by Katie Nelson
I didn’t think about the Stanford coach, or what I’d say to the guys when we walked back in, or whether everything would be different from that moment. I just knew that I could still taste her in my mouth, that my scalp was still tingling from the tug of her fingers in my hair, and that the scent of lavender drove me wild.
When the time came to announce the winners in Policy Debate, my nerves were back. The second the announcer mentioned the event, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, my pulse began to accelerate and I couldn’t keep my body still in my seat. Squeezing my hands into fists, I listened to him announce the quarterfinalists. My legs were bouncing on the balls of my feet as the semifinalists came forward and accepted their trophies. My ears were ringing. The audience was clapping. Then I heard the words, second place, followed by the names of our opponents. My whole team was on their feet, clapping and screaming, and somehow my feet propelled me forward, and the Duke and I walked onstage to accept our awards.
When it was over, Bannerman had placed third overall, setting a new school record. Watterson was pleased—we could tell—but he spoke calmly to the other coaches, playing the gracious competitor, as he expected us to. A few students from other schools came up and congratulated us. I looked for Ben, or any of my friends from my old team, but they weren’t around. I guess I deserved that, after ignoring him at the dance. It was getting harder and harder to find things to talk about with them, and I always got the feeling that they resented my success, like it was some kind of betrayal. My old coach from Hollister gave me a big hug, telling me how proud she was, how she hated to lose, but was okay losing to me. It was flattering, but I was grateful when we were interrupted by the Stanford coach.
“Nice showing, McKay.” He shook my hand. People around us backed away to let us talk.
“Thanks,” I replied.
“Mr. Watterson tells me you’re interested in Stanford.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I am.” For someone hoping for a debate scholarship, I couldn’t seem to string words together into a sentence. I must have looked like an idiot.
“I think you’re just what we’re looking for. I’ll be watching you at State, and hopefully Nationals, too.”
“We haven’t qualified yet,” I said.
“Keep doing what you’re doing, and you will.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Handing me his business card, he said, “Keep in touch. We can talk about your options in the summer.”
I stared at the card with its cardinal-red lettering and the embossed green tree logo in the middle. It was wild. I’d imagined this happening so many times, but in that moment, it didn’t seem real. When I looked up, I realized that I’d been staring at the card a little too long, and the coach was waiting for me to reply.
“Thanks. Yeah. I will.”
He nodded and walked away. I should have watched where he was going, checked to see who my competition was, but I was still too stunned to think.
From a few feet away, I saw the Duke watching me. When I met his gaze, he smiled. “Nice,” he said, nodding.
I grinned—a giant, goofy, kid-on-a-merry-go-round grin—right back at him.
Then I opened my backpack and pulled out my binder, so I could put the business card somewhere safe. Tucked into the vinyl pocket, folded in half, was the case the Duke had stolen only hours earlier. I glanced over my shoulder, expecting someone to be watching, expecting to get caught, but nobody was paying any attention to me. Nobody cared. Watterson was herding everyone onto the buses, but I slipped away. I ran into the bathroom and locked myself in a stall.
Pressing my back against the door, I tore the case into tiny pieces and threw them in the toilet. The pipes gurgled and the water swirled, taking the pages deep into the sewer. I flushed after every page, and then again, even when the water ran clear. When I was sure it was all gone, I ran and caught the bus.
That night, we all gathered in Garrett and Tomas’s room and stayed up eating candy and watching movies on pay-per-view. It was good to do something that didn’t require any thought. It was good to laugh. And by the time the movies were over, I was so exhausted that I crashed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS BREAK, THE Duke came to see me. He appeared in my room after Huang had left to shower, casually leaning against the doorframe.
“Spoiler alert,” he said. “The North wins the war.”
I was lying on my bed, trying to finish the reading assignment for US history. Stuffing my notebook inside to hold my place, I closed the textbook and sat up.
“Really? I did not see that coming.”
“Blew my mind, too.”
“What’s up,” I asked. “Want to come in?”
The Duke cocked his head, flipping his hair out of his eyes. “I’m supposed to be packing. My flight leaves right after my trig final.”
“Oh, right. Back to England. That should be fun.”
He shrugged.
I waited, expecting something. We hung out a lot, but usually in groups, and it was always on his terms—his room, his house, his party. This was different.
Still, he didn’t say anything, and I could tell he was trying to work up to something. He looked around my room, out my window, then finally, when his eyes landed on Huang’s bookshelf, he spoke. “So listen, mate. I was hoping you could help me out with something.”
His eyes met mine and I nodded.
“I’m expecting a package. It was supposed to be here today, but it looks like it won’t come until tomorrow afternoon, after I’m gone.”
He paused.
“You want me to pick it up for you?” I asked. “Sure. No problem.”
He smiled. “Thanks. But there’s more. I need you to drop it off at this house in Oakland.” He must have sensed my hesitation. He barreled on. “I know it’s out of your way, but I’ll give you gas money. Your wife-beater truck gets, what, eight, ten miles to the gallon?”
I shook my head. “More like twelve.” I smiled a little. The Duke relaxed, and I knew that I’d do it. Not like I had anything I needed to rush home to anyway.
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He pressed two crisp hundreds into my hand along with a small slip of paper: the name Jimmy, with an address and a phone number.
“They’ll be expecting you,” the Duke said. “Don’t call unless you get lost, or something.”
I nodded, but tried to give the Duke one of the hundreds back. “It’s too much.”
He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Keep it. I’m sure you’ll find something to spend it on.”
Then Huang was back, pushing past the Duke without saying a word to him. He went to his closet and opened it with an exaggerated sigh. After locating some kind of lotion that smelled like grass, he sat down on the bed and began rubbing it into his feet. The Duke gave me a questioning look and I rolled my eyes. I’d gotten so used to Huang that I didn’t even notice this stuff anymore.
The Duke turned to leave. “Hey, thanks again.”
I shrugged. “No problem. When do you come back?”
He hesitated for a moment. I’d never seen him do that. “Uh. The third. Yeah.”
I stood and walked with him into the hall. “Okay. If I don’t see you, Merry Christmas.”
He stopped. For a second, we stood there facing each other, stuck in a moment of indecision. Should we shake hands? Fist bump? Do that whole awkward guy hug? Were we friends now? It felt like it. As I stood there in the hall, I realized that I wanted to be. And that wasn’t because he’d just given me two hundred bucks. Even though he was always surrounded by people, I could tell that he wasn’t sure what to do either.
So I stuck out my hand and he shook it with more enthusiasm that I’d expected. “Merry Christmas to you, too,” he said. As he walked down the hall to his room, I hoped he meant it.
The package the Duke was expecting turned out to be a small padded envelope.
Even though I knew the Duke had already told him to, Rick almost didn
’t give it to me. But when I started to walk away, telling him that he could deal with the Duke when he got back, he finally caved and threw the package at me. It bounced off my shoulder and fell to the ground.
As I carried it up to my room, I examined the front. There was no return address. The address was printed on a plain white label in Times New Roman. For some reason, I’d expected it to come addressed to Andrew Tate, but the top line simply read The Duke. It was postmarked from Los Angeles.
I sat on my bed and tried to decide what to do. It was almost four. If I left now, I’d get stuck in rush hour traffic, which was one of the worse forms of torture. And the Duke hadn’t given me a deadline for delivery. If he’d been expecting it before he left, though, he probably was planning on delivering it before he left, too. Which meant that it was already late. I’d better go. Digging the slip of paper with the address out of my wallet, I typed the information into my phone, but before I left, I remembered something.
Through the envelope, I could tell it was about the same size and shape. Without thinking about the consequences, I ripped it open. Sure enough, the only thing inside was a small black flash drive, exactly like the one I’d delivered for him before. Knowing that the Duke was somewhere at least thirty-thousand feet above me, I was suddenly brave, and plugged the drive into my laptop.
A small window popped up asking if I wanted to view or save these files. I clicked VIEW. Another window opened, asking for a password. I closed it and tried clicking SAVE instead. Another prompt for a password. Even though I didn’t think it would work, I tried “theduke.” Incorrect. I kept trying, making combinations out of his initials, his room number, phone number. Nothing worked. Finally, I ejected the drive and shut my computer down. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what might be on the USB stick.
The whole way to Oakland, I imagined all kinds of scenarios. The drive was full of stolen identities and the Duke was selling social security numbers and credit scores to a bunch of scam artists. It was full of blueprints—plans to build weapons or nuclear submarines or some other secret weapon for the government. Or maybe it was some kind of computer program, a virus that would cripple the economy or hack into Mark Zuckerberg’s firewall. As I idled down the freeway, stuck in traffic that barely moved at times, I decided that whatever it was, it must be something big.
When I finally made it to my exit, I drove into an older section of Oakland, full of houses built right on top of each other all the way up the hillside. There was plenty of graffiti, and cars lined the streets, though it was difficult to tell how many of them actually ran.
I circled the block a few times before I found a place to park. After cutting the engine, I double-checked the address and stepped out of the Bronco, the flash drive buried in my pocket.
I found the house and knocked on the door. Hands stuffed in my pocket, I waited, wondering for the first time if this was a bad idea. The neighborhood was old, with the usual signs of neglect, but I’d been in worse. Still, there was something … off. Before I could figure out what it was, the door opened.
“Yeah?” The woman who answered the door had a mullet haircut, the kind made popular by NASCAR fans all over the country. Her University of Hawaii T-shirt was stained with blue paint, and her bare toenails were yellow, cracked, and beginning to curl over her toes. She glared at me, daring me to speak, and I reached into my pocket to check the address again.
“Sorry,” I said. “I must have the wrong house. I’m looking for Jimmy.”
“I’m Jimmy.”
I didn’t know what to say, and I stood there—for way too long—with nothing but a stupid expression on my face. Then my brain kicked back on and I tried, albeit a little late, to pretend I had known that.
“Right. Yeah. Um, I was supposed to deliver something. From Andrew.”
She stared at me, as confused as I had been.
“The Duke.”
She nodded and opened the screen door, stepping outside right into my personal space. She held out her hand. “Deliver it then.”
I dug the flash drive out of my pocket and handed it to her. “No envelope? What? He afraid of eatin’ up all his profits on office supplies?”
I was regretting opening the envelope. I wondered if she’d say anything to the Duke about it. I hoped not.
I shrugged. “You know the Duke.”
She shook her head. “Never met the guy.”
One hand on the doorknob, she turned to go back into the house. I knew that this was my only chance to get answers, but I didn’t even know what questions to ask.
“Do you need to check that?” I asked. She stopped. “You know, try it in your computer to make sure you can open the files and stuff?”
“Why? He change the password again?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
She pulled open the screen door. I started to follow. “Wait here,” she said, and walked into the darkened room.
To the right of the entry was a room that, in another life, had probably been a dining room. Now it was piled with cardboard boxes with barely enough room to squeeze between the rows. Pushed against one wall was a folding table with a dusty desktop computer on it, the kind that nobody sold anymore, but that sat in the library at my old school. Jimmy stood in front of it, waiting for it to start.
The computer finally booted up, and she plugged in the drive. When the window popped up asking for the password, she pulled a cell phone out of her pocket. After a few seconds, she copied a sequence from the phone into the computer, and waited. I wasn’t close enough to read what she’d typed, but another window opened, filled with folders labeled by date. Some of them were a few days away, in late December. There were several labeled New Year’s Day. Before I could see anymore, Jimmy closed the window and turned off the monitor.
“Works fine,” she said, walking back to the door. “Like last time.”
“Great,” I said. “I’ll let him know.”
I didn’t move from the porch. I was running out of time. “Can I use your bathroom?” I blurted out.
She let out a loud, exasperated breath. “Yeah, all right.”
I followed her down the hall. The bathroom door didn’t have a handle, just a hole where it should have been. “Doesn’t lock,” she said. “Guess it’s a good thing you’re a boy. Easier access.”
I shut the door, but didn’t hear her walk away. She was probably waiting right outside, listening. I unzipped my pants and took care of business as fast as I could. As I was washing my hands, I heard a beep outside the door. When I opened it, she was texting someone.
“Thanks,” I said. “Long drive home. I wouldn’t have made it.”
She nodded and led me back to the front door, still staring at her phone. It beeped again. I gave up. I wouldn’t get anything out of her.
But as I was opening the front door, she said, “Hold on. Apparently, I’m supposed to give this to you. Your little friend said he’d pick it up from you.”
I turned and saw a key in her hand, the kind that went to a locker, with a round orange top inscribed with a number: 4032. It was like the key I’d seen in the Duke’s backpack the night he snuck out of our hotel room.
“What, you want a milk bone to go with it?” Jimmy was staring at me, her hand outstretched, waiting for me to take the key. I was curious, but I was nervous, too, and I wasn’t sure why. I grabbed the key, my fingers brushing against her rough palm. I needed to get out of there. Fast.
“I’ll give it to him. Thanks,” I said, walking quickly down the front steps and out to the sidewalk. I glanced over my shoulder when I reached the street, but Jimmy wasn’t there.
Back in my Bronco, I turned the radio up as loud as it would go. The speakers crackled, the music distorted. I didn’t want to think about the key, the flash drive, or what any of it might mean. Opening the large center console, I threw the key inside. By the time I got home, it was buried under gum wrappers, receipts, some old CDs, and a broken pair of sunglasses.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT WAS NEW YEAR’S EVE, and I was home, on the couch with my mom and my little brother.
Yes, I was aware of how pathetic I was.
I really didn’t care. I’d texted Ben to see if he wanted to catch a movie or something, but he was spending the break in Tahoe with his dad. Or at least that’s what he said. Abby had given me a courtesy invitation to go to a party with her, so she’d fulfilled her cousinly obligation. I didn’t want to third-wheel it along with her and Blake any more than she wanted me there. I’d declined, as we both knew I would, opting instead to gorge on junk food, watch TV, and probably be in bed by 12:30.
So when there was a knock on our door a little after eight, we assumed it was finally our pizza. I was unprepared to see the Duke standing on our doorstep, holding a bottle of sparkling cider.
“Happy New Year!” Was he drunk? His eyes were a little red and his voice was way too cheery. I was trying to figure out why he was here when Sam walked up behind me.
“You’re not the pizza guy,” Sam said.
The Duke shook his head. His face fell. “Sorry to disappoint.”
“No, it’s fine. Come on in.”
He followed me inside and I shut the door. “I thought you were still in England. When did you get back?”
“Did you remember to tip?” Mom asked, coming around the corner. She stopped when she saw the Duke.
The Duke smiled and held the sparkling cider out to my mom. “Sorry to drop in on you, Mrs. McKay. I got back early and didn’t feel like being alone on New Year’s Eve.”
He could have written a book on manipulating parents. In less than fifteen seconds, he’d managed to charm my mother, while simultaneously evoking her sympathy. And my mom, who prided herself on detecting a load of BS from a mile away, bought it all.
Taking the cider from him, she put one hand on the Duke’s back and led him into the living room. “Of course. You’re welcome here any time! Have you eaten? We’ve got plenty of pizza on the way.”