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“Cassel,” she whispers. She’s said my name a hundred times before, a thousand times, but never like this.
I pull back, abruptly, panting. Never like this.
She rises with me, but now at least we’re both sitting up. That helps. She’s breathing hard, her eyes black with pupil.
“I don’t—,” I start. “It’s not—not real.”
The words make no sense. I shake my head to clear it.
She looks at me with an expression I cannot name. Her lips are slightly apart and swollen.
“We have to go back,” I say finally.
“Okay.” I can barely hear the word. Her voice is all breath.
I nod, pushing myself to my feet. I reach out my hand, and she lets me pull her up. For a moment her hand is in mine, warm and bare.
At the window to my room, I catch my reflection in the glass. Shaggy black hair. Sneer. I look like a hungry ghost, glowering in at a world I am no longer fit to be part of.
* * *
The dream takes me by surprise. I’m standing at the edge of a lawn. Barron’s beside me. I know, without any reason to know, that we’re waiting for someone to come out of the big pillared white house in front of us.
“Join me in a cup of tea?” he asks, holding out a paper cup with a smirk. The amber liquid inside is boiling, bubbles rising along with steam. It’s going to scald us both.
“Oh,” I say. “Do you think we’ll fit?”
6
I’M USELESS IN CLASSES the next day. I fail a quiz in physics and conjugate my verbs completely weirdly in French. Luckily, I probably won’t need French in my future assassination career, unless I’m one of those fancy movie assassins who travel the world and also steal jewels. Physics I might need—got to calculate the trajectory of bullets somehow.
I call Barron on my lunch break to avoid the cafeteria. I don’t know how to say anything to Sam and Daneca that isn’t all lies. And I don’t know how to say anything to Lila that isn’t the truth.
“Hey,” he says. “We still on for Tuesday pizza?” His voice is casual. Normal. It makes me almost believe that I can relax.
“I need to ask you something. In person. Where are you?” A teacher walks by and gives me a look. We’re not supposed to be calling people during the school day, even between classes. I’m a senior, though, so she doesn’t give me a hard time.
“Mom and I are having fun. We’re staying at the Nassau Inn. It’s pretty swank.”
“That’s in Princeton,” I say. It’s right downtown, minutes away from Daneca’s house. I experience a frisson of horror at the thought of my mother and hers in the same pharmacy line.
Barron laughs. “Yeah. And? Mom says you two basically tore up Atlantic City, so we’re looking for a fresh start.”
I have no idea why I thought that Barron would do anything but amplify all of Mom’s problems. A memory of him saying something about a painting nags at me; I should have seen this coming.
“Look, whatever,” I say. “Can you meet me somewhere at six? I can skip dinner and some of study hall.”
“We’ll come over now. Mom can sign you out, remember? We’ll get sushi.”
“Sure, okay,” I say.
It takes them an hour and a half to make the twenty-minute trip from Princeton to Wallingford. By the time they get there, I am in the “extra help” period, where I have to suffer through realizing that almost all my physics mistakes were dumb and obvious.
It’s a relief to be called to the office.
Barron is lounging against the secretary desk in a sharkskin suit. Mom is next to him, her hair pulled back into a Hermès scarf with a massive black-and-white hat over it, black gloves, and a low-cut black dress. They’re both wearing sunglasses. She’s bent over, signing a sheet.
I think she’s supposed to look like she’s in mourning.
