into place.
Mr. Buble parked outside of a brown one-story building, the Summerville library. I thought it was the same dull brick as Ashley Waters High School. With the sun low behind the trees behind it, the building was illuminated by low lamps pointed in its direction surrounding the building.
We got a clear view of the inside just from the parking lot. The place was pretty busy. The only thing blocking the view further inside was the bookshelves. Otherwise we could monitor everything going on.
Mr. Buble parked at an angle, backing into a spot closer to the street. “Our job is very simple, but I’m going to start first and you’ll be my lookout team.”
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“You two will monitor me from here. I’m going inside and will get access to the office computer. An unfortunate accounting error is about to occur. It will render this library unable to take on their newest employee. They will conveniently find a request via email for a reference librarian at a college, a small reference library for a group of psychiatrists, funnily enough.”
I’d heard about what was happening on the way over. Mitch seemed like he was trouble. Just from what they mentioned, he likely needed therapy. Putting him to work with a college library, a college known for psychology majors, seemed to be a good solution.
There was still a chance he’d reject the job. Unfortunately, it meant more drastic measures if he did.
“If I fail, we’ll have to exchange places,” Mr. Buble said.
“Shouldn’t someone go in with you?” Victor asked.
“You can see me unless I’m in the office specifically. You’ll also be kept on the line.” He leaned forward to ease his phone out of his pocket and show it to us. He then produced an earpiece that connected to his phone. “We should be able to hear each other the entire time.”
They switched positions. I was sitting in the passenger side, Victor in the driver’s seat.
Mr. Buble stood outside the car. “If anyone comes close to the car, just start to have a conversation. Actually it’s probably better if you’re already in conversation.” He looked expectantly in my direction.
Here? With him listening? And after everything that happened today? I could barely remember what he wanted me to talk to Victor about.
It would be an awkward conversation, not actually being able to say too much.
Mr. Buble walked away from the car. We could watch him the entire time. He said things to people like hello and excuse me and we heard it fairly clearly on the phone line.
Victor put his phone into the cup holder between us, speaker side up so we were listening. “Hopefully this is boring.”
“It never seems to be boring around us,” I said.
“Actually when we’re not fighting for our lives like lately, this is one hundred precent the job. It’s just us watching from a car while someone goes in to do something. Sometimes you’re the one that goes in to find a computer to gain access. Getting people into positions where they can live their lives and not be miserable and make other people miserable, and possibly get them the help they need. It’s prevention instead of waiting for it to escalate.”
I leaned back against the seat, with my hands shoved into the pockets of the jacket to keep warm. With the car off, and it being nighttime, the temperature in the car was getting cooler by the minute.
Victor scratched absently at his T-shirt, his hand going under the sweater and he used his nails more frequently.
“Do you not like your clothes?” I asked.
“I don’t like how they feel,” he said. “I’ve been wearing Armani too long. It all feels too different.” He dropped his arm, leaning against the center console but then picked it back up just to take the sweater off an
d toss it into the back. He combed back his wavy brown hair, trying to put it into place but it still had a few flyaway strands, some falling into his eyes.
It was his eyes I kept looking at, for a sign of the fire he usually carried. It was there, in the back, not as dramatic as I’d known it to be.
“Maybe we should get your clothes back,” I said.
“I was trying to wear other things,” he said. He smiled a bit at me. “I can’t always wear the same thing.”
“Mr. Blackbourne does.”
“For now. He wears different things sometimes.”
“But do you like the Armani clothes?”
He leaned his head back, gazing in toward Mr. Buble who had stopped at the desk and was chattering with some librarian woman behind it.
He finally replied, “I like the feel of it. Smoother. Everything else feels too rough lately. The expense to keep wearing those clothes though… there’s other things to spend money on.”
“I bet Gabriel would know what is similar.”
He nodded and then waited a minute, his big brown eyes watching me.
Enough to make me blush. It was difficult to look right at their faces sometimes. Too handsome. Their gazes so intense, silently asking me to talk to them or do something and I had no idea what that was.
Except this time I knew I had to say something.
“I know something’s bothering you,” Victor said. “I can tell.”
I blinked a few times. I looked down at the console between us. I lifted a hand out to trace the cloth material between the seats, following the seams on my side. Keeping my gaze on my fingers instead of him made it easier to talk. “I heard about Brie. About what happened. How your parents would rather you date her and not me.”
The air in the car stilled for what felt like eons.
Eventually he turned fully to me, adjusting his leg until his knee was up at his chest. “Yeah, that was stupid of me, wasn’t it?”
“I know why you would try.”
“I thought about it, for the evening…” He paused and leaned his cheek against his raised knee. “And then the more drunk I got, the more I tried to stop it and the more my mother was practically throwing Brie at me.”
My hand stopped. I looked up at him. “You tried to stop it?”
He nodded. “Before the concert. I knew it was stupid and it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work for Brie either. Her girlfriend… she’d be mad. I thought you’d be mad.” He rolled his eyes, leaning his head back, grinning. “Brie knew, too. She resisted, but tried to be polite about it. One little inkling that we got along, and my mother and her mother were all over it. We knew… we knew in the long run it wouldn’t work out. They’d make us spend too much time together, force us publicly to be together. She had the application printed out to attend Brie’s school within moments.” He stopped frowning. “I know now that’s why… it’s why she was mad at the end. When you were there and I wanted to go with you. It wasn’t about me wanting to walk away, she just didn’t want me to walk away with you. I’ve no doubt Brie coming out at the end was her attempt to stop us. Little did she know Brie was on my side. Our side.”
That made me feel loads better. “Mr. Buble told me about the article and his thoughts on it. I think he was trying to help.”
“He told me to tell you. I never got the chance really. He said he had to talk to you about it.” He smiled a bit, some of the fire coming back into his eyes. “Sorry I didn’t talk to you about it before… or that I even thought to try. Seemed like a good idea in the moment.” A pause. “Was that what was bothering you?”
I didn’t want to admit it, and looked down at the center console again, laughing, mostly at myself. “I’m stupid.”
“You’re not stupid.”
Slowly, I lowered the hood from the hoodie down, shifting my hair so the bruise marks that Silas had made were more obvious. “I ask you to get along with the others and don’t be jealous…” I said you, as in the group in general but I couldn’t say what I wanted with Mr. Buble listening, the group, “and yet I’m the one that gets jealous… I feel it. I feel bad I even have to ask you to temper the feeling and yet I feel it.”
He looked at me, at the bruises on my neck. I assumed he knew what they were.
I was the hypocrite of them all. I got jealous so quickly. Mr. Buble assumed I would, and he was paving the way to make sure we talked it out before it became too much of a wedge between us, before I found out about Brie some other way, maybe with his mom saying something.
His hand reached out, covering mine, warming the skin.
I looked up at his eyes, the fire that smoldered.
“I wanted to do this with you,” Victor said. “With them, too. And I’d not have it any other way now. We are what we are now. And we can do this. I like it this way.”
“You do?”
“I don’t have to worry about you. Not as much anyway. They have your back when I can’t be there. It means everything to me. I don’t even think about it anymore.”
I had no answer, just my heart beating so fast in my chest. I wanted to say more.
I wanted to ask him about that night.
Did he remember now? He remembered the other things.
Did he remember what he said to me?
Yet, I didn’t dare ask. I didn’t want to with Mr. Buble listening. Not that I worried about hiding my feelings… but it was awkward.
He picked up my hand, pulled it close until his lips were hovering over the knuckle. He kissed it gently once and kept it close to his face.
He kept it like that, like all he wanted was to press his skin to mine and let it linger as long as he could.
Stolen moments, whenever we could get them, sometimes on the job.
There was a shadow in the parking lot that caught my attention. I turned my head, letting Victor hang on to my hand as much as possible. I was pretty sure whoever it was really couldn’t see who we were or what we were doing in the car anyway.
The shadow approached, and the closer it got, the more it appeared they were heading for the car next to us.
“Tell me about… concerts…” I said carefully, trying to signal that we should probably talk or something like Mr. Buble said. Appear like we’re just having a conversation in the car.
He shifted his head, clearly focused and alert that something might be wrong. He glanced out of the corner of his eye but focused on me. “Concerts?”
I didn’t know where I was going with it, I just wanted to start something. “The others said you like to go… when they aren’t your own?” It was a second too late to realize maybe I was spoiling Dr. Green’s surprise with this, but my brain was having a hard time getting off this track. “There’s a concert this week. Did the others tell you?”
He was about to say something when the shadowed figure had come up between the cars, and in an awkward bending motion, leaned in, seemed to recognize Victor and rapped on the window.
I didn’t know the man, but he had old wire frames and leathery, wrinkled skin.
Victor made a short groan, released my hand and unrolled the window, just enough to talk to him. “Hi Mitch. Didn’t know you were working tonight.”
“Thought I saw two teenagers doing something weird out here,” he said. “Turns out I was right.” The accusation in his tone was as if he’d caught us doing something horrendous, not just talking.
Victor tilted his head. “What?”
“It’s always you kids. Think you can do whatever you want wherever you want to. Sex. Drugs. You’re going to make her pregnant. What’s your parents’ names? I’m going to have to give them a call.”
Victor shook his head, half sputtering.
I blushed but funny enough, unlike the old principal or teachers or my parents, this felt completely ridiculous. It was like just because he was an adult, he was monitoring us and in charge, when he had absolutely no authority or reason to come to us and ask about us.
Mitch reached for the door handle for the car. “Will you get out here so I can talk to you?”
“Absolutely not,” Victor said, a lower tone than his usual baritone smoothness. “Nothing we’re doing is any of your business.”
“I know you’re doing biblical things to her in there,” he said. He shook the door handle again. “Don’t make me call other people over.”
“I’ll call them.” He picked up his phone out of the center console and showed Mitch the phone. “I’ll call the police if you don’t leave us alone.”
“I know the police, and they know me. They’ll believe me over you.” He squinted at him. “You are that kid. That rich one. Victor.”
Victor attempted to roll up the window but Mitch put his fingers through and in order to stop it rolling up on his fingers, Victor paused.
Mitch hooked his knuckles onto the glass, trying to push down. “Unlock the door.”
He was absolutely crazy.
“Get away from them,” a voice boomed, in such a loud way it’d draw attention from anyone, including people inside.
Mr. Buble was walking toward us with purpose. He probably heard the whole thing.
Mitch jerked his hand back away from the window and held both hands up in the air, like a burglar getting caught. “You won’t believe what I found these kids doing. Fooling around out here…”
Mr. Buble said absolutely nothing. His shoulders seemed to broaden and he shifted to move himself between the car and Mitch. The moment he had any sort of angle, he moved his body toward Mitch, moving him without touching him. Mitch had to back away or Mr. Buble was going to force him away.
Mitch, wide-eyed, kept trying. “Those kids… they… that boy. He’s Victor Morgan. He was doing things to her…”
It was like he didn’t expect another adult to not believe him.
When Mr. Buble had forced him back far enough, he turned away, motioned for Victor to hop over.
Victor, in a quick movement, lifted himself up and back, shifting to the rear seat to make way for Mr. Buble.
I had my belt back on, but not before Mr. Buble had started the car and headed out of the parking lot.