by Tim Floreen
“Can I try?” Nico asked.
Our hands fumbled against each other as I passed him the lighter and a sparkler. Then the lighter flame sprang up again, and his sparkler started to crackle and fizz. He flashed me a sly grin in the unsteady light. I tried to smile back but couldn’t tell if I succeeded. He lobbed the sparkler over the side and rushed forward to watch it spiral down.
“Come here! You have to see this!”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. Terror sizzled through me. For a second my whole body felt like one of those fireworks. The light from the sparkler had already started to fade, but I could still see the tips of my sneakers inches away from the edge, the narrow ledge thirty feet down where that kid had landed, and beyond that, a yawning, black nothingness. Then I couldn’t see anything at all. My heart sprinted. Inside my hoodie pocket, Gremlin resumed his purring. But I forced myself to stay there, inches away from that void I couldn’t see but knew was right in front of me. Feeling Nico’s hot, strong hand clutch mine made the agony worthwhile.
“So this is really the first time you haven’t had your Secret Service detail following you in years?” he asked.
“Yeah. Crazy, huh?” I lit another sparkler but didn’t throw it in. We turned to face each other, the firework crackling between us. Its flickering light brought out the threads of gold in his brown eyes.
“What does it feel like to be watched all the time like that?”
“Pretty much as sucky as you’d expect. Being the son of the president is like all the worst parts of being the president with none of the perks. You have to give up your whole life, but you don’t get paid and you have no power whatsoever and you’ll never have an airport named after you. There are lights and cameras in your face all the time, people talking about you on the Supernet.”
He shook his head. “No wonder you’re in the closet.”
My stomach clenched. “What makes you think I’m in the closet?”
“You mean you’re out?”
“No, I mean, what makes you think I’m gay?”
He laughed. The loudest laugh I’d heard from him yet. It filled the cavern and echoed against the walls. I almost thought he’d start a cave-in. Wiping his eyes, he noticed I hadn’t joined him. “You are kidding, aren’t you?”
“Well,” I mumbled.
“You asked me out on a date, Lee. We were just holding hands a second ago. Of course you’re gay.” He smacked my chest with the back of his hand.
I coughed up a weak laugh of my own. “Yeah. I was kidding. Of course I’m gay.”
And just like that, there went my plausible deniability. I didn’t even freak out, either. I thought of Jeremy, that kid I’d kissed freshman year. Neither one of us had ever once spoken the word “gay,” not even after we’d kissed. That charged silence had felt safe, and also weirdly exciting. But this habit Nico had of laying everything out on the table—this was exciting too, in a different way.
“Listen, Nico,” I said. “I think I should tell you something.” The firework had almost burned all the way down. The fountain of sparks had slowed to a trickle. “Toward the end of freshman year, I started hanging out with this guy named Jeremy. We never talked about it, but I could tell he had, you know, feelings for me. I guess I had feelings too. One night we were studying together in the library. We’d taken over an alcove up on the mezzanine, and I’d noticed my Nighttime Armed Babysitter had fallen asleep. He does that sometimes. I realized it was the first time Jeremy and I had ever been alone together, and I knew it might be the last too, so I kissed him.”
The sparkler hissed out in my hand. Nico’s face disappeared before I could catch his reaction. Even with my severely limited understanding of romance, I knew talking about kissing some other guy probably wasn’t recommended on a first date.
“How was it?” Nico said.
I tossed aside the burned-out sparkler and set another one crackling. “Nice, I think. I was so nervous, I barely felt it. Then, after it was over, I noticed a security camera creeping by. I got all weird, and made up an excuse to leave, and spent the rest of the night alone in my room with my stomach tied up in knots. I’d thought about boys before, but I’d never actually done anything like that, and now that my gayness was an actual thing, it had me seriously freaked. I spun out this whole story in my brain: the kiss had been recorded, someone would see the footage, my dad and everybody else in America would find out. The next time I saw Jeremy, I couldn’t even get myself to say hello to him. We spent the rest of the year ignoring each other, and when I came back after summer break, I found out he’d transferred to another school.”
Nico raised his hand and let the sparks glance off his fingers. “So if we were to end up kissing tonight—I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but if—is that what you’d do to me, too? Ignore me for the rest of the year?”
I gulped. Had he just said, If we were to end up kissing? “Sorry, that’s not what I meant. I promise I wouldn’t do that. But I want you to understand how things are. It’s true, Nico, I’m deep in the closet. Like all the way in the back, behind the winter coats. If people find out the founder of the Human Values Movement has a gay son, he won’t stand a chance when he comes up for reelection.”
“But why?” Nico said. “That’s what I don’t get. Why does being antirobot also make Human Values antigay?”
“You should ask Bex. She’s the expert. She has this theory that the invention of artificial consciousness triggered a sort of collective existential crisis in the human race. Now that machines were just as sophisticated as humans, it suddenly seemed incredibly important to figure out what exactly sets humans apart from machines. Because there has to be something, right? The Human Values Movement decided the difference is free will. Supposedly, people have it, machines don’t. Even the 2Bs can only follow their programming, but humans have the ability to choose who and what and how to be. I guess the Human Values hard-liners think that includes sexuality, too.”
Nico squinted at me. “Tell me something. You don’t believe that Human Values crap, do you?”
“I don’t think I chose to be gay, if that’s what you mean. In fact, I didn’t choose a lot of things. Like being the son of the president. Or coming to Inverness. Or even being in the closet, really. All in all, I’d say I have about as much free will as an espresso maker.”
Another sparkler died. Only one left. For some reason, I dreaded returning to the brighter, steadier light of our pucks.
After igniting the last firework, I took a tiny step closer to the edge of the chasm and peeked over.
“Every once in a while,” I said, “I look up at this mountain and think: What if that kid from the story didn’t die after all? What if he just realized he was sick of his life and decided to stay in those tunnels forever? I know it sounds weird, but I like to imagine him wandering around in here. Hundreds of miles of passages, a whole maze of choices, and he can go anywhere he likes.”
Nico glanced over the edge, then back at me, his nose scrunched. “You know, you really are a downer sometimes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Of course you have a choice. You always have a choice. I mean, not about being gay. That’s just stupid. But you could come out of the closet if you really wanted to.”
“You sound like Bex. Didn’t you hear what I just said? If I came out, it would destroy my dad.”
“That’s his problem.”
“And it would be hell for me, too.”
“How do you know that?”
“Trust me. I know.” He opened his mouth to say something else, but I raised a finger. “Nico. I’m serious. Don’t.”
“Okay.” He held up his hands in surrender. “I’ll let that issue go. For now. Let’s take another example. Something else you could choose to do if you wanted to.”
“What’s that?”
“You could kiss me.”
My arm must’ve jerked, because the sparkler flew out of my fingers. I fumbled for it, and for a few s
econds it jumped between my hands, spinning and twirling and leaving swirls of sparks in its wake.
Then Nico plucked it out of the air.
“Thanks,” I said, reaching for it.
He tossed it into the chasm. The last thing I saw was that Cheshire grin of his. Then blackness.
“No lights,” he said. “No cameras.”
Again I felt the heat from his body on mine. But I didn’t budge. Part of me—the Kamikaze Lee part—did want to kiss Nico, so much it made my chest feel like it might explode. Meanwhile, Gutless Lee wanted to run straight out of the cavern and all the way back to school. And as usual, there I stood, stuck in the middle, doing nothing.
“Now, you have to admit,” Nico said, “that was a pretty romantic moment. I hope you’re not going to leave me hang—”
I grabbed him in the darkness, pulled him to me, and crushed my mouth against his.
13
We kissed only once. His lips were so warm, I flinched when they first touched mine. A half second later, though, I couldn’t get enough of his heat. My whole body seemed to light up in a way it never had before, like a machine that executed some brand-new, hidden program when you pressed the right combination of buttons.
Afterward, we pulled apart, still holding each other’s arms. My stomach contracted. For the past few minutes I’d forgotten all about that huge chasm right next to us, but now the memory came rushing back. I couldn’t tell in the darkness how close we were to the edge, and I couldn’t remember where we’d stood the last time the light had gone out.
“Puck, turn on your light,” I blurted.
Nico reappeared in front of me, and so did the cavern walls, the ground under our feet, the edge of the chasm—six inches away.
“We should probably head back,” I told him, trying to sound casual.
“Hey.” He squeezed my forearms. “You okay?”
“Sure, I’m fine.” I did my best to focus on Nico’s brown eyes and crooked teeth, his hands holding my arms. And little by little, it was true. I was fine. My stomach untwisted itself. My head cleared. I smiled at him, and it didn’t even feel like one of my grotesque forced smiles. It was like the muscles of my face had finally figured out what to do. “I just don’t want to push my luck with my Armed Babysitters.”
We made our way single file through the tunnel. Outside again, he grabbed my hand, laced his fingers through mine, and squeezed. We walked like that all the way down the mountainside, while our pucks bobbed along side by side above our heads. I seemed to have gotten all the gloomy babbling out of my system, so Nico finally had a chance to tell me more about his own life: his three noisy sisters; his drama teacher back at his old school, the one who first got him interested in theater; his addiction to empanadas made by Santiago street vendors, “the greasier the better.” The trail rejoined the river. Not long after that, we reached the highway and stopped on the shoulder. Inverness Prep’s front gate stood across from us, with the school’s jagged silhouette behind it. Like a reflex, my hand released his.
“Remember, you promised,” Nico said. “You won’t get weird, right?”
“I won’t get weird. But I still need this to stay quiet, at least for a while. You understand that, don’t you?”
“In other words, no serenading you in the dining hall.”
“That would probably be best.”
We clambered down the riverbank and passed through the tunnel that went under the highway. I closed the gate behind us. After releasing the Swarmbots, we followed the walkway along the side of the canal, our pucks’ lights turned off again to make us less conspicuous. Near the top of the stairs that led to the front lawn, we crouched and waited for the Secret Service agent to pass. Then we skirted the front of the school as far as the tree that stood below Nico’s window.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel.”
She trotted out of the bushes, a few leaves stuck in her blond hair. After she’d once again scaled the wall, before she started to hoist Nico up, I grabbed him and gave him one more quick, reckless kiss. He was back in his window a few moments later, his elbows on the sill, his puck hovering next to him. He murmured something into it. My puck chimed and lit up. Another line I recognized from Romeo and Juliet: A thousand times good night.
A second chime, and a new message appeared on my puck’s circular screen: Where the hell are you, sir?
Crap. I gave Nico one last wave and sprinted back toward the canal. On the way, I panted out a message to Trumbull: I’ll be there in a minute. Just please don’t call in the entire US military, okay? Then I instructed my puck to make the Swarmbots stand down and wait outside my window.
I hurried down the stairs, under the school, through the subbasement, and back into the service stairwell, Rapunzel scuttling along at my heels. I took the stairs all the way up to the third floor: no point in putting myself through another agonizing climb now. Bursting into the boys’ wing corridor, I found Trumbull standing in my doorway, sunglasses on, arms crossed. He didn’t say a word. He just stepped to the side and motioned me into my room with a nod of his head.
“You little sneak!” Ray said, apparently delighted by my stunt. He pointed his thumb at my open window. “How did you get down?”
“With this, I assume.”
Trumbull picked up Rapunzel. She wiggled her legs and turned her Barbie doll head to smile at him. “How can I help you?”
“How do you turn this thing off, sir?”
“Go to sleep, Rapunzel.”
Her legs went limp. Her eyes closed. Ray hooked his finger through the carabiner hanging from her side and tugged on the cord, chuckling. “Rapunzel. That’s a good one.”
Trumbull tucked her under his arm. “You realize if you hadn’t answered my message, this whole place would be swarming with Humvees and helicopters right now.”
“But I did answer your message. I was going stir-crazy, Trumbull. I just needed to get some fresh air. I didn’t go far.”
“Yeah,” Ray put in. “No harm done. Ease up on the guy, Trumbull.”
But Trumbull didn’t even glance at Ray. “Fresh air? What if that raven of yours had found you wandering around out there? Or what if this robot here had malfunctioned the way that one did? Did you think about that?”
I honestly hadn’t. The date tonight had squeezed everything else out of my mind. “I’m sorry. I really am.” I tossed my backpack in the corner, sank down on my bed, and pushed up my glasses to rub my eyes. “Listen, Trumbull, it’s late. Could you finish reprimanding me in the morning? I need to get some sleep.”
“I can’t let you do that, sir. Your grandfather wants to see you.”
I fumbled my glasses back into place. “How come?”
“Why do you think? He wants to talk to you about what you did.”
“You mean you told him?” I sprang to my feet. “Why’d you have to do that?”
“Protocol, sir. You were out after curfew. You broke a school rule. I notified him just a minute ago, after I received your message.”
“Sorry, buddy,” Ray added.
I glanced at my puck. It was almost one in the morning. “And he wants to see me now?”
“That’s correct.”
“Should I change?” I still had on my black hoodie and jeans. The riverbank had left my sneakers caked in mud.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Trumbull handed Rapunzel to Ray—I knew I wouldn’t get her back any time soon—and opened the door for me. Ray gave me a good-luck wink. I headed down the corridor, and Trumbull fell into position behind me. The school was silent except for the river’s low rumble and the creaking of the floor under our feet. The Spiders did most of their cleaning at night, when the halls were clear, so we passed three of them on our way to the main staircase. Each one folded itself against the wall and murmured a polite “excuse me.” They reminded me of empty-eyed prison guards standing by as I marched to my execution.
We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, where the teachers and s
taff members who lived on campus had their apartments. From there, a narrower staircase led up to the tower that housed Stroud’s office and residence. In the vestibule, his secretary’s desk stood empty.
“He told me he’d call you in when he was ready for you,” Trumbull said.
I nodded.
An arrangement of framed photographs crowded the wall next to me: students in gray blazers or midnight-blue athletic gear, most of them boys. I’d never looked at them carefully before. As my eyes drifted over the pictures and their captions, I recognized a few of the faces and even more of the names. Heads of state, heads of corporations, dignitaries foreign and domestic. Inverness Prep’s Wall of Fame.
My gaze landed on a photo of a tall, good-looking guy with white-blond hair and a calculating expression that reminded me of the FUUWLs. He stood clutching a trophy above a caption that read, “Paul Waring wins the National Junior Chess League Championship for Inverness Prep.”
Paul Waring. He’d been the director of Bethesda National Laboratory when Mom and Dr. Singh worked there. He’d also ordered Charlotte’s termination—and then died in her first attack. I hadn’t realized he’d gone to Inverness Prep too. It seemed like everyone on earth had a connection to this place. The people who were important, at least. Or, as in my case, the people who happened to be related to the people who were important.
Stroud’s voice rumbled from my puck. “You may come in, Lee. Leave your puck outside, please.”
I felt a coldness in my chest, like I’d just swallowed ice. It pushed out the warmth that had lingered there ever since my kiss with Nico. My hand burrowed into my hoodie pocket and wrapped around Gremlin. “Stay out here, puck,” I said. Trumbull opened the door. I found myself wishing I could ask him to come in with me. What good was a Secret Service detail if it couldn’t protect you from the things that really scared you?
14
Stroud had never summoned me to his office for a reprimand before. Of course, Bex had made the trip plenty of times. She always tried to shrug off those visits afterward, calling them more annoying than anything else, but I could tell they rattled her. As for me, I’d started having nightmares about my grandfather long before I’d set foot at Inverness Prep.