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“What?” My heart is a drum, beating out of time. I toss my backpack onto my bed and sit down beside it. “What do you mean—‘screwed up’?”
Daneca looks relieved that I finally seem to understand her. She scoots forward, leaning in toward me. “Lila caught me. I’m an idiot. It must have been obvious what I was trying.”
I picture Daneca trying to get off her glove without Lila noticing. It didn’t occur to me until now how hard it must have been. Daneca doesn’t know how to brush someone accidentally, the way you need to for a working or to lift a wallet. She’s no expert at sleight of hand.
“So you didn’t—,” I say. “So you didn’t work her?” All I feel is relief so intense that I almost laugh.
I’m glad. Horribly, shockingly glad.
I can learn to live with guilt. I don’t care about being good. I can learn to live with anything if it means being with Lila too.
Daneca shakes her head. “She made me tell her everything. She can be really frightening, you know.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah, she can be.”
“She made me promise not to say anything to you,” Daneca says, voice low.
I look out the window. There are so many thoughts running through my head, it’s like I’m not thinking at all. But still I force myself to give her a quick smile. “She didn’t think you would break a promise? We’ve got to do something about that reputation of yours, Goody Two-shoes.”
“I’m sorry,” Daneca says, ignoring my attempt at humor.
“It’s not your fault,” I say. “I shouldn’t have asked you. It wasn’t fair.”
She stands up and starts toward the door.
“See you at dinner,” she says, looking at me with surprising fondness.
As the door closes behind Daneca, I feel a terrible wave of emotion sweep through me, reckless joy and horror so mixed up that I don’t know what to feel first.
I tried to make myself do the right thing. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. All I know right now is that I love Lila, and for a little while she’ll love me back.
* * *
When I find Lila, she’s heading toward the library. The collar of her shirt is open and the white silk scarf around her throat flutters in the wind. She looks like she’s about to go for a drive in a car with the top down.
“Hey,” I say, jogging up alongside her. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“Cassel,” she says, like my name tastes sour on her tongue. She doesn’t slow.
“I know you’re probably furious about Daneca,” I say, walking backward so I can look at her while I’m talking. “And you have every right to be. But let me explain.”
“Can you?” Lila says, stopping abruptly. “I’m not a toy you can just turn off.”
“I know that,” I say.
“How could you think that it would be okay to work me? How would it be any different from what your mother did?” She looks like she feels a little bit sorry for me and a little bit disgusted. “The curse is over. We’re over.”
“Oh.” Of course. I grit my teeth against the reflexive flinch. All I can hear is my mother’s words in Atlantic City: She wouldn’t have given you the time of day, Cassel.
“It wasn’t enough for you to have your joke, pretending to love me, pretending you weren’t pretending—” She stops herself, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, they’re bright with fury. “I’m not cursed anymore. I’m not going to grovel for your attention. It must have been thrilling to have me sigh over every one of your thoughtless smiles, but that’s never going to happen again.”
“That’s not what it was like,” I say. I’m stunned, all of my months of pain and panic reduced, in her eyes, to gloating.
“I’m not weak, Cassel. I’m not the kind of girl who cries over you.” Her voice shakes. “I’m not the girl who does whatever you want whenever you want it.”
“That’s why I asked Daneca—,” I say, but I can’t finish. It’s not even true. I asked Daneca to work her because I was starting to believe the illusion. Daneca was trying to save me from myself.
“You wanted to make me feel nothing for you?” Lila says. “Well, let me do you one better. I hate you. How about that? I hate you, and you didn’t have to do a thing to make me.”
