by Holly Black
I grin. “And you stayed a shrimp.”
“He loved cheap horror novels, and when he started one, he’d read it straight through until the end, no matter what. Sometimes his grandfather would come into his bedroom and switch off the lamp when it got really late, so Cassel would climb out the window and read by the streetlight. I’d come over in the morning and find him asleep on the lawn.”
“Awwww,” Daneca says.
I make a rude sound, accompanied by an equally rude gesture.
“One time, at a fair in Ocean City, he ate so much cotton candy that he threw up.”
“Who hasn’t?” I say.
“He had a black-and-white film marathon, after which he wore a fedora.” She raises her brows, daring me to contradict her. “For a month. In the middle of summer.”
I laugh.
“A fedora?” Sam says.
I remember sitting in the basement for hours, watching movie after movie of rough-voiced women and men in dapper suits with drinks in their gloved hands. When Lila’s parents got divorced, she went to Paris with her father and came back smoking Gitanes and outlining her eyes in smudgy black kohl. It was like she’d stepped out of the movie I wanted to be in.
I see her now, the stiffness of her body as she leans deliberately away from me, pressing her cheek against the window. She looks tired.
In Carney, back then, I didn’t care about blending in. I wasn’t constantly trying to bluff my way into seeming like a better guy. I had no secrets I was desperate to keep. And Lila was brave and sure and totally unstoppable.
I wonder what the kid I was then would think of the people we are now.
Cops are standing by blockades far from where the march is supposed to be. Traffic cones are set up, flares sparking with sizzling orange flames. There are people, too, more than I expected, and a distant roar that promises even more than that.
“There’s no place to park,” Sam complains, slowly circling the same block for the third time.
Daneca pokes at her phone as we inch along behind a line of cars. “Turn left when you can,” she says after a few minutes. “I have an app that says there’s a garage a couple blocks from here.”
The first two we pass are full, but then we find cars just parking on top of the median and along the sidewalks. Sam pulls the hearse onto a patch of green grass and kills the engine.
“Rebel,” I say.
Daneca grins hugely and opens the door. “Look at all these people!”
Lila and I get out, and the four of us head in the direction most are going.
“It makes you feel like everything could change, you know?” Daneca says.
“Everything is going to change,” says Sam, surprising me.
Daneca turns and gives him a look. I can tell he surprised her, too.
“Well, it is,” he says. “One way or another.”
I guess he’s right. Either proposition two will get voted down and workers will start to rise up, or proposition two will pass and other states will fall all over themselves to try the same trick.
“Changing is what people do when they have no options left,” Lila says cryptically.
I try to catch her eye, but she’s too busy watching the crowd.
We walk like that for a few more blocks and start to see signs.
WE ARE NOT A CURSE, one reads.
I wonder what kind of slogans they had at the press conference Mom attended.
A group of kids are sitting on the steps of a Fidelity bank. One throws a beer in the direction of the protesters. It shatters, glass and foam making everyone near its impact start shouting.
A man whose huge beard is long enough to overlap his T-shirt jumps up onto the hood of a car and yells louder than the others, “Down with proposition two! Flatten Patton!”
A policeman standing in front of a bodega picks up his radio and starts speaking rapidly into it. He looks flustered.
“I think the park is this way,” Daneca says, pointing from the screen of her phone to a side street. I’m not sure she noticed anything else.
A couple more blocks and the crowd becomes so thick that it’s more like a tide we have been swept up in. We’re a vein rushing blood toward the heart, a furnace of sun-warmed body heat, a herd barreling toward a cliff.
I see more and more signs.
HANDS OFF OUR RIGHTS.
TESTING EVERYONE/TRUSTING NO ONE.
THIS ISN’T WORKING.
“How many people are they estimating will come out for this?” Lila shouts.
“Twenty, maybe fifty thousand maximum,” Daneca shouts back.
Lila looks toward where our street intersects with Broad, where the main protest is. We can’t see too far, but the wall of noise—of slogans being screamed through bull-horns, of drums, of sirens—is almost deafening. “I think that number was off—way off.”
As we get closer, it’s easy to see why. I no longer have to imagine what signs Patton’s supporters might have been waving around. They are out in force, lining the street on either side of the march.
MURDERERS AND MANIPULATORS OUT OF MY STATE, says one sign.
NO MORE HEEBEEGEEBIES.
WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO HIDE?
And finally, simply, GOTCHA, with a circle drawn to look like the crosshairs of a gun. That one is held up by an old woman with frizzy red hair and bright pink lipstick.
She’s standing on the steps of city hall, the golden dome glowing above her.
As I scan the crowd of proposition two supporters, I see a familiar face far in the back. Janssen’s mistress. She’s got her dark hair pulled into a ponytail, sunglasses on top of her head. No poodles with her today.
I slow down, trying to make sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.
She’s taking bills from someone, both of them standing close to the glass window of a restaurant.
The crowd keeps moving around me, pushing me along with it. Someone’s shoulder bangs into my arm. A guy a little older than me, snapping pictures.
“Who are you looking at?” Lila asks me, craning her neck.
“See that woman by the window?” I say, trying to shove my way sideways through the crowd. “Ponytail. She hired the hit on Janssen.”
“I know her. She used to work for him,” Lila says, following me.
“What?” I stop so suddenly that the man behind me slams into my back. He grunts.
“Sorry,” I tell him, but he just gives me a dirty look.
Daneca and Sam are ahead of us in the crowd. I want to call out to them to slow down, but there’s no way they’d hear.
The woman is walking away from the march. As slowly as I’m moving, I am never going to get to her.
“I thought she was his girlfriend,” I tell Lila.
“Maybe, but she was also his underling,” she says. “She lines up buyers. High rollers. People who can afford to buy regular doses of ecstatic emotion—the kind of blissed-out happiness that’ll send you spiraling into depression if you stop. Or they buy luck from half a dozen curse workers at a time. Use enough luck at once and it can change big things.”
“Did she know Philip?” I ask.
“You said she ordered the hit.”
Janssen’s mistress disappears into the throng. We’re not moving fast enough to follow. Daneca and Sam are gone too—somewhere ahead of us on Broad Street, I’m sure, but I can’t spot them anymore.
I mop my brow with the tail of my white shirt. “This sucks.”
Lila laughs and gestures to the large sign flapping in the wind above us. It’s covered in glitter and reads BARE HANDS; PURE HEARTS. “Before Wallingford, I’d never met many people who weren’t workers—I never know what to make of them.”
“Just me,” I say. “I was the nonworker you knew.”
She gives me a quick look, and I realize, of course, that she left out the most critical thing when she summarized my past in the car.
Back then I was beneath her.
Even if she never said it to me, even i
f she didn’t act like what she could do mattered, everyone else said it enough that there was no chance I’d forget. She was a worker; I was part of the world of marks who existed to be manipulated.
I see another sign in the crowd, POWER CORRUPTS EVERYONE.
“Lila—,” I start.
Then a girl walking just ahead of us takes off her gloves. She holds up her hands. They look pale and wrinkled from being inside leather in this heat.
I blink. In my life I haven’t seen many bare female hands. It’s hard not to stare.
“Bare hands, pure heart!” the girl yells.
Beside her I see a few other people pulling off gloves with wicked smiles. One throws a pair up into the sky.
My fingers itch for release. I imagine what it would be like to feel the breeze against my palms.
The combination of heat and rebellion spreads like a ripple through the crowd, and suddenly bare fingers are waving in the air. We are stepping over discarded gloves.
“Cassel!” someone calls, and I see Sam. He’s managed to wedge himself and Daneca between two parked cars and out of foot traffic. He’s red-faced from the heat. She’s gloveless and beckoning us over.
Her hands are pale, with long fingers.
We push our way through the crowd to them. We’re almost there when we hear the sound of a bullhorn from somewhere in front of us.
“Everyone must cover their hands immediately,” a tinny voice booms. A siren wails. “This is the police. Cover your hands immediately.”
Daneca looks as horrified as if they were talking personally to her.
There is technically nothing illegal about bare hands. Just like there is technically nothing illegal about a sharp kitchen knife. But when you wave one around, the police don’t like it. And when you point it at something, that’s when the cuffs really come out.
“Lift me up,” Lila says.
“What?”
All around us people are jeering. But there is another sound, farther away, a roar of engines and cries that no longer contain words.
A news helicopter buzzes overhead.
“Up,” she says with a smile, pointing in the air. “I want to see what’s happening.”
I put my arms around her waist and lift her. She’s light. Her skin is soft against me, and she smells like sweat and crushed grass.
I set her down on the hood of the car, next to where Sam’s standing.
“There’s a bunch of cops,” she says, hopping down. “Riot gear. We’ve got to get out of here.”
I nod once. Criminals like us are good at running.
“We’re not doing anything illegal,” Daneca says, but she doesn’t sound sure. Around us the crowd feels it too. They aren’t moving in the same direction anymore. They’re scattering.
“Inside,” I say. “If we can get to one of the buildings, we can wait out whatever happens.”
But as we move toward the doorway nearest to us, cops start streaming across the sidewalk, their faces covered by helmets.
“Get down on the ground!” comes the command. They spread out, shoving protestors if they hesitate. One girl tries to argue, and a cop swings a baton at her leg. Another girl gets sprayed in the face with some chemical. She falls to the ground, clawing at her skin.
Lila and I drop down onto the asphalt immediately.
“What’s going on?” Sam says, kneeling down too. Daneca squats beside him.
“Under the car,” Lila says, crawling forward on her elbows.
It’s a pretty good plan. We still get arrested, but at least it takes a little longer.
The last time I was in a prison was to visit Mom. Prisons are places where people live. They’re dehumanizing, but they have things like tables and cafeterias and exercise rooms.
This is different. This is a jail.
They take our wallets, cell phones, and bags. They don’t even bother fingerprinting us. They just ask us our names and march us down to a holding cell. Girls in one, guys in the one next door. And so on, down a long noisy hallway.
There’s a couple of benches, a sink, and a single disgusting toilet. All occupied.
Daneca tries to tell them that we’re underage, but the cops don’t pay any attention to her. They just lock us up.
Sam is standing near me, his head leaning against the bars and his eyes closed. Daneca found a spot on one of the benches and is sitting, her face streaked with tears. They made her cover her hands before they hauled us into their armored van—and when she couldn’t find one of her gloves, they taped a bag all the way to her elbow. It’s cradled against her body now.
Lila paces back and forth.
“Lila,” I say, and she whirls, teeth bared, hand striking at me through the bars.
“Hey,” I say, catching her wrist.
She looks so surprised that I wonder if, for a moment, she forgot she was human.
“We’re going to be okay,” I say. “We’re going to get out of here.”
She nods, embarrassed now, but her breaths are still coming too fast. “What time do you think it is?”
We got to the protest at about four thirty and we never even made it to the park. “Maybe around seven,” I say.
“Still early. God, I am such a mess.” She pulls away from me, rubbing her gloved hand through her hair.
“You’re fine,” I say.
She snorts.
I look around the room at all the desperate faces. I bet none of them have ever seen the inside of a jail before. I bet none of them have family who’ve been in prison.
“Ever think about the future?” I ask, trying to distract her.
“Like, the future in which we’re not locked up?”
“After graduation. After Wallingford.” It is much in my thoughts lately.
She shrugs, leaning her face against a metal bar. “I don’t know. Dad took me to Vieques this past summer. We’d just lie on the beach or swim. Everything’s brighter and bluer there, you know? I’d like to go back. Soak it all up. I’m tired of being shut in dark places.”
I think of her trapped in that horrible wire cage by Barron for months at a time. During one of my bleaker moments the past summer, I looked up the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners. Depression, despair, crippling anxiety, hallucinations.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in a cage again.
“Never been out of the country,” I say. Who am I kidding? I’ve never even been on an airplane.
“You could come,” she says.
“If you still want me with you after we graduate, I’m yours,” I say, trying to make my vow sound a little more casual. “So that’s it? You’re just going to lie around on a beach.”
“Until Dad needs me,” she says. Her breaths are more even now, her eyes less wide and wild. “I’ve always known what I was going to be when I grew up.”
“The family business,” I say. “You ever think of doing something else?”
“No,” she says, but there’s something in her voice that makes me wonder. “It’s all I’m good at. Besides, I’m a Zacharov.”
I think about the things I’m good at. And I think about Ms. Vanderveer, my guidance counselor. The future’s going to be here sooner than you think.
We’re in the cells for what I estimate to be another hour before a cop walks in, one we haven’t seen before. He’s got a clipboard.
Everyone starts shouting at once. Demands to see lawyers. Protestations of innocence. Threats of lawsuits.
The policeman waits for the furor to die down, then speaks. “I need the following people to come to the front of your cell and press your hands together in front of you with your fingers laced. Samuel Yu, Daneca Wasserman, and Lila Zacharov.”
The cells again erupt in shouts. Daneca gets up off the bench. Sam follows her to the front of the cell, turning back toward me and widening his eyes in an expression of bafflement. After a few moments, the shouting dies down.
I wait for him to call me next, but there appear to be no more names
on the clipboard.
Lila steps forward, then hesitates.
“Go,” I tell her.
“We have a friend with us,” Lila tells the officer, looking back in my direction.
“Cassel Sharpe,” Sam supplies. “That’s his name. Maybe you missed it?”
“This is all my fault—,” Daneca starts.
“Be quiet, look straight ahead, hands clasped in front,” the cop yells. “Everyone else take three steps away from the door. Now!”
They’re cuffed and marched away, all of them turning their heads back toward me as I try to come up with explanations for why they’re gone and I’m not. Maybe their parents were called and mine couldn’t be reached. Maybe it was just random groups of three that were being taken for fingerprinting. I’m still trying to convince myself when Agent Jones saunters up to the cell door.
“Oh,” I say.
“Cassel Sharpe.” A small smile lifts a corner of his mouth. “Please step to the front of the cell, hands clasped together in front of you.”
I do.
Jones leads me grimly into another hallway, one he has to swipe a card to enter. One without cells, just white walls and windowless doors. “We put an alert on your name, Cassel. Imagine my surprise when it turned up that you were in custody in Newark.”
I swallow nervously. My throat feels dry.
“You got that information for me yet?” His breath smells like sour coffee and cigarettes.
“Not quite yet,” I say.
“Have a good march?” he asks. “Get lots of exercise running from the law? Growing boy has got to get his exercise.”
“Ha, ha,” I say.
He grins like we really did just share a joke. “Let me tell you how this is going to go. I’m going to give you two choices, and you’re going to make the right one.”
I nod my head to show I’m listening, although I’m sure I’m not going to like what comes next.
“A couple doors down I’ve got Lila Zacharov and the other two you were brought in with. You and I can go there, and I’ll explain that any friend of Cassel’s is free to go. Then I’ll let them out. Maybe I’ll even apologize.”
My shoulders tense. “They’ll think I’m working for you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Definitely.”