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“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.
2
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.”
