AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He sounds like a jerk.”
“He was a jerk,” Daneca says. “But I still liked him. I think in some weird way I liked him more.”
“So, did you work him?”
“No,” Daneca said. “I worked me. To stop feeling the way I did. To feel nothing.”
I didn’t expect that. “You’re a good person,” I say, humbled. “I give you a hard time about it, but I really do admire you. You care so much about doing the right thing.”
She shakes her head as I pull into a coffee shop. “It was weird. Every time I looked at him afterward, I had that tip-of-the-tongue feeling, like I couldn’t quite remember a word I ought to have known. It felt wrong, Cassel.”
We get out of the car. “I’m not saying that working yourself is a great idea…”
The coffee place has tin ceilings and a counter full of fresh-baked cookies. Its tables are filled with students and the self-employed, tapping away on laptops and clutching cups with a reverence that suggests they just crawled out of bed.
Daneca orders a maté chai latte, and I get a regular cup of coffee. Her drink comes out a vivid grass green.
I make a face. We head to the only free table, one next to the door and the racks of newspapers. As I sit down, one of the headlines catches my eye.
“Don’t look like that,” Daneca says. “It’s good. Want a sip?”
I shake my head. There is a photograph of a man I know beside the words “Bronx Hitman Jumps Bail.” The type under the picture says “Death worker Emil Lombardo, also known as the Hunter, missing after being indicted for double homicide.” They didn’t even bother to lie to me about his name.
“Do you have a quarter?” I ask, fishing around in my pockets.
Daneca reaches into her messenger bag and feels around until she finds one. She slaps it down on the table. “You know what the weirdest thing about me working myself over that boy was?”
I find fifty cents and feed our combined change into the machine. “No, what?”
I lift out the paper. The double homicide was of a thirty-four-year-old woman and her mother. Two witnesses to another crime—something about the Zacharovs and real estate. There are smaller pictures of the dead women beneath the fold. They both look like nice people.
Nice people. Good people. Like Daneca.
“The weirdest thing,” Daneca says, “is that after I stopped liking him, he asked me out. When I turned him down, he was really hurt. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong.”
I touch my gloved finger to the murdered women’s faces, letting the leather smear the ink. Last night I helped their killer get away. “That is weird,” I say hollowly.
* * *
When we get back to school, it’s just in time for my computer class. I walk in as the bell stops ringing.
“Mr. Sharpe,” says Ms. Takano without looking up. “They’re looking for you in the office.” She hands me her official hall pass, a large plastic dinosaur.
I take my time walking across the green. I think about my new car, gleaming in the sun. I think of the sophomore-year production of Macbeth, and Amanda Kerwick as Lady Macbeth, holding up her bare hands, looking for blood.
But there is no mere spot on me. As her husband says, “I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
I shake my head. I’m just looking for excuses to keep the car.
When I walk into the office, Ms. Logan frowns. “I didn’t think you’d be back so soon. Cassel—you know you’re supposed to sign out when you leave campus.”
“I know,” I say contritely. I’m hoping that Northcutt gives me only a single demerit for cutting class. Not a week ago I was bragging to Lila about my strategies to get off campus without trouble. Then I drove off without implementing a single one.
But Ms. Logan just shoves the sign-in folder at me. “Put the time you left here,” she says, brushing her gloved finger over the line. “And when you came back, here.”
I write them down faithfully.
“Good,” she says. “The lawyer said you were a bit dazed when he called to remind you about the meeting. Northcutt wants you to know that you don’t have to go back to class if you’re not ready.”
