by Holly Black
“Ow!” she yells, and lets go.
The air rushes past me, too fast for me to make any sound. I try to keep my limbs loose, not to brace myself for impact, but hitting the ground feels like a punch in the chest. My breath goes out of me.
I barely manage to crawl into the bushes before the blowback hits.
Everything aches. I lift my head to see a pink light glowing behind the stretch of trees near the track. Morning.
I’m still a cat.
Blowback as something smaller than yourself is even more bizarre than usual. Nothing feels real or right. No part of your body is your own. Even perspective is all wrong.
Waking up in an unfamiliar body is stranger still.
My senses are heightened to a surreal degree. I can hear insects moving through blades of grass. I can smell mice burrowing into the soft wood. I feel very small and very scared.
I’m not sure I can walk. I push myself up, leg by leg, and wobble until I’m sure I’ve got my balance. Then I shift one front paw and one back one, moving in a staggered limp across the quad in the early morning light.
It feels like it takes hours. By the time I make it to beneath my own window, I’m exhausted. The window is just as I left it, slightly lifted from the sill, but not so wide that Sam would be woken by the breeze.
I yowl hopefully. Sam, predictably, hears nothing.
Closing my eyes against the pain, I force the transformation. It hurts, like my skin was still raw from shifting the first time. I push open the window and hop inside, falling onto the floor with a thump.
“Hrm,” Sam says muzzily, turning over.
“Help me,” I say, lifting my arm to touch the metal edge of his bed. “Please. The blowback. You’ve got to keep me from being loud.”
He’s staring at me with wide eyes. They only get wider when my fingers start to curl like vines. My leg starts shaking.
“It hurts,” I say, shamed by the whine in my voice.
Sam is getting up, throwing his comforter over me. Two pillows come down on either side of my head so I can’t thrash it around too badly. He’s totally awake now, looking at me with true adrenaline-pumping horror.
“I’m sorry,” I manage to get out before my tongue turns to wood.
I feel a sharp nudge on my side. I turn stiffly and blink up at Mr. Pascoli.
“Get up, Mr. Sharpe,” our hall master says. “You’re going to be late for class.”
“He’s sick,” I hear Sam say.
I am cocooned in blankets. Just moving is hard, like the air has turned semi-solid. I groan and then close my eyes again. I have never felt so worn out. I had no idea that back-to-back blowback could do this to me.
“What is he doing on the floor?” I hear Pascoli say. “Are you hungover, Mr. Sharpe?”
“I’m sick,” I slur, borrowing Sam’s excuse. My mind isn’t working fast enough to come up with one of my own. “I think I have a fever.”
“You better get down to the nurse, then. Breakfast is almost over.”
“I’ll take him,” Sam says.
“I want to see a copy of that slip, Mr. Sharpe. And you better get one. If I find out you’ve been drinking or using, I don’t care what’s going on with your family, you’re going to be off my hall. Understand?”
“Yeah.” I nod. Right now I am willing to say whatever I think will make Pascoli go away faster.
“Come on,” Sam says, picking me up under my arms and dumping me onto my bed.
I struggle to stay sitting up. My head swims. I’m not really sure how I pull on jeans, gloves, and boots, which I fumble over and finally decide not to lace.
“Maybe we should call someone,” he whispers once Pascoli is out of the room. “Mrs. Wasserman?”
I frown, trying to concentrate on his words. “What do you mean?”
“Last night you seemed way screwed-up. And today? You look pretty bad.”
“Just tired,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything like—”
“Blowback,” I say quickly, reluctant to hear his description of what it looks like. “Don’t worry about it.”
He narrows his eyes but waits for me to get up. He follows as I shuffle dazedly across campus.
“I need one more thing,” I say, “when we get to the nurse’s office.”
“Sure, man,” he says, but I don’t think he’s decided yet. I’m freaking him out.
“When we go in there, I am going to have a coughing fit, and you are going to volunteer to get me a glass of water. But you’re going to get me hot water—as hot as you can get it out of the tap. Okay?”
“Why?” asks Sam.
I force a grin. “Easiest way to fake a fever.”
Even semiconscious I can still manage a minor con.
Hours later I wake up in the nurse’s office, drooling on a pillow. I’m ravenously hungry. I get up and realize I’m still wearing my boots. I lace them and pad out to the front room.
The school nurse is gray-haired, short, and round. She moves around her white room, with its anatomical posters, with purpose born of the fact that she believes that all student problems can be cured with (a) rest on one of her cots, (b) two aspirin, or (c) Neosporin and a bandage. Luckily, there’s nothing else I need.
“Hey,” I say. “I’m feeling better. I’m going to go back to my room now if that’s okay?”
Nurse Kozel’s in the middle of giving pills to Willow Davis. “Cassel, why don’t you sit down and let me check your temperature. It was pretty high before.”
“Okay,” I say, slouching in a chair.
Willow swallows her medicine with a sip from a paper cup as Nurse Kozel crosses to the other side for the thermometer.
“You might as well lie down in the back until the pills start working,” Kozel calls. “I’ll come in a little while to check on you.”
“I’m so hungover,” Willow says to me under her breath. I smile the conspiratorial smile of people who have used the nurse’s office to sleep off the night before.
She heads for the back, and I get a thermometer stuck under my tongue. While I wait, I consider for the first time what happened—and didn’t happen—with Lila.
It’s just a matter of time.
Even in the light of day, the thought feels no less true.
Temptation is tempting. I like my shiny new Mercedes-Benz; I like getting fancy dinners with the head of a crime family; I like the Feds off my back and my mom safe. I like having Lila kiss me as if we could have some kind of future. I like it when she says my name as though I’m the only other person in the world.
I like it so much that I’ll probably do anything to get it.
Ignore that Lila doesn’t really love me. Kill my own brother. Become a hired assassin. Anything.
I thought that I could never betray my family, never work someone I loved, never kill anyone, never be like Philip, but I get more like him every day. Life’s full of opportunities to make crappy decisions that feel good. And after the first one, the rest get a whole lot easier.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE GREAT THING ABOUT a sick day is that it’s not hard to walk out of school. I do. I could drive, but I worry they’d notice my car missing. I can’t afford to take any more chances.
Besides, right now I’m not sure I should be trusted with nice things.
I have woken with a new resolution. No more stupid risks. No more trying to get caught. No more leaving things up to fate. No more waiting for the other shoe to drop. I walk until I get far enough off campus to be safe. Then I call a cab with my cell phone.
Barron doesn’t want to go to the Feds. If he tells them everything, then he gets nothing from the Brennans. But if he really believes I’m not going to cave to his demands, he might turn me in, and I need to tidy things up before he gets the chance. Especially because I know something that he can’t—there isn’t evidence just of what I’ve done at the old house. There’s evidence of Mom’s crime too.
First things fi
rst, I have to get rid of that.
I’m her son. It’s my job to keep her safe.
I wait on the tree-lined sidewalk in front of a bunch of nice-looking houses. Ones with backyards and swings. A white-haired lady smiles at me when she ducks out to get her mail from a polished brass box.
I smile back automatically. I bet those fat pearls she’s got in her ears are real. If I asked politely, she’d probably let me wait on her porch. Maybe even make me a sandwich.
My stomach grumbles. I ignore it. After another moment she goes back inside, the screen door slamming on my chances for lunch.
The trees shake with a sudden gust of wind, and a few still-green maple leaves fall around me. I toe one with my booted foot. It doesn’t look it, but it’s already dead.
The cab pulls up, the driver frowning when he sees me. I slide into the back and give him directions to the garbage house. Happily, he doesn’t ask any questions about picking up a kid three blocks away from a high school. Probably he’s seen a lot worse.
He drops me off, and I hand him the cash from a few recent wagers. I’m low on funds and I’m spending money that I don’t really have. An unexpected dark horse bet coming in could clean me out.
I head up the hill toward the old place. It looks ominous, even in the day. Its shingles are gray with neglect, and one of the windows in the upper story—the one to Mom’s old room—is broken with a bag taped over it.
Barron had to know I might come here. He had to think I might hide the body, now that he warned me that he knows where it is. But whatever surprises he left for me must be in the basement, because the kitchen looks identical to the way I left it on Sunday. My half cup of coffee is still sitting in the sink, the liquid inside looking ominously close to mold.
The coat is right where I left it too, in the back of the closet, gun still rolled inside. I kneel down and pull the bundle out just to be sure.
I picture my mother, pressing the barrel against Philip’s chest. He couldn’t have believed she’d shoot—he was her firstborn. Maybe he laughed. Or maybe he knew her better than I did. Maybe he saw in her expression that no amount of love was worth her freedom.
But the more I try to imagine it, the more I see myself in his place, feel the cold barrel of the gun, see my mother’s smeary lipsticked mouth pull into a grimace. A shudder runs down my back.
I force myself up, grab a knife from the block and a plastic bag from under the sink. I need to stop thinking. I start chopping the buttons off the coat instead. I’m going to burn the cloth, so I want to make sure any hooks or solid parts go into the plastic bag with the gun. After that I plan on weighting it with bricks and sinking it in the Round Valley Reservoir up near Clinton. Grandad once told me that half of New Jersey’s criminals have dropped something down there—it’s the deepest lake in the state.
I turn the pockets inside out, checking for coins.
Red leather gloves tumble onto the linoleum floor. And something else, something solid.
A familiar amulet, cracked in half. At the sight of it I know who killed Philip. Everything snaps into place. The plan changes.
Oh, man, I am an idiot.
I call her from a pay phone, just like Mom taught me.
“You should have told me,” I say, but I understand why she didn’t.
On the cab ride back to school, I get a text from Audrey.
I remember how there was a time when that would have thrilled me. Now I open my phone with a sigh.
mutually assured destruction
meet me @ the library tomorrow @ lunch
I have been too busy worrying about my immediate problems to really consider who to tell—or even whether to tell anyone—that Audrey threw a rock through Lila’s window, but Audrey raises an interesting point. If I report Audrey, then Audrey reports seeing me in Lila’s room. I’m not sure which crime they’ll think is worse, but I don’t want to get tossed out of Wallingford in our senior year, even if I get tossed out with someone else.
And I do know which one of us Northcutt thinks is more trustworthy.
I text her back: i’ll be there
I’m exhausted. Too tired to do anything more than drag myself back to the dorm and eat the rest of Sam’s Pop-Tarts. I fall asleep on top of my blankets, still in my clothes. For the second time that day, I don’t even remember to take my boots off.
Wednesday afternoon, Audrey is waiting for me on the library steps, red hair tossed by the wind. She’s sitting with her hands in bright kelly green gloves, clasped in the lap of her Wallingford pleated skirt.
Seeing her makes me think ugly thoughts. Zacharov’s story about Jenny. The words scrawled on the paper. Shards of glass shining at Lila’s feet.
“How could you?” Audrey spits when I get close, like she’s the one with a reason to be angry.
I’m taken aback. “What? You threw a rock—”
“So what? Lila took everything from me. Everything.” Her neck has gone red and blotchy, like it always does when she’s upset. “And then you’re there, in her room, in the middle of the night like you don’t care if you get caught. How could you do that after what she—what she—”
Tears stream down her cheeks. “What?” I ask.
“What did she do?”
She just shakes her head, incoherent with weeping.
I sigh and sit beside her on the steps. After a moment I put my arm around her shoulders, drawing her shaking body against me. She tucks her head into my neck, and I inhale the familiar floral scent of her shampoo. I know that she’d probably hate me if she knew what I was really like or what I could really do, but she was my girlfriend once. I can’t help caring.
“Hey,” I say softly, meaninglessly. “It’s okay. Whatever it is.”
“No, it’s not,” Audrey says. “I hate her. I hate her! I wish the rock smashed her face in.”
“You don’t mean that,” I say.
“She got Greg suspended, and then his parents wouldn’t let him come home.” She gives a wet gasp. “They saw those stupid pictures your friends took. He had to beg for his mother to—to even listen through the door.” She’s crying so hard that her breaths are more like big hiccupping gulps of air. She fights to get words out between sobs. “So they finally took him to get tested. And when they found out he wasn’t a worker, they decided to enroll him at Southwick Academy.”
Audrey stops trying to talk at that point. It’s as though she’s possessed by grief, as if something other than herself has hold of her body.
Southwick Academy is famously anti-worker. It’s in Florida, close to the Georgia border, and requires all student applications to come with a copy of their hyperbathygammic test. A test with clear negative results. If the student is accepted, then he or she is retested by the on-staff physician.
Sending Greg to Southwick means that his reputation, and presumably the reputation of his parents, is saved. I’d feel bad, if I didn’t think he’d enjoy being at a school where everyone feels the way he does about workers.
“We’ll all be out of high school in less than a year,” I say. “You’ll see him again.”
After a few moments Audrey pulls away and looks up at me with red-rimmed eyes. Then she shakes her head. “He told me about Lila before he left. How he cheated on me. That she worked him to make him want—”
“That’s not true,” I say.
She takes a long, shuddering breath. Then she wipes her cheeks with her kelly green gloves. “That just makes it worse. That you want her and he wants her and no one was forced and she’s not even nice.”
“Greg’s not nice,” I say.
“He was,” she says. “To me. When we were alone. But I guess it didn’t mean anything. Lila made it not mean anything.”
I get up. “No, she didn’t. Look, I get why you’re pissed. I even get why you smashed her window, but this has to stop. No more rocks. No more slurs.”
“She cheated on you, too,” Audrey says.
I just shake my head.
“Fine
,” she says, standing and dusting off her skirt. “If you don’t tell anyone what I did, I won’t say that you were in her room.”
“And you’ll leave Lila alone?”
“I’ll keep your secret. This time. I’m not promising anything else.” Audrey stalks down the steps and across the quad without looking back once.
My shirt is still wet with her tears.
Classes go about as well as usual. Lately, I can’t seem to get it together. Emma Bovary and her basket of apricots blur together with information asymmetries and incomplete markets. I close my eyes in one class and when I open them, I’m in another.
I walk into the cafeteria for dinner and pile food onto my plate. Tonight’s main course is chicken enchiladas with salsa verde. My stomach is so empty that even the smell of the food makes it churn. I’m early, so I have a few minutes at the table alone. I use them to shovel food into my face.
Eventually, Sam sits down across from me. He grins. “You look slightly less close to death.”
I snort, but most of my attention is on watching Lila walk in and pick up a tray of food. Looking at her brings a hot flush of memory to my skin. I’m ashamed of myself and I want to touch her again, all at once.
She and Daneca come to the table and take seats. Daneca looks over toward Sam, but he’s staring at his plate.
“Hey,” I say as neutrally as I can.
Lila points her fork at me. “I heard a rumor about you.”
“Oh?” I can’t tell if she’s teasing or not, but she’s not smiling.
“I heard that you were taking bets about me.” Lila rubs her gloved hand across her forehead, pushing back her bangs. She seems tired. I’m guessing she didn’t get any sleep last night. “Me and Greg. Me being crazy. Me being in a prison in Moscow.”
I glance quickly at Sam, who is wearing an expression of almost comical surprise. He’s been helping me keep the books for bets, since his stint running the business, so he knows what’s come in and what’s gone out. He knows we’re busted.
“Not because I wanted to,” I say. “If I didn’t, I was afraid people would make too much of it. I mean, I take bets on everything.”