by Holly Black
“If Lila thinks I’m working for the Feds and tells her father, I’m not going to be able to find out anything for you. I’ll be useless.” I’m talking too fast. He can tell he’s getting to me. If the rumor gets around that I’m working for the Feds, my own mother won’t want to be seen with me.
“Maybe I don’t consider you all that useful anymore.” Jones shrugs. “Maybe if we’re all the friends you’ve got, you’ll see things a little differently.”
I take a deep breath. “What’s my second choice?”
“Tell me that by the end of next week you’ll have that lead for me. You’re going to find out something on this mysterious assassin. Something I can use. No more excuses.”
I nod. “I will.”
He claps my shoulder heavily with his gloved hand. “I told you you’d make the right choice.”
Then he lets me into the room with the others.
Daneca scrambles up from where she’s sitting on the floor and hugs me. She smells like patchouli. Her eyes look bloodshot.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You must be so mad at me. But we’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We would never—”
“Nobody’s mad,” I say, then look over at Sam and Lila to see if they can explain the rest of what she was saying.
“They told us we could walk out of here,” Sam starts, then pauses, “if we volunteered to be tested.”
“Tested?” I want to kill Jones right then. Of course he’s got some stupid extra angle going.
“The hyperbathygammic test,” Lila says quietly. She looks tired.
I punch the concrete wall. It just hurts my hand.
“We’re not going to take the test, Cassel,” Daneca says.
“No,” I say. “No. You should. Both of you. Then you can call someone for Lila and me when you get out.”
I have no doubt that Zacharov’s lawyers will have Lila out of jail within moments. Me? Well, it’ll take Grandad a little longer, but if the Feds want me to hunt for their lead, they’re going to have to help out.
“But they’re going to know that you’re both—,” Sam starts.
“That’s the beauty of the test,” Lila says. “The only people afraid to take it are people with something to hide.”
“It’s not legal to force us,” Daneca says, shaking her head. “We’re being held unlawfully. We weren’t properly booked or Mirandized. We didn’t commit any crime. This is a clear case of the government exploiting its power for its own anti-worker agenda.”
“You think?” I sit down next to Lila on the floor. But despite my flippant answer, it’s impossible not to be impressed with Daneca. She’s never been in trouble before, and even in jail, she cares about what’s right.
“You’re shaking,” Lila says softly, putting her gloved hand on my arm.
I’m surprised. I look down at my hands like I no longer remember to whom they belong. The knuckles of my left glove are scuffed from throwing that punch. Scuffed and trembling.
“Sam,” I say, trying to steady myself. “You, at least, don’t have to stay.”
Sam looks at me and turns to Daneca. “I know you want to do the right thing, but if we don’t agree to get tested, what happens next?” He lowers his voice. “What if they stop asking?”
“What if they don’t let us out, even after they test us?” Daneca says. “I’m not doing it. It’s against absolutely everything I believe in.”
“You think I don’t know it’s wrong?” Sam snaps. “You don’t think I get that this is unfair? That it sucks?”
I don’t want them to fight. Not over this.
“Forget it,” I say loudly, trying to sound like I know what I’m talking about. “Let’s just wait. They’re going to let us out soon. They’ve got to. Like Daneca said, they didn’t really book us. We’re going to be fine.”
We lapse into an uneasy silence.
An hour later, just as panic begins to gnaw my gut, just when I’m ready to admit that I’m wrong and they’re going to let us rot in here, just as I’m about to bang on the door and beg to see Agent Jones, a cop comes in and tells us we’re free to go. No explanation. We’re just shown the door.
The car’s as we left it, except for the driver-side mirror, which is cracked.
We get back to Wallingford by ten. As we cross the quad, I have the strange feeling that we’ve been gone for days instead of just a couple of hours. We’re too late for study hall, but in time for in-room check.
“I heard Ramirez let you boys go to that protest,” Mr. Pascoli says, giving me a suspicious look. “How was it?”
“We decided to drive down to the beach instead,” says Sam. “Good thing too. I hear the march got really out of control.” His cheeks color a little as he speaks, like he’s ashamed of lying.
He doesn’t say anything else about it.
By lights-out it’s as if the whole thing never happened.
Friday afternoon I’m sitting in the back of physics class, staring at the quiz in front of me. I am concentrating on the problem of a girl increasing the amplitude of a swing’s oscillations by moving her legs along with the motion. I am not sure if this is an example of resonance, wave transmission, or something else that I’ve forgotten. The only thing that I am sure of is that I am going to fail this quiz.
I’m filling in one of those multiple-choice bubbles, my pencil going around and around in a circle, when Megan Tilman screams. My pencil streaks across the paper, making a line of graphite.
“Ms. Tilman,” Dr. Jonahdab says, looking up from her desk. “What is the matter?”
Megan is clutching her chest and staring at Daneca, who’s one desk over from her. “My luck amulet broke. It snapped in half.”
Gasps run through the class.
“You worked me, didn’t you?” Megan says.
“Me?” Daneca asks, blinking at her like she’s gone crazy.
“When did you feel your amulet break?” Dr. Jonahdab asks. “Are you sure that it broke right at this moment?”
Megan shakes her head. “I don’t know. I just—I grabbed for it and there was only half still on the chain. Then when I moved, the other piece fell onto my desk. It must have been stuck in my blouse.”
Yes, she really says “blouse,” like she’s someone’s grandmother.
“Sometimes stones just break,” says Dr. Jonahdab. “They’re fragile. No one touched you, Megan. Everyone here is wearing gloves.”
“She’s on the video at that worker meeting,” Megan says, pointing to Daneca. “She sits right next to me. It must have been her.”
I expect Daneca to lecture her. I really do. I figure Daneca’s been waiting all the time I’ve known her for a chance to really let some idiot have it, especially after yesterday. Instead she sinks down in her chair, her face going bright red. Tears glisten in her eyes. “I’m not a worker,” she says quietly.
“Then why do you go to those meetings?” one of the other girls asks.
“Heebeegeebies.” Someone fake coughs.
I stare at Daneca, willing her to speak. To tell Megan that a decent person cares about people other than herself. To explain about the plight of workers and put everyone in their place. All the righteous stuff she says to me and Sam. All the stuff she said, even in jail. I open my mouth, but even in my mind the lecture gets garbled. I can’t remember the slogans. I don’t know how to talk about worker rights.
Besides, for some reason, that seems like the last thing Daneca wants me to do.
I turn to Dr. Jonahdab, but she’s glancing between Daneca and Megan, like somehow she’s going to be able to sense the truth if she just watches them a little longer. Something’s got to wake her up. Leaning toward the guy at the desk next to mine—Harvey Silverman—I say, “Hey, what did you get for problem three?” I say it loud enough that my voice carries even to the front of the class.
Daneca turns toward me. She shakes her head narrowly in warning.
Harvey looks down at his paper, and Dr. Jonahdab finally seems to snap
out of her trance. “All right, everyone, that is enough talking! We are in the middle of a quiz. Megan, you may bring up your paper and take the rest of the test at my desk. After that we will go to the office together.”
“I can’t concentrate,” Megan says, standing up. “Not while she’s here.”
“Then you can go down to the office now.” Dr. Jonahdab writes something on a piece of paper and rips it off a legal pad. Megan takes her bag and the paper, leaving all her books behind as she walks out.
As soon as the bell rings, Daneca races toward the door, but Dr. Jonahdab calls her back. “Ms. Wasserman, I know they’ll want to talk to you.”
Daneca reaches into her bag. “I’m calling my mother. I’m not—”
“Look, we know that you didn’t do anything wrong—” She cuts herself off when she notices me loitering by the door. “Can I help you, Mr. Sharpe?”
“No,” I say. “I was just—no.”
Daneca gives me a tremulous smile as I go.
On my way to French class, I walk by one of the announcement boards. It’s plastered with a bunch of those public service posters you see in magazines—the kind that say I’D RATHER GO NAKED THAN BE WITHOUT MY GLOVES. Or JUST BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT, DOESN’T MAKE IT OKAY. HIRING CURSE WORKERS IS A CRIME. Or simply NO GLOVE, NO LOVE—except that the faces of models have been replaced with grainy stills of students from the video. Photos that the school secretary is frantically trying to rip down.
By the time I get to my French class, the news of what happened to Megan is all over the school.
“Daneca cursed her with bad luck, so she’d fail the test,” someone says as I pass. “That’s how she keeps up her GPA. She’s probably been doing it to all of us for years.”
“And Ramirez knew about it. That’s why she’s leaving.”
I spin around. “What?”
It turns out the speaker is Courtney Ramos. Her eyes go wide. She was in the middle of applying lip gloss, and the wand hovers in the air, like she’s frozen.
“What did you say?” I shout. People in the hallway turn toward us.
“Ms. Ramirez resigned,” Courtney says. “I heard it when I was in the office waiting for my guidance counselor.”
Ramirez, who let us go to the protest. Who was the only one willing to sponsor HEX, so Daneca could organize the club on campus two years ago. Who doesn’t deserve to get taken down for us. Mr. Knight flashes his class, but he stays. Ramirez goes.
I grab Courtney’s shoulder. “That can’t be true. Why would that be true?”
She pulls out of my grip. “Get off of me. There’s something really wrong with you, man. You know that?”
I turn away from her and walk off toward Ramirez’s music room. I get halfway across campus before I see her in the faculty parking lot, shoving a cardboard box into the trunk of her car. Ms. Carter is with her, a milk crate under her arm.
Ramirez looks over at me and then shuts the trunk with a finality that keeps me from walking toward her.
Everyone knows “resigned” is a fancy word for “fired”.
It feels totally surreal to take Lila to the movies. We both have notes from our parents on file that let us leave on Fridays for the weekend, so we can just get into my car and meet Daneca and Sam at the theater.
She slides into the passenger side. She’s got on long silver earrings that dangle like daggers, and a white dress that rides up her thighs when she sits down. I try not to notice. Okay, I try not to stare, because that would make me crash the car and kill us both.
“So is this what kids at Wallingford do when they’re going out?” Lila asks me.
“Oh, come on,” I say, laughing. “You’ve been gone for three years; you’re not a time traveler. You know what a date is.”
She smacks my arm. It stings, and I smile. “No, I’m serious,” she says. “It’s just all very proper. Like maybe we’re going to go parking later or you’re going to give me your pin.”
“How was it at your old school? Straight-up Roman orgies?”
I wonder if she’s seen any of her friends from that fancy Manhattan school. I remember them from her fourteenth birthday, full of glittering superiority. Rich worker kids, about to rule the world.
“There were a lot of parties. People just hooked up sometimes. No one was exclusive.” She shrugs her shoulders, and then looks up at me through her pale lashes. “But worry not. I am amused by your quaint customs.”
“Thank goodness for that,” I say, touching my heart in mock earnestness.
Sam and Daneca are waiting for us at the concessions stand, having an argument about whether red licorice is or is not more disgusting than black licorice. Sam’s cradling an enormous glistening tub of popcorn.
“So, uh, you want anything?” I ask Lila.
“Are you offering to buy me my movie snacks?” she asks delightedly.
Sam laughs, and I give him the filthiest look I can summon up.
“Cherry slushy,” Lila says quickly, maybe feeling she’s taken teasing me too far, and comes with me to the counter.
We watch as they color the ice red. Lila leans against my shoulder.
“I’m sorry if I’m horrible,” she says, her mouth moving against my sleeve. “I’m really nervous.”
“I thought we already established that I like it when you’re horrible,” I say under my breath, picking up the slushies.
Her smile is as bright as the marquee lights.
Then the four of us get our tickets ripped and go into a room that’s already playing the opening credits. The theater isn’t crowded or anything, so we get to sit in the back.
Through some unspoken decision, none of us mentions the previous day’s events, not the protest or the jail. The cool of the movie theater seems solid and real, making everything else feel very far away.
The Giant Spider Invasion is awesome. Sam talks through the whole thing, explaining which spiders are puppets and what the webbing is constructed from. I have no idea what the plot is except that the giant spider crisis seems to be powered by some kind of outer space energy. Scientists make out. The spiders die.
Even Daneca has a good time.
Afterward we go to a diner and eat club sandwiches and fries, accompanied by endless cups of black coffee. Sam shows us how to use ketchup, sugar, and Worcestershire sauce to make pretty decent-looking fake blood. The waitress is not amused.
Lila tells me I can just drop her off at the train station, but I drive her into Manhattan instead. And as we stop in front of her father’s Park Avenue apartment, surrounded by city lights, she leans over to kiss me good night.
Her lips and tongue are still stained cherry red.
CHAPTER TEN
I STAY AT THE GARBAGE house, in my old room, tossing and turning on the bed. Try as I might to not think about the dead guy chilling in the freezer two floors below me, all I can imagine is Janssen’s dead eyes staring up through the floorboards, begging silently to be discovered.
He deserves a better burial than being shut in an ice chest, no matter what he did in life. And God knows what I deserve for putting him there.
Since I can’t sleep anyway, I open up the file the Feds gave me and spread the pages across my mattress. It gives me Janssen’s girlfriend’s name—Bethenny Thomas—and some sketchy details about her statement that night. Nothing all that interesting. I picture her, pressing an envelope of cash against Anton’s chest. And then I picture myself, leaning over Janssen, my bare hand reaching for him, fingers curling.
I wonder if I’m the last thing he saw, a gawky kid with a bad haircut, fifteen years old at the time.
I flop onto my back, scattering papers. None of them matter. They don’t add up to Philip’s murderer. No wonder the Feds are confused. All they want to know is what this big secret is Philip had, but it isn’t here. It must be maddening to get so close to solving something and then have a new mystery on top of the old one. What was Philip’s big secret, and who killed him to protect it?
> The first part is easy. I’m the secret.
Who would kill to protect me?
I think of the figure in the oversize coat and the red gloves. Then I think about her some more.
The next morning I pad downstairs and make coffee, never having managed more than a little fitful sleep. Somewhere in the night I determined that the only way I am going to be able to figure out anything is if I start looking.
I figure the best place to start is Philip’s house. The cops might have already gone through it, and so might the Feds, but they don’t know what they’re looking for. Of course, I don’t know what I’m looking for either, but I know Philip.
And I’m on a deadline.
I drink the coffee, take a shower, put on a black T-shirt and dark gray jeans, and go out to my car. It doesn’t start. I pop the hood and stare at the engine for a while, but diesel cars aren’t really my area of expertise.
I kick the tires. Then I call Sam.
His hearse pulls into my driveway not long after.
“What did you do to her?” Sam asks, petting the hood of my car and looking at me accusingly. He’s wearing his weekend attire: a shirt with Eddie Munster on it, a pair of black jeans, and mirrored aviator sunglasses. How his parents don’t see that he wants to work on special effects for movies, I don’t know.
I shrug.
He pokes around for a couple of minutes and tells me I need to replace one of the fuses and probably the battery, too.
“Great,” I say, “but there’s something else I need to do today.”
“What’s that?” Sam asks.
“Solve a crime,” I say.
He tilts his head, like he’s considering whether or not to believe me. “Really?”
I shrug. “Probably not. How about committing a crime instead?”
“Now, that sounds more like you,” he says. “Any particular one you had in mind?”
I laugh. “Breaking and entering. But it’s my brother’s house. So it’s not that bad, right?”
“Which brother?” he asks, pulling the sunglasses down his nose so he can peer over them and raise a single eyebrow. He looks like a cop in a bad TV show, which I think is what he’s going for.