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“Yeah.” I climb down, hopping off the box and landing with a thud. “I know. I will. I just didn’t have time. Tomorrow, I promise.”
“How much time does it take to throw a gun in a dumpster?”
“I really wish you would stop saying the word ‘gun,’?” I say, low, flopping down onto my own bed and reaching for my laptop. “There’s nothing I can do about it now, unless I want to chuck it out the window. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
He groans and goes back to his side of the room, picking up his headphones. He looks annoyed, but nothing worse. I guess he’s used to me acting like a criminal.
“Whose?” he asks finally, nodding toward the closet.
“Some guy. He dropped it.”
Sam frowns. “That sounds likely—and by ‘likely’ I mean ‘not at all likely.’ And by the way, did you know that if someone found that thing in here, not only would you be thrown out of school, you would be, like, stricken from school memory. They would burn your face out of the Wallingford yearbooks. They would get a team of memory workers to come in and make it so that no one even recalled they’d ever gone to school with you. This is exactly the kind of thing they promise parents will never happen at Wallingford Preparatory.”
A shudder runs across my shoulders at the mention of memory workers. Barron is one. He used his power to make me forget a lot of things—that I am a transformation worker, that he pushed me into becoming a disturbingly efficient assassin, even that I transformed Lila into an animal and he kept her in a cage for years. My sociopathic big brother, who stole chunks of my life. The only brother I have left. The one who’s training me.
That’s family for you. Can’t live with them; can’t murder them. Unless Barron rats me out to Yulikova. Then I really might.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to regain the thread of the conversation. “I’ll get rid of it. I promise. No, wait, I already promised. How about I pinkie swear?”
“Unbelievable,” Sam says, but I can tell he’s not really mad. As I am busy determining this, watching the play of emotions cross his face, I notice he’s got about a dozen pens piled on the navy blanket next to him and he’s marking a pad with each one.
“What are you doing over there?”
He grins. “I got these on eBay. A whole case of disappearing-ink pens. Nice, right? They were used by the KGB. These are serious spy tools.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Two choices, really. Awesome prank or potentially actually useful for our bookmaking operation.”
“Sam, we’ve already talked about this. It’s yours now, if you want it, but I’m out.” I’ve been the bookie for ridiculous school stuff for as long as I’ve been at Wallingford. If you wanted to put money down on the football game, you came to me. If you wanted to put down money on whether or not there was Salisbury steak for lunch three times a week or whether Headmistress Northcutt and Dean Wharton were having an affair or whether Harvey Silverman would die of alcohol poisoning before he graduated, you also came to me. I would calculate the odds, hold the cash, and charge a commission for my trouble. In a school with lots of bored rich kids, it was a good way to line my pockets. It was pretty harmless, until it wasn’t. Until kids started taking bets on which students were curse workers. Until those students were targets.
Then it felt a lot like I was taking blood money.
Sam sighs. “Well, there are still endless pranks we could pull. Imagine a whole room full of test takers, and then nothing on any of the tests twenty-four to forty-eight hours later. Or what if you slipped one of these into a teacher’s grade book? Chaos.”
I grin. Chaos, beautiful chaos. “So, which one will you choose? My pickpocketing skills are at your service.”
He chucks a pen in my direction. “Be careful you don’t do your homework with that,” he says.
I snatch it out of the air a moment before it crashes into my lamp. “Hey!” I say, turning back to him. “Watch it. What’s with the wild pitch?”
He’s looking at me with a strange expression on his face. “Cassel.” His voice has gone low and earnest. “Do you think you could talk to Daneca for me?”
I hesitate, glancing down at the pen in my hands, turning it over in my gloved fingers, then looking back up at him. “About what?”
“I apologized,” he says. “I keep apologizing. I don’t know what she wants.”
“Did something happen?”
“We met up for coffee, but then it turned into the same old argument.” He shakes his head. “I don’t understand. She’s the one who lied. She’s the one who never told me she was a worker. She probably never would have told me either, if her brother hadn’t blurted it out. How come I’m the one who has to keep apologizing?”
In all relationships there’s a balance of power. Some relationships are a constant fight for the upper hand. In others one person is in charge—although not always the person who thinks they are. Then, I guess there are relationships so equal that no one has to think about it. I don’t know anything about those. What I do know is that power can shift in a moment. Way back at the beginning of their relationship, Sam was always deferring to Daneca. But once he got mad, he couldn’t seem to stop being angry.
By the time he was ready to hear her apology, she no longer wanted to give it. And so they’ve somersaulted back and forth these past few weeks, neither one sorry enough to placate the other, neither of them sorry at the right time, both sure the other is in the wrong.
I can’t tell if that means they’re broken up or not. Neither can Sam.
“If you don’t know why you’re apologizing, your apology probably sucks,” I say.
