White Cat

Page 10

The librarian waves from behind her big oak desk. She’s just out of library school and has cat’s-eye glasses in every color of the rainbow. Several losers put down money on hooking up with her themselves. I felt bad when I told them the odds I’d assigned.
“Good to have you back, Cassel,” she says.
“Good to be back, Ms. Fiske.” Once spotted, I figure the best I can manage is not being conspicuous. Hopefully by the time she figures out I’m not back for real, I will be.
My working money—a total of three thousand dollars—is hidden between the pages of a big leather-bound onomasticon. I’ve kept it there for the last two years without incident. No one ever touches it but me. My only fear is that the book will be culled, since no one ever uses an onomasticon, but I think Wallingford keeps it because it looks expensive and obscure enough to reassure visiting parents that their kids are learning genius-type stuff.
I open the book and slide out six hundred dollars, poke around for a couple of minutes acting like I’m considering reading some Renaissance poetry, and then slink back to the dorm, where Sam’s supposed to meet me. As I step off the stairs and into the hall, Valerio walks out of his room. I dodge to the side, into the bathroom, and then close myself in a stall. Leaning against the wall while waiting for my heart to start beating normally, I try to remind myself that so long as no one sees you doing something embarrassing, there’s no reason to be humiliated. Valerio doesn’t follow. I text Sam.
He walks into the bathroom moments later, laughing. “What a clandestine spot for a meeting.”
I push open the stall door. “Laugh it up.” There’s no rancor in my voice, though. Just relief.
“The coast is clear,” he says. “The eagle has flown the coop. The cow stands alone.”
I can’t help smiling as I dig out the money from my pocket. “You are a master of deception.”
“Hey,” he says. “Can you teach me to calculate odds? Like, if there was something I wanted to take bets on? And what’s the deal with the point spreads on the games? How do you figure those? You aren’t doing it the way they say online.”
“It’s complicated,” I say, stalling. What I mean is: It’s fixed.
He leans against the sink. “We Asians are all math geniuses.”
“Okay, genius. Maybe another time, though?”
“Sure,” he says, and I wonder if he’s already planning to cut me loose from my own business. I figure I can probably screw him somehow if he does, but the thought of having to plan it just makes me tired.
Sam counts the money carefully. I watch him in the mirror. “You know what I wish?” he asks when he’s done.
“What?”
“That someone would convert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.”
That startles a laugh out of me. “That would be pretty awesome.”
A slow, shy smile spreads across his mouth. “And we could take bets on them. And be filthy rich.”
I lean my head against the frame of the stall, looking at the tile wall and the pattern of yellowed cracks there, and grin. “I take back anything I might have implied to the contrary. Sam, you are a genius.”
I’m not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria.
But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn’t make sense.
All friendships are negotiations of power.
Like, okay, Philip has this best friend, Anton. Anton is Lila’s cousin; he came down to Carney with her in the summers. Anton and Philip spent three heat-soaked months drinking whatever liquor they could get out of the locals and working on their cars.
Anton’s mother is Zacharov’s sister Eva, making him Zacharov’s closest living male relative. Anton made sure that Philip knew that if Philip wanted to work for the family, that meant he was going to be working for Anton. Their friendship was—and is—based on Philip’s acknowledgment that Anton’s in charge and Philip’s ready to follow his lead.
Anton didn’t like me because my friendship with Lila seemed to come without acknowledgment of his status.
One time, when we were thirteen, he walked into Lila’s grandmother’s kitchen. Lila and I were wrestling over some dumb thing, banging into the cabinets and laughing. He pulled me off her and knocked me to the floor.
“Apologize, you little pervert,” he said.
It was true that all the pushing and shoving was mostly an excuse to touch Lila, but I’d rather get kicked around than admit it.
“Stop it!” she screamed at Anton, grabbing for his gloved hands.
“Your father sent me down here to keep an eye on you,” he said. “He wouldn’t want you spending all your time with this deviant. He’s not even one of us.”
“You don’t tell me what to do,” Lila told him. “Ever.”
He looked back down at me. “How about I tell you what to do, Cassel? Get down on your knees. That’s how you’re supposed to act in front of a laborer princess.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Lila said stiffly. “Stand up.”
I was starting to rise when he kicked me in my shoulder. I fell back onto my knees.
“Stop it!” she yelled.
“Good,” he said. “Now why don’t you kiss her foot? You know you want to.”
“I said leave him alone, Anton,” said Lila. “Why do you have to be such a jerk?”
“Kiss her foot,” he said, “and I’ll let you up.” He was nineteen and huge. My shoulder hurt and my cheeks were already burning. I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to the top of Lila’s sandaled foot. We’d been swimming earlier that day; her skin tasted like salt.
She jerked her leg back. Anton laughed.
“You think you’re in charge already,” she said, her voice trembling. “You think Dad’s going to make you his heir, but I’m his daughter. Me. I’m his heir. And when I am the head of the Zacharov family, I won’t forget this.”
I stood up slowly and walked back to Grandad’s house.
She wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after, probably because I’d done what Anton told me instead of what she’d said. And Philip went on like nothing had happened. Like he’d already chosen who he cared more about, already chosen power over me.
I can’t trust the people I care about not to hurt me. And I’m not sure I can trust myself not to hurt them, either.
Friendships suck.
I look at the clock on my phone on my way to the car and figure that I better head home if I want my grandfather not to notice how long I’ve been gone. But I have one more stop to make. On my way out to the car, I call Maura. She’s the final ingredient in my plan: someone to answer the prepaid phone if it rings.
“Hello?” she says softly. I hear the baby crying in the background.
“Hey,” I say, and let out my breath. I was worried Philip would answer. “It’s Cassel. You busy?”
“Just trying to clean some peaches off the wall. You looking for your brother? He’s—”
“No,” I say, maybe a little too fast. “I have to ask for a favor. From you. It would really help me out.”
“Okay,” she says.
“All you have to do is answer a cell phone I’m going to give you and pretend that you’re the receptionist at a sleep center. I’ll write down exactly what you have to say.”
“Let me guess. I have to say that you can go back to school.”
“Nothing like that. Just confirm the office sent over a letter and that the doctor is with a patient but he’ll call them back. Then call me and I’ll handle the rest. I don’t think it will even come to that. They might want to verify the office really sent out the letter, but that’s probably it.”
“Aren’t you too young to be living a life of crime?”
I smile. “Then you’ll do it?”
“Sure. Bring over the phone. Philip isn’t going to be back for an hour. I’m assuming that you don’t want him to know about this.”
I grin. She sounds so normal that it’s hard to recall a sunken-eyed Maura perched at the top of the stairs, talking about angels. “Maura, you are a goddess. I will carve your likeness in mashed potatoes so all can worship you like I do. When you leave Philip, will you marry me?”
She laughs. “You better not let Philip hear you say that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Are you still? I mean, does he know?”
“Know about what?”
“Oh,” I say awkwardly. “The other night. You were talking about leaving—but, hey, I guess you guys worked things out. That’s great.”
“I never said that,” Maura says, her voice flat. “Why would I say that when Philip and I are so happy?”
“I don’t know. I probably misunderstood. I gotta go. I’ll be over with the phone.” I hang up, my hands slippery with sweat. I have no idea what just happened. Maybe she doesn’t want to say anything over the phone, in case people are listening. Or maybe someone’s there—someone she couldn’t talk in front of.
I think of Grandad saying Philip was working her, and I wonder if I misunderstood. Maybe she really doesn’t remember what she said, because he hired someone to take those memories from her. Maybe she doesn’t remember lots of things.
Maura opens the door when I ring the bell, but only partway. She doesn’t invite me in either. Unease roils in my stomach.
I look at her eyes, trying to read something from them, but she just looks blank, drained. “Thanks again for doing this.” I hold out the phone, wrapped in a slip of paper with directions on it.
“It’s fine.” Her leather gloves brush mine as she picks up the cell, and I realize she’s about to close the door. I stick my foot in the gap to stop her.
“Wait,” I say. “Hold on a second.”
She frowns.
“Do you remember the music?” I ask her.
She lets the door fall open, staring at me. “You hear it too? It started just this morning and it’s so beautiful. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”
“I’ve never heard anything like it,” I say warily. She honestly doesn’t remember. I can think of only one person who’d benefit from her forgetting to leave her husband.
I dig around in my pocket and take out the memory charm. Give this to remember. It looks like an heirloom, something that might be passed on to a favored daughter-in-law to welcome her to the family. “My mother wanted you to have this,” I lie.
She shrinks back, and I remember that not everyone likes my mother. “Philip doesn’t like me to wear charms,” she says. “He says a worker’s wife shouldn’t look afraid.”
“You can hide it,” I say quickly, but the door’s already closing.
“Take care of yourself,” Maura says through the sliver of space that remains. “Good-bye, Cassel.”
I stand on the steps for a few moments with the charm still in my hand, trying to think. Trying to remember.
Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.
After Lila’s parents divorced, she got dragged around Europe for a while, then spent several summers in New York with her father. I only knew where she was because her grandmother told my grandmother, so I was surprised to walk into the kitchen one day and see Lila there, sitting on the counter and talking to Barron like she’d never been gone.
“Hey,” she said, cracking her gum. She’d cut her hair chin length and dyed it bright pink. That and thick eyeliner made her look older than thirteen. Older than me.
“Scram,” said Barron. “We’re talking business.”
My throat felt tight, like swallowing might hurt. “Whatever.” I picked up my Heinlein book and an apple and went back to the basement.
I sat staring at the television for a while as an anime guy with a very large sword hacked up a satisfying amount of monsters. I thought about how much I didn’t care that Lila was back. After a while she came down the stairs and flopped onto the worn leather couch next to me. Her thumbs were stuck through holes in her mouse gray sweater, and I noticed a Band-Aid along the curve of her cheek.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“To see you. What do you think?” She gestured to my book. “Is that good?”
“If you like hot cloned assassins. And who doesn’t?”
“Only crazy people,” she said, and I couldn’t help smiling. She told me a little about Paris, about the diamond her father had bid on and won at Sotheby’s, which was supposed to have belonged to Rasputin and given him eternal life. About the way she’d had her breakfast on a balcony, drinking milky cups of coffee and eating bread slathered with sweet butter. She didn’t sound like she’d missed south Jersey very much, and I couldn’t blame her.
“So, what did Barron want?” I asked her.
“Nothing.” She bit her lip as she pulled all that pink hair into a sleek, tight ponytail.
“Secret worker stuff,” I said, waving my hands around to show how impressed I was. “Ooooh. Don’t tell me. I might run to the cops.”
She studied the warped yarn around her thumb. “He says it’s simple. Just a couple of hours. And he promised me eternal devotion.”