I shake my head even before he finishes speaking. “Stop. I don’t want to have anything to do with him. I won’t.”
“But if you knew him in some other setting … if he was a guy in a coffee shop and you were a girl in school …” His words trail off as his eyes drift to the side—to nothing.
At first, I thought he was accusing me. But part of me thinks that maybe he’s jealous. That maybe I’m not defending myself here, but reassuring him instead.
“But I’m not,” I say, mirroring Cameron’s own words. He wouldn’t even check to see if his last life had left him something. All the hypotheticals in the world can’t change who we are right now.
“There are things about your personalities that must make you compatible,” he says.
He’s right, of course. There’s something. But it’s not enough, on its own. “You’re right,” I say. “There must be. But only on paper. Human beings aren’t quantifiable,” I say, thinking of those scientific studies. What I wouldn’t give for just one life. Just this one.
His eyes meet mine. “You kissed him,” he says. It’s a statement, but it’s also a question.
“Yes,” I say. I’m incapable of lying to him, apparently. Consequences be damned.
He pauses. “Why?”
“To buy myself some time. To catch him off guard.” I don’t pause. The words pour out of me, and I don’t know what he’ll do with them.
He nods to himself, like yes, that seems like me, and my heart sinks. “Dominic said you don’t do things without a reason.”
“Seems like a good idea to have a reason for things.”
“You want me to kiss you?” he asks. Cameron kills me with his honesty. With the way he challenges me to be honest with him, as well.
I squeeze me eyes shut and almost deny it, but stop myself. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought you wanted to,” I say, evading the question.
He half laughs. “Yeah, which is why I’m asking. The thing is, I have a terrible history with girls I like betraying me. So I’m feeling just the slightest bit cautious.” I assume he’s talking about this Ella person, but the only thing I notice is the whole “girls I like” part, and that I’m included in this category.
I look away, trying not to smile, then face him again. “I have no idea why I’m doing this.”
“That really doesn’t sound anything like you. Do better than that, Alina.” He leans back on his arms, and he watches my face as I answer.
I shrug with one shoulder. And I tell him the thing I was thinking, but didn’t say, back in the cafeteria. “Because I think you’re incredible. Because I want you to.”
And that’s all it takes. He leans forward and pulls my hat off, my ponytail now undone. He puts both hands on each side of my face, and his kiss is soft—softer than I expected. I don’t know what to do exactly, as my only experience before this was a fake kiss and I wasn’t thinking so much about the kiss as I was about the next step. But now I am lost in this moment, and this one only. He’s breathing me in, somehow, but he’s going slow, like he’s waiting for a sign from me, but I can’t move. And I can’t get him to move any closer.
I’m resting on my elbows and I have no idea how to move without us both toppling over, without ruining this. So I stay perfectly still, with his hands on my face, and his lips barely pressing on my own. I should probably do something. But I’m frozen, because there are a thousand different possibilities suddenly before me.
Like that moment when we left the underground for the rest of the world, that new and terrifying possibility of something more. It’s all I wanted, and now it’s right here, right in front of me. Suddenly, I have it: somebody who doesn’t see me as June—I am free of her. And now I’m just Alina Chase, and I don’t know if that’s good enough. How frightening that big expanse of freedom can be when you finally get there.
He pulls back, resting his forehead against mine, and it leaves me wanting and wanting and pushing up on my hands and leaning closer for more. He puts a hand on the back of my head then, and he gives me exactly what I’m asking for, coming closer.
I stop thinking. I know nothing.
Except this: with his hands tangled in my hair, and his weight on top of mine, I have never felt so free.
And then the door opens.
“Oh, ick.”
Chapter 18
“Stop.” casey holds a hand out. “Rewind. Undo. Cameron, a word?”
Cameron pulls back in record speed, his hand dropping from my hair, his body shifting to the other side of the mat.
“Find anything?” he asks, acting like nothing has happened, nothing has changed. Like the whole world hasn’t shifted in some way.
My body still feels charged—I can’t shift back like Cameron has just done. I feel like the room is moving.
Casey stands with her hands on her hips. “This”—she points at Cameron, then me, then him again—“isn’t happening.”
“Like I said,” he says, shrugging with one shoulder, “find anything?” I can’t tell whether his shrug means okay sure, nothing will happen or hey, that was nothing anyway or I’m ignoring you. There’s so much I don’t know about him still. The last moment has made me feel like I know both everything and nothing about him. That he’s telling me something and yet showing me how much more there’s still to know. The world balancing on a point, and he is at the center.
“Cameron,” she says.
“Casey,” he says.
She gestures to the doors behind her.
He sighs and shrugs again, but he follows her out into the hallway. Great. I flip onto my back again, and I try to switch my mind like Cameron has done. I think of the data, the names, the science, the starred numbers. But they float through my mind with no purpose, deemed unimportant by the current state of events.
I can hear them arguing, because as one voice raises, the other raises higher, until they’re almost yelling. “Casey, get a grip!”
“No, you get a grip!”
Ugh.
And then the door flies open, and someone sounds out of breath. I don’t dare move. They pace around the room, and finally, when I can’t stand it anymore, I ask, “Did you find anything about Ivory Street?”
Casey huffs, and I can’t tell whether she’s mad at me or him or the entire situation we’re stuck in. “As a matter of fact, yes,” she says. “I’ve found out she’s unlisted. But her name was on a paper published two years ago, which is promising.”
“How is that promising?”
“Well I was hoping she’s not dead, seeing as this was seventeen years ago … but no worries, she’s fifty-five and alive and well.” She pulls out a folded-up sheet of paper. “Here she is. At some political fund-raiser.” The picture is grainy and black-and-white, and from the distance, I can’t make out her features. “And while I don’t have a contact for her personally, I do have the location for her lab.”
I walk toward them, focusing on Casey, trying to ignore Cameron standing there completely perfect in my peripheral vision.
“So we just show up?” I ask.
“No,” Cameron says. “We go there to find her. And then we follow. Where is it?”
“Five- or six-hour drive, maybe more. I don’t know,” Casey says.
“Okay. Should we leave tonight?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I need to get a car first.”
“We have a car,” I say.
“A different one,” he says.
I feel like I’m keeping a mental tally of crimes, but I don’t have any better options. We don’t have any money—or access to any money without someone noticing. I hope the end justifies the means. I hope I am forgiven. I hope there’s something at the end of all this that makes these wrongs worth the price.
June, I hope you’re worth it.
And I swear I can hear her, as she whispers in my ear like an echo: I hope you’re worth it.
Cameron is tasked with creating some sort of meal from the thin
gs we’ve found in the cafeteria, and Casey picks a uniform from the pile and heads toward the girls’ locker room. I start to help him, but Casey stops at the door and calls to me. “Come with me, Alina.” I glance at Cameron, but he’s ignoring me. “Cameron says I need to check your stitches, anyway.” I start blushing again, remembering how I blushed back then. His hand on my stomach. His knuckles trailing against my skin. His kiss.
Casey walks into a shower and pulls the curtain shut behind her. She hands me her clothes through the side of the curtain, and I stand there, completely useless. The water turns on, and the steam drifts from her stall. “Oh, my God, this feels so good,” she says. Maybe she does want to check out my stitches, but it’s obvious that mostly she wants to keep me from Cameron.
“So listen, Alina,” she says, over the sound of running water. “We need to have a talk.” Okay, so I was wrong. Not only does she want to keep me from him, apparently we need to talk about it. I think about slinking away. I wonder if she’ll even notice. But in the end, I stand there holding her clothes, because I do owe her this. I do.
“Okay,” I say.
“I think you’re … Well, you’re you. And I like you. And obviously he likes you. And I think you like us?”
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to respond to that, but she doesn’t give me the chance anyway.
“But I’m not sure. And that uncertainty, I can’t deal with it right now. You understand? I can’t stay up worrying about whether you’re playing him for something.”
“I’m not,” I cut in.
“I hope you’re not, I really do. So if you mean that, stop playing.”
I’m not sure what part of this she thinks is me playing anything. It didn’t feel like playing at all. It felt like something bigger than the moment we were in. Bigger than the situation. Bigger than the goal. Something that had both nothing and everything to do with it. “But I’m not playing.”
She turns the water off and extends her hand through the curtain, and I place the uniform in her open palm. “This. Just stop this. Please,” she says. When she’s dressed, she pulls the curtain open, wringing out the ends of her hair. “His last girlfriend—Ella? It’s the whole reason he was locked up. She got him into the mess, and then she flipped on him to save her own ass. So please. You held a piece of glass to my throat. We risked our lives for you. The only thing I’m asking is for you to keep your distance. No distractions. This isn’t the time. You can see that, I’m sure. This isn’t the time.”
I nod. It’s all I can manage.
“Now let’s see the damage,” she says, like everything’s normal again.
I pull off my shirt. She leans closer. “He did a really good job,” she whispers. “No signs of infection, either.” Then she checks out my side. “Still sting?” she asks.
“Not too much,” I say.
She smiles. “I do like you, Alina. But we’re so entirely screwed right now. The only way to make it out of this is to get into that database and hope like hell there’s something we can use.”
I hate the idea that I must be like June, using what we might find for selfish reasons. I hate it, and yet I don’t have any better ideas.
Like the terrifying ocean. The only way past it is through it.
Dinner turns out to be cereal and soda with a side of chocolate bars.
And distance turns out to be the length of one blue gym mat, separated by one watchful sister.
Even in the dark, I see her staring at me. “See?” she says, “I already can’t sleep. This is ridiculous.”
Cameron, on the other side, is already breathing slowly and steadily, apparently unworried and unaffected by the whole situation.
“Don’t worry, Casey,” I say.
And then I spend the night trying not to think of him. Instead, I see the starred numbers on the printouts, boxes and boxes of paper in the hideaway. I try to focus, but instead my mind keeps replaying Cameron’s face the second before he kissed me. And then the kiss. And I can’t unfocus from it. I have decided it’s really unfair. I should get to decide what my mind thinks about, and not the other way around …
I bolt upright, my head swimming with Cameron and numbers and stars and data. I grab June’s notebook, flipping through the pages in the dark. Not that it would suddenly make sense to me now, even if I could see it. I need to see what’s on the hard drives again. I need to see the starred data and the data in the articles.
“Casey,” I say, shaking her shoulder.
“What?” she asks.
“I need to see the data again.”
“I’m actually sleeping here. In the morning, Alina.”
But I can’t sleep again. I can’t stop thinking of June, of what she must’ve felt. Because I realize, this path we’re on, I’m no longer following clues left behind for me. It’s me stepping in June’s footprints. It’s me reliving her life. It’s me seeing things exactly as she saw them. She hasn’t left me anything more. Now I’m discovering, just as she did. And so this feeling—this feeling that there’s something in that data—I know it’s not just my feeling. It’s June’s.
And the answer, I know, even though it pains me to think it—the answer is inside the database.
Cameron wakes before Casey. He sees me sitting in a ball on the mat, and he pushes himself to standing. He grins and disappears into the boys’ locker room for less than five minutes and comes out looking completely put together. He has on the uniform again, and for a moment I can picture him like this, walking out of the high school locker room, onto the court to play a game. I see him smile at some girl, like he’s doing to me, an acknowledgment of some secret they share. I see that he has had a life, and he won’t have it again. And maybe it’s not the same—from hiding to free, from free to hiding—but that difference, the distance from what we were to what we are, is the same. And if we really are so similar—people, I mean—then I think I understand him. I think he understands me, even.
“Off to get a car,” he says, jogging toward the office with the open window. I remember how he said that freeing me might turn out to be the one good thing he does with his life. How much we all need this. How much we all need each other.
I want to tell him to be careful, but I decide that makes me seem needy or nervous or both. He’s halfway toward the office, but I whisper it anyway.
Casey wakes almost as soon as he leaves. “Where’s Cameron?”
“Committing auto theft,” I say. “Ready?” I grab June’s notebook and hope I can make sense of it—if I can at least figure out what she was looking for.
“Ready for what?” she asks.
“The data. I need to see it again. You said in the morning. And it’s morning.”
“Right,” she says. She gropes around for the bag with the hard drives and stands up. “You’re a little intense in the morning, you know that?”
I think I’m probably a little intense all of the time. I’m realizing I don’t even care to hide it.
Casey walks with me down to the computer lab and sets up the cables, loading the files for me. As I sit down, she groans. “Give me five minutes. I would kill for some caffeine right now.”
She leaves me in the room, her footsteps quickly disappearing as I pull up the files of starred numbers. I do a search for the data, for the amount of asterisks. And I do a search for the total number of lines in the spreadsheet. I write down the answers, and I’m reading through the science article again when I hear the footsteps returning. They pause in front of the open door. “This has to mean something,” I say. “They don’t match up.”
And when the footsteps don’t continue, don’t respond, I look up, and I freeze.
There’s a boy in the doorway. Or a man. That in-between, indeterminate period. Probably my age. “Oh,” I say. “Hi.” I wish I had the ball cap on, so I could hide behind the brim. But at least I’m wearing the uniform.
He’s holding a mop and has a ring of keys attached to a belt loop. “Do you work here?” I ask. Trying to ma
ke it seem like I belong here, too. Smile, I remind myself.
“Yeah,” he says slowly. “In the summer.”
I lean back in my seat and pretend to refocus on the screen. “I’ll see you around, then,” I say, trying to convince him that I belong here, that I am meant to be here in this room, that he’s mistaken if he thinks otherwise. I am good at pretending. I am good at hiding the truth.
He takes a step back, then says, “You play for our team?”
“Uh-huh,” I say, because what else can I say when I’m wearing the school uniform and I’m in the school computer lab and he knows my face from somewhere. This school is probably small. He probably goes here. I’m probably screwed.
“Hey, Melissa!” I hear Casey yell from down the hall.
“In here,” I call back. Thank God, I think. Casey is better at people. She’ll know what to do. She already does.
“I was looking for you.” She skids to a stop in front of the room, pushing past the guy without making eye contact, like he’s in our way and his presence is inconsequential. “You done yet? We need to get back to the gym.”
I take the hint and start packing the cables away, disconnecting the hard drives, putting everything back in Casey’s bag.
But the guy just stands there. “What’s going on at the gym?” he asks.
Casey places a hand on her hip and still doesn’t look at him, but she puts on this condescending air, which makes her seem younger, instead of the other way around. “We’re volunteering,” she says. “Come on.” She pulls my arm, and I follow. We’re walking down the hall, ignoring him, when I hear it.
The click of a camera.
Casey hears it, too.
She spins around, and the guy gets off one more shot before sprinting in the other direction. “Shit,” she says, and she starts to run.
“Stop!” I say. “What are you going to do when you catch him?” I ask.
She stops, staring back at me, her eyes full of desperation.
“It’s too late,” I say. We’re not going to hurt some kid. Someone who’s here by accident. Someone whose only crime is the circumstances of his location. I was a victim of circumstance, a victim of my life—there’s never a good enough justification for the things they have done to me because of it.
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