“It just never occurred to me that it could be a fake,” she says. “How could anyone do something like that?”
“Yeah, I know.” The truth is that people like me are always trying to figure out a way to fake something and pass it off as real—rare books, business contracts, deeds to nonexistent real estate. “People will surprise you, I guess.”
She glances at the phone on her desk. “We have to tell somebody.”
“Like who, the library police?” I shake my head. “I think maybe for right now we should keep this to ourselves until—”
“Hey, bro. Where you been?”
I stop midsentence and look around to see Brandt standing there with Andrea on his arm. For a second, he just glowers at me, and then his face breaks into his easy-like-Sunday-morning grin. Andrea is already smiling, bright-eyed and cute as a button above her scarf, her cheeks apple-red from the chill of the day. Brandt slams me on the shoulder with a bone-jarring thwack.
“How’s it going?” He leans down, voice dropping to a whisper. “Glad to run into you here. I wanted to talk to you about that opportunity you mentioned the other night. When can we go see this boss of yours?”
In the moment of silence that follows, I can feel Gatsby’s questioning eyes on me. “Actually”—I turn to flick a glance at Andrea, hoping my reaction comes off as looking nervous enough—“I’m not really sure if I can still—”
“Friday night is Homecoming,” Brandt says. “I won’t be running the casino that night. We’ll go together to talk to him then.”
“What about the dance?” Andrea asks.
“I’ll put in an appearance and be out of there by eight.” He looks at me again. “Make it happen, okay?” His voice tightens. “Don’t waste my time.” He turns to Andrea, who’s pretending to look at the books on the circulation desk. “You ready, babe?”
“I’m always ready . . . babe,” Andrea murmurs, and leans in to kiss him with enough visible tongue that Gatsby and I are basically forced to pretend we’re someplace far enough away that we can’t hear the sucking noises they’re making. We’re talking feeding time at the aquarium. I don’t even want to know what Andrea has to think about in order to sell it.
“I’ll see you around,” I say, nodding toward Gatsby, and walk away. The last thing I see is Andrea’s face smiling smugly at me as I head out the door.
Fourteen
IT’S STILL DARK OUTSIDE WHEN MY CELL PHONE GOES OFF ON Monday morning with a 702 area code—Las Vegas. It’s five a.m. here, which means that where Uncle Roy is calling from it’s not even early—it’s still late.
“Hey, Uncle Roy,” I croak, shaking off the cobwebs while I scan the floor for an unopened bottle of Mountain Dew to pour over my brain and wake it up.
“William!” Roy’s voice bellows, and I can hear the endless ringing of slot machines and the rabble of voices in the background. “Did I catch you sleeping?”
“No,” I say, “I was just getting up.”
Roy is my mom’s uncle, making him my great-uncle and the single greatest old-school-confidence man that I know. For most of his life, he’s lived in Vegas, working security before he became a full-time grifter like his favorite niece. Back when the old MGM Grand burned down in 1980, he was part of the retrieval team that the casino sent into the vault to get the money out, while the place was still smoldering. He and a handful of other guards carried the cash to a secret location to await pickup from an armored car. He used to tell me stories of hauling pillowcases stuffed with bills past the scorched bodies of gamblers who were melted to slot machines because they hadn’t been able to walk away, even while the place went up in flames. At eighty-two, Uncle Roy is one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met, and he still hasn’t gotten over Mom’s death.
“Sorry I haven’t had a chance to call you back, William,” Roy says. “I’ve been a little busy.”
“I thought you were taking it easy these days,” I say.
“Yeah, I’ve never worked harder than after I retired,” Roy says, chuckling, and I can hear the faint metallic snick of his lighter as he fires up what I’m sure is his twentieth cigarette of the night. “Where are you, anyway?”
“New England,” I say. “North of Boston. A prep school called Connaughton.”
“Posh digs,” he says admiringly. “So what can I do for you? Judging from the message you left, I’m guessing you’re looking for funding?”
Good old Roy, never one to waste time. “Well, actually, I’m setting up a little con here,” I say, “and I was hoping I could hit you up for some seed money. And maybe a few guys in the Boston area that you could recommend?”
Roy bellows out smoky laughter. “Like mother, like son, huh?” The laughter becomes a wheezing cough, and I wait while it dies away and he gets his breath back. “Sure, I got friends in that neck of the woods. Some of them even owe me a favor. How many guys do you need?”
“Six.”
“No problem. What type are you looking for? Distinguished? Continental? Harvard Yard types?”
“Actually,” I say, “I’m hoping for some younger faces. Programmers. Silicon Valley by way of MIT.”
“Interesting,” he says, and I can hear him clicking buttons on a keyboard while an infinitely more complex array of switches and sprockets start turning in his mind. “Yeah, I can think of five guys right off the top of my head that I can get up there by tomorrow. What’s the angle?”
“I’m running the online poker swindle on a mark here, a rich jerk sitting on a trust fund the size of Mount Everest. But in order to make it work, I need a full boiler-room setup with computers and phone lines. And . . .” I pause and swallow hard. “I kind of need it by Friday.”
“Friday? This Friday?” There’s a long pause, and I realize Uncle Roy is laughing. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”
“Sorry,” I say. “You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t really need it.”
“Same old William, God love you.” He chortles. “Hey, remember back when you soaked that entertainment lawyer for sixteen grand in Reno? You weren’t even ten years old at the time.” His voice practically glows with fond recollection. “Geez, kiddo, your mom would be so proud.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“I’ll be on the first flight out tomorrow morning.”
“Wait.” At first I think I’ve misheard him. “What?”
“My grand-nephew losing his cherry in the big con—you think I’d miss this for the world?”
“Uhhh,” I mumble. It’s all I say, but when it comes to somebody as intuitive as Uncle Roy, it’s one “uhhh” too many. When Roy speaks again, all the laughter has disappeared from his voice, replaced by a suffocating vacuum of suspicion.
“Your old man’s involved in this, isn’t he?” he asks.
“Well . . .” I can’t lie to Uncle Roy. Even if I could, he’d know it in a second. “Kind of. But it wasn’t his idea. I had to bring him in on the deal.”
“William . . .” Uncle Roy groans. It comes out sounding like a growl, as if I’d just awakened a sleeping bear midway through hibernation. “Why’d you go and do that, kiddo? You know you can always come to me for help. Why’d you have to bring that dirtbag into it?” Uncle Roy has never liked Dad, even back before Mom died, and things have only gone downhill since then. “Is he on the sauce again?”
“Not that much.”
“Is he on the lam from somebody?”
“I don’t know.” At least this much is true. In Roy’s mind, Dad has always been the worst kind of grifter, careless and greedy, which makes him a walking occupational hazard. It helps explain why Dad spent the first part of my life in and out of prison, while Roy’s never seen the inside of a jail cell. “You think I should cut him loose?”
“Too late now, kid.” Roy sighs. “If you drop him now, he’ll queer the pitch. What’s the nearest airport to you?”
“Manchester,” I say.
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You’re still in?”
Fifteen
AFTER UNCLE ROY HANGS UP, I DECIDE TO LIE BACK DOWN for five more minutes of sleep. The next thing I know, it’s eleven o’clock (I guess the fancy-schmancy Connaughton blackout curtains really work). I’ve already missed World History and Economics, and the dimly functioning part of my brain manages to realize that I’m going to be late for English Lit, even if I could somehow magically teleport myself fully dressed to Mr. Bodkins’s classroom.
“Crap!” I jump out of bed, throwing on clothes and grabbing my backpack, then run across the already deserted quad and trying to come up with an excuse for my tardiness. My mind is a blank. It’s probably ironic that I have no trouble fleecing somebody like Brandt Rush for untold hundreds of thousands or more while I still can’t make up a decent story to explain why I’m late to English class, but right now I’m too stressed out to appreciate the distinction.
Ducking into the deadly silence of Mr. Bodkins’s class, I’m instantly aware of the eyes of the entire class leveling themselves on me. Mr. Bodkins is hunched, red-eyed, and disheveled behind his desk, and fortunately he looks too hung-over from the weekend to notice me sliding in behind my desk.
“Pass your papers to the front,” he’s saying, and I feel my stomach do a triple axel as I just now remember the assignment that Gatsby reminded me about yesterday, the five-page critical analysis that we were supposed to do on Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Throwing a desperate glance straight back over my shoulder, I see my classmates already passing forward their papers. In the midst of it all, Gatsby gives me a quick once-over, and I’m guessing she already knows from my reaction what the problem is. As awkward as it may be, now is probably the time to go up and hit Mr. Bodkins with whatever sob story I can come up with and plead for mercy. I’m just hoping he won’t try to stick my tie into the shredder.
The girl behind me hands up a stack of papers and I start to stand, figuring I’ll carry them up to Mr. Bodkins along with a story about my dead grandmother. On my feet, I glimpse down at the paper on the top of the pile.
GRAVEN IMAGES:
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL IN HAWTHORNE’S
“YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN”
by Will Shea
I flip through five pages of perfectly cogent literary analysis, typewritten and double-spaced with my name on it, then glance back at Gatsby, stunned. She’s not even looking at me.
“Thank you, Mr. Shea.” Mr. Bodkins walks by and takes the stack of papers from my hand, and when I look around at Gatsby again, she’s writing something down in her notebook, still not looking at me.
“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” I tell her later.
We’re sitting in the dining hall over lunch—shrimp quesadilla for me, garden salad for her, along with some kind of veggie burger that actually smells amazing considering there’s no meat in it. Through the giant wall-size windows, the last swarms of orange leaves are chasing one another in late-October dust devils. The weather’s already changing, tilting into winter.
“What makes you think it was me?” she asks.
“The fact that you know what I’m talking about even though I haven’t said it yet. Anyway, it really wasn’t necessary.”
“Right,” Gatsby says, taking a big bite of her salad. “Because you had it all worked out.”
“Well, I didn’t say that . . .”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I take a bite of my quesadilla, which is crunchy yet tender and bursting with fresh cilantro, and realize that she’s still looking at me. “So why did you do it?”
“What?”
“Write that paper for me.”
She ponders the question, or pretends to. “Maybe I figured you could use a break after ‘falling down the stairs’ and busting up your face,” Gatsby says, using air quotes for the little white lie I had tried to pass over her in the library yesterday.
“I’m not joking,” I say. “You could get suspended for this, or worse. Why would you take a risk like that for somebody you hardly know?”
She looks at me for a long moment and then sits back, crossing her arms. “I wanted to help you. Is that so hard to swallow?”
“I mean, it’s just—you’re smart, you’re funny, you’re pretty.” My face is starting to get hot. “Okay, so you work in a library and spend your free time breaking into the rare books when you’re depressed, but still . . .”
Now Gatsby’s laughing. “You’re welcome, okay?” she says, and there’s another long silence, one that makes me think maybe I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place. “Will?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s your secret?”
“What?”
“You know mine. What’s yours?”
That stops me, and I just look at her. Suddenly the whole dining hall feels like it’s gone silent, and my heart is beating very fast, but Gatsby’s merely looking at me with an expression of intelligent curiosity. “What are you talking about?”
“There’s something you’re not telling anybody, including me.”
I force a smile. “What, you’re psychic now too?”
“It’s just intuition. I noticed it the first time we talked, and it just keeps getting stronger.” She blinks. “Tell me, what was it like growing up with missionary parents on the other side of the world?”
For a second there’s just more silence between us.
“It was lonely,” I say, and a second later, I realize how corny that sounds. But Gatsby doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t even crack a smile. She just stares back at me.
“Did you have friends there?” she asks. “On your island?”
“Not really.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Let’s just say I’m a lot happier here.”
“I’m glad.”
“And I do appreciate your writing the paper.”
“It wasn’t that big of a deal,” she says. “I like Hawthorne.”
“Why?”
“He’s cool.”
“Said nobody ever, in the history of the human race.”
“You know, the library has a collection of his original letters and manuscripts.”
“Are you sure they’re real and not forgeries?” I ask. “Like, not written on My Little Pony stationery or something?”
“Stop it.” Gatsby laughs and punches me, hard enough to hurt. “Look,” she says, “if it wasn’t for me, your precious scholarship would already be in jeopardy, so can we agree to move on?” She waits. I’m just looking at her, a little dazed from either her fist or her generosity. “Seriously, though, what was it like?”
“What?”
“Ebeye. Growing up there. I can’t imagine. I’ve never met anyone who’s lived in a place like that. Did your parents always know that’s what they wanted to do?”
I take in a breath to deliver my spiel but I feel my throat swelling up, like I’m having some kind of allergic reaction to my own lie. Gatsby mistakes my silence for reluctance, as if she’s overstepped her bounds, and draws back.
“I get it,” she says. “You don’t want to talk.”
“No,” I say, “it’s just that—”
“—he doesn’t know where to start,” a voice says to my right, where Andrea has materialized with her lunch and a stack of books. “Right, Will? That’s what happens when you’re raised by missionaries. All that humility starts backing up in your system until it floods your brain.”
Gatsby turns and regards her coolly. “Hey, Andrea.”
“Hello, Gatsby.” Andrea sips her coffee. “Happy Monday.”
“Thanks,” Gatsby says, and she’s already getting up, gathering her tray. “I’ll see you later, Will?”
“Definitely,” I say, as Andrea settles down next to me, emanating a kind of smugness that doesn’t even require visual confirmation.
“Well,” she says. “That looked cozy. Sorry to interrupt.”
I roll my eyes. “Please.”
“A word of advice, Will. Don’t get too close to her. I wouldn’t want you to start believing your own lies—especially since you’ve already tipped your hand to Brandt. Secrets don’t last long here.”
“Noted.” I regard her unemotionally. “Did you want something?”
“As a matter of fact . . .” Andrea opens her backpack and pulls out a leather-bound planner. “I just wanted to go over our little event calendar together.” She opens the book to November, where the box representing the twenty-second is circled in red pen. “Now, as you recall, our arrangement ends the week before Thanksgiving break. Today is October 28, which means we’ve got almost four weeks to get Brandt to hand over fifty thousand. You still want to go through with this?”
“Why?” I say. “You want out? Is being Brandt’s pet floozy not paying off like you hoped?”
“Oh my.” She smiles. “You really have no clue what you’re doing, do you?”
“Watch me,” I say.
“Believe me,” Andrea says, “I am. So far I’ve seen you get beat up and thrown out of Casino Night for cheating. Is that your full repertoire, or did you learn any other tricks down in New Jersey?”
“You have no idea.”
“You’re a hoot, Will.” To my surprise, when she smiles again, the delight on her face looks genuine. “No matter how this all comes out, you’ve already made my year so much more interesting. Thank you for that.”
“So glad I could be here to amuse you.”
“Oh, you do.”
And it isn’t until Andrea leans over to peck my cheek that I realize Gatsby hasn’t left the dining hall yet—she’s still standing by the door, watching us. Then she turns and walks away.
Sixteen
THE NEXT MORNING I’VE GOT MY ALARM SET EARLY so I can make it to class without running, but something totally unexpected happens—it snows.
Climbing out of bed, I draw back my curtains to discover a lunar landscape, the campus already covered by a thin but steadily growing layer of white. Thick flurries come whipping down through the branches as the wind blusters along the walkways. This is crazy, I think. Down in New Jersey it almost never snows before Thanksgiving.
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