The Accidental Bad Girl

by Maxine Kaplan

  “I never had the chance to ask you: How was jail?”

  “Oh, it was super fun,” I said, mildly. Again, I lied, telling him something I knew he’d be amused to hear. “I loved sweet-talking Grant into bailing me out. It’s always fun to prostrate myself in front of him.”

  Mason smiled wickedly. Fondly. My stomach turned. A soft, comforting, secret bundle in the pit of my stomach that I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge, a satisfaction at being seen, even by him, was dissolving. I was betraying him. He didn’t know me.

  No one does. Not even me. What am I doing here?

  A familiar laugh and gasp made me twist my head around. My jaw fell open.

  Behind me at the maître d’ stand, was an incongruous knot of Howell kids, including Audrey, Ellie, and, of all people, Gilly. What could they possibly all be doing together?

  “I thought this was a date, Kendall,” said Mason, his voice dry. “What are all of your friends doing crashing our happy reunion?”

  “Not a clue,” I answered, honestly. I looked closer at the group, and it clicked. Naya and Luca were in the group, and so were Drew, Dave, and Lemon. It was November already.

  “It’s the dress rehearsal of the play,” I said out loud. “They all go out to a fancy dinner before, even the stage crew guys. I went when Naya was in The Crucible last year. They won’t sit together.” And sure enough, Audrey, Ellie, Naya, and the other “acceptable” theater kids (basically the ones who did track or baseball in the spring and skipped the musical) sat at one table, and Gilly and his gangly, mopey cohort sat at another.

  “That’s fascinating, Kendall. There’s nothing I find more enthralling than the social intricacies of high school extracurricular activities.”

  Gilly had seen me right away and was looking at me with tortured, liquid eyes. I tore my gaze away, back to Mason. “I’m sorry, Mason. What would you prefer to talk about? The state of the New York art scene? Favorite books? Mid-season replacement TV shows we’re excited about?”

  “Aw, come on, kiddo, you can do better than that. Dazzle me with those mean girl wits. Give me something good.”

  This was my opening. “I can tell you about how I broke your code.”

  His smile stayed in place but drained out of his eyes. I saw Mendoza touch his earpiece. Rockford had heard me. I might not have much time.

  I spoke faster. “Is that why you wanted to use a kid like me, instead of other college students? Did you think I’d be too entrenched in the social intricacies of high school extracurricular activities to be curious? Or did you just think you were smarter than me?”

  Mason leaned forward, his eyes a diamond-tipped drill. “Maybe I wanted you to figure it out.”

  I met his eyes. “And why would you want me to know that you’re the one that makes the pills?” Come on, come on. Say you make them. Lean forward just like that, so I can get it on tape.

  That would have been too easy. Mason just smiled and said lightly, “I like seeing you live up to your potential, Kendall.” I caught eyes with Mendoza, who sympathetically shook his head. That wasn’t an admission of guilt.

  I was suddenly furious. “You like seeing me live up to my potential? You couldn’t just leave me alone? I had worked very hard to be a certain girl, and I was very good at being that girl, until I wasn’t. And I fucked up. But that was going to be fine, because I chose someone else I wanted to be, someone who could use her brain to escape Grant, and Audrey, and Howell, and just go study space, and you’re the one who fucked that up. You made me be the girl in the picture!” My voice was getting louder, the rest of the dining room quieter. I saw Audrey lift her hand to quiet her table. She was listening intently. It didn’t matter.

  I looked back at Mason. “All this because I wasn’t living up to your estimation of my potential.” I shook my head, disgusted. “When will people stop telling me what kind of girl I am?”

  Mason looked confused. He opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted.

  Gilly was standing at my elbow.

  Mason looked up at him curiously. “Can I help you?” He looked a little closer. “We’ve met, right?”

  Gilly didn’t even look at Mason. His eyes were set directly on me. Suddenly he went down on his knees, put his hand over his heart, and started speaking.

  “Daylight and Champaign discovers not more,” he said, in a rich, unctuous, hilarious voice. “This is open. I will be proud, I will read politic authors, I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquaintance, I will be point-devise the very man. I do not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me; for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me.” I remembered this. This was the monologue I had laughed at.

  Gilly gestured at himself, pride in every line. “She did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered,” he continued. “And in this she manifests herself to my love, and with a kind of injunction drives me to these habits of her liking.”

  I felt my jaw hanging open like a fish, but I couldn’t make it shut. I didn’t want it to. This was the weirdest thing I had ever seen. This was the best thing I had ever seen.

  Laundromat was silent. Gilly worked the room, sighing and gazing across the tables until his eyes fell on me. He lowered them to my lap and took my hand, saying, quietly, softly, “I thank my stars I am happy. I will be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered, even with the swiftness of putting on. Jove and my stars be praised!”

  There was a silence until the tech table exploded into raucous applause and whistles. Gilly tried to bite down on a smile but couldn’t quite conceal it. He looked up at me, appeal and warmth and something else I couldn’t identify radiating from his eyes. Something . . . loving?

  Ick? Or . . . maybe . . . aw? I knew I should be able to tell the difference, but I couldn’t.

  Gilly got to his feet, still holding my hand. “That was very good,” I told him. “Very funny.” He smiled again, a full-bloom grin this time.

  Mason cleared his throat. “I love dinner theater as much as the next guy—meaning I’ll tolerate it if someone else is paying—but, as it happens, I intend to be the one paying for this meal, so can you go away, please?”

  Gilly flinched and dropped my hand. I tried to warn him with my eyes to go away. He wouldn’t break eye contact, so I ventured to shake my head, using movements as minuscule as I could manage.

  Gilly seemed to understand a little, because his face got scared. His gaze flickered to Mason, and he practically snarled. Then he walked back to his table, and the clamor of the restaurant resumed.

  Mason observed all of this closely, sipping his drink the whole time. He did that so he seemed casual, but I knew his eyes well enough to know that he hadn’t missed anything about that interaction.

  “So who was that?” he asked. “What was that?”

  I focused on my water glass. “That was . . . my friend. Sort of. He’s weird.”

  “Clearly. He’s a new friend?”

  “Kind of. Why do you ask?”

  “Because your old friends are staring at you.”

  Audrey and Ellie were indeed staring at me. Audrey had her eyebrows arched and her lips pursed, in a tolerant condescension that I recognized. Ellie just looked like she was trying not to laugh.

  I forced my focus back to Mason. “What were we talking about?” I asked.

  “You were yelling at me for objectifying you.”

  He started to speak, but then sat back and stared at something behind my shoulder. I turned just in time to see a black Crown Victoria pull up outside the restaurant. I could make out Rockford in the passenger side.

  Mason looked around the bar and caught sight of Mendoza just as he put his hand down from his ear. He turned back to me, his eyes full of ice.

  “What did you do?” he hissed.

  “Nothing,” I whispered back. “You’re paranoid.”

  Mason grabbed my hand and jerked me out of my chair. The menace that had always been under the surface o
f his crooked smile and pretty eyes was written in every muscle of his face and radiating through his fingers to my rapidly bruising wrist.

  With his other hand, he pulled out cash, lots of cash, more cash than the bill would have been, and threw it onto the table. “We’re going to walk toward the bathrooms now,” he said in a low tone. “You’re going to walk with me like we’re about to hook up. Now.”

  I looked behind me. The Crown Vic was still there. They had told me to play the part, so I got up, my wrist still held in Mason’s hand like a vise, and led the way to the bathrooms downstairs. Once there, Mason changed directions and bolted toward the service entrance on the other side of the hall. It was the kind restaurants used for deliveries and led up a rickety, narrow set of stairs directly to the back alley. He pushed me in front of him, his arm across my waist, almost like an embrace, and in a few steps, we were outside.

  I had left my coat inside and started shivering. He had, too, but didn’t seem to mind the cold. He pushed me forward until we reached a Prius—the same Prius from the photo on my Facebook album.

  I had never given that picture to Rockford, even though it had plates in it. It had seemed irrelevant. It hadn’t occurred to me.

  This suddenly seemed deeply stupid.

  He unlocked the door, and I opened my mouth to scream for Rockford, but Mason did the last thing I had ever really expected him to do.

  I thought he might drug me. I thought he might punch me. I even thought he might cut me—if I had a knife, anyone could have one.

  What I hadn’t expected him to do was pull out a dull black and terrifying handgun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Our ride out of the city was silent. Which was too bad, because the receiver in Mendoza’s ear and Rockford’s car had a limited range, and I would have liked the wire strapped to my chest to transmit some useful information for once. But once Mason pulled out a gun, there was very little left to say. He kept one hand on the wheel and one hand on the grip, a finger hovering centimeters behind the trigger. The barrel rested on the cup holder, aimed up toward me. I didn’t have my cell phone. Once Mason got me in the car, he made me throw it out the window.

  We’d been on the road for almost an hour before Mason finally spoke, just as he exited the highway onto the more poorly lit and less populated roads of upper Westchester County, New York.

  “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” he asked.

  “Do you want to tell me?” I was pleased my voice came out steady.

  “We’re going to just outside Cold Spring,” he said, turning onto a wooded, dirt road. “My father has a compound. He uses it for fishing mostly.”

  “And that’s why you have a P.O. box in Cold Spring.”

  “It’s why I set one up in Cold Spring, but I think you’ll find that my name’s never been connected to it. And there’s no address on the compound, because it was built on a private parcel of land. My dad’s name isn’t on the deed. They’ll trace the ownership eventually, but you and I will be gone before they do.”

  I felt myself start to breathe fast. I counted the ruts in the road as the Prius bounced over them. One, two, three. One, two, three.

  My heart slowed enough for me to grasp at self-preservation. “They?” I asked as airily as I could. “Who’s they?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Kendall. I might be the only person in your life who doesn’t like it.”

  I looked at him. He was driving slowly, his hand gripping the gun so tightly, his knuckles were white.

  “You want me to stop playing dumb, Mason? Fine, I will. But stop playing gangster. Put the gun down and focus on the road. It’s pitch-black out and freezing. I don’t have a coat. I don’t have a phone. I don’t have any knowledge of the area. I’m not going to jump out of the car and try to make a break for it. Relax.”

  He looked over at me, his eyes wary, crunching the numbers. Ultimately, he shook his head. “It’s a nice try. But I keep my hand on this gun until I can put it in a place where you can’t get at it,” he told me. “Appreciate that I don’t underestimate you, Kendall. It’s why I wanted to keep you.”

  Mason turned up a steep incline, stopped, and reached into his pocket, bringing out what looked like an old-fashioned pager. He hit a button on the top, and a huge iron gate I hadn’t even noticed opened in front of us.

  He tossed the button on the dash and drove us through. The gate shut behind us.

  So this was Mason’s dad’s complex.

  I pressed my face to the window, trying to memorize the lay of the land.

  “You said we’d be gone before the cops found us,” I said. “Why even bother stopping here?”

  I felt the dirt road underneath the car turn into smooth pavement and turned to face the front. We had pulled up to a low but sprawling mid-century house of blond wood and glass.

  Mason shut the car off and threw the keys on the dash. “Because this house has a helicopter pad.”

  The lights were on throughout the house. Mason pulled me out of the car and through the unlocked front door.

  Clutching my arm with one hand and hitting the safety on the gun with the other, Mason called out, casually, “We’ve got company, bro.”

  Leon walked out of the kitchen, looking disconcertingly homey and reassuring in bare feet and sweatpants. He had a tentatively pleasant smile on his face, which drained to alarm when he saw me. He stopped short.

  “What is this?” he asked, standing still. “What is Kendall doing here? Why are you here so early?”

  Now that I knew they were brothers, I could see the resemblance. Leon must have gotten his coloring from Louisa Cohn, which might have been why I had missed it. He had neither the twisted Disney prince affect of Mason nor the Bond villain styling of his father. He was a soothing beige type: lightly tanned skin, softly curling, light brown hair, and those calming gray eyes. But the angles in his face matched Mason’s exactly; so did the confident way he moved.

  The initial hit of charisma was the same. But where Mason was an ice pick, Leon was a back massager.

  I looked up at Mason. He was looking at his brother with a mixture of disgust and affection. I’d be jealous, too, I thought. Leon had simply lucked out.

  “Exigent circumstances,” answered Mason, shortly, handing me over to Leon, who gingerly took my arm, much more gently than his brother had. Mason walked the gun over to a wall safe and started turning the knob. “Your good friend Kendall has been working with the police.”

  Leon turned white. He turned to me. “How much do they know?” he asked.

  Mason, assuming the question was directed to him, shrugged. “I imagine they don’t have enough to arrest me or they already would have. I don’t know what they know about you, Leon. But Kendall and her potential testimony are coming with us to Saint Lucia, anyway, so we’re safe.”

  “What?” Leon and I asked in unison. We looked briefly at each other.

  “I’m not going to Saint Lucia,” I said, my voice trembling against my will.

  “That wasn’t always the plan, was it?” asked Leon, confused. “Why would she?”

  Mason didn’t answer us. He put the gun in the safe, shut the door, and walked toward us. He looked at where Leon was still holding my arm. Leon saw him looking and dropped it like it was electrified. “Call Dad,” said Mason, not unkindly. “Tell him we need the chopper here, now, as soon as possible, and the house ready and waiting for us, or he’s risking his own skin.”

  Leon bit his lip and took a step closer to me, as if he wanted to protect me. “What are you going to do with her?” he asked, and I realized that he was scared of his little brother.

  Mason knew it, too. He narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Feed her,” he told him, in a tone of voice that said this should be obvious. “Find her a sweater and some caffeine. It might be a long night.” He sighed and rubbed his temple. “Make the call, Leon. He’ll like to hear from you more than he would from me.”

  Leon looked his brother in the eyes fo
r a moment, as if searching for something. Eventually, he sighed and rubbed his head in almost the exact same gesture Mason had used and headed to a side room, pulling a cell phone out of his pocket and sneaking a last backward glance at the two of us before shutting the door.

  We watched him go. When we were alone, Mason turned back to me. “Do you actually want some coffee?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, I’m making us some anyway. I want to be ready to leave.”

  He walked into the kitchen and, having nowhere else to go, I followed him. It was straight out of a cooking show, all gleaming surfaces and wood accents. I surveyed the room, and my eyes landed on a wall phone.

  Mason walked into a pantry, and I made a beeline for it, but had only gotten through to an operator saying, “911, what’s your emergency?” when a finger reached over my head and hit the hang up button.

  I looked up at Mason, who shook his head and said, “No dice, kiddo.”

  He walked to the fridge and stuck his head in it, staring blankly at its contents.

  “So, we’re running away together, huh?” I asked.

  Mason laughed, but he didn’t sound like he thought it was funny. “Guess so,” he said. “My little partner-in-crime.”

  He looked me in the eye, and I got a faint hint of the magnetism I had felt that first afternoon in the basement of Simone’s building, and at his party. I could still feel it, buried under everything else I felt about him. It made me angrier than ever.

  “There’s something very . . . unnerving about you, Kendall,” he continued, reaching into the fridge. “You are a very scary little girl.”

  “Yes, you seem terrified.”

  Mason chuckled. “I’m bigger than you. That helps. Also, you like me. That helps, too.”

  “I don’t like you,” I muttered, clenching my fists. “I never liked you.”

  “Oh, no?” He pulled out a baking dish of macaroni and cheese and set it on the kitchen island. He took off the top and started eating it cold with his fingers. He offered it to me, but I didn’t respond. “Maybe you don’t like me. Turning down mac and cheese. What kind of teenage girl are you?”