by Rysa Walker
“Did you talk to Tilson?”
He nods and glances over at Charlayne.
“Oh, you haven’t met, have you? Trey Coleman, this is my friend Charlayne.” I hesitate at the end, realizing that from her perspective, we’ve only known each other for a few minutes, so the word friend might sound weird. But she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
“Charlayne Singleton. Pleased to meet you,” she says, sticking out her hand.
He shakes her hand, his eyes grazing briefly over the pink tattoo. I wonder if Cyrist girls find the tattoo useful sometimes? I can see how it might be easier to just put “not gonna happen” out front when talking to some guys.
Charlayne turns her smile back toward me. “Nice meeting you, too, Kate. I’ll see you in AP History—but for now I’d better get back into position before the curtain goes up.” She wags her eyebrows at me before scooting back over near the Evelettes.
“What was all that about?” Trey asks. “Isn’t she with Carrington Day?”
I nod, still a little baffled at this turn of events. When we met in the other timeline, Charlayne seemed to be under Eve’s thumb, but now I’m wondering if that was a misperception on my part. Or maybe it’s just because she was at the temple. Maybe my Charlayne is somewhere in there, dying to break out of her Cyrist shackles.
“We should go.” I put my empty glass on one of the small tables. “I’ll fill you in when we get to the car.”
“I totally agree. I think this party could get . . . interesting . . . once the Carrington Day folks encounter Tilson. That is, if the rest of the Briar Hill faculty lets them encounter Tilson.”
I give him a curious look, but he doesn’t respond, so I glance across the crowded patio, looking for the clearest path to the door. Mrs. Meyer is no longer at her post greeting newcomers, so hopefully we won’t have to make any sort of excuse for leaving early. We maneuver around a few groups of people and are nearly home free when I come face-to-face with the reason why Mrs. Meyer is not by the door.
Eve stands next to her father, grandmother, and an older man I haven’t met. I turn on my heel quickly and bump into Trey’s chest. He catches the hint and shifts us a few steps back, apparently hoping we can take cover behind the two rather large men who are a few feet to the left. One of them is Charlayne’s dad, who carries an extra forty pounds or so in this timeline.
But the movement catches Mrs. Meyer’s eye. “There you are! I found Evie—”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Meyer, but we have to leave,” Trey says. “Kate just received a call from her father, and her grandmother has taken a turn for the worse.”
It’s a good effort, but I feel eyes on me and reflexively glance up. Sure enough, it’s Eve. She’s wearing a wicked, little smile that tells me, beyond any doubt, that she remembers every little detail of our last encounter.
“Oh my.” Mrs. Meyer pats my arm. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I’ll have Patrick put her on the prayer list.”
I return her smile. Then Eve slides between us, and her grandmother says, “This is my granddaughter, Eve Conwell. Evie, this is”—she looks at Trey’s name tag—“Trey Coleman and Kate . . . Oh, I’ve forgotten your last name, sweetie.”
“Pierce-Keller.”
Eve’s blue eyes widen. “But we’ve met already, Gram. I never forget a face.” She pauses like she’s trying to remember. “I believe . . . we met at your aunt’s place. Yes, that’s it. But I could have sworn your name was Kelly.”
I flash her a tight-lipped smile. “No. It’s Kate.”
“That’s wonderful that you know each other!” Mrs. Meyer says absently, her eyes straying over toward the food tent. “I’ve got to go see why the hot appetizers aren’t circulating. Kate, I wish your grandmother a speedy recovery.” And then she’s off, flagging down one of the servers.
I take another step toward the door, with Trey following closely, but Eve steps in and grabs my left forearm with her right hand. “Just a quick word before you go, Kate?” Her pale pink nails are pressing ever so slightly into my skin, and her voice is light, almost chirpy. “I’m so glad that we’ll be together at Briar Hill. I know how concerned your aunt is that you stay focused on your education, rather than—um, extracurricular activities?” On the last two words, the smile widens and she digs her nails in hard.
I wince for a second, but then paste on a fake smile to match Eve’s, as several pairs of eyes are now watching us. Trey clearly realizes what she’s doing, because he exhales sharply from just behind me.
I decide to try out one of the pressure-point tricks that Sensei Barbie and I were working on. I reach over like I’m going to clasp Eve’s hand in both of mine and place my thumb inside the pressure point on her radial nerve, just above the wrist, where a nurse might take a pulse. Then I push downward with a rubbing motion. Eve is gripping my arm very tightly, and it works like a charm—her hand pops open, and she lets out a surprised yelp as she stumbles forward.
I’m pretty sure she would have fallen, just as I did when Barbie demonstrated that trigger point to me a few weeks back. It’s not one of the potentially lethal grips—she showed me a few of those as well—but it definitely hurts, even when you’re expecting it and have been warned to keep a light grip.
Eve doesn’t fall, however. Trey’s inner gentleman kicks in, and he catches her, propping her back up on her high heels.
“Oops,” he says in a low voice. “You should be more careful, Eve.”
She flashes him a smile that doesn’t go anywhere near her eyes as she rubs her injured arm. “Indeed I should,” she says. Then she leans toward him and whispers, “You should be careful, too. Kate’s aunt says she likes to keep a little something going on the side. You might want to ask her about that.”
I step forward, jaw clinched, but Trey slides his arm around my shoulders and steers me toward the door. “That was a neat trick. What exactly did you do to her?” he asks.
“Ninja secret. I’ll show you later.”
Patrick Conwell’s ice-blue eyes follow us as Trey opens the sliding glass door and we slip inside. The afternoon sun is now lower on the horizon, casting the cavernous living room into shadow and making the brightly lit art alcoves stand out even more starkly. My eyes drift over the artwork in the niches as we hurry toward the foyer, until the painting in the third alcove stops me dead in my tracks.
The canvas is about three feet wide and maybe five feet high, so it takes up most of the niche. Several recessed spotlights illuminate the painting—a bizarre cross between the Virgin Mary and a fertility goddess. Prudence sits on the grass, legs crossed in the half-lotus position, her face tilted toward the sky, eyes closed. A loosely draped white dress conceals her very pregnant body. Her hands rest on her bare abdomen, and long dark hair cascades over her shoulders. I suspect Sara would classify the work as hyperrealist, because every leaf, every curve, every curl is finely detailed, the colors seeming to pop off the canvas, like a photograph on steroids.
No wonder Mrs. Meyer thought I looked familiar. If you ignore the extended belly—something I’m having a very difficult time doing—the fertility goddess in her living room looks exactly like me.
∞10∞
We’re on a bench, waiting for the valet to bring Trey’s car, when the front door swings open. Mrs. Denning, the Briar Hill principal, leans out to say something to the second valet, who holds the door open as she backs through, pulling a wheelchair. When she turns the chair around, we see the passenger: a very old, very dignified, and very angry man in a light gray pin-striped suit, his hair and mustache a shade darker than his jacket. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses sits atop a nose that is just a little too large for his face, and his eyes stare straight out at the lawn.
Mrs. Denning spots us on the bench. “You’re Kate, right? Harry Keller’s daughter?”
“Hi, Mrs. Denning.”
She kneels down so that she can look Dr. Tilson in the eye, but he’s still staring straight ahead. “Harvey, I’m going to leave you here
with Miss Keller and . . .” She’s clearly trying to remember Trey’s name and then decides not to bother. “And the young man you spoke with earlier. I’ll find Tony and have him take you home. He can come back for me later. I’m sorry you weren’t made aware of the location, but you just can’t say those things in public. We would have made other arrangements for your retirement party if I’d had any idea your . . . prejudice . . . against Cyrists was so strong.”
Tilson whips his head toward her, pinning her with a steely glare. “A prejudice is an irrational opinion based on faulty or incomplete information, Carol Ann. My views are fully rational, based upon an extensive, decades-long study of these charlatans.” He turns his gaze back toward the lawn, dismissing her.
With a shake of her head, Mrs. Denning looks at me and says in a semiwhisper, “You don’t mind, do you, Kate? I shouldn’t be but a few minutes.”
“Oh, no. Not at all. We’re just waiting on the car anyway.”
Mrs. Denning pushes the wheelchair over and parks Tilson next to me, giving the old guy one more indignant look before scurrying off, her low heels clicking on the stone.
Once the door has closed behind her, Tilson glances briefly at Trey, then at me, lingering on my face. His eyes narrow and then dart down to my hands, which are mostly covered by the full red skirt. “Are you one of them, young lady?”
I start to answer, but Trey leans forward. “Dr. Tilson, this is Kate Pierce-Keller. Her dad teaches at Briar Hill? Harry Keller?”
“Don’t know him. And she hasn’t answered my question.”
I lift my hands up and turn them around so that he can see the backs. “No, sir. Not a Cyrist. Not a fan, either,” I add in a lower voice.
“Anyone ever told you that you resemble their female demigod?”
Demigod?
I give him a pained smile. “Yes, sir. That fact has complicated my life more than once.”
His expression thaws slightly. “Well, you’re a pretty girl, nonetheless, and more importantly, a smart one, if you want nothing to do with those frauds. I just wish you and Mr. Coleman had the privilege of graduating from Briar Hill before it sold its soul to the goddamn devil.” He nods toward Trey. “As his father and grand–father can attest, it was once a fine school.”
“It was still a fine school last year,” I say.
“So your father teaches there now. Did he support this merger?”
“I don’t think he had much say. He only started last January, a few months after we moved here from Iowa.” I glance around and then continue in a lower voice. “But he didn’t know Carrington Day was Cyrist, or he’d have told me. We’re—well, I guess you could say we agree with you on that topic.”
“And how about you, Coleman?”
Trey also looks around before he speaks. “I’d have said I was agnostic on the Cyrists a few months ago, but I’ve . . .” He gives me a quick smile and then looks back at Tilson. “Let’s just say recent events have opened my eyes a bit.”
Tilson nods vigorously. “Ah, the election.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not what Trey meant at all, but the old man continues. “I’ve never trusted them and never understood how anyone could fall for their bill of sale, but between the last campaign and some of the laws they’ve passed in the last few months, you’d think more eyes would be opened. Whatever happened to the First Amendment? Freedom of religion? Of speech? I’d like to think those laws will be overturned, but the Supreme Court is as useless as tits on a bull these days.”
Trey and I just nod. It seems the safest response. I make a mental note to ask Connor for an update of recent events, because I’ve been paying too much attention to the past to focus on the here and now.
“But most people are fools,” Tilson continues. “They see exactly what they want to see and nothing more. It’s like Niemöller said, if you ignore it when they’re taking rights from everyone else, pretty soon they’ll come after yours, and there’s no one left to protest.”
Just then a stout man in his late fifties huffs through the door. “Dr. Tilson, Carol Ann tells me you’re not feeling well. How about I take you back home?”
Tilson gives the two of us a conspiratorial glance. “Carol Ann is mistaken, Anthony. I’ve never felt better. I was just enjoying a pleasant conversation with two students whose futures your wife and the rest of the board have sold down the river. But, yes, all in all, I do think it’s time to go home.”
The man doesn’t reply; he just glances around for the valets. They’re both off fetching cars, so he turns the wheelchair around and begins lowering it, rather clumsily, down the stairs.
Trey jumps up. “Wait, I’ll help.”
Between the two of them, the wheels reach the pavement safely just as the cars arrive, Trey’s blue Lexus following behind a tan SUV that must belong to Denning.
Tilson gives me a quick smile as they wheel him around to help him into the car. “Au revoir, Miss Keller.”
I wave goodbye as I get into Trey’s car. He joins me a minute or so later, shaking his head. “Well, now that we’ve ruled out barbecue for dinner, how do you feel about Mexican? There’s a good place over on Wisconsin.”
“Mexican is fine with me.”
Trey calls ahead for a reservation. As we pull away from the house, I cast a parting look at the wide, green, soggy front lawn. The sky is beginning to cloud over again. Mrs. Meyer’s party probably isn’t going as well as she’d hoped, given the mushy grass and Tilson’s unceremonious exit. Her comment about having Patrick put Katherine on the Cyrist prayer list gives me a shiver, especially since she seemed so sincere about it. Either she’s a good actress or she really is oblivious to what’s going on under her nose. I suspect it’s the latter, since she seems oblivious to the fact that her granddaughter is a total bitch. I rub the inside of my arm, now decorated by four angry, blood-filled crescents.
Once we’re out on the main road, I say, “Tilson is . . . interesting.”
Trey laughs. “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. Someone should really have told him where his retirement party was being held. Even I knew he had strong views on the Cyrists, based on one of Dad’s stories about his classes. When I introduced myself, he said I should tell my dad and granddad to be thankful they were students at Briar Hill when it was a real school and not the propaganda wing for a bunch of lotus-wearing parasites.”
I laugh. “He actually said that?”
“Yeah. One of the teachers coming to Briar Hill from Carrington was within earshot, too, and you should have seen Principal Denning’s face. Beet red. So . . . this demigod he was talking about?”
“Prudence—the aunt I mentioned who’s working with Saul? Although I can’t say I’ve ever heard her referred to as a demigod.” I hesitate and then ask, “Did you see the painting in their living room?”
“Which one?”
I shudder. “If you have to ask which one, you didn’t see it. Let’s just say it would have to be entitled Mother Prudence rather than Sister Prudence. I thought you must have seen it, since you stepped in with that Disney Channel comment when Mrs. Meyer was trying to place my face.”
He looks surprised. “No, I just hate when people spend five minutes trying to figure out who you look like, then decide it’s their cousin Ed when he was your age, or whatever. And you do look like one of those girls. I can’t remember the show, but she’s cute, kind of short, with long, dark hair.”
“Well, I look much more like Prudence, unfortunately.” I decide to hit Google Images when I get home so that I can inoculate myself against the Cyrist notion of religious art. I don’t want to be caught off guard the next time I’m walking along the National Mall in downtown DC and find a sidewalk vendor hawking statues of the Madonna Prudence next to the black-velvet paintings of Elvis.
“Who was the girl you were talking to?”
“Charlayne Singleton. My best friend before the Cyrist takeover, or whatever you want to call it. In that timeline, her brother, Joseph, was dating a Cy
rist, but her mom and dad had mixed feelings. With this latest shift, Joseph is already married, and Charlayne’s parents have been members of the Temple since before she was born. You actually met Charlayne in the other timeline. And Eve.”
“I take it you and Eve have a history?”
“You could say that. I hit her over the head with a chair. And sort of kicked her dog.”
A smile lifts the side of his mouth. “I’m going to guess they both had it coming?”
“Eve was planning to turn us over to Cyrist temple security. I apparently didn’t hit her hard enough, because she released the hounds before we could get out of there. And yeah, the pup definitely asked for it.” I lift the hem of my dress about two inches. Trey glances away from the road to see the two thin pink lines on my thigh from when I was bitten.
“Ouch.” His expression shifts a bit, like he’s thought of something he didn’t particularly want to remember. He can’t be remembering our close call at the temple, since that’s simply not possible.
“It could have been much worse, believe me.”
“Oh, I do,” he says.
I don’t really know what he means by that, so I just look out the window as the big estates give way to smaller lots and then, after we cross the Beltway, to a mélange of strip malls and apartment buildings. A gray sky forms the backdrop, with a few patches of orange-and-purple twilight peeking through.
Trey puts on some music—I think it’s The Shins—and we ride along for a while in silence. Not the companionable kind of silence. More the I-have-no-idea-what-to-say-next kind of silence, and it’s miserable.
Apparently Trey feels the same way, because after a few minutes, he blurts out, “God, Kate. What are you in the middle of? Do you have any idea how much power those people have? The president is Cyrist! Tilson is an old man in a wheelchair, so everyone thinks he’s just a grumpy old jerk who wants kids to get the hell off his lawn. But you’re talking about overthrowing them. Do you think they’ll just sit still for that?”