The fear was still there, whispering, You almost got totally screwed. If it weren’t for Bells…But success was a cheering stadium, drowning it out. And I knew I’d chase this feeling my whole life.
Which made me think, even as we walked, with traffic passing and people giving me the strangest looks, I get it.
My mom.
I got it.
Not the flaming garbage fire of what she’d done. But why. I could see it. I could comprehend. Her problem wasn’t wanting this feeling. This electricity. Like my blood was a current buzzing about beneath my skin. Her problem was refusing it, beating it back if ever she got a taste. Spending her life pounding on that brick wall. Not my dad, but a wall of her own design, one she’d slammed down around herself to keep practicality in and dreams out. Or maybe it was the other way around. The wall trapped whoever it was she really wanted to be inside, and the only way for that true self to survive was to smash through that wall in the worst, most destructive way. Leaving my dad and me coughing and hacking and trying to breathe despite the dust of her rubble.
Bells and I crossed the street and walked up behind Keagan’s car. Nari must’ve seen us in the side-view mirror, because she burst, surged, bounded out of the passenger side, tossing her headset on the seat behind her. She held her hands up, fingers splayed, dropped her jaw, and silent screamed.
Bellamy laughed.
I hurried forward and ducked into the backseat. Bells and Nari followed.
Keagan looked back at me from the driver’s seat and said, “You need a hose.”
Bellamy focused on Nari, all intense, and asked the question I hadn’t bothered to even think yet: “San?”
SANTIAGO
Las palabras se las lleva el viento.
Actions speak louder than words.
Walking out of the FI building, after wiping my prints off Foster’s office door handle with my sleeve, after reattaching the vent cover in the conference room, checking the sleek black table for smudges, and returning the chair to its place, after fixing my tie and slipping back into my suit jacket, after striding, confident, down the hallway around the atrium, through the doors into the antechamber, after riding the elevator and crossing the lobby unnoticed, I pushed through the main doors thinking impractical, illogical, risk.
Words.
Only words.
Words that were so quiet, forgettable, lost in the wind beside the anchored reality of my actions.
I walked the sidewalk back to Keagan’s car, hands in my pockets, gripping the flash drive in one and the ID in the other, looking nearly the same as when I’d gone in, save some scuffs on my new shoes and the smudges of dust on my slacks, and felt my smile spread like a thing not entirely owned by me, wide and bright and not altogether under my control. I felt vivid. I felt invincible.
Because I’d done it.
I was a damned good bet.
NARI
If only I knew then what I know now.
We did it.
We. Did. It.
We were rock stars! Robin Hoods! Five Batmans righting wrongs and slaying villains in the night! Or, you know, in the evening. And less slaying than reappropriating funds from. Oooh, The Revengers! Okay, fine, still no luck on the cool title front. But who cared! We’d done it. And (insert awkward grimace while fidgeting here) yeah, there were a few moments when I wasn’t sure we would.
But we did.
The mood in the car was loose with it. Yes, loose. Like muscles after a workout, like we’d all just finished running a race. Exhausted, introspective, relieved. Same as when we’d pulled into the city a few short days before, the only voice in the car was that of the maps app, calmly directing Keagan where to go. An hour and a half later, we stopped for gas. Santiago and Reese went inside to change. Bells went for snacks. Keag filled the tank. And I checked the still-nonexistent balance of our fake person’s bank account and the current cost of Bitcoin, guesstimating how long it’d take for Foster to activate my malware on each of his accounts, how long it’d take to siphon enough money after that to buy each Bitcoin.
I hoped we’d make Bells’s first payment deadline in August.
I hoped it wouldn’t be too tight.
KEAGAN
$0.00
“Can I call you later?” Nari asks, leaning down to look in through the open passenger door, laptop hugged to her chest.
I rub my eyes. They feel like wax. Or sand. Sandy wax. Waxy sand? I just need to sleep. It’s early. Seven-ish. And I literally drove all night. Actually literally, not even the fake, I-really-mean-figuratively kind. “Of course,” I say, and she looks relieved. Like I’d say no? But I get it. Things are still weird. Like when you get out of a super-intense movie and feel like part of you is still living in it. Sometimes it’s awesome. Especially after some epic sci-fi or a superhero flick where afterward I feel like maybe, if I really wanted to, I could up and fly.
This is not like that. “Or just come over,” I say.
She nods and closes the car door, then takes a wide step back, and through the window I watch her raise her arm and blow me an emphatic kiss. A proper Swim Fast Salute.
I give her a tired smile and drive away. Halfway home my car’s fuel light flicks on and I pull into a gas station. Leaning against the back door as the pump chugs, I cross my arms and close my eyes. I keep seeing Reese and Bellamy striding down the sidewalk, Reese still in her wig and covered in fake blood dried a red so dark it looked black in places, Bellamy full-on beaming, like she’d swallowed a tiny star. She seemed taller, like after doing all this she took up a little more space. Next, Santiago. He’d glowed just as bright. They all had. Even Nari. And me?
The pump clicks and I turn to put the nozzle away, then screw my gas cap back on. Seen through the rear window, the backseat looks like one of those confetti poppers has gone off, except instead of colored paper bits, it’s filled with junk food wrappers and empty coffee cups, a goo-covered black wig, and San’s discarded tie.
I pull up to the curb in front of my house, eyelids drooping. The mess and camping gear can wait. I’m at least twenty-five percent asleep, maybe even thirty, as I walk up the path and shove open our moisture-warped front door. I figured the house would be quiet, but my dad’s in the kitchen eating what looks like leftover fried rice. His hands still wear dried smears of clay from a predawn pottery session.
“Hey, kid,” he says, chewing.
“Hey.”
“You’re back early.”
“Yeah.” I feel dizzy. Delirious. Either the room’s swaying or I am. “You’re up early.”
“When inspiration strikes, right?”
“Sure, whatever.”
He frowns. “Hungry?”
I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am. I don’t know. But I sit across the rickety little kitchen table from him anyway. He passes me his bowl and fork. After the first bite, I shovel the rest into my mouth, barely chewing.
“Guess that answers my question,” he says.
I shrug.
“Mr. Noncommittal this beautiful a.m., huh?”
“Guess so.”
I finish the rest of the fried rice. My dad gets me a glass of water. I drain it in two gulps and stand, aiming for the hallway. My room. My bed.
“Keagan,” my dad says.
I stop, look back. He’s doing his discerning-parent face. Like he can see inside my head. Or like he’s looking super hard but can’t see because my shield’s up. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
Am I okay.
I—I don’t know how to answer that. In all the most urgent ways? Sure, I’m okay. As in, I’m not bleeding. Or nauseous. Or being chased by a zombie.
But.
“Do you ever…” I don’t know how to finish. My dad waits, patient. I swallow. “Are you proud of me?”
His eyebrows lift. “Proud of you? Kea
gan, of course I am.”
Hearing that feels like a hot little flower blooming in my stomach. Weird, right? A little gross? But I don’t know how else to describe it. I cross my arms to hold the feeling in. “Does it bother you that I don’t have a…thing?”
He tips his head. “What do you mean?”
“Like, a passion. A dream.”
“Oh.” He shifts in the kitchen chair, making the vinyl squeak. “Maybe like how your best friends all want to be astronauts and famous artists and Olympic divers and, what’s Nari always saying she wants to do, rule the universe?” He laughs. “Like that?”
I nod.
“Nope,” he says. “Doesn’t bother me.”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“That at eighteen you haven’t figured out your life’s passion? No.”
I lean back against the doorway to the hall. Thirty percent asleep, remember? “Not even that I don’t know what to do about college or jobs or whatever after school?”
“College isn’t for everyone, Keag. And it doesn’t have to be.” He shifts again, crossing his arms like mine. Or mine are crossed like his. No, I did it first. What I mean is, you know how some fathers and sons or mothers and daughters or some other combo have that whole mirror-plus-thirty-years thing going on? Well, that’s us. I will look exactly like my dad in a few decades, and a few decades ago, he looked exactly like me. But with, like, jorts or DayGlo or whatever shit was trendy in the early eighties. Big hair? Mullets? I don’t know. Discerning-parent face back on, he asks, “Did Nari say something?”
“Sort of.”
He sighs. “Listen,” he says, and his face switches from discerning to gentle lecturing. “Knowing what you want to do with your entire life when you’re seventeen, eighteen years old is incredible. And rare. And…how to say it?” He leans back in his chair and crosses one leg over the other. “Fleeting? I just mean it may not stick. People grow, Keagan. And they change. Not fundamentally, I don’t think. Even now, I’m not sure about that. But their interests and, yes, their passions and goals. They evolve. The stuff your friends are so passionate about right now might not be what they’re passionate about in five or ten years. And you feeling like you don’t have something like that?” He uncrosses his legs and leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Take me,” he says. “I thought I wanted to be a drummer. Or a lawyer.” He makes a wide-eyed face. “And your mom? She did two years of an undergrad program thinking she’d go to pharmacy school.”
“Really?” We don’t even keep Tylenol in the house, my mom hates “Big Pharma” so much.
“Really.”
I close my eyes, leaning my head back against the doorjamb and sighing.
“You’ll figure your shit out, Keag,” my dad continues. “In a few months or a few years. There’s no rush. Try stuff out. See what you like and what you don’t. You have some pretty exceptional friends. But having grand plans isn’t what makes them exceptional. And you know what?” He pauses and I open my eyes to look at him. “Like calls to like. You’re pretty exceptional, too.”
I half smile. “In your unbiased opinion, right?”
“Oh, totally biased,” he says, smiling back. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
I tell my dad thanks and shuffle down the hall and into my room, closing the door, shedding my shoes, jacket, and jeans before tripping onto my bed.
Eyes closed, I let my brain stumble along, ticking through a mess of thoughts like a scribbled to-do list—the stuff my dad said, stuff Nari’s said, a slide show of images and snapshots from the past week—and finally devolving into a mess of surreal mash-ups of reality and dreams. The next thing I know, my room is dim and Nari’s staring at me from my desk chair, which she’s dragged over to the side of my bed.
“Hey,” she says.
I roll over onto my stomach, arms folded beneath my chest, and turn my head to look at her. “Hey.” I grin. “Gonna give me the Talk?”
Her brow quirks. “As in Birds and Bees? And”—she waggles her eyebrows—“ahem, Pollination?”
I nod, cheek against the mattress. “Re-pro-duck-shun.”
She taps a finger on her mouth, considering. “Okay. Here’s one: Zeus, after impregnating Metis, swallowed her up and birthed Athena from his forehead.” She shrugs. “Good?”
“Perfect,” I say, and stretch my arm out to her. She accepts the invitation and climbs over me into the bed, kissing the back of my neck as she goes. “They should use that story in sex ed. Like, ‘Don’t have sex, horny teens, or you may get pregnant and cannibalized.’ ”
She rests her head between my shoulder blades. I can feel her breath through my thin cotton T-shirt. “Or become a cannibal and push a baby out of your head.”
“Exactly. Equal opportunities for horror.”
We’re quiet for a while. Nari slides her arm around my chest. I squeeze her hand between my side and tricep. “So.”
She moves her head, rests her chin on my back. “So.”
I roll over, and she shifts, too, until we’re sitting on my bed, both cross-legged and not touching. “We’re awkward,” she says. “We’re never awkward.”
“Yeah, well, the past six weeks haven’t been exactly normal.”
“True.”
She picks at a wrinkle in my comforter. Nari isn’t big on nervous fidgeting because she isn’t big on nervousness. It’s the self-confidence thing. Like the idea of being nervous doesn’t usually occur to her. Knowing that this makes her nervous, that I do? Let’s just say that our dynamic has been a little skewed in the “nerves” arena. I mean, she’s a badass while I’m…?
Well, that’s the thing, right? I don’t know what I am. But maybe my dad’s right and I don’t have to know right now. Maybe I’ll know next year or five years from now. Maybe I’ll try carpentry or construction and hate it. Maybe I’ll love it. I. Just. Don’t. Know.
And you know what? That’s okay. I get that now. Right now. That it’s okay. That my dad’s maybe right in a lot of what he said and definitely right about at least one thing: My friends are exceptional. And not because of their dreams, or not just because of their dreams, but because they’re good, caring, determined, interesting, kind, accepting people.
But also, maybe he’s right that I’m exceptional, too. Or maybe he’s not, and I’m normal. But also good. And caring. And determined. And interesting and kind and accepting. Just without the cherry on top of some life–slash–world changing ambition. Which isn’t a failure. And shouldn’t make me ignorable.
Nari catches herself fidgeting, shakes her hands out, and arranges them neatly in her lap. “Say something.”
“Something.”
She glares.
“Sorry.”
“I mean it. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Okay.” I take a slow breath. “I’m thinking that not having some huge life passion like the rest of you makes me feel small and left out. And that being generally opposed to all the…”
“Grand theft and major cybercrimes?”
“Yeah, that. Has made that smallness bigger. Which is an oxymoron, but whatever, you get what I mean.”
“I do.” She chews the inside of her cheek, notices that she’s chewing the inside of her cheek, stops, shakes her head, and asks, “Is that all?”
“No.” I scoot closer to her on the bed, close enough that our knees are touching. “I’m also thinking that it’s okay that I don’t know what I want to do with my life yet. And that it doesn’t make me smaller. And shouldn’t make me easy to ignore.”
“That’s…a lot.”
“Yeah. I’m feeling very perspicacious. Meaning, of course, that I now have ‘a ready understanding of things.’ ”
“Keagan!” She beams. “All the points!”
“Like that? I’ve been saving it up.”
“Brilliant.”
I smile at her. The blip of normal feels nice.
Head slightly bowed, she looks up at me. “You feel ignored?”
I huff a laugh. “Well, yeah. Not sure if you know this about yourself, Nari, but you can be kind of a steamroller. But, like, in the best way.”
She laughs, too, though a little sadly. “What’s the ‘best way’ for a steamroller?”
I shrug. “Flattening things that really need to be flattened?”
“Har har.”
“Narioka.” I grab her hand. “You’re amazing. And I love you. An obnoxious amount. But I think I can love you and still not want to be flattened.”
She laughs again, small but for real. “And I can love you, an obnoxious amount, and still think you should yell a little louder for me to change direction before it’s too late and you’re screaming about me flattening your feet.”
“Right. Love and acceptance, but with, like, degrees. For example, ‘I love you even though you like those horrible mustard pretzel things’ versus ‘I love you even though your kink involves a full-body hamster costume.’ ”
“ ‘I love you even though you think the Star Wars prequels are better than the original trilogy’ versus ‘I love you even though you collect mannequins that you dress up, name, and talk to down in your basement.’ ”
“ ‘I love you even though you hate peanut butter M&M’s’ versus ‘I love you even though you spearheaded a campaign to get your boyfriend and three best friends to commit a major crime, which sure it was for the best of reasons and we all agreed to go along, so it’s not like it’s all your fault by any means, but it was still completely and terrifyingly illegal, and we still may get caught, and you basically ignored or glared down my every attempt at reason.’ ”
Nari goes back to fidgeting. She doesn’t meet my eye. “Get you a girl who can do both.” And I lunge for her, looping my arms around her waist and squeezing her to me as tightly as I can.
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