by Rachel Shane
“It means I may have some openings. If you know how to open them.” Whitney spun around and proceeded toward the back of the house.
That didn’t really help with the clarity issue. Openings . . . in a group that might or might not be doing things that might or might not be illegal? “Is this a secret society?” I asked, imagining hazing rituals and initiations and a translation book for Whitney’s cryptic riddles.
Chess laughed. “Something like that.” He glanced back and forth between Whitney and me. “I’ll drive Alice home.”
The mug in my hands was definitely looking half full.
Whitney stopped in place. “Kingston’s going to be pissed. Wait by the car. I’m coming with you guys.”
Kingston. They’d mentioned him before. Was he the guy at the warehouse? I should have realized. The beanie hat wasn’t as showy as some of his other . . . well, the only real word was costumes, but maybe he was having an off night. Kingston Hatter was another kid with a bad reputation, like Chess. Except, gossip and rumors about him included solid evidence, such as the mug shot that had invaded email inboxes as spam: Student Arrested! Must Read. There was also the small fact that Kingston was strange. Stranger than Whitney’s house, if that was possible. These were the types of students I expected to be spending their nights driving home drunk from parties, not converting dead warehouses into environmental meccas.
Chess gestured toward his car, as if I could miss it. “Your carriage awaits.” He bowed for good measure.
“How long have you worked at the Garden Center?” I ran my finger over the silver metal poking through the evergreen paint.
He snapped his head toward me. “I don’t work there.”
I squinted at him. “Oh, I spotted you and Whitney there. Before I followed her. You were wearing a Garden Center apron.”
“Well, don’t spread that around, okay?”
“Why? I think it’s great.”
He set his brown eyes on me. “It gives off the wrong image.”
“So instead you want people to think you’re a . . . ” There were many words I could finish with based on rumors—badass, candidate for juvie, nonconformist—but now, talking to him, I knew these didn’t quite fit. “I’m just curious.”
“There’s enough gossip about me. I don’t need to go around debunking it.” He flashed me one of his trademark smiles. “Alice, why are you really here?”
I could tell him about my quest to start a farmers’ market in this ever-disappearing, rural town—the very project my parents had been striving toward before it died with them. But it didn’t seem like an appropriate time to spill my sob story. So I just said, “Answers.”
His breath caught. “To what questions?” He leaned against the car, arms crossed, attempting to look casual even though his face betrayed his interest. When I didn’t clarify, he said, “Better question. Are you sure this is the best place to find them?” Chess raised an eyebrow. “Whitney doesn’t seem like your type of friend.”
“And you don’t seem like the type of person who would work at the Garden Center.” I swept my hair behind my ear. “Besides, I told you. No one else gets it.”
He opened the back door for me. “Look, Whitney has a hard time trusting people, and you didn’t exactly make yourself seem trustworthy.”
“I didn’t tattle on her about the paper.” I climbed onto the back seat, and he leaned over me, door still open. I felt like a little kid waiting for her mommy to strap her into the car seat. “I really didn’t mean to freak her out.”
“I know that. Do something that will get her attention. Impress her,” he said. “If you want to, that is. I personally think it’s in your best interest to stay away.”
“A few minutes ago you stood up for me. Now you’re contradicting yourself.”
Chess shrugged. “Sometimes both paths are right.”
“Why should I stay away?”
He pursed his lips. “What we do—sometimes it’s not really . . . stuff we can brag about. You could get in trouble. I don’t want that.”
“I already figured that out. What with Principal Dodgson threatening expulsion.”
“That’s not the kind of trouble I meant.” Before he could clarify, Whitney scampered toward the car. Chess slammed the door on me and moved to the driver’s seat. Whitney plopped into the passenger seat.
“What did Kingston say?” Chess asked.
“I said I’m coming,” a new male voice yelled. “Out, Whitney. I called shotty.”
He yanked open the passenger door and tugged on Whitney’s arm to pull her out. He wore the same all-black ensemble as the guy from the warehouse, mud dotting the surface. Had he arrived to complete whatever order Whitney had given him by the warehouse? My fingers curled around the back-door handle just in case.
She stuck out her tongue at him. “You can’t control-alt-command me.” She pointed a finger-gun at Chess. “Start the engine.”
Kingston glanced at his watch, then brushed his hands over his beanie, pulling it off and taking the hoodie with it. A short crewcut remained. It looked more like a five-o’clock shadow on the pallor of his unnaturally pale olive skin. He slammed the front door and wrenched open the back one. After plopping down next to me, he set his eyes on me, lashes so thick it looked like he was wearing guyliner. If he could turn the stare from death to flirty, he might be cute. He’d probably have to get rid of the scowl, though.
“What are you looking at?” he asked me.
“Kingston, you can’t ask that when you’re the one staring,” Whitney said.
He leaned closer. “No, she’s up to something. I can tell.” He narrowed his eyes. “If you’re trying to crack the mysteries of the universe, don’t bother. I’ve hidden them in a seed and buried them in the ground.”
He seemed to be waiting for an answer. “I—I’ll keep that in mind if I ever get the urge to try,” I said.
He scoffed. “What did I just tell you? You can’t try.” He thrust his hand out to me and I flinched, but he only pointed. “You a narc?”
My throat was so dry I couldn’t even get out my no.
“No one uses that word anymore.” Whitney readjusted her seat, pushing it too far into his knees.
“I’m bringing it back. You can resurrect words, not people, though I’m working on a solution for that.” He turned his wrist so he could undo his watch. It flopped in the air like a whip as he shook it.
I inched closer to the window, wondering if I’d made the right choice after all.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Kingston said, bringing the watch to his ear.
“Alice and I had a heart-to-heart.” Chess met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “She’s not going to spread any rumors.”
I squeezed my thumb and index finger together and drew them across my lips.
“Whitney tells me you’re smart. I hope that’s true. For your sake.”
“Kingston, God, you could be a little nicer.”
“What? You gonna tattle to Mom and Dad?” He struggled to get the watch back on his wrist.
“They’re stepbrother and sister,” Chess clarified for me.
“Ah,” I said. Aside from their reputations and apparent love for plants, I didn’t think they had anything in common. While the radical house seemed to fit Whitney, I pictured Kingston living in something more . . . secure. Like a Transylvanian castle with a moat. Or a prison.
“And what are you doing with your watch, King?” Whitney asked.
“I’m trying”—he got so fed up, he threw the watch on the floor—“to turn back the time so this little girl never fucked up our evening.”
“It doesn’t quite work like that.” Whitney’s tone was serious but contained a hint of sarcasm.
“Obviously.” He rolled his eyes. “The battery’s dead.”
Note to self: getting in cars with classmates could be just as precarious as getting in cars with strangers.
Chess pulled out of the driveway and the car wobbled onto the s
treet. Through the rest of the car ride, no one discussed anything related to the warehouse, the paper prank, or whatever secret these three had. Was anyone else in on it? Kingston kept glaring at me. Chess countered Kingston’s glares with sympathetic checks in the rearview.
We neared the main road. I leaned forward and placed my palm on Chess’s seat. “Turn left here.”
But he swerved the car in the opposite direction.
“Oh no. I live back that way.”
“I know.”
Goosebumps pebbled my skin. I’d never given him my address.
“Good,” Kingston said. “I think they’re surveilling the main road.”
“Who is?” I blurted, before I could stop myself.
“Them,” Kingston snapped in an irritated tone.
Oh right, the ever-illustrious them.
Chess stayed straight for a while, then turned down a few more streets, utilizing back roads before approaching my house from a side street. I sat in my seat, stunned. His route avoided annoying traffic lights and saved a good five minutes.
“Nice garden.” Kingston burst out laughing.
Heat swarmed into my cheeks. This garden was a last resort, a desperate attempt to start a farmers’ market myself by growing the produce and peddling it at a weekend lemonade-type stall. Too bad none of my fruits and veggies had popped out of the ground. The only thing standing was the white rosebush I’d planted with my mom in a prime spot below my bedroom window, long before my pathetic farming-lite failure. I had a better chance of growing boobs.
“You’re being too rigid with it, aligning everything in such neat rows.” Whitney patted the air in a line. “Plants don’t like that. They don’t like to be confined.”
“And keep your mouth shut,” Kingston added, though the threat was unnecessary.
“Ignore him,” Whitney told me. “He thinks he’s a girl and has the right to PMS.”
Kingston kicked her seat hard and she let out an oof.
“And just for that we’re listening to pop music on the way home.” Whitney fiddled with the dial until she found cheery singing on top of a catchy beat.
“Oh no. That punishes me, too!” Chess tried to turn the dial, but she slapped his hand away.
I forced myself to push open the door.
Chess rolled down his window. “You’re going to want to lie down. That green concoction? It sometimes causes dizziness.”
“I thought you said—Should you be driving then?”
“I’m a rebel.” He winked at me.
I turned toward my house and released the smile I’d been harboring. I didn’t know what they were up to or what Chess had meant by doing things they couldn’t “brag about,” but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be part of it.
CHAPTER 5
Once inside my room, I pressed myself against the height-measuring strip on my wall. Some girls obsessively weighed themselves. I’d been tracking my height since I started—or rather, halted—my growth spurt. I planted my feet flat, standing rigid like a soldier in a lineup. Instead of a one-handed salute to my officer, I lifted my right hand and held it level with my head.
I marked my height, squeezed my eyes shut, and stepped away to see the result. One eye popped open.
Four feet nine and three-quarter inches.
I . . . shrank? How was that possible? The green liquid was making me hallucinate; that was the only plausible explanation. And in fact, I didn’t feel quite like myself. The giggles that were escaping my throat belonged to someone like Quinn, not me. I pressed my fingers to my temples and sank onto my bed. My eyes shifted to my French textbook, lying open, to my homework. I tugged it toward me and tried to concentrate on my lessons, translating the provided poem from English into French. Comment va le petit crocodile.
I slammed the notebook shut. No, that wasn’t right at all. The word crocodile wasn’t even in the original English sentence. What was wrong with me? Had the green liquid turned me into someone else, someone not very bright? Like Quinn?
That idea made about as much sense as Kingston wanting to turn back time by winding his watch. Whatever. I had to focus on my goal: finding a way into Whitney’s group by doing something to impress her.
But what? I didn’t exactly have a year’s supply of paper lying around.
The door slammed downstairs. My sister, Lorina. I wandered into the hallway, wobbling, and clutched the banister to keep my balance as I descended the stairs. My head felt light, as if it might float away from my neck at any moment. That drink was definitely strange. Might even win the award over Kingston for oddness.
“Alice?” Lorina stuck her head into the living room. “I got petit fours on my way home.”
Maybe food would help. Besides, I had a weakness for tiny desserts. Because as much as I hated to admit it, I adored anything that came in a small package. Like I shared some sort of solidarity with the travel-size toiletries sold in the neglected section of the drug store.
Lorina gestured for me to follow her into the kitchen. She eased the lights to full blast, then lit a few candles so we could actually see each other. Ever since the nuclear-power plant had shut down a few years earlier, the ambience of most homes and buildings was permanently set to romantic to conserve energy.
Now I could see the dark bags under her lower eyelids. Her black suit covered her body, baggy because it had belonged to our mother. Unlike me, she could fit in clothes that didn’t come from the children’s section. Her sunshine-blonde hair cascaded around her face, casting an angelic glow. My own hair, plucked from the same golden harp, concealed me in a similar disguise. Lorina opened a white box tied with a red-and-white-striped baker’s ribbon and slid it across the table toward me.
Miniature replicas of bigger cakes waited inside the box, each one covered with pastel fondant and white frosting that spelled out Eat me!
“Why’d you splurge on the cakes?” I reached in and took the light-blue one. It fit my mood.
“I have something to celebrate.” Lorina’s finger hovered over the cakes, dangling back and forth as she tried to decide which one to choose.
I smiled. My lips seemed slippery, like they might slide right off my face. “Oooh. What?”
“Are you okay? You look a little weird.”
“Pretty tired.” I hated to lie, but I had no idea how to explain the green liquid, not without getting in trouble or hiring a chemist. “So what are we celebrating?”
She reached over and stroked my knuckles. “Alice, you don’t have to keep things from me. I’m here for you. If you’re sick, I want to take care of you.” Her words made me feel shittier than the manure Whitney probably used to make her plants grow.
Of course Lorina would drop everything to take care of me. That was what she did. My twenty-one-year-old sister had put most of the inheritance we’d received into a college fund for me, trading her own education for the role of pseudo-mom. She wouldn’t let me get a job, claiming she wanted me to enjoy my childhood like she had done, before she had to abandon it to raise me.
“Really, I’m fine. Tell me about your news.” I sat up straighter even though my head felt fuzzy, too stuffed with cotton to operate regularly. “Cute guy?”
She blushed. “No, nothing like that.” She wiped her fingers over her brow in a dismissive gesture that clearly showed she wished it were exactly like that. “It’s work stuff.” Lorina administrated the crap out of her administrative-assistant position at the Department of Public Health and Safety for the town. In fact, I sometimes suspected she did all her boss’s work on top of hers. “Apparently Wonderland isn’t so wonderful lately.”
“That’s an understatement.” We lived in Wonderland, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago where they tore out trees and then named streets after them. Everything pretty and picturesque, like the rolling hills and cornfields my school bus used to pass by in elementary school, had melted into a haze of gray, like someone had zapped all the color with a Photoshop ray gun. Monstrous warehouses squatted on the now-barre
n lots, and it was only a matter of time before gas masks became fashionable to combat the exhaust fumes being spit out from clogged highways.
“There’ve been some shady eco-demonstrations going on.”
The blood drained from my face. Did this have anything to do with Whitney’s group and whatever was going on at the warehouse or the message at school? I shook that thought away. They seemed to be doing good things, not bad. Planting a garden in an unused space was the kind of project elementary schools would force their students to do during an agriculture lesson. Of course, they never did this under the cover of night in absolute secrecy.
“Like what Mom and Dad used to do? With the farmers’ market?”
“No, what they did was all in the public eye. This isn’t. It’s illegal.” She chomped down on a tiny cake.
“Illegal how?” My breath waited in my throat. Is this what Chess meant about getting in trouble? With the law? I was hoping he meant in trouble with, you know, thorny rosebush stems.
“A lot of vandalism. Nothing dangerous yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
The word ecotage flashed like a neon light in my mind.
“My boss is getting a committee together to investigate.” Her entire face lit up, erasing the dark circles.
“Not the police?”
She shrugged. “My boss was adamant against it. Guess they want to keep it in the department for now. I thought that was a little weird, but—”
“Wait, so are you on it?” I couldn’t keep the caution out of my voice.
“My boss is letting me spearhead it. This is my chance to show them I can handle more responsibility. Bigger cases.” Usually she investigated claims from citizens about rusty water fountains or garbage men slacking on their trash-removal duties.
I stopped chewing. “Bigger how?”
She pursed her lips. “You don’t seem excited.”
I studied my clasped hands in my lap. “It reminds me too much of Mom and Dad.” It wasn’t a lie, but Lorina didn’t need to know I thought that was a good thing. Though I made every effort to finish what they started in the privacy of my own room, Lorina had vowed to let their dreams rest with them. If she found out about Whitney’s group, she’d try to stop me from joining just like my parents would have if they were still around. They had believed protests should lead to change, not vandalism.