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I wonder just how mad she’d be if she knew I was here, watching her. Probably really, really mad.
Cold October air floods into the car suddenly, tossing around the empty cup in the backseat.
“Come on,” Barron says, leaning on the door, grinning down at me. I didn’t even notice him getting out. “Grab some quarters for the meter, and your stuff.” He jerks his head in the direction of the boy with the braids. “We’re going to follow him.”
“What about that phone call?” I shiver in my thin green T-shirt. My leather jacket is wadded up in the backseat of my car. I reach for it and shrug it on.
“I was bored,” Barron says. “Now I’m not.”
This morning when he told me we were going to practice tailing people, I picked Lila as my target half as a joke, half because there’s something wrong with me. I didn’t think that Barron would agree. I didn’t think that we’d actually see her leaving her apartment building and getting into a town car. I for sure didn’t think that I would wind up here, close to actually finding out what she’s been doing when she’s not in school.
I get out of the car and slam the door behind me.
That’s the problem with temptation. It’s so damn tempting.
“Feels almost like real agent work, doesn’t it?” Barron says as we walk down the street, heads bowed against the wind. “You know, if we caught your girlfriend committing a crime, I bet Yulikova would give us a bonus or something for being prize pupils.”
“Except that we’re not going to do that,” I say.
“I thought you wanted us to be good guys.” He grins a too-wide grin. He’s enjoying needling me, and my reacting only makes it worse, but I can’t stop.
“Not if it means hurting her,” I say, my voice as deadly as I can make it. “Never her.”
“Got it. Hurting, bad. But how do you excuse stalking her and her friends, little brother?”
“I’m not excusing it,” I say. “I’m just doing it.”
Following—stalking—someone isn’t easy. You try not to stare too hard at the back of his head, keep your distance, and act like you’re just another person freezing your ass off in late October on the streets of Queens. Above all you try not to seem like a badly trained federal agent wannabe.
“Stop worrying,” Barron says, strolling along beside me. “Even if we get made, this guy will probably be flattered. He’d think he was moving up in the world if he had a government tail.”
Barron is better at acting casual than I am. I guess he should be. He’s got nothing to lose if we’re spotted. Lila couldn’t possibly hate him more than she does. Plus, he probably trains for this all day, while I’m at Wallingford studying to get into the kind of college there is no way I am ever going to attend.
It still annoys me. Since I was a kid, we’ve competed over lots of things. Mostly, all those competitions were ones I lost.
We were the two youngest, and when Philip would be off with his friends on the weekends, Barron and I would be stuck doing whatever errands Dad needed doing, or practicing whatever skill he thought we needed to learn.
He particularly wanted us to be better at pickpocketing and lock-picking than we were.
Two kids are the perfect pickpocket team, he’d say. One to do the lift, the other one to distract or to take the handoff.
We both practiced dips. First identifying where Dad kept his wallet by looking for a bulge in a back pocket or the way one side of his coat swung heavily because something was inside. Then the lift. I was pretty good; Barron was better.
Then we practiced distraction. Crying. Asking for directions. Giving the mark a quarter that you claim they dropped.
It’s like stage magic, Dad said. You’ve got to make me look over there so I won’t notice what’s happening right in front of my face.
When Dad didn’t feel like fending off our clumsy attempts at lifts, he’d bring us to the barn and show us his collection: He had an old metal tackle box with locks on all the sides, so you had to run the gauntlet of seven different locks to get into it. Neither Barron nor I ever managed.
Once we learned how to open a lock with a tool, we’d have to learn to pick it with a bobby pin, with a hanger, then with a stick or some other found object. I kept hoping that I’d be naturally great at locks, since I was pretty sure I wasn’t a worker back then, and since I already felt like an outsider in my family. I thought that if there was one thing I was better at than all of them, that would make up for everything else.
It sucks to be the youngest.
If you get into the supersecure box, we’ll sneak into the movie of your choice, Dad would say. Or, I put candy in there. Or, If you really want that video game, just open the box and I’ll get it for you. But it didn’t matter what he promised. What did matter was that I only ever managed to pick three locks; Barron managed five.
And here we are again, learning a bunch of new skills. I can’t help feeling a little bit competitive and a little bit disappointed in myself that I’m already so far behind. After all, Yulikova thinks Barron has a real future with the Bureau. She told me so. I told her that sociopaths are relentlessly charming.
I think she figured I was joking.
