I must look blank, because she laughs. “I go to this school too. Everyone knows you got cuffed and thrown into the back of a black car by guys in suits.”
“So, what do most people think?”
“There’s a rumor going around that you’re a narc,” she says, and I groan. “But I think the jury’s still out.”
“I don’t know what the suits want with me any more than the school does,” I say. “I’m sorry I asked you about the cigarette. I just had to know.”
“You’re getting very popular,” she says. “Not enough Cassel to go around.”
I look up. We’ve walked past the library. We’re almost to the woods. I swing around, and she does the same. We walk back together quietly, lost in separate thoughts.
I want to reach out for her hand, but I don’t. It’s not fair. She’d have to take it.
I’m heading toward Physics when Sam stops me in the hall.
“Did you hear?” he asks. “Greg Harmsford went crazy and trashed his own laptop.”
“When?” I ask, frowning. “At lunch?”
“Last night. Apparently everyone on his hall woke up to him drowning it in a sink. The screen was already cracked like he’d been punching it.” At that, Sam can no longer contain his laughter. “Serious anger management problem.”
I grin.
“He says that he did it in his sleep. Way to steal your excuse,” says Sam. “Besides, everyone could see that his eyes were open.”
“Oh,” I say, the grin sliding off my face. “He was sleepwalking?”
“He was faking,” Sam says.
I wonder where Lila was while I drove around with her father. I wonder if she visited Greg’s room, if he asked her to come in, if she slowly removed her gloves before she ran her hands through his hair.
Sam turns to me to say something else.
Then, thankfully, the bell rings and I have to run to class. I sit down and listen to Dr. Jonahdab. Today she’s talking about the principal of momentum and how hard it is to stop something once it has been set in motion.
Daneca rushes past me out of the room at the end of Physics. She heads for Sam’s class and stands near the door, waiting for him. The expression she’s wearing makes it clear that Sam hasn’t started talking to her yet.
“Please,” she says to him, hugging her books to her chest, but he walks past her without even hesitating. The skin around her eyes is red and swollen with recent tears.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I say, although I’m not sure I believe it. It’s just something people say.
“I guess I should have expected it,” she says, pushing back a lock of purple-tipped hair and sighing. “My mom said lots of people want to know workers but would never date one. I thought Sam was different.”
My stomach growls, and I remember that I skipped lunch. “No, you didn’t,” I say. “That’s why you lied to him.”
“Well, I was right, wasn’t I?” she asks plaintively. She wants to be contradicted.
“I don’t know,” I say.
My next class—ceramics—is held across the quad at the Rawlings Fine Arts Center. I’m surprised when Daneca follows me onto the green; I really doubt her next class is there too.
“What do you mean?” she asks. “Why do you think he’s like this?”
“Maybe he’s mad you didn’t trust him. Maybe he’s mad you didn’t tell him the real reason you didn’t want to be tested. Maybe he’s just happy to be in the right for once—you know, enjoying having the upper hand.”
“He’s not like that,” she says.
“You mean he’s not like me?” I ask. In the nearby parking lot a tow truck is starting to pull out with a car attached.
She blinks, as if startled. I have no idea why; it’s not like she doesn’t keep assuming terrible things about me. “I didn’t say that.”
“Well, you’re right. I would like it, even if I didn’t want to admit it. Everyone likes a little power, especially people who feel powerless.” I think of Sam at the start of the semester, feeling like he could never measure up to Daneca, but I doubt she has any idea about that.
“Is that how you are with Lila?” If she wasn’t judging me before, she’s judging me now.
I shake my head, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “You know it’s not the same—not real. Haven’t you ever worked—”
I stop speaking as I realize the car being towed is mine. “What the hell?” I say, and take off running.
“Hey!” I shout as I see the bumper of my car smack against the last speed bump before the road. All I can see of the guy driving is that he’s got a cap on, pulled low enough to shade his eyes. I can’t even see the license on the tow truck, since my own car is obscuring it. I can see the name airbrushed on the side of the truck, though. Tallington Towing.
“What just happened?” Daneca asks. She’s standing in the empty parking spot where my Benz used to be.
“He stole my car!” I say, utterly baffled. I turn and sweep my hand to indicate all the other vehicles in the parking lot. “Why not one of these? These are nice cars! Why my crappy broken down piece of—”
“Cassel,” Daneca says sternly, interrupting me. She points to the ground in front of her. “You better take a look at this.”
I walk over and spot a small black jewelry box with a black bow sitting in the middle of the empty space. I squat down and touch the small tag, flip it over. There on the black paper, in even blacker ink, is a crude drawing of the crenellations of a castle. Frowning at it, I feel the familiar pull of the shadow world of crime and cons. This is a gift from that world.
Castle.
Cassel.
I pull the ribbon, and it comes free easily. Before I lift the lid, I briefly consider that there’s going to be something unpleasant inside—a bomb or a finger—but if there’s really a body part inside, waiting’s only going to make everything worse. I open the box. Inside, nestled in cut black foam, is a square Benz key. Shiny. Silver edged and so newfangled that it looks more like a flash drive than anything to do with a car.
I lift it up and click the unlock button. Headlights flicker in a car across from where I’m standing. A black Roadster with chrome trim.
“Are you kidding me?” I say.
Daneca walks over and presses her face against the window. Her breath fogs the glass. “There’s a letter inside.”
I hear the bell ring faintly from inside the academic center. We’re officially late for class.
Daneca seems not to hear it. She opens the door and takes out an envelope. Her gloved fingers make quick work of it, ripping open the flap before I can stop her.
“Hey,” I say. “That’s mine.”
“Do you know who it’s from?” she asks, unfolding the paper.
Sure. There’s only one person it could be from. Zacharov. But I’d rather she didn’t know that.
I make a grab for the letter, but she laughs and holds it out of reach.
“Come on,” I say, but she’s already reading.
“Iiiiinteresting,” Daneca says, her gaze rising to meet mine. She holds out the note:
A taste of your future.
—Z
I snatch it out of her hand and crumple it. “Let’s take a drive,” I say, holding the key up in front of her. “We’re already cutting class—at least we can have some fun.”
Daneca slides into the passenger seat without protest, shocking me. She waits until I’ve buckled myself in before she asks, “So, what’s that note about?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Just that Zacharov wants me to join his merry band of thieves.”
“Are you going to keep this?” she asks, brushing gloved fingers over the dashboard. “It’s a pretty expensive bribe.”
The car is beautiful. Its engine hums and the gas pedal responds to even the lightest touch.
“If you keep it,” Daneca says, “he’ll have his claws in you.”
Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.
I pull out onto the street and head for the highway. We ride in silence for a few moments.
“Before—when we were heading to class—you asked me if I ever worked anyone.” Daneca looks out the window.
“Please know that I am seriously the last person in the world to judge you.”
She laughs. “Where are we going anyway?”
“I thought we’d get coffee and a doughnut. Brain food.”
“I’m more of an herbal tea girl,” Daneca says.
“I’m shocked,” I say, taking one hand off the wheel and placing it over my heart. “But you were about to tell me all your secrets. Please, continue.”
She rolls her eyes, leans forward, and fiddles with the radio. The speakers are just as fantastic as the rest of the car. No hiss. No distortion. Just full, clear sound. “There’s not much to tell,” she says, adjusting the volume down. “There was this guy I liked when I was twelve, right before I came to Wallingford. His name was Justin. We were both at this arts-focused middle school and he was a kid actor. He’d done some commercials and everything. I was just on the edge of his friends circle, you know.”
I nod. I survive at the edge of friends circles.
“And I followed him around like a puppy dog. Every time he talked to me, I felt like my heart was in my throat. I wrote a haiku about him.”
I look over at her, eyebrows raised. “Seriously? A haiku?”
“Oh, yeah—want to hear it? ‘Golden blond hair and eyes like blue laser beams. Why won’t you notice me?’”
I laugh, snorting. She laughs too.
“I can’t believe you remember that,” I say.
“Well, I remember it because he read it. The teacher hung up all of our haikus without telling us she was going to, and a girl in class told him about mine. It was horrible. Humiliating. All his friends would tease me about it and he would just look at me with this smug smirk. Ugh.”
“He sounds like a jerk.”
“He was a jerk,” Daneca says. “But I still liked him. I think in some weird way I liked him more.”
“So, did you work him?”
“No,” Daneca said. “I worked me. To stop feeling the way I did. To feel nothing.”
I didn’t expect that. “You’re a good person,” I say, humbled. “I give you a hard time about it, but I really do admire you. You care so much about doing the right thing.”
She shakes her head as I pull into a coffee shop. “It was weird. Every time I looked at him afterward, I had that tip-of-the-tongue feeling, like I couldn’t quite remember a word I ought to have known. It felt wrong, Cassel.”
We get out of the car. “I’m not saying that working yourself is a great idea . . .”
The coffee place has tin ceilings and a counter full of fresh-baked cookies. Its tables are filled with students and the self-employed, tapping away on laptops and clutching cups with a reverence that suggests they just crawled out of bed.
Daneca orders a mate chai latte, and I get a regular cup of coffee. Her drink comes out a vivid grass green.
I make a face. We head to the only free table, one next to the door and the racks of newspapers. As I sit down, one of the headlines catches my eye.
“Don’t look like that,” Daneca says. “It’s good. Want a sip?”
I shake my head. There is a photograph of a man I know beside the words “Bronx Hitman Jumps Bail.” The type under the picture says “Death worker Emil Lombardo, also known as the Hunter, missing after being indicted for double homicide.” They didn’t even bother to lie to me about his name.
“Do you have a quarter?” I ask, fishing around in my pockets.
Daneca reaches into her messenger bag and feels around until she finds one. She slaps it down on the table. “You know what the weirdest thing about me working myself over that boy was?”
I find fifty cents and feed our combined change into the machine. “No, what?”
I lift out the paper. The double homicide was of a thirty-four-year-old woman and her mother. Two witnesses to another crime—something about the Zacharovs and real estate. There are smaller pictures of the dead women beneath the fold. They both look like nice people.
Nice people. Good people. Like Daneca.
“The weirdest thing,” Daneca says, “is that after I stopped liking him, he asked me out. When I turned him down, he was really hurt. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong.”
I touch my gloved finger to the murdered women’s faces, letting the leather smear the ink. Last night I helped their killer get away. “That is weird,” I say hollowly.
When we get back to school, it’s just in time for my computer class. I walk in as the bell stops ringing.
“Mr. Sharpe,” says Ms. Takano without looking up. “They’re looking for you in the office.” She hands me her official hall pass, a large plastic dinosaur.
I take my time walking across the green. I think about my new car, gleaming in the sun. I think of the sophomore-year production of Macbeth, and Amanda Kerwick as Lady Macbeth, holding up her bare hands, looking for blood.
But there is no mere spot on me. As her husband says, “I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
I shake my head. I’m just looking for excuses to keep the car.
When I walk into the office, Ms. Logan frowns. “I didn’t think you’d be back so soon. Cassel—you know you’re supposed to sign out when you leave campus.”
