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“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Brown will be here in a moment. He’s going to be telling me his side of the story. Are you sure you don’t have anything more to say?”
“No, sir.”
“Fine,” Dean Wharton says, pushing up his glasses so that he can massage the bridge of his nose with brown-gloved fingers. “Go wait outside.”
I go and sit in one of the chairs in front of the school secretary. Kevin walks past me with a grunt, on his way into Wharton’s office. The skin along Kevin’s cheek is turning an interesting greenish color. He’s going to have a hell of a bruise.
He’s going to tell Wharton, I don’t know what came over Cassel. He just went nuts. I didn’t provoke him.
A few minutes later Kevin leaves. He smirks at me as he walks out into the hall. I smirk right back.
“Mr. Sharpe, can you come in here, please?”
I do. I sit back in the chair, looking at the piles of paper. Just one push would send a stack crashing into all the others.
“You angry about something?” Dean Wharton asks me, as though he can read my thoughts.
I open my mouth to deny it, but I can’t. It’s like I have been carrying this feeling around with me for so long that I didn’t even know what it was. Wharton, of all people, has put his finger on what’s wrong with me.
I’m furious.
I think of not knowing what compelled me to strike a gun out of the hand of a killer. Of how satisfying it was to hit Kevin. Of how I want to do it again and again, want to feel bones snap and blood smear. Of how it felt to stand over him, my skin on fire with rage.
“No, sir,” I manage to get out. I swallow hard because I don’t know when I became so distanced from myself. I knew Sam was angry when he talked about Daneca. How come I didn’t know that I was mad too?
Wharton clears his throat. “You’ve been through a lot, between the death of your brother Philip and your mother’s current… legal woes.”
Legal woes. Nice. I nod.
“I don’t want to see you head down a path you can’t come back from, Cassel.”
“Understood,” I say. “Can I go back to class now?”
“Go on. But remember, you have two demerits and the year isn’t even half over. One more and you’re out. Dismissed.”
I get up, sling my backpack over my shoulder, and slink back to the Academic Center in time for the next bell. I don’t see Lila in the halls, although my gaze pauses on any blond-haired girl who passes me. I have no idea what I will say to her if I do see her. So, I hear you ordered your first murder. How was that? seems a little on the nose.
Besides, who says it was her first?
I duck into the bathroom, turn on the faucets, and splash my face with cold water.
It’s a shock, liquid streaming over my cheeks and collecting in the hollow of my throat, splashing my white shirt. Darkening my gloves. Stupidly, I forgot to take them off.
Wake up, I tell myself. Snap out of it.
Reflected in the mirror, my dark eyes look more shadowed than ever. My cheekbones stand out, like my skin is too tight.
Really fitting in, I tell myself. Dad would be so proud. You’re a real charmer, Cassel Sharpe.
I still make it to physics before Daneca does, which is good. Theoretically she and I are still friends, but she’s been avoiding me since she started fighting with Sam. If I want to talk to her, I’m going to have to corner her.
We don’t have assigned seats, which means it’s easy for me to find a desk near where Daneca usually sits and dump my stuff on the chair. Then I get up and talk to someone on the other side of the room. Willow Davis. She seems suspicious when I ask her a question about the homework, but answers without too much hesitation. She’s telling me something about how there are ten different dimensions of space and one of time, all curled around one another, when Daneca comes in.
“Understand?” Willow asks. “So there could be other versions of us living in other worlds—like maybe there’s a world where ghosts and monsters are real. Or where no one is hyperbathygammic. Or where we all have snake heads.”
I shake my head. “That can’t be real. That cannot be real science. It’s too awesome.”
