Mind Games
Page 10
Doesn't matter where I go.
Outside the entrance hall I nearly bump into a boy. He's wearing a coat and he is tall and he belongs black-and-white and shirtless on the wall of a clothing store and his warm brown eyes are completely glazed over. I simultaneously want to kiss him and to get as far away from him as possible. He feels wrong, he feels dangerous; my heart speeds up the same way for him that it did for the stun guns.
Everything here feels wrong all the time. But he feels exciting wrong.
"Hey," he says, grinning, his eyes tracing over me without apology.
"Hey." There are no boys here. Not teenagers, anyway. Only men. With weapons. (It hurts, it hurts, my body hurts.)
"James. Keane. James Keane." He sticks out his hand for me to shake it.
I keep my murderer hands to myself. "Keane as in the Keane Foundation?"
"The very same!"
"I should bash your brains in right now," I say, but I am too tired to do it.
"You're the third person to say that to me today!" He winks, then takes my arm and links it through his own. "Why don't you take me on the grand tour of the secret school."
"Why don't you take a walking tour through rush-hour traffic?"
He laughs. "I like you. What did you say your name is?"
"Sofia."
"Sofia. Soooofia. Sofia, I have done something very bad."
It is wrong to go with him as he pulls me down the hall toward the empty classrooms. I go anyway. "I'll bet I've done something worse." Tap tap goes my finger.
"I would love to hear it if you have. But I get to go first. I have"-he looks both ways down the hall in exaggerated caution, then leans in and whispers right in my ear (wrong, wrong, but it doesn't stop the shivers from going up and down my spine; he is gorgeous, I have never been this close to a gorgeous boy)-"broken into a boarding school for special teenage girls."
I shove him back, glare. "That's it? That's pathetic."
"It's not! It's very, very bad. You see, I brought whiskey with me. Stolen whiskey."
I yawn, patting my hand over my mouth.
"Stolen from the dean of my college."
I check the watch I am not wearing for the time.
"After he expelled me."
I look him straight in the eyes. "I delivered a package bomb that killed two people."
His face freezes. I shouldn't have told. I shouldn't have. I don't care. I stare defiantly at him.
His frozen face melts into a smile. "Well, my dear girl, you win. I think this calls for a drink." He tries to open the nearest door, but it's locked. He takes a step back, lifts his leg, and kicks it open with a resounding crack. "That'll hurt in the morning. Ladies first." He holds out a hand to the now-open room.
He doesn't care that I killed two people.
What is wrong with him?
I walk in. (In this room I have picked which gun was unloaded out of ten options. And then they pulled the trigger on me. I have picked stocks that went on to skyrocket. I have picked which pencil I would shove into Ms. Robertson's ear until she kicked me out for thinking about it.)
James staggers/swaggers past me and sits on the floor against the wall out of view of the damaged door. He pats the floor next to him.
I sit. He passes me a bottle he pulls out of his coat and I know-I know, I know-I should not ever taste alcohol.
I take a swig.
I choke and cough and he laughs. I take another and manage to swallow it.
"That's a girl. Now, do you want to know a secret?"
"I know too many secrets."
"Well, you don't know any of mine. My mother was psychic. Genuine, see-the-future, real-deal psychic." He waits. "You aren't impressed?"
"Should I be?"
"Probably not. Made it awfully hard to really get into trouble, though. She could always see it coming. Do you want to know the trick to getting in trouble under the watchful eye of a psychic?"
I think of the nailed-shut windows. I think of Clarice. I think of the two, the two, the two who are now zero. Tap tap. "Yes."
"Don't plan it. Don't even think about it. The second you get an inkling of what you could do, do it then. Never plan anything ahead of time. Always go on pure instinct."
I smile, take another long drink before he pulls it away. "I can do that."
"To my mother," he says, raising the bottle. "And to yours." He passes it back to me.
"Mine's dead."
"Mine, too!"
He doesn't seem sorry. Usually people are sorry about dead parents. I like that he isn't sorry. "Both my parents died in a car wreck. My sister saw it before it happened. It still happened."
"My mother shot herself in the head. Yesterday."
I stare at him in shock and horror. Then I hand the bottle back and say, "Well, my dear boy, you win. This calls for a drink."
He laughs, and I do too, and I realize it's the first time I've laughed in six months. I think I'm in love with him. And I know I'm in love with this drink and the soft, fuzzy way it makes me feel.
"I broke in here tonight to see the reason my mother blew her brains out. I'm very disappointed it's just a building. I'm less disappointed in the company."
"I would burn this school to the ground if I could."
"You'd be hurting the wrong people. It's my father. You should burn him. I hate him."
"To your father." I take another few gulps.
"To burning my father to the ground."
In the morning when they find us passed out next to each other on the floor, James is sent away but not before he salutes me. Clarice doesn't say a word about it, but Annie is in a rage when I get back to my room.
My head hurts, hurts. I remember the laughing, though. And his face. And that he knows what I did and he still sat next to me and laughed and told me I had the prettiest eyes he'd ever seen but that I was far too young for him to kiss until he had had at least three more drinks.
I don't know why Annie is talking so loud. Why is she talking? I want her to stop talking.
"Listen to me, Fia!" She grabs my shoulders and forces me to look into her face, even though she can't see mine. I stick my tongue out at her. "Never drink again."
"But it was fun," I whine.
"Anything could have happened to you!"
My head agrees. She's right, I know she's right. "Fine."
"And stay away from James."
"Why? What does it matter? He's gone. I'll probably never see him again." I want to, though. He was wrong, but it didn't make me feel sick-it made me feel dizzy, that feeling you get on the edge of a very high place where you feel immortal and fragile at the same time, and I liked it.
"I promised you I wouldn't tell Clarice about the new things I was seeing. You promise me you'll stay away from James. He's bad news; he's dangerous, Fia."
Not as dangerous as I am, Annie. I promise her anyway.
Chapter Ten
ANNIE
Monday Evening
"I NEED TO TALK TO MR. KEANE. NOW." I TAP MY FOOT impatiently at Hallway Darren, who smells of mustard. I've tried to call Fia back, but it goes straight to voice mail. She's going to do something stupid; I know she's going to go dancing. Probably right now. She can't mess up, not again. I'm getting so much better. I know I'll see what we need soon, something that will get us free. Something that will atone for all the ways I've destroyed my sister.
I can feel it-it's close, that future where we're free. That secret future I've never told anyone about, that I don't even know any details about other than the way I feel in it. I have to get things back under control so we can find that future.
Darren shifts in his chair. It creaks. "I'll call his secretary and see if I can set something up."
"You might want to mention I've seen his death. His imminent death. Just so they know who to blame when he doesn't get warned in time."
I've read of the blood draining from people's faces when they're scared. I like to imagine that's what's happening to Darren right now. I hear something thud to the floor-small, must be his phone, butterfingers-before he stammers to someone that I need an appointment with Mr. Keane immediately. He doesn't say why. Probably doesn't want to be culpable if something really does go wrong.
"He's in the building." Darren says, relief evident in his voice. No one knows where Keane will be at any given time, and he's very rarely here. This is lucky. "I can take you up right now."
"There's a good boy."
He tries to take my elbow. He always tries to take my elbow. I want to take my elbow to his face. Instead, I move it away and walk down the hall to the elevator on my own. As if I don't know the confines of my prison. As if I am not aware of every square foot of space that holds me here, where no one can get to me and where no one can get me out. These walls hold Fia, too, even though she's not in them.
I wish she could leave me. But I know she never will.
The elevator's familiar hum and cheerful ding announce our arrival on the top floor. I've only been here one other time, just last week. It smells clean, perfectly clean, the air purified and washed and dried of everything that goes on underneath it. The rest of the school and dorms smell like women. This floor has not a single scent of perfume or floral shampoo or lotion.
I am the only woman here who Keane will see. I suppose I should be flattered, but he knows I'm the only one who can see him without seeing him. He won't let Readers or Feelers within two floors of himself, and he never lets any of the psychics see his face, because if we don't know his face, we can't recognize him if we see him in a vision.
A bit paranoid, our mysterious boss. Probably comes with the territory when you have US senators killed. Fia still doesn't know she told me about that. Oh, Fia.
Good thing Darren isn't bright enough to have figured out that there's no way I could have seen a vision with Keane in it and known what I was seeing. I step away from the elevator doors. Then I stand. And wait. It's humiliating. I try to stand as straight as possible, to keep my face perfectly even and composed. I have been living on my few prison floors for so long that being anywhere else without Eden terrifies me. It could all be open. It could stretch on forever without any walls. It could be nothing but an infinite white space.
I don't know. I can never know. And I can't do a thing until someone lets me. I miss the way Fia used to hold my hand. I felt like I lost a limb when she stopped doing it.
"This way, Miss Rosen."
I startle. Someone is right next to me. The carpet up here is so thick, I didn't even hear him approach. But I know his voice. He is-Daniel. John. Daniel/John. The man who recognized that Fia belonged here, too. Without him, it would have only been me, it would have only ever been me.
"Daniel. Or was it John?"
"You have an excellent memory." He takes my elbow lightly and leads me to my left. I count the steps. Thirty-two until he directs me to go ahead of him and the carpet changes. It's a different room this time.
The door closes behind me. He didn't escort me to a chair. I wish I could kill him.
I know Keane is in the room. I can feel him like electricity, but he doesn't say anything. So I walk forward, shoulders back, one hand lifted casually in front of myself. What if there is no chair or desk? What if I walk until I run into Keane? The idea of touching him makes me want to turn and run. I stop, and stand where I am.
"Good evening, Annabelle." His voice is deep and even and devoid of tone.
"I need to know who shot my sister." I wait. He says nothing. "I didn't see them. It's hard to see Sofia when she's out and acting on pure instinct. She shifts, based on things that don't make sense, things that shouldn't affect anything, so we-I-can't see it. I only get glimpses, and even those don't always happen. So I need to know who else was there and whether they were there for her or Adam Denting. If they were there for Denting, then we have no more problems because he's dead. But if they were there for Sofia, that means you aren't the only one using psychics, which means our problems are very, very big."
Outside the entrance hall I nearly bump into a boy. He's wearing a coat and he is tall and he belongs black-and-white and shirtless on the wall of a clothing store and his warm brown eyes are completely glazed over. I simultaneously want to kiss him and to get as far away from him as possible. He feels wrong, he feels dangerous; my heart speeds up the same way for him that it did for the stun guns.
Everything here feels wrong all the time. But he feels exciting wrong.
"Hey," he says, grinning, his eyes tracing over me without apology.
"Hey." There are no boys here. Not teenagers, anyway. Only men. With weapons. (It hurts, it hurts, my body hurts.)
"James. Keane. James Keane." He sticks out his hand for me to shake it.
I keep my murderer hands to myself. "Keane as in the Keane Foundation?"
"The very same!"
"I should bash your brains in right now," I say, but I am too tired to do it.
"You're the third person to say that to me today!" He winks, then takes my arm and links it through his own. "Why don't you take me on the grand tour of the secret school."
"Why don't you take a walking tour through rush-hour traffic?"
He laughs. "I like you. What did you say your name is?"
"Sofia."
"Sofia. Soooofia. Sofia, I have done something very bad."
It is wrong to go with him as he pulls me down the hall toward the empty classrooms. I go anyway. "I'll bet I've done something worse." Tap tap goes my finger.
"I would love to hear it if you have. But I get to go first. I have"-he looks both ways down the hall in exaggerated caution, then leans in and whispers right in my ear (wrong, wrong, but it doesn't stop the shivers from going up and down my spine; he is gorgeous, I have never been this close to a gorgeous boy)-"broken into a boarding school for special teenage girls."
I shove him back, glare. "That's it? That's pathetic."
"It's not! It's very, very bad. You see, I brought whiskey with me. Stolen whiskey."
I yawn, patting my hand over my mouth.
"Stolen from the dean of my college."
I check the watch I am not wearing for the time.
"After he expelled me."
I look him straight in the eyes. "I delivered a package bomb that killed two people."
His face freezes. I shouldn't have told. I shouldn't have. I don't care. I stare defiantly at him.
His frozen face melts into a smile. "Well, my dear girl, you win. I think this calls for a drink." He tries to open the nearest door, but it's locked. He takes a step back, lifts his leg, and kicks it open with a resounding crack. "That'll hurt in the morning. Ladies first." He holds out a hand to the now-open room.
He doesn't care that I killed two people.
What is wrong with him?
I walk in. (In this room I have picked which gun was unloaded out of ten options. And then they pulled the trigger on me. I have picked stocks that went on to skyrocket. I have picked which pencil I would shove into Ms. Robertson's ear until she kicked me out for thinking about it.)
James staggers/swaggers past me and sits on the floor against the wall out of view of the damaged door. He pats the floor next to him.
I sit. He passes me a bottle he pulls out of his coat and I know-I know, I know-I should not ever taste alcohol.
I take a swig.
I choke and cough and he laughs. I take another and manage to swallow it.
"That's a girl. Now, do you want to know a secret?"
"I know too many secrets."
"Well, you don't know any of mine. My mother was psychic. Genuine, see-the-future, real-deal psychic." He waits. "You aren't impressed?"
"Should I be?"
"Probably not. Made it awfully hard to really get into trouble, though. She could always see it coming. Do you want to know the trick to getting in trouble under the watchful eye of a psychic?"
I think of the nailed-shut windows. I think of Clarice. I think of the two, the two, the two who are now zero. Tap tap. "Yes."
"Don't plan it. Don't even think about it. The second you get an inkling of what you could do, do it then. Never plan anything ahead of time. Always go on pure instinct."
I smile, take another long drink before he pulls it away. "I can do that."
"To my mother," he says, raising the bottle. "And to yours." He passes it back to me.
"Mine's dead."
"Mine, too!"
He doesn't seem sorry. Usually people are sorry about dead parents. I like that he isn't sorry. "Both my parents died in a car wreck. My sister saw it before it happened. It still happened."
"My mother shot herself in the head. Yesterday."
I stare at him in shock and horror. Then I hand the bottle back and say, "Well, my dear boy, you win. This calls for a drink."
He laughs, and I do too, and I realize it's the first time I've laughed in six months. I think I'm in love with him. And I know I'm in love with this drink and the soft, fuzzy way it makes me feel.
"I broke in here tonight to see the reason my mother blew her brains out. I'm very disappointed it's just a building. I'm less disappointed in the company."
"I would burn this school to the ground if I could."
"You'd be hurting the wrong people. It's my father. You should burn him. I hate him."
"To your father." I take another few gulps.
"To burning my father to the ground."
In the morning when they find us passed out next to each other on the floor, James is sent away but not before he salutes me. Clarice doesn't say a word about it, but Annie is in a rage when I get back to my room.
My head hurts, hurts. I remember the laughing, though. And his face. And that he knows what I did and he still sat next to me and laughed and told me I had the prettiest eyes he'd ever seen but that I was far too young for him to kiss until he had had at least three more drinks.
I don't know why Annie is talking so loud. Why is she talking? I want her to stop talking.
"Listen to me, Fia!" She grabs my shoulders and forces me to look into her face, even though she can't see mine. I stick my tongue out at her. "Never drink again."
"But it was fun," I whine.
"Anything could have happened to you!"
My head agrees. She's right, I know she's right. "Fine."
"And stay away from James."
"Why? What does it matter? He's gone. I'll probably never see him again." I want to, though. He was wrong, but it didn't make me feel sick-it made me feel dizzy, that feeling you get on the edge of a very high place where you feel immortal and fragile at the same time, and I liked it.
"I promised you I wouldn't tell Clarice about the new things I was seeing. You promise me you'll stay away from James. He's bad news; he's dangerous, Fia."
Not as dangerous as I am, Annie. I promise her anyway.
Chapter Ten
ANNIE
Monday Evening
"I NEED TO TALK TO MR. KEANE. NOW." I TAP MY FOOT impatiently at Hallway Darren, who smells of mustard. I've tried to call Fia back, but it goes straight to voice mail. She's going to do something stupid; I know she's going to go dancing. Probably right now. She can't mess up, not again. I'm getting so much better. I know I'll see what we need soon, something that will get us free. Something that will atone for all the ways I've destroyed my sister.
I can feel it-it's close, that future where we're free. That secret future I've never told anyone about, that I don't even know any details about other than the way I feel in it. I have to get things back under control so we can find that future.
Darren shifts in his chair. It creaks. "I'll call his secretary and see if I can set something up."
"You might want to mention I've seen his death. His imminent death. Just so they know who to blame when he doesn't get warned in time."
I've read of the blood draining from people's faces when they're scared. I like to imagine that's what's happening to Darren right now. I hear something thud to the floor-small, must be his phone, butterfingers-before he stammers to someone that I need an appointment with Mr. Keane immediately. He doesn't say why. Probably doesn't want to be culpable if something really does go wrong.
"He's in the building." Darren says, relief evident in his voice. No one knows where Keane will be at any given time, and he's very rarely here. This is lucky. "I can take you up right now."
"There's a good boy."
He tries to take my elbow. He always tries to take my elbow. I want to take my elbow to his face. Instead, I move it away and walk down the hall to the elevator on my own. As if I don't know the confines of my prison. As if I am not aware of every square foot of space that holds me here, where no one can get to me and where no one can get me out. These walls hold Fia, too, even though she's not in them.
I wish she could leave me. But I know she never will.
The elevator's familiar hum and cheerful ding announce our arrival on the top floor. I've only been here one other time, just last week. It smells clean, perfectly clean, the air purified and washed and dried of everything that goes on underneath it. The rest of the school and dorms smell like women. This floor has not a single scent of perfume or floral shampoo or lotion.
I am the only woman here who Keane will see. I suppose I should be flattered, but he knows I'm the only one who can see him without seeing him. He won't let Readers or Feelers within two floors of himself, and he never lets any of the psychics see his face, because if we don't know his face, we can't recognize him if we see him in a vision.
A bit paranoid, our mysterious boss. Probably comes with the territory when you have US senators killed. Fia still doesn't know she told me about that. Oh, Fia.
Good thing Darren isn't bright enough to have figured out that there's no way I could have seen a vision with Keane in it and known what I was seeing. I step away from the elevator doors. Then I stand. And wait. It's humiliating. I try to stand as straight as possible, to keep my face perfectly even and composed. I have been living on my few prison floors for so long that being anywhere else without Eden terrifies me. It could all be open. It could stretch on forever without any walls. It could be nothing but an infinite white space.
I don't know. I can never know. And I can't do a thing until someone lets me. I miss the way Fia used to hold my hand. I felt like I lost a limb when she stopped doing it.
"This way, Miss Rosen."
I startle. Someone is right next to me. The carpet up here is so thick, I didn't even hear him approach. But I know his voice. He is-Daniel. John. Daniel/John. The man who recognized that Fia belonged here, too. Without him, it would have only been me, it would have only ever been me.
"Daniel. Or was it John?"
"You have an excellent memory." He takes my elbow lightly and leads me to my left. I count the steps. Thirty-two until he directs me to go ahead of him and the carpet changes. It's a different room this time.
The door closes behind me. He didn't escort me to a chair. I wish I could kill him.
I know Keane is in the room. I can feel him like electricity, but he doesn't say anything. So I walk forward, shoulders back, one hand lifted casually in front of myself. What if there is no chair or desk? What if I walk until I run into Keane? The idea of touching him makes me want to turn and run. I stop, and stand where I am.
"Good evening, Annabelle." His voice is deep and even and devoid of tone.
"I need to know who shot my sister." I wait. He says nothing. "I didn't see them. It's hard to see Sofia when she's out and acting on pure instinct. She shifts, based on things that don't make sense, things that shouldn't affect anything, so we-I-can't see it. I only get glimpses, and even those don't always happen. So I need to know who else was there and whether they were there for her or Adam Denting. If they were there for Denting, then we have no more problems because he's dead. But if they were there for Sofia, that means you aren't the only one using psychics, which means our problems are very, very big."
