Shame heats his face. “Of course.”
My vision blurs. She says something else soothing, but not to me.
* * *
We check out in the morning. Sunlight makes my brain feel like it’s throbbing inside my skull. Sweat slicks my skin—the kind of unnatural sweat that comes along with injury. Each movement makes me as dizzy as riding a thousand roller coasters all at once. While we wait for the valet to get my car, I fumble through my backpack for sunglasses and try to avoid looking at the dark bruise on Mom’s shoulder.
She’s been totally silent since she told me we were leaving—all through packing and even the ride down in the elevator. I can tell she’s seething.
I feel too sick to know what to do about it.
Finally my ancient and rusted Benz drives up to the front of the hotel. Mom hands something to the driver and gets the keys while I slide in on the other side. The seat is hot on the backs of my legs, even through jeans.
“How could you answer the door like that?” she shouts as soon as we pull away from the curb. “Not looking through the peephole. Not calling out to ask who was there?”
I flinch at her voice.
“Are you stupid, Cassel? Didn’t I teach you better than that?”
She’s right. It was thoughtless. Stupid. Private school has made me careless. It’s exactly the kind of dumb mistake that separates a decent con man from an amateur. Plus the blowback from the emotion work makes her unstable. Not that she isn’t normally pretty unstable. But working magnifies it. So does anger. There’s nothing for me to do but ride it out.
I was used to her being like this when I was a kid. But she’s been in jail long enough for me to forget how bad she can get.
“Are you stupid?” she screeches. “Answer me!”
“Stop,” I say, and lean my head against the window, shutting my eyes. “Please stop. I’m sorry, okay?”
“No,” she says, her voice vicious and certain. “No one’s that pathetic. You did it on purpose! You wanted to ruin things for me.”
“Oh, come on,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking. I said I was sorry. Look, I’m the one with the goose egg to show for it. So we have to leave Atlantic City? We’d have to leave in a week anyway when I went back to school.”
“You did this to me because of Lila.” Her gaze is on the road, but her eyes glitter with fury. “Because you’re still angry.”
Lila. My best friend, who I thought I killed.
“I’m not talking about her,” I snap. “Not with you.”
I think about Lila’s wide, expressive mouth turning up at the corners. I think about her spread out on my bed, reaching for me.
With one touch of her hand, Mom made Lila love me. And made sure I could never, ever have her.
“Hit a nerve?” Mom says, gleefully cruel. “It’s amazing you actually thought you were good enough for Zacharov’s daughter.”
“Shut up,” I say.
“She was using you, you stupid little moron. When everything was said and done, she wouldn’t have given you the time of day, Cassel. You would have been a reminder of Barron and misery and nothing more.”
“I don’t care,” I say. My hands are shaking. “It would still have been better than—” Better than having to avoid her until the curse fades. Better than the way she’ll look at me once it does.
Lila’s desire for me is a perversion of love. A mockery.
And I almost didn’t care, I wanted her so much.
“I did you a favor,” my mother says. “You should be grateful. You should be thanking me. I got you Lila on a silver platter—something you could have never in your life had otherwise.”
I laugh abruptly. “I should be thanking you? How about you hold your breath until I do?”
“Don’t talk that way to me,” Mom roars, and slaps me, hard.
Hard enough that my battered head hits the window. I see stars. Little explosions of light behind the dark glasses. Behind my eyelids.
“Pull over,” I say. Nausea overwhelms me.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice seesawing back to sweet. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Are you okay?”
The world is starting to tilt. “You have to pull over.”
“Maybe right now you’d rather walk than deal with me, but if you’re really hurt, then you better—”
“Pull over!” I shout, and something about the urgency of my tone finally convinces her. She steers the car abruptly onto the shoulder of the road and brakes hard. I stumble out while we’re still moving.
Just in time to heave my guts up in the grass.
I really hope no one at Wallingford wants me to write an essay on how I spent my summer vacation.
CHAPTER TWO
I PARK MY BENZ IN THE seniors’ lot, which is much closer to the dorms than where underclassmen are forced to leave their cars. I feel a little smug until I shut off the engine and it makes an odd metallic cough, like maybe it just gave up the ghost. I get out and kick the front tire halfheartedly. I had a plan to fix up the car, but with Mom home I never quite got around to it.
Leaving my bags in the trunk, I walk across campus toward the Finke Academic Center.
Over the doorway of the large brick building hangs a hand-lettered sign: WELCOME FRESHMEN. The trees rustle with a light wind, and I am overcome with a feeling of nostalgia for something I haven’t yet lost.
At a table inside, Ms. Noyes is looking through a box of cards and giving out orientation packets. A few sophomores I don’t know too well are shrieking and hugging one another. When they see me, they quiet down and start whispering instead. I overhear “kill himself” and “in his underwear” and “cute.” I walk faster.
At the desk a blotchy, trembling girl and her father are picking up dorm keys. She clings to his hand like she’d be lost without it. This is clearly the first time the girl has spent any time away from home. I feel sorry for her and envy her all at once.
“Hey, Ms. Noyes,” I say when it’s my turn. “How’s it going?”
She looks up and smiles. “Cassel Sharpe! I am so pleased you’ll be living on campus again.” She gets me my manila folder and room assignment. In addition to the exclusive parking lot and, bizarrely, a stretch of grass—no, really, it’s called “senior grass”—seniors also get the best dorm rooms. It looks like mine is on the ground level. I guess they’re a little leery of me on a high floor after that whole almost-falling-off-a-roof thing.
“Me too.” And I am glad to be back. I really, really am. “Has Sam Yu checked in yet?”
She flips through the cards. “No, you beat him.”
Sam has been my roommate since we were sophomores, but it wasn’t until the end of last year that we got to be friends. I’m still not really good at friendship, but I’m trying.
“Thanks. See you later,” I say. There’s always an assembly on the first night before classes start. Headmistress Northcutt and Dean Wharton tell us that we’re intelligent, capable young men and women, and then proceed to lecture us about how only the school rules keep us safe from ourselves. It’s a good time.
“Try to stay out of trouble,” she says with a grin. Her voice is teasing, but there’s a firmness there that makes me think she doesn’t say this to all incoming students.
“Absolutely,” I say.
Back in the parking lot I start unloading the car. There’s a bunch of stuff. Mom spent Labor Day weekend pretending we’d never had a fight and buying me extravagant presents to make up for that fight we never had. I am now the owner of a new iPod, a leather bomber jacket, and a laptop. I’m pretty sure I saw her paying for the laptop with Clyde Austin’s credit card, but I pretended not to notice. Mom packed my bags for me too, on her working theory that no matter what I say I want, she knows what I’ll actually need. I repacked them as soon as she was out of the room.
“You know I love you, right, baby?” Mom asked this morning as I was leaving.
The weird thing is, I do know.
When I get to my new dorm room—bigger than the one we had last year, plus the ground floor means I don’t have to haul all my crap up a million flights of stairs—I dump everything on the floor and sigh.
I wonder where Lila is right now. I wonder if her father shipped her off to some Swiss Boarding School for worker crime family kids, some place with armed guards and high gates. I wonder if she likes it. Maybe the curse has already worn off and she’s just sitting around, sipping hot chocolate and chatting up ski instructors. Maybe it would be safe to call her, just to talk for a few minutes. Just to hear her voice.
I want to, so badly that I force myself to call my brother Barron instead, just to remind me what’s real. He told me to call once I settled in, anyway. I figure this is settled enough.
“Hey,” he says, picking up after only one ring. “How’s my favorite brother?” Every time I hear his voice, I get the same knot in my stomach. He made me into a killer. He used me, but he doesn’t remember that. He thinks that we’re thick as thieves, hand in glove. All the things I made him think.
Blowback ate away so many of his memories that he believes the fake ones I carefully forged into his notebooks—the ones of us being close. And that makes him the only person I’m sure I can trust.
Pathetic, right?
“I’m worried about Mom. She’s getting worse,” I say. “Reckless. She can’t get caught again, or she’s going to jail forever.”
I’m not sure what he can do. It’s not like I did such a good job of keeping her out of trouble in Atlantic City.
“Oh, come on.” He sounds bored and a little drunk. I hear soft music in the background. It’s not even noon. “Juries love her.”
I’m pretty sure he’s missing the point. “Just, please—she’s not careful. Maybe she’ll listen to you. You were going to be the lawyer—”
“She’s an old lady,” Barron says. “And she’s been locked up for years. Let her have some fun. She needs to blow off steam. Seduce old dudes. Lose money at canasta.”
I laugh, despite myself. “Just keep an eye on her before she takes those old dudes for everything they’ve got.”
“Roger dodger. Mission heard and accepted,” he says, and I find myself relaxing. Then he sighs. “Have you talked to Philip recently?”
“You know I haven’t,” I say. “Every time I call, he hangs up on me, and there’s nothing I can—”
The doorknob starts to turn.
“Let me call you later,” I say quickly. It’s too weird to be talking to Barron and pretending everything is normal in front of my roommate, who knows what Barron’s done. Who’d wonder why I would call Philip. Who doesn’t understand what it means to have a family as messed up as mine.
“Peace out, little brother,” Barron says, and hangs up.
Sam walks in, duffel bag over his shoulder. “Hey,” he says with a shy smile. “Long time, no see. How was Toronto?”
“There was supposed to be an ice castle,” I say. “But it melted.”
Yeah, I lied to him about where I spent the summer. I didn’t have to—there was no really good reason not to tell him I went to Atlantic City, except it didn’t seem like a place normal people go with a parent. I told you I’m no good at this friends thing.
“That’s too bad.” Sam turns to put an aluminum toolbox on the rickety wooden dresser. He’s a big guy, tall and round. He always seems to move carefully, like someone who is uncomfortable with taking up too much space. “Hey, I got some new stuff you’re going to love.”
“Oh, yeah?” I unpack the way I usually do—by shoving everything under my bed until room inspection. That’s what happens when you grow up in a garbage house; you feel more comfortable with a little squalor.
“I have a kit to make molds of teeth and craft really perfect fangs. Like, perfect. They fit over your teeth as if they were tiny little gloves.” He looks happier than I remember him. “Daneca and I went into New York—to this special effects warehouse, and cleaned the place out. Resins. Elastomer. Poly foams. I could probably fake setting someone on fire.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Hey,” he says. “After last year I figured I’d better be prepared.”
Carter Thompson Memorial Auditorium is the place where, every year, all the students gather to listen while the rules are repeated for anyone too lazy to read the handbook. “Boys must wear the Wallingford jacket and tie, black dress pants, and a white shirt. Girls must wear the Wallingford jacket, a black skirt or black dress pants, and a white shirt. Both boys and girls should wear black dress shoes. No sneakers. No jeans.” Fascinating stuff like that.
Sam and I try to grab a seat in the back, but Ms. Logan, the school secretary, spots us and points out an empty row in the front.
“Boys,” she says. “We’re trying to be an example to all the new students, now that we’re seniors, aren’t we?”
“Can’t we be bad examples?” Sam asks, and I snort.
“Mr. Yu,” says Ms. Logan, pressing her lips together. “Senioritis is a serious condition this early in the year. Lethal. Mr. Sharpe, I would appreciate it if you didn’t encourage him.”
We move to the new seats.
Dean Wharton and Headmistress Northcutt are already up at the lectern. Northcutt starts off with lots of rah-rahing about how we’re all one big family here at Walling-ford, how we support one another through the hard times, and how we’ll look back on our years here as among the best of our lives.
