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Rahul and Jeremy laugh, Jeremy spitting a piece of salad out onto his plate. Now Greg can’t just boot me from the table. He won’t let me leave with Rahul and Jeremy well-disposed toward me.
“Can you picture her face?” Rahul says gleefully.
“Whatever,” says Greg. “We can come up with something better than that.”
“Like what?” asks Audrey. She doesn’t sound like she’s challenging him. She sounds like she’s sure he’s going to come up with an absolutely brilliant suggestion in just a moment and she’s patiently waiting. She sounds kind. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if her new boyfriend made her old boyfriend look like a fool either.
By this point I’m sure I have somewhere to sit for dinner. I get my food and eat it, listening to them trade prank ideas back and forth. The more we talk about it, the more I warm to the idea of deciding the scheme early so we can focus for the rest of the year on the perfect execution. I let Greg get in a few digs.
And if I sometimes flash to the image of the body in the freezer, to the waxen face of my brother, or to the wide-eyed way Lila looked when I pulled away from her last night, well, then, I have had a lifetime of experience keeping what I’m thinking off my face.
“Hey, look at the new kid. Isn’t she supposed to be some crime boss’s daughter?” Jeremy says.
I swivel my head to see Lila standing. A junior girl I don’t know is talking to her, gesturing grandly with blue-gloved hands. I can’t hear what they’re saying over the general dining hall noise, but the junior’s expression is alight with malicious glee.
“Girl fight,” Rahul says, grinning.
But when Lila takes a step toward the sophomore, it’s not to punch or pull hair. She starts removing a single black glove.
I see a flash of bare fingers and hear Greg’s indrawn breath beside me. The junior girl stumbles back.
“She’s crazy,” says Jeremy. “That’s nuts. She’s going to—”
People are getting up, conversations are pausing. In that lull of sound I hear Lila’s voice distinctly.
“You sure you want to cross me?” she says. In that moment she’s her father’s daughter.
The junior runs off toward the teacher’s table, and Lila sits down, pulling her glove back on. I see Daneca gaping at her. After a few moments Dean Wharton comes over and escorts Lila out of the building.
I push around the Salisbury steak in front of me. After a while of doing that, I get up.
“Greg,” Audrey says, rising with me. “Can you give me a minute with Cassel?”
“Whatever.” He shrugs, but the look he shoots me is anything but casual. It’s hard to picture a guy like Greg Harmsford loving anyone, but the way he watches Audrey is at least possessive.
“What’s going on with you?” Audrey asks as we walk toward the dorms. The sun is just going down and the sky is dim. The leaves are turned over on their backs, waiting for rain. “You don’t care about the senior prank. I know that because you never, ever say what you actually mean.”
Six months ago we almost got back together. I’d thought that being with her would, through some power of alchemy, transmute me into being a normal guy with normal problems. When she looks at me, I see the reflection of a different self in her eyes. Someone I long to be.
I lean toward her. She puts a hand on my chest and pushes me back, hard.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“I don’t know. I thought—” I thought I was supposed to kiss her.
“Cassel,” she says, exasperated. “You’re always like this. Hot or cold. Do you even know what you want?”
I look at the concrete path beneath me, at the desiccated bodies of earthworms who crawled out of the ground in the rain, only to get scorched by the sun.
“You’re the one who wanted to talk,” I say defensively.
“Do you even remember last year? I cried my eyes out after you came back to school and acted like nothing we’d said to each other while you were kicked out mattered.”
I nod, not looking at her, because she’s right. After my mother worked Lila, the only reason I didn’t flunk out was because Sam did half of my homework for me. Everything felt hollow and unreal. I blew off Audrey without even making up excuses.
“Why? And why talk to me now like that never happened?” Her voice has a funny quality to it. I know that if I look up at her, her neck will be all blotchy, like it always gets when she’s upset.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re right. I’m not really good at relationships.”
