He dumps the cash and tosses me the wallet while he counts.
“Eighty-three dollars,” he says.
“Not bad.” We should save it, but the pizza I promised is waiting, and the movies are calling.
In the shade of the drugstore, I kick the wallet under a bench. Some Good Samaritan’s bound to return it to the man, so at least he’ll get back his ID and credit cards.
As I look up, I’m struck by the sight.
Great big windows take up the whole face of the drugstore, every inch of them spotless except for painted-on advertisements for back-to-school specials like wide-ruled notebook paper and number two pencils.
There’s something about those windows.
Wen glances at the drugstore, the street, then the drugstore again. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Nothing.”
But there’s no denying that these wide windows, with their Palson’s Family Drugstore logo, are familiar.
Wen slides down the waxed aisle of the drugstore, wearing a pair of mirrored aviators, the price tag hanging between his eyes. Off the rack, I grab a pair of black sunglasses studded with fake diamonds. I pucker my lips and perch the frames on the end of my nose as I look in the mirror.
My reflection reminds me of the picture of Mom that Wen keeps inside the glove box of the Chevy. Sunglasses cover her clear blue-green eyes as she makes a peace sign at whoever’s taking the picture—Rona, no doubt.
I place them back on the rack where they belong.
Wen admires his reflection and fingers the price tag. “I think I’m going to buy these.”
“You’ll be wasting our money. Every dollar we spend is a dollar we have to steal.”
I check the aisle for people and the ceiling for cameras, then slip the glasses from his face and into the bag at my hip, price tag and all.
Wen homes in on a point past my shoulder. My suspicion prickles. We might have to make a run for it.
“Our friend from the pool hall,” he whispers. “He’s walking this way. Three. Two. One.”
I mouth, shit, before I whirl around and come face to face with the lazy smile of the only boy to ever get the better of me, a boy I thought belonged two hours down the road in a town called Pike.
I smirk and cross my arms. “If it isn’t Spencer Sway, the pool shark.”
He ambles closer, wearing a lazy smile. “You know, you’ve kept me up at night, riddled with guilt over that.”
“Oh, Spencer, there’s enough losing in life to feel bad about. Never feel bad for winning.”
He glances to my hips, where my bag is slung, hiding the shoplifted glasses.
Wen thrusts his hand toward Spencer. “Hey, man.”
“I’m sorry,” Spencer says as he pumps Wen’s hand. “I can’t remember your name.”
Wen opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.
Spencer’s face is frozen with this expression that will only hold so long before it melts into uncertainty. I can’t remember, either. This is the moment when you give a name, any name, and hope against all hope that the markie never remembered the first alias you told them.
“Joel,” Wen says. He holds up the batteries in his hand and makes his way toward the register. “I’ll go pay for our stuff.”
I skim over the dark indigo of Spencer’s jeans, his buttoned-up linen shirt, searching his arms for something interesting, a package of condoms or a bottle of booze. But there’s nothing in front of me other than a white-bread boy who’s easy on the eyes—in a way markie girls would like. All he’s carrying is a white paper medicine bag and a thick book with the words STONEWALL JACKSON UNIVERSITY FALL CATALOG running down the spine.
“Getting a jump on next year’s plans,” he says with a weak smile.
I nod like I understand what he’s saying, and he slides the book against his hip, so the title’s no longer readable.
Behind me, I hear Wen passing money back and forth at the register, changing bills so fast the clerk’s getting confused. An old Wanderer trick, which Wen hasn’t quite mastered. Sometimes my brother’s timing is terrible.
Spencer pivots toward the counter, but I plant my hand in the crook of his elbow and guide him deeper into the store.
“So what are you doing here? I thought you lived in Pike.”
He cringes and leans closer. “Keep it down. I wasn’t supposed to be in Pike, and, well, gossip travels quick in this town.”
“Oooh,” I whisper. “Where should you have been?”
“AP chemistry. But my attention span felt a little short that day.”
“I can imagine.” I flick the white paper bag he’s holding. “Picking up your Adderall?”
He smiles and pulls it a few inches out of my reach. “For my little sister. She’s got a cold.” He cranes his neck to the front of the store where Wen stands. “Hey, are you two okay?”
I swallow. “Perfect.”
“It’s your brother . . .” He brings a finger to his own cheek—the same spot as Wen’s bruise. Spencer’s noticed. “That’s one hell of a shiner.”
“Oh no, he’s clumsy as all get out. Fell down and hit his cheek on our family’s schooner. High seas. You see, my brother’s supposed to wear glasses. Drives our mom up a tree that he won’t, but he’s vain. Horribly vain.”
“Meet you in the truck, Amy,” yells Wen.
“Why don’t your parents get him contacts?”
Smart-ass. “Can’t wear ’em. He’s got a condition with the shape of his eyes, and the doctors say no contacts.”
“Astigmatism?”
“Exactly.” Really, I have no idea what he’s talking about. I add astigmatism to my encyclopedia list. “You probably have things to do, don’t you, Spencer?”
“Have you ever considered a career in the military? Because you’re an old pro at handing out marching orders.”
We step onto the pristine, litter-free Cedar Falls sidewalk. Beside the door, Wen’s got one foot propped on the bench, where a little girl is sitting with her ice cream cone. He flips a quarter in the air and slaps it down on his wrist. “See, heads again.”
She climbs onto her knees and gapes at the coin. “Wow.”
“You ready to go, Mags?” Spencer wiggles his fingers, and the girl comes to his side and takes his hand. “My sister, Margaret.”
Her eyes are serious, staring up at Spencer. “That boy can do magic. He throws the coin in the air, and it’s always heads.”
He was teaching her how to do a controlled toss, a sleight of hand where you toss the coin in the air so it wobbles but never flips. That’s how we control the outcome of the coin flip every time. Wen shouldn’t be doing it here.
Spencer drops to his knee beside Margaret and dabs at her mouth with a napkin from his pocket. “It’s probably a trick coin. Both sides are heads, right, Joel?”
Wen cringes and slips the coin inside his pocket. “Right.”
I have to change the subject, so I grab on to my knees and bend to Margaret’s eye level. “How old are you, Margaret?”
“Seven,” she answers.
“Five,” says Spencer. “She lies.”
Margaret and I have something in common.
I slump against the front of the Chevy, the metal grate burning through my shirt. “Big age gap. What are you, seventeen, eighteen, forty-five?”
“First guess. She was, uh”—Spencer lowers his voice—“a surprise. In more ways than one.” He points to the Italian restaurant beside the drugstore. “We’re going to get pizza. You want to come along?”
Wen lurches forward, and it takes all my restraint not to reach forward and haul his pizza-loving ass into the Chevy.
“No, thanks,” I say. “Our parents are probably wondering where we got to.”
Spencer crosses the dusty sidewalk, leaving a few feet to separate us. “Maybe I’ll see you around town.”
“Stranger things have happened.” Squinting at the sun, I reach up and brush that one stubborn piece of hair free from his ey
es. A compulsion, a reflex to fix the one out-of-sorts thing about him.
Both Spencer and Margaret trail off down the sidewalk as our engine turns over.
Wen digs through my bag for his new glasses and slides them onto his face, inspecting his reflection in the vanity mirror. “So we’re not getting pizza now?”
“We shouldn’t be eating with them. And I do believe this is a one-pizza-joint town.”
I pull into the road, and the Chevy idles behind a crop of kids in the crosswalk. Out the passenger side, Margaret waves at us through the windows of the pizza shop. Spencer lifts his hand.
There’s something more behind Spencer’s eyes, some kind of knowing that sets my cucumber-cool nerves on edge.
CHAPTER 8
We lie in our beds, not still hungry, but not satisfied, either. I lay my encyclopedia across my shirt, with my eyes closed, and hug it against my chest. Not even A, with its grayscale pictures of sweeping plains and rugged jungles, is enough to calm the stirring inside me.
Our screens do nothing to deaden the sound of the kids yelling outside. It’s near midnight, and they’re still running around chasing fireflies.
Wen stops thumbing through G and rolls over onto his side. “She talked to me first, you know? Said she was bored. How was I supposed to know she was his sister?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“She was a kid,” he says. “Who’s going to listen to her?”
“They’re markies, Wen, and that’s his little sister. They’re different from us. They might listen. And you didn’t have to shortchange the clerk.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve shortchanged every clerk who’s waited on you for the last six months.” He opens G and reads, but his feet rustle through the sheets. “Did you know giraffes can live for months without water? That’s longer than a camel.”
I press my lips together, holding on to my smile. My brother knows I can’t stay angry with him for long.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
I’ve read through the half set of encyclopedias once, skipping over most of the topics. Not my brother—Wen’s read them all cover to cover at least five times.
Our band of Wanderers values the education they believe we need. We didn’t sit in classrooms with sharpened number-two pencils poised, studying grammar on a blackboard. Cons and scams were where Rona focused our young, moldable minds. And we learned by doing.
Wen and I could pick someone clean as soon as we were tall enough to reach their pockets. Rona taught us enough about search-and-seizure law to keep our wrists out of handcuffs. Then there was math—math without infinite numbers, geometry, cosines, and tangents. And at the center of our teaching was cold, hard cash. First, there was dealing out bills until we could count it faster than most markies, fast enough to shortchange a clerk. Next, we learned enough statistics to help us place a bet and win.
Education came in small doses, but those who wanted to find it within the Wanderer world did. Wen and I did both—wanted it and found it—though we had different reasons. He loved the idea of knowing things, and I just wanted to know them.
He wanted to learn how the world worked, and I wanted to learn how to work the world.
“You’re not still thinking about going to that markie party Saturday, are you?” he asks.
“And why wouldn’t I be?”
“Are you sure it’s a good idea? Our luck’s been shit since we got to town.”
“One night, Wen. One good night and we’re free as birds for at least a month.”
“Free as birds,” he repeats, like he’s tasting the words. “Speaking of birds . . . maybe that owl was a warning we shouldn’t be doing this. From the Falconer.”
The owl we buried is a memory neither of us seems able to shake. For me, the owl is nothing but a reminder that I have no faith. I would tell Wen I don’t believe, if only that didn’t make me the one to shatter his beliefs.
“You really think it works like that? Because I don’t see it that way.” I hate the cadence of my voice when I’m manipulating my brother. “If something bad was going to happen, we’d have more than one sign, you know?”
He nods to himself.
“Wen, just give me one night.”
He turns off his book light, and I know I’ve won him over. “Good night, you thief, you vagabond.”
“Good night.”
My mind is already drifting across oceans as a voice cuts through.
“You kids in there?”
Rona’s got her nose pressed against the screen, and she’s rattling the door.
“We’re sleeping!” I scream.
Wen hops off the bed to let her inside. He hangs a lantern from the tent ceiling and gives me a dirty look as she stops under its light.
Rona’s applied a bold ring of red lipstick and sprayed so much hair spray her hair is peppered with flecks of white. All fixed up for some reason. I have a feeling I’m about to learn why.
“Felix is here,” she says.
The book on my chest tumbles from my mattress to the floor. “What do you mean, he’s here? It’s not time. I’m—I’m only sixteen.”
Our Formica countertop creaks against her weight as she settles her hips against it. She stares down at the linoleum and then meets my eyes. “Sixteen’s not so unheard of. Perfectly marriageable in the eyes of Boss.”
Nothing was supposed to happen until I turned eighteen—an adult in every world, even the markies’. My months for planning a way to keep all of me, they’ve been stolen. I’m a good enough thief to know when I’ve been swindled.
I expect rage to come screaming out of me, but Rona’s words are a noose around my throat.
“Where is he now?” I manage.
“Boss’s RV. With Boss and Lando. Lando says you gotta at least say hello.”
“I don’t want to see him. Fuck this.”
“Why you gotta talk like that?” Rona sighs. “This ain’t nothing, honey. They won’t marry you off tonight.”
Wen slides from the kitchen booth and wedges himself between us. “She’s not going to marry anyone.”
This’ll hurt him as much as it will me, and I have to stay strong enough for the both of us. I stand straighter and command those fleeting parts of me to stay put a little longer. Nothing’s happened yet, and freedom is still mine to claim.
Rona shakes a finger at him. “Don’t you be putting more stubborn ideas in Tal’s head. She’s got enough of them on her own.” She turns to me. “It’s only a little greeting. You’ve gotta say hello.”
“There must be a way out,” says Wen. His words grow shaky, like he’s trying not to cry. “Nothing can be that absolute.”
Rona rests her shoulder against the door frame. “If there’s a way out of it, I’m hard pressed to find it. Not with Felix’s family paying such a high price for Tal.”
Money. It makes the world go round, they say. Felix’s family used it once to buy me for him. A bundle of money can buy me back again, for myself this time. How to get my hands on enough cash, I’m not sure.
Tonight Felix is a dozen trailers over, waiting to meet me. I’ve got to treat this like any other con and fake whatever needs faking until I can pull a plan together. Surprise is always a part of the cons and, therefore, an old friend of mine.
I hop off my mattress, the pads of my feet stinging as they hit the floor. “Let’s get this over with.”
We head toward the heart of camp, Rona, Wen, and me. In some camps, girls get married as early as fifteen, but Boss and Lando have been lax when it comes to that tradition.
I’m three months away from my seventeenth birthday, and it’s been eight months since I watched marriage tear apart everything Sonia was.
Sonia got married alongside the roar of the sea. The Wanderers didn’t plan it that way, though the ocean was the place I led them three days before the ceremony.
Rumors abounded that the tugging inside me might have been influenced by Sonia’s fantasies of bare feet and sand between he
r toes. My gift is never compromised by my desires, I swore to everyone. Not ever.
The night before Sonia’s wedding, the two of us crept outside long after the camp dozed off. We sat on the dock, dangling our legs off the edge, and drank wine coolers I’d lifted hours before. When the bottles were empty, our bodies buzzing from liquor and laughter, she grinned and tugged us both into the freezing salt water, clothes and all.
Sonia and Emil took off after their wedding to head around the coast for a week, just the two of them. That night they returned, I didn’t have her to myself, not for a minute. People from camp kept her distracted, offering up their congratulations and advice about running cons as a married unit, and Sonia’s feet stayed planted at Emil’s side.
Late at night, I snuck into the new trailer Emil had bought them, untangled her limbs from his, and coaxed her onto the beach.
The sand stung our faces, and the wind whipped our hair into knots. I tried to talk to her about my latest scam and about Wen spending his time buried in his encyclopedias. Sonia barely listened, flicking her eyes in the direction of camp every few minutes like she was afraid Emil would find her outside of their bed.
“Let’s jump in,” I said, squeezing her hands inside mine.
“Are you joking? It’s freezing.”
“You’ve never cared about anything like that before.”
She moved her front teeth along her bottom lip and whispered—whispered even though not a soul was around and the wind drowned out her voice—“Emil wouldn’t like it.” She pulled away from me and balled up the bottom of her sweatshirt in her hands. “I can’t be tearing off with you all hours of the night anymore.”
I knew those weren’t Sonia’s words. They were Emil’s through and through.
“Marriage isn’t going to change you, Sonia.”
But we both knew—it already had.
Marriage will wreck me, too. I can’t belong to someone when I’ve only ever been accountable to myself and to the Wen-and-Tal version of the world. Rona said Sonia grew up. But it was so much more than that. She stopped wishing and dreaming and wanting for herself.
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