Immoral Code

by Lillian Clark

  “Is there really more than one way to skin a cat?” I asked.

  “Probably,” they both said. Then Reese shook her head and, peeling slices of cheddar out of a package to put on each sandwich, said, “This is pointless. One of you, talk about something else.”

  “Okay,” I said, and talked about how many different kinds of mustard there are until Reese pretended to die of boredom. Then Nari and Bellamy came back, and we all ate sandwiches and continued on continuing on. By which I mean Nari opened her computer and the security cam feeds again, but it being eight then eight-thirty then nine and so on, there wasn’t much to see. Meanwhile the others took turns in the shower, and by ten even Nari’d agreed there was really nothing left to look at so closed it down and opened Netflix looking for the best-worst B horror movie we somehow hadn’t already seen.

  San and I shoved the beds together to make one Superbed. Reese picked a movie about a yeti. We ate snacks, brushed teeth, cuddled up, and fell asleep to the sounds of yeti mayhem and the street outside. Then it was morning again, Wednesday morning, two days to go, which meant more of the same. Eat. Watch security feeds. Argue routes: Stairway? Elevator? Side entrance? Front? Argue specifics: How early should Reese go in? How long would it actually take San to get to Foster’s office, install the malware on his computer, and get out again? How long into that would Reese’s distraction need to last? Argue scenarios: What if someone spotted San on the FI executives’ floor? Could he fake it? Would his ID hold up? Should he just turn and run?

  “No way—I can do it,” San said. “Just wait.” And he closed himself in the bathroom with his garment bag, throwing the door open a few minutes later and striking a pose.

  “Daaaammn.” That was Reese. Bellamy blushed. Nari whistled. And I said, “Call him Bond, Santiago Bond,” in a British-ish accent. I mean, I’d seen the suit before since I went with him to buy it a couple weeks back, but still. Wearing it—gray with a white shirt, matching narrow gray tie and brown leather shoes—San could’ve passed for twenty-two, twenty-three, easy. Even brimming with my epic misgivings, I didn’t think anyone would give him a second glance. At least, not the kind we were worried about.

  He struck a few more poses while we cheered him on, then said, “Okay, okay, now it’s weird,” and ducked back into the bathroom. When he came out dressed as regular Santiago again, we agreed; yes, he could fake it. It’d be enough.

  Then there was more watching and eating and sitting and arguing and deciding and eating and deciding and sitting and watching until I was sure even I could recite the name, job description, and favorite color to go with every senior and junior executive’s face and probably all of the associates and interns from the other floors, too, and it wasn’t even my job to be in the building Friday.

  But it wasn’t me who finally snapped and kicked the air-conditioning unit for the third time, screaming, “IF I DON’T GET OUT OF THIS ROOM SOON, I’M GOING TO RIP THIS THING OUT OF THE WALL WITH MY BARE HANDS AND THROW IT THROUGH A WINDOW!” It was Reese.

  “Need a break, Reese?” San asked.

  “Yes,” she panted. “Please.”

  BELLAMY

  Slow Fuses Still Burn

  Reese was bouncing. Literally, not figuratively. Bobbing up and down on her toes where we stood on the sidewalk in front of our hotel.

  “Okay.” San clapped his hands, like a coach bringing his team to attention. I smiled at him. He smiled back. “What’s the plan?”

  “Dinner!” cheered Nari.

  “And drinks!” Reese added, and pulled five fake IDs from her pocket. “See, see, see?” she said, continuing to bounce as she passed them out to us. “Aren’t they great?”

  They were. Mine had a picture of me, my first name with a different last, and my birth date with only the year changed to make me twenty-one. She’d done the same with the others’, only varying birth years a bit. San’s said he was twenty-three; Keagan and Reese, twenty-two; and Nari, twenty-one like me. “Because you two look the youngest,” Reese explained.

  “I still don’t look twenty-one.” I don’t wear makeup and my regular attire of jeans and a T-shirt didn’t tend to age me up much.

  “That’s okay,” San said. “You don’t have to use it if you don’t want. Or if you do, I’m sure you’ll blend in with the group.”

  I nodded and decided not to worry about it. The IDs did look really good. Reese had been thorough, even including our signatures in different handwriting styles and missing only the holograms some licenses had.

  The story was that we were college students from Wyoming—because, according to Reese, “Who the hell’s from Wyoming and knows what their driver’s licenses look like?”—in the city for spring break.

  “So,” Keagan began, still examining his ID, and I tensed. He’d been quiet all day, and my first thought was that the fake IDs crossed his line. My second was annoyance. But less with whatever objection I assumed he’d voice and more because he was a walking reminder of all the things I’d spent the last days and weeks choosing to ignore. But he only tucked his ID into his wallet and asked, “Where to?”

  We wandered toward Union Square, following Nari and Reese as they looked up places to go on Nari’s phone. Keagan walked behind them, with Santiago and me at the back. Navigating the other foot traffic, San moved closer to me. I reached for his hand and interlinked his fingers with mine. He squeezed. Then Reese pointed her finger toward the sky, announced that she’d picked a place, and we let go.

  The place was a bar and grill, moderately busy at seven-thirty on a Wednesday night. “Decent reviews, a full bar, and two dollar signs,” Reese said. “Sound good?” We nodded, and Keagan held open the door for the rest of us to file through.

  The hostess sat us in a booth in the back corner. The waiter didn’t blink at our IDs as we ordered a round of drinks. “Brava, Reese,” Nari said once he was out of earshot.

  Ten minutes later, drinks in hand and orders placed, we sat listening to the general din of the restaurant. Our silence was awkward. Silence had never been awkward between us before. I took a sip of my drink, an eleven-dollar cocktail that was supposed to taste like lemonade but mostly tasted like vodka. “Nearly useless superpowers. San, go.”

  Santiago swallowed a mouthful of his beer, brow creased in thought. “Okay.” He set his glass down. “Magnetism. But not like Magneto. I can’t control metal, I’m just, you know, magnetic.”

  “You’d never lose your keys,” said Reese.

  “True. You could just stick them and your phone to yourself,” I said. “No need for pockets.”

  “Perfect,” San said, smiling, and tapped his glass against mine.

  Nari decided on speaking with animals but only cats, “Because they wouldn’t give two ripe shits about me. With dogs you could make, like, a dog army. But cats?” She shrugged. “They’d probably still ignore me most of the time.”

  “Yeah.” Reese stirred her blended cocktail with her straw. “Or resent your ability to speak their language and pee on your bed.”

  I settled on levitation, but only a few inches above the ground. “At least you’d never trip,” San said.

  Nari nodded. “Or step in anything gross.”

  Reese went with X-ray vision.

  “But X-ray vision is awesome!” Santiago argued. “It’s a staple. Freaking canon.”

  “No way,” she said. “X-ray vision plus something is awesome. Plus superstrength or shooting laser beams from your eyes or whatever. Just being able to see inside shit would be totally purposeless. And kind of inconvenient. I don’t want to see people’s guts. And if I did find something rad hidden somewhere, how would I get to it with my wimpy noodle arms?” She wiggled one thin arm around for emphasis.

  “Fair enough.” San turned to Keagan. “Keag?”

  Rolling his already empty beer glass between his hands, Keagan looked up. “What?” H
e hadn’t been listening. To any of it.

  Santiago frowned. “Mostly pointless superpower.”

  Keag opened his mouth to say something, but his eyes flicked to mine and he closed it again. “Dewrinkling,” he said, and tipped the last drops of his beer into his mouth. “My clothes would always look fresh even without an iron or a trip through the dryer.”

  “Nice,” San said. “Now you get to pick the next—”

  “I’m gonna get another drink,” Keagan interrupted, and pushed out of the booth, empty glass in hand.

  San watched him walk to the bar. “Well.”

  “Whatever,” Nari said. She scooted out the booth’s other side and went in the opposite direction from the bar toward the bathroom. Reese gave Santiago and me a toothy grimace and followed her.

  I groaned and set my forehead on the table.

  San slid his arm around my waist. “Don’t.” I looked up. The feeling, the casual frequency with which he’d started to touch me, was still so new. It was all so new. Knowing that those touches meant what I’d hoped they did. Knowing that they were the promise of more. While still knowing that, with college and complications and time constraints, they were mismatched puzzle pieces, with pictures and shapes that didn’t fit.

  But I wanted the pieces anyway.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  “Except it is.”

  “You’re the reason we’re doing this. But Keagan’s crap isn’t your fault. They’re different things.”

  The waiter, laden with a massive tray of food, approached our table, so I didn’t say it, but I wondered, Are they?

  Keagan didn’t come back until we were nearly done with dinner. Reese, Nari, San, and I ate quietly, joylessly, while he stayed at the bar nursing another beer, his plate sitting next to Nari’s, untouched. By the time the bill came and we’d had his meal put in a to-go box, San was ready to drag him back over. Instead, Keag walked up to the table with a wide smile and his hands full.

  “Shots!” he cheered.

  “Keagan…,” San said.

  He set five shot glasses of brown liquor down on the table, spilling a few drops from two of them, then slid one to each of us. “Come on,” he said. “Cheers!”

  No one moved. “What? Aren’t we having fun or celebrating or some shit?” He lifted his shot glass from the table. “No takers? Really?” He took the shot in one quick swallow, then reached for the one in front of Nari. “More for me, I guess.” And he swallowed that one, too.

  He reached across Nari for Reese’s, but she threw it back with a gasp and a shiver before he could grab it. “There,” she snapped. “Happy?”

  “Not even remotely,” he answered, and turned to San and me. San, hand on his shot glass, sat rigid between Keagan—still standing at the end of the table—and me in the corner of the booth. But it was me Keag focused on. “Bells?”

  I could already feel the alcohol from my lemonade-vodka drink dilating the blood vessels in my face and hands, making me feel hot and puffy, interfering with my neurotransmitters, giving me a sense of separation and looseness. I held his eye and swallowed the shot in one rough go, coughing on the fire of it as I set the empty glass back down.

  “Cheers, Bellamy,” he said. “Glad to see you’re still a sucker for peer pressure.”

  “Jesus,” Nari hissed. “Quit being such a dick, Keagan.”

  He turned on her. “A dick? Really?”

  “All right.” San took his shot in one quick motion and stood from the booth, forcing Keagan to step back and let him out. “We’re done. Let’s go.” With a hand on Keag’s shoulder, he aimed him toward the door.

  I stared at the remnants of liquor in the bottom of my shot glass, feeling the heat of it in my gut, burning me from the inside out.

  SANTIAGO

  Okay Okay Okay

  I walked Keagan through the restaurant and out the door, keeping my hand on his arm, not because I thought he’d do something stupid but because I honestly didn’t know what to think.

  Out on the sidewalk Keagan paused, scrubbing his hands through his short hair, smearing them down his face; then he tipped his head back and stared at the sky until the girls walked out the door behind us.

  Keagan didn’t turn, but he must’ve heard them, because he said, “Sorry,” before starting in the direction of the hotel. I jogged to catch up with him, looking back once to see the girls following a short distance behind.

  “You okay?” I asked him, though of course I knew he wasn’t. The other questions that’d filtered through my head had seemed too loaded, too leading. Maybe I was avoiding them, refusing to poke the bear, stir the pot, yank the tiger’s tail.

  He stopped, arms crossed, in the middle of the sidewalk. I paused beside him and he turned to face me, expression cutting. “Are you okay?’

  I opened my mouth, but whatever he saw on my face made him scoff. “You’re really just okay with all of this?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, only shook his head and strode off down the sidewalk.

  I caught up. “Yes.”

  He barked a laugh. “Yes,” he mimicked.

  “I’m serious.” I dodged a couple walking toward us. Keag stomped straight through them, making them drop their linked hands. Their posture made me think of Bellamy, and I looked back for the girls, now more than half a block behind us. “I’m okay with it.”

  Keagan glanced at me, disgusted. “Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “From the beginning.”

  “It’s not that—”

  “What? Simple? It’s not that simple?” He stopped, shaking his head. “Well, you’ve fooled me. Which is just so fucking fitting, right? Keagan’s the fool! Keagan’s the one who doesn’t get it.”

  “Keagan. No one thinks—”

  He turned to me and spread his arms wide in an irate gesture. “This isn’t a game, Santiago! We don’t get to make up our own rules! How do none of you get that?”

  “I—” I didn’t know what I was going to say, but Keagan didn’t want to hear my answer either way. He crossed his arms, furious, and resumed walking. We didn’t talk the rest of the way.

  REESE

  Light the Match, Pull the Pin

  Nari, Bells, and I followed half a block behind Keagan and Santiago all the way back to the hotel. Nari walked with her arms crossed, brow tight, and eyes on her feet while Bellamy and I looked between her and each other. The mood was iron, rust, the color of corrosion and a smell like blood.

  Back in the room we arranged ourselves on the chair, bedside table, and Superbed, and the mood shifted, cinching tight, tight, tighter. I knew this feeling. This sick anticipation. The twist in my guts. The air stretched and twanging while I waited, already wincing, for the rubber band to snap.

  So, I decided, screw it! The night was already shit, right? Might as well light it on fire.

  “Split Pig,” I said.

  Sitting on the other mattress next to Nari, Bells shook her head. “Reese, no.”

  She was probably right. Bad idea. But I felt my skin crawl. I have a total love-hate relationship with confrontation. It’s the child-of-a-dysfunctional-marriage thing. And maybe a little bit the no-regrets thing, too, since confrontation’s a tightrope of dos and don’ts and shoulds and shouldn’t-haves. I hate the damage of confrontation. I hate hurtfulness for the sake of hurting. I hate bickering. Hate it. Shit like arguing about the “right” way to load a dishwasher or mow the lawn or pack luggage into the car. I hate how bickering over whether the mugs should go topside up or down in the cabinet leads to State of the Union, I hate everything you are and everything you do fighting. But I love—love? need?—the other kind. I need to light the match when the room is filling with fumes.

  Example:

  “Reese,” she’d said. Over and over. ReeseReeseReese. Chasing me, still tying her robe around her waist, bare feet th
umping down the hall and into the kitchen as I ran for the back door. I was fire. The hottest blue. The color when copper burns. ReeseReeseReese.

  She’d caught me right as I reached the door. Grip so hard my arm bruised the next day.

  “Reese,” she’d said. “You can’t tell him. Please. Give me a few days. I’ll—”

  There’d been a thud down the hall. In my parents’ room. Because they’d been in my parents’ bed.

  I’d yanked my arm out of her grip, said, “Fuck you,” slammed the door so hard behind me the window cracked. And told him. My dad. Not that minute or hour or day, but I told him. Because I wasn’t sure she would. And because I’d rather light the match and burn to death than suffocate as the gas slowly replaces all the breathable air.

  But before I could take it back, diffuse, open a metaphorical window, Keag lit his own match.

  “Great!” he said. “I won last time, so it’s my turn. And I’ve got a good one.” He laughed. Darkly. Really, super darkly. “Five teenagers, each with their own special skill set—except, well, whatever—plan the heist of all heists. The Big One. The Epic Thing. Or whatever the hell we’re calling it. To rob an innocent-ish albeit shitbag of a man for their own means, like they’re all in some fucking movie instead of real, go-to-jail, have-no-superpowers life. And…go!”

  “Keag…,” San said.

  “Nope. Not this time, Santiago. You all want to play pretend and make up your own rules about what’s right and wrong? Sweet! Let’s play!” Keagan stood up off the chair, his eyes a little glassy, his expression almost manic. “Like, best-case scenario? We commit a shitload of crimes, but you know, for a good reason. Two or ten or twenty wrongs make a right, right? Worst case?” He shrugged. “Jail? But, hey, I bet someone can think of something better! An armed security guard? Come on, people! Start the thread! Who’s gonna go out first? San? Reese? My bet’s on Ree—”