by Julie Cross
“So I’m totally not trying at this,” Justice says, brushing off her lackluster performance on the field. “Ellie, right? We had bio together last year.”
“Ellie Ames,” Bret adds. “Mr. Lance’s favorite student.”
“I’m so not.” I look away from both of them, my gaze fixed on the field. I don’t know how this will go down—Bret paying attention to me and Justice crushing on him. Except, oddly, she doesn’t seem to be crushing on him despite what Chantel said at the store the other day. I’ve been watching for signs of this the past couple of days. “I hated on his very favorite book all week. And I argue with him almost every day.”
“The guy gets off on that shit,” Bret says so matter-of-factly.
“Gross,” Justice says, wrinkling her nose. “It should be illegal for any teachers to get off on anything.”
Bret studies the score sheet and then looks at both Justice and me. “Hate to say it, but you guys are not making this team.”
“Not like I wanted to anyway,” Justice mutters.
Sitting in the grass near my left foot is Bret’s iPhone. I glance at it for a beat and then look up again. Not yet. Trust first, then invasion of privacy.
“You going to Dominic’s party tonight?” Bret asks Justice. After she confirms, he turns to me. “What about you?”
“I was thinking about going to Dominic’s thing. He mentioned it in gym the other day.” He had mentioned it, just not to me. Definitely not to invite me. But the best way to get an invite to the cool kids’ club is to pretend like you already have one. “I’ve got a ton of homework and college essays to write from Lance’s workshop, so we’ll see.”
“You should come,” Bret says.
Justice smiles at me, seeming genuine, which is quite a shocker. “Totally.”
Establish human connection: check.
From the field behind us, a guy calls out Bret’s name. I squint into the sun and spot Jacob, Chantel’s current boyfriend if my school social gossip is up to speed. Bret jogs over to talk to him. I glance at Justice and see her giving Jacob a thumbs-up. She catches me watching and quickly drops her hand.
“So…” I swing my arms and stare out at the scrimmage game. “Should we blow off the rest of this tryout or take our chances?”
Justice glances wistfully in the direction of the girls’ locker room. “My parents would kill me if I left early.”
“I could give you a bloody nose?” I suggest.
She eyes me, one dark eyebrow cocked. “Somehow I don’t doubt that.”
Good. You shouldn’t.
CHAPTER 8
“A party on a yacht floating around the Potomac River,” Harper repeats from her safe spot seated on the pool steps in the shallow end. “Who’s driving this yacht?”
I rest against the pool wall, panting from my long swim. “Pretty sure it’s anchored.”
“Why are you suddenly interested in going to parties?” Harper asks.
I dunk my head underwater, and when I reemerge, I say, “Your lecture about opening up to people got me thinking.”
“Uh-huh.” She gives me this look like, Yeah right, but her focus shifts to Aidan, who’s coming down the steps after going up to the apartment to change out of his suit. “And a yacht party will help with this pursuit?”
Pursuit. Interesting word choice.
“It’s a start, right?”
Harper narrows her eyes. She knows I’m lying, but she’s biding her time, waiting for the right moment to call me on it. Or she wants to figure out on her own what I’m up to.
“A start to what?” Aidan asks.
“A start to launching Ellie’s social campaign.” Harper flashes me a grin. “She’s going to some rich kid’s yacht party later.”
I stick out my tongue at her when Aidan’s not looking.
“Apparently she’s decided to make friends at school,” Harper adds.
“Hmm…” Aidan stares down at me from the pool deck, his huge biceps folded across his chest, dark skin standing out against his white polo shirt—he looks fierce and intimidating. “And you would repeat this statement while taking a lie-detector test?”
Intimidating assuming I didn’t know him so well.
“Sure.” I float on my back, staring up at the sun and bright blue sky. “I could pass a polygraph—lying—in my sleep.”
“You know this for sure?” Aidan challenges. “I’ve seen the coolest, calmest agents fail to do that. You must have superpowers.”
With my ears in the water, I have to listen over the whoosh of the pool filter to hear him. “Try me.”
“My polygraph machine is in the shop, unfortunately. How about a game of memory? Have you looked at the photos since I went upstairs?” Aidan asks.
I put my feet back on the bottom of the pool and head for the steps. “Nope, and you can ask Harper. She’s my witness.”
Harper hands me a towel and swears to Aidan that I haven’t cheated. Over the summer, Harper and I helped Aidan prepare for some tests he had to take with the Secret Service. Tests where they show you photos, allowing you to study them briefly before the pictures are put away. Later, you’re asked to recall details from the photos. Turns out, I’m pretty good at this game, and now Aidan likes to use me as his opponent to keep his skills sharp.
With my towel wrapped around me, I take a seat at the umbrella table beside the pool. Aidan is on my right, Harper on my left. Harper leafs through the stack of color images, keeping them concealed from us. “In the image of the downtown-looking area, between the two tallest buildings, what did you see?”
“An alley,” I say immediately. Aidan opened his mouth but I beat him to it. I squint at nothing, pulling the image back to my mind. “And a No Loitering sign—”
“A 2005 Ford Fusion,” Aidan spouts off. “Dark blu— No, hunter green. And a—”
“Bally’s fitness member magnet on the trunk!” I shout before he can. “License plate Land of Linco—”
“Illinois!” Aidan interrupts.
I bang my hand on the glass table as if that will bring me more clarity. “5L62F45.”
Aidan stops and turns to face me. “What was that?”
“Plate number. Aren’t we supposed to—”
Harper lifts the image closer to her face. “5L62F45. God, I think I need glasses.”
“How did you see that? How did you remember it?” Aidan asks, staring at me.
My face heats up, like I’ve done something wrong. How did I remember that plate number? There was definitely a thought process. I looked at it just so I could beat Aidan, figured he’d do the same. Was that cheating? Those lines have never been very clear to me.
“I-I don’t know…” I stutter and then work harder to unravel it because Aidan is still staring at me like I’m a freak. “It was an easy one to remember. Five L…five liters… Sixty two—the age you have to be for senior discounts. F for fuck. And forty-five…because today’s my—” I stop, not wanting to finish.
“Mom’s birthday.” Harp looks up from the picture.
I stare at my fingernails. “Today. She’s forty-five today.”
Last year, my family celebrated my mother’s birthday by conning an eighty-five-year-old woman out of ten thousand dollars. I pulled off an Oscar-worthy performance, selling my dad as a miracle therapist who had taken me from delinquent teen to prim and proper and driven. My mom was the single mother who hadn’t known what to do with me. Ten grand and a month in Dr. Ames’s reprogramming camp saved my life. And it could save her grandson’s, too. Later, while my family dined on steak, lobster, and chocolate lava cake, I sat there thinking about the old woman and the look of hope on her face when she’d watched the reprogramming team show up and pluck her grandson from his downward spiral. But we hadn’t been there to save anyone. Quite the opposite. We’d given the kid two hundred bucks, a fake ID, and a bus ticket to Vegas.
I couldn’t eat anything that night, and when I glanced across the table at my mother, I noticed her smile hadn’
t reached her eyes and all she’d done was move food around her plate, hadn’t eaten a bite of her birthday dinner. Then there was my dad, on top of the world, no guilt ruining his appetite. And my mom beside him, feeling like shit but pretending she was happy. Forty-four years old and she still did everything for him. Even things I’m sure she didn’t want to do. I wonder if she gets to celebrate forty-five years where she’s at right now?
My family used that con several times, though fortunately without my parents and me, with a different Dr. Ames each time. But the memory stuck with me. So much that when the FBI suggested Harper and I change our last names, I picked Ames. To remember how I felt after taking that lady’s money. Harper was so glad to see me, she didn’t care what I picked. Didn’t give it a second thought.
Aidan scrubs a hand over his face, giving the mention of our mother a moment to sit in the air before shifting back to the game. “Seriously, Ellie, swear you didn’t cheat?”
“Why would I cheat?” I ask. “Are we playing or not?”
Aidan stares at me for a beat longer and then gives Harper a nod. She shakes her head, refocusing. “Okay, the picture of the warehouse in the desert… Name as many entry points as you can.”
“The window,” I say, only half as energetic.
“Which window?” Harper presses.
“You can’t—” Aidan starts but stops when he sees Harper studying the photo.
Harper mutters something about the manufacturer and the year. “Yeah, she’s right. Those locks are pretty basic, wouldn’t make a sound to open.”
I look between the two adults in front of me and watch what I think Harper has been so afraid of happening. Aidan eyeing her like she’s a stranger to him. And I wonder, not for the first time, how they met. Neither will tell me.
Harper drops her gaze back to the photos. “I’m probably wrong about the lock. Why would it be easy to pick?”
“Because it’s just a picture, Harper,” I say. She doesn’t need to be ashamed. She didn’t use her skills to take that nice old lady’s money. I point a finger at the guy beside me. “Aidan’s the one turning it into a bomb factory or something. Regular people use regular unreliable locks.”
Silence falls among us. A woman shakes out a doormat over her balcony, and I can practically hear the dust falling to the ground.
“I think that’s enough memory for today.” Aidan reaches across the table, carefully draws the photos out of Harper’s hands, then he says, so quietly I can barely hear him, “I wasn’t judging you. I was just floored because everyone in my crew would suggest busting a window to get in. No one would even consider quiet entry. It’s smart. Muscles get in the way of brains more often than you’d think.”
A lump forms in my throat, and I’m thankful Aidan’s staring at my sister and not me. Harper lifts a hand, rubs his head. “We’ll have to teach you some tricks.”
“I’d like that.” He stands, kisses her forehead. “I’ll let you ladies talk.”
Harper and I both watch him walk away with the photos, and then for some reason we burst out laughing the second he’s out of sight.
“He’s got such a nice ass,” Harper says.
“It’s all those squats and lunges.” I open her purse and dig until I find a pack of Starbursts, but it’s ripped from my hand immediately. “Hey! I’m starving.”
“Who was that girl lying on the couch crying,” Harper reminds me, still holding the candy hostage, “‘My tooth is exploding, I’m dying, Harper, I can’t take this any longer, kill me now…’”
I glare at her.
“Is that candy worth a thousand dollars?” she points out. “We’re gonna be paying that bill for five years.”
“Sorry,” I mumble. God, I hate that I cost them that much money. If I could get a job, then I’d be able to help. Or if I pulled a con or two… “I still can’t believe we’re actually paying a bill.”
Harper looks at me for a long moment. “The license plate… You did that thing I taught you?”
I nod. “Five liters for the seniors, and Mom is fucked because she’s only forty-five.”
Harper laughs. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Well, it worked.” I shrug. “Did you remember her birthday? Before I mentioned it?”
“Yeah.” She looks up at our apartment. “This morning when I looked at my phone.”
I chew on my thumbnail. “Do you think she’s okay?”
“I’m sure she’s fine.” She looks away from me, her face turning to stone.
And with that statement, I know the Mom conversation is done. Harper doesn’t care that it’s her birthday, and I don’t blame her. It’s a sore subject for her and now for me, too, since she told me the truth this past summer. My parents had always loved to tell the story of my birthday. Born on the Fourth of July. How American. But Harper was eight when I was born and she remembers details that would disprove this birthdate—cooler weather, the fact that she was in school at the time. Late August is an extreme possibility but September or October are more likely. Today could be my birthday for all I know. Am I even seventeen yet? Or am I still sixteen? Who the hell knows? I guess maybe I’ll just have to wait for November to roll around and call it a done deal.
You wouldn’t think that would be such a huge thing, and believe me, I’ve tried to make it not a big thing, but a birthday… It’s like the stamp every person gets stating, I’m here, I exist.
“Ellie?” Harper says, bringing me back to the here and now. “I found us a cooking class. Or should I say, culinary studies. The guy who cooks for the Feldsteins teaches it.”
“Is it expensive? I don’t want you to blow an entire paycheck for me to take a class.” Harper works part-time as a nanny for a very rich family. Neither of us is legal to work in the U.S., so Harper fakes an accent and the Feldsteins are convinced they’ve got an authentic, illegal German nanny who will make their children bilingual by age five. It’s a lie that Aidan isn’t too fond of but goes along with because Harper can, in fact, teach those kids German. It isn’t completely fraudulent.
“We are taking the class free of charge.” Harper grins. “Thanks to my awesome connections. Sunday night. You and me. Making some kosher meals.”
“Why kosher?” I ask but we’re interrupted by a red Mustang convertible pulling up in the parking lot beside us. I stare at the car in disbelief.
Miles is hopping out of Bret’s red Mustang. And guess who’s in the backseat? Dominic DeLuca, Justice, and Jacob, Chantel’s boyfriend.
“Thanks for the ride, man,” Miles says.
“No problem,” Bret responds. “See you later tonight!”
My mouth is still hanging open when Miles breezes past Harper and me on his way to his place.
“Hey!” I yell at him. He stops, turns, pretends to be surprised to see me out here. I jog over to him and keep my voice low. “What are you doing hanging out with them?”
“SAT prep class,” he says simply, like I should have thought of that. And damn…I should have thought of that. Would have been a hell of a lot better than field hockey tryouts.
“Yeah, but why were you in Bret’s car?” Especially after everything he said about the guy when we were in the store.
“I needed a ride.” He spreads his arms out wide. “Beats taking the bus. You said so yourself.”
“What are you up to?” I demand.
Miles is Mr. Discipline today, working hard to keep his eyes on my face and not on my bikini top. But I can see the strain, the downward pull of gravity he’s fighting. It makes my stomach flutter just thinking about him thinking about checking me out. “What are you up to?”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer, just takes off. So what now? I have to fight him for Bret’s attention? After he closes his apartment door, I turn to Harper. “I need a really tight dress.”
She lifts a brow. “Sweet tart?” she says. I shake my head. “Candy apple?”
“No mission,” I lie. “Just need to look hot.”
&nb
sp; CHAPTER 9
“You want a drink?” Bret asks me.
I eye the open glasses of various premade cocktails on the deck bar and shake my head. “I’m good.”
Bret flashes me his killer grin that I’m sure gets him whatever he wants and then walks off to greet some of our classmates who just showed. It’s getting a little crowded on this deck, and without the khakis and school polos, I hardly recognize anyone. I’m sure it goes both ways, considering I’m wearing a designer dress Mrs. Feldstein gave to Harper because it was “so last season” along with platform sandals that I’m completely in love with but are the most uncomfortable, noisy shoes ever. It’s difficult to snoop around in noisy shoes but unfortunately, nothing else went with the dress.
Like Bret, Dominic DeLuca is wearing board shorts and a T-shirt, his feet bare, nose pink, dark hair carelessly messy from swimming, and the scent of sunblock wafting off him. I say hi to Dominic, but he doesn’t smile or acknowledge me beyond a quick nod and, “Hey.”
He’s definitely got the hot-brooding-guy act down.
I do a lap around the deck. Can’t believe one family owns a one-hundred-foot yacht complete with built-in speakers—music is playing through them—a bartender, and plenty of standing and sitting places. The sun is setting and the lights on the deck are popping on one at a time, casting a colorful glow all around. The only thing I dislike about this boat are the edges. I’ve never swum in a river, lake, or ocean, not sure if I even could, and getting anywhere near those railings is not on my to-do list tonight.
Chantel and Justice have just arrived and are now knocking back drinks near the bar. I wait for Justice to spot me and wave before I head over to them. I know better than to assume the camaraderie on the field this morning would continue around her other friends. Her shiny black hair is down, and she’s wearing a beautiful dark-blue dress and shoes taller than mine.
“Oh my God, Ellie, you look amazing!” Justice says.
Chantel gives me this fake smile. “You totally do.”
“Where did you get that dress?” Justice asks me.
“My sister. The lady she works for—she’s a nanny—wears her clothes once and gets rid of them.” I smooth a hand over the silky black material. It’s made to lie over the skin like butter and appear simple. “It’s completely perfect.”