by C. L. Stone
Corey had the table set up with one of the pizzas open. He put the other ones aside. He had the television on, with an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation playing.
I sighed heavily and felt a lot of the day slipping away. The lure of pizza had me dashing over and jumping on the bed closest to the table. I bounced once.
Corey laughed. He motioned to the box. “Don’t have any plates. Come eat over here so we’re not getting crumbs in the bed.”
“Let’s get crumbs in Raven’s bed,” I said. “Or sand.”
Corey shook his head. “He’s the last one I want to piss off.”
I could sympathize, but it was tempting. I moved the other chair until I was sitting beside him and could watch television. I grabbed a piece of pizza, used a napkin to catch crumbs and sat back.
By the time I was on my third piece, I had my feet propped up on his legs. By my fifth piece, he’d finished, sat back, and was warming my toes with his hands as he watched the show.
Corey stretched in his seat during a commercial. “Must be nice to be captain of a star ship,” he said. “I think I could handle that job.”
“No,” I said. “You’d be Data.”
He laughed. “I’m not quite Data.”
“Data’s my favorite,” I said. “I mean he’s super smart but there’s things he doesn’t know and he doesn’t hesitate to go look it up or ask one of the others. He’s so literal and open. And he’s an android.”
Corey readjusted a little, tugging my feet closer in his lap. “So you’re into androids?”
“How cool would it be to be an android?” I said. I finished my pizza and crumpled the napkin, tossing it toward the empty pizza box. “You don’t have to eat. You don’t have to sleep. Super strong…”
“No emotions, though,” he said. “No real feelings.”
“Ah,” I said. I sliced my hand through the air. “He’s probably better off.” Wasn’t that the truth? Wasn’t I screwing up with the guys when I couldn’t control my feelings for them? If I was an android, it wouldn’t matter. It had to be so much easier.
Corey sighed, tilting his head like he was considering. “Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “It’d suck.” He squeezed my feet. “He spent the entire show trying to be human. I mean, unless he installed a specific computer program, he wouldn’t enjoy pizza. You couldn’t even taste it. You wouldn’t care.”
“Good point.” I got up, moving over to the bed to stretch out on it. I captured two of the pillows together and stuffed them under my head. Corey was a blast. It was the first time all day I hadn’t been worried about Wil or the Academy or Sara or anything. It was good to forget for a minute. Clear the head.
Corey pulled his phone from his pocket, checking it. “No word from the guys.”
I rolled over, looking at him. The pang of guilt setting in. “Is that bad?”
He shrugged. “If they were calling, I’d be more worried. Means they need backup, and we don’t exactly have transportation to get to them quickly right now.” He got up, stretched and climbed onto the bed, sitting cross-legged. “You shouldn’t lay down after you eat,” he said. “Bad for you.”
I wanted to ignore him because I was tired, but I moved the pillows and propped myself up to sitting.
He moved himself until he was next to me. He held the phone up, looking at it like he was waiting for messages.
“Are you worried?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean not just for my brother. The others… They’re like family to me. I’m not supposed to worry. I should trust them to do what they need. It’s hard not to, though.”
“They’re not dead,” I said, meaning to be helpful.
He laughed a little. “Well, I wasn’t thinking that, until now.”
Crap. “Well, I mean, they…” I almost said the Academy would get them out, but I realized I shouldn’t know that part. “Can Axel do anything? Are they going to be stuck in jail?”
“Naw,” Corey said. “They’ll be okay there. I mean trespassing is probably the worst they could pin on them, and I doubt they’ll be able to charge them with much at all.”
“They could lie. They could make things up.”
“They’d be going through paperwork and trouble to do that.” He shook his head. “They wouldn’t do it for something like this. Too risky to their jobs.”
I guess that made sense.
Corey’s fingers fumbled with his phone. His eyes kept going to it. I had the same feeling. Was there anything I could do besides wait?
“How long will it take?” I asked. “How long will it be before they get released?”
Corey shrugged. “It’s late. They could keep them overnight.”
“Axel couldn’t bail them out now?”
“I think they’d want a judge to look it over before they set bail, if any. Judges are home for the evening. It really depends on what’s going on.” He grimaced and then tucked his phone aside. “Can’t sit here and worry,” he said. “It’s not helpful.”
I checked the time. It was ten. I looked around, trying to figure out what to do next. I was super sleepy, though. I started going down the list. “Is there anything we can do for Sara?”
“Well, from what you’ve told me, I’m thinking we should talk to Future again. But not tonight. She could tell us who that woman is, perhaps; the one you were interested in.”
“Should we babysit the grandmother?”
“Brandon tapped her phone for now,” he said. “If she gets a call, we’ll know. And he’s been watching all day. No activity with the grandmother, other than fixing up her lawn.”
I stopped for a minute, considering. “Is she not worried? Could it be they actually left town?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He sighed and rolled his head back until he was resting it against the headboard. “I wish it was so simple. We really should find Sara, though, and make sure she’s okay. I don’t like not knowing.”
It was what gnawed at me, too. I didn’t even know the poor girl, but I couldn’t stop thinking of that apartment, her things, her chalk drawings. One day she’s drawing flowers on the porch, the next, who knows where she is? “Maybe…I mean if he ran off and they were still safe, maybe they should stay that way.”
“They should have their lives back,” he said. “They shouldn’t have to run and hide.”
“If he comes back, he’d end up in jail, wouldn’t he?”
“Maybe,” he said. “He’d have to go to trial.”
“The mother would get the girl.”
“If we can find her,” he said.
“She’s probably out looking for her.”
He shook his head slowly. He didn’t know.
I sighed heavily. We had no leads, and nothing to do until morning, and that wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg. The Academy, Wil, the mess I was in with the boys…not to mention I was homeless except for the guys supporting me.
Corey reached out, taking my hand in his. He covered it with both hands, using his thumbs to massage the back softly. “Not a great start to an Academy introduction, is it?”
I squinted at him. “Hm?”
“I mean, the first time with Coaltar was messed up and now with this Sara stuff, we shouldn’t be this incompetent.” He smirked but there was a shot of darkness in his eyes. “And we can’t even get back to Wil right now. I know you want to. You probably think we’re screw-ups.”
That caught me so hard. He had absolutely no idea. Screw-ups I could live with. Screw-ups I could love. If all the Academy was, was well-meaning screw-ups, I’d have signed up right then and there and would have never, ever left. I was a screw-up, so I’d fit in. “It’s not normally like this,” I said, almost a question, but I knew better, and I didn’t want to lie.
Corey shook his head, smiling. “I shouldn’t say it never gets this crazy, because it can. But usually there’s a break between cases like this. And, I mean, it’s been a strange case all over.”
“That’s not your fault, tho
ugh,” I said. “The grandmother had lied from the beginning. Maybe if she said something earlier, it could have been prevented.”
His thumbs stopped massaging for a moment, and his smile lifted more. “So you’re still good with signing up? Joining us, maybe?”
I looked at him for the longest time, at the eagerness at the possibility of me joining them.
Despite knowing the bad things they’d done in the past, the mug shots and the rap sheets, looking at his cerulean eyes, his handsome face, and his sweet smile, I couldn’t imagine Corey doing any of the bad things Blake had said. I couldn’t imagine Corey kidnapping my own brother just to persuade me to join, or for some other idiotic plan.
Would the Academy do it and not tell Corey? Did they even know about the missing people at that school Blake had talked about?
“I like…” I said slowly, “I like what we’re doing here. I like why we’re here. I mean I don’t like the situation but…”
“You’re glad we’re helping,” he said.
“Yes. And I was okay with what you were doing before. With making sure the whole drug thing was cleared up.” I pressed my lips together, then, unsure how to say the next without being crude; Corey was the last person I wanted to be crude with.
He squeezed my hand gently. “What?”
I looked down, finding it easier to talk to my legs. “My own father lied to me for who knows how many years,” I said. Again, I was quiet, because I didn’t want to say the next part. It was hard. It was probably the biggest risk, because it was the most honest I was feeling in that moment. All the fears about them welled up inside me, and I was on the edge, where I could swim or drown, and I was scared to death of both.
“Kayli,” he said quietly. He released my hand and slowly, as if checking with me that it was okay, eased his arm around my shoulders. “Come here a second.”
As easy as falling, I did. My head pressed his chest. My hands gripped at his shirt. The tough ego inside me fought back tears. How in the world did he do this to me? All the tension I’d been feeling for the past few days was surfacing.
Corey’s hands on my back smoothed over the shirt, warming. “I know he lied,” he said quietly. “Your family should be someone you trust. Sometimes your family, your real family, isn’t who you think it is.” He pressed his cheek to the top of my head, and breathed out slowly. “It’s hard to jump in with someone new when you’ve been knocked down by someone you probably once cared about a lot. But you have to start somewhere.”
He was right, and it killed me. What was worse, was that this time, this moment, may have been my last chance. I wanted to believe in them so much. I wanted to believe that guys like this could exist. If they were as bad as Blake said, it could break my faith. If someone like Corey could be evil, what chance was there of anyone being good?
And what did that say about me? Because I was neck deep with them, and feeling a part of something better. It scared me because I worked so well with them. Like I was born to do this. Like this was why I suffered so long, with pickpocketing and with the rough life I’d led. If they were bad guys, and yet I felt they were doing good things, maybe I was just like them. It meant I was a bad guy, too, didn’t it?
“You don’t have to decide now,” he said quietly. “I know—”
“I don’t know anything,” I said in a voice a little higher pitched than I meant. I swallowed again and started over. “I mean, it’s…difficult to say I want to, when I do want to, but I don’t know anything about it. I ask questions, and I get these strange answers. It doesn’t make any sense.”
He was quiet for a long moment, stroking my back and holding on to me. “What do you want to know?” he asked quietly.
“Hm?”
“I understand how you feel,” he said. He pulled back a bit, enough so he could look down at me. I forced myself to put on a poker face, but knew my lip was pouting. He released one side of me to put his hand on my cheek. “Kayli, I felt the same way when I joined.”
“You did?”
He nodded. “I spent a few years among hackers. I lived on the Internet, in places I shouldn’t have been. I learned secrets because I was curious. I wanted to know things. When the Academy finally caught up with me, I dove right in, trying to figure out how it worked. I didn’t like not knowing how it operated. It drove me crazy.”
“Did you find out?”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “I did. I did it the wrong way.”
“Why?”
“Because what I found was the world looking in on the Academy,” he said. “The things I pulled up, the stuff I learned, it was all an outside view, not the inside.”
“What’s the difference?”
He smiled slowly. His thumb slid across my cheek. “Look at us, now,” he said. “Look at you. Okay, imagine for a moment, we’re back at that mall, and instead of you bumping into me, I was watching you pick a pocket. If I didn’t know you at all, what would I think?”
I shook my head a bit, but it was tucked against him, so there was little movement. “Thief,” I said.
He reached down, taking up my hand and splaying out the drawing of the scarab beetle with the spade on my skin. He traced the lines. “I wouldn’t know Kayli. I wouldn’t know that she only took what she needed, because she was just trying to survive and keep her brother safe and fed. I wouldn’t see that she had the most self-sacrificing personality, a huge heart. Underneath the rough exterior, you’d do anything to right the wrongs. I’d see just the shell.”
I breathed heavily and tugged away from him enough that he drew his hand away so I could press my own palms to my eyes. “But how do you get to know the real Academy? Not everyone…not all people are good on the inside. I mean I thought my dad… I always thought I could sympathize because he lost his wife…my mom…”
“There’s Wil,” he said quietly.
“Wil left without telling me,” I said, keeping my face covered. “He didn’t trust me to tell me he was leaving.”
Corey was quiet for a long moment. I couldn’t blame him. There wasn’t an easy answer to this. I didn’t know why Wil left, but the fact that he didn’t leave a note or tell me meant he didn’t want me to know where he’d gone.
Maybe that’s why I was so hesitant to go find him. I didn’t want to find out he didn’t want to see me. I didn’t want to learn that somehow this was my fault, that maybe he left because he really hated me.
“Kayli,” he whispered. He tugged at my elbow for a moment. I resisted, pressing my palms against my face still. He pursued, tugging again. “Sweetie, look at me for a second.”
I opened my eyes and was caught up in his intense gaze and gentle, sympathetic smile. He didn’t have to say anything. His smile was a promise and his hands rubbing my arm encouraged me.
I think I fell in love at that moment. He was so sympathetic, strong, smart, handsome.
“You don’t know the truth,” he said quietly. “You see the shell. You see he left without a word. Did you think for a moment that maybe he left to give you a chance? That he could see you deteriorating? He’s a smart kid, so I bet he could feel you being tense and worrying. Maybe he didn’t do it the right way, but maybe he was trying because he cared about you, and he couldn’t stand to see you running yourself into the ground for his sake. Maybe in his own way, he thought he was helping.”
I shook my head slowly, thinking.
“And maybe,” he said, “the Academy isn’t like how you see it from the outside. Like how Kayli isn’t just a thief. If anyone was looking in on this group, they’d see two boys in jail, two trying to bail them out, and us interfering with a case that doesn’t have anything to do with us. They wouldn’t know we were looking for a missing girl, taking the risks necessary to find her and to make sure she’s safe, that the family doesn’t end up in jail and her in foster care of some kind.”
“How do you know, though?” I asked. “I mean, the Academy part. How can you join something when you don’t know a thing about what th
ey stand for? What they do?”
“What do we do, Kayli?” he asked. The corner of his mouth lifted. “You and I. What have we been doing?”
I quieted, unsure.
“If we are the Academy,” he said, “then what we do is who we are and what we’re about. When you couldn’t live with knowing Coaltar got away trying to poison a well in a village you’d never even heard of, what did we do?”
“Marc didn’t want to go with me. There was a rule he didn’t want to break,” I said.
“Because they wouldn’t be happy if any of us got hurt.” He rubbed his palms over my arms. “We protect those we care about first, because we can’t help anyone else if we go running off, getting shot at, injured, killed, or arrested or any of that stuff. But we also have to make our own decisions. We need to take risks, and sometimes when you’re involved in an assignment like this, or like with Coaltar, you may end up breaking some Academy rules because you need to. Because we’re on the inside, and the ones who keep us in check, they’re on the outside and they have to wait for us to tell them what happened.”
“And then you get in trouble,” I said.
He smiled. “They only want the details. They trust us to do the right thing. The only ones who can punish us are ourselves. We choose, not them.”
“So if you get into trouble, you…decide what happens?”
He nodded, smiling. “You’re getting it.”
It was a hard idea to wrap my head around. It was a strange situation, like they really were in charge of their own group, they just had others in the group as a sounding board to keep them in check. Maybe he was right. Maybe I didn’t understand everything going on, but that’s why I was sticking to finding out myself, instead of relying on what Blake told me, which could only be his outside perspective. I’d been on the inside, with them, with Corey, Blake’s theories didn’t tell the whole story. It was why I stuck around instead of running off with Blake. I knew there was more to it.
“Am I allowed to know?” I asked. “I mean, you said there’s rules. What are they? How does it work?”
His smile lifted and his eyes sparked. “Do you want to get in and find out?”