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“Right,” I say. “It’s a shame they won’t let you do it.”
“They’re not big on my prosthetics either. I wanted to give James a beard. I mean, has Ms. Stavrakis even seen paintings of Charlemagne? Totally bearded.” He looks at me for a long moment. “Are you okay?”
“Sure. Of course. So who won what?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” He goes back to putting his equipment away. “Two teachers were spotted hooking up—practically no one bet on it, but three people did. Your payout is, like, six hundred bucks.” He corrects himself. “Our payout.”
“I guess the house doesn’t always win.” I miscalculated my odds in a big way, but I don’t want him to know how big a hit I’m going to take. I rely on people making bad bets. “Who?”
He grins. “Ramirez and Carter.”
I shake my head. Music teacher and the freshman English teacher. Both married to other people. “Evidence? You better not be handing out any winnings without—”
He flips open his laptop and shows me the picture. Ms. Carter’s got her hand on the back of Ms. Ramirez’s neck and her mouth on the front of it.
“Doctored?” I ask hopefully.
He shakes his head. “You know, people have been acting really weird since I took over your operation. Asking my friends about me.”
“People don’t like to think of their bookies as having friends. Makes them nervous.”
“I’m not going to give up my friends.”
“Of course you’re not,” I say automatically. “I’ll go get the cash. Look,” I say, and sigh. “I’m sorry if I seem like a hard-ass or whatever, asking you for evidence.” My skin itches with discomfort. I’ve been acting like Sam’s a fellow criminal.
“You aren’t being weird,” he says, looking puzzled. “No weirder than usual, anyway. You seem fine, man.”
I guess he’s used to suspicious people with crappy tempers. Or maybe I’ve never seemed as normal as I thought. Trudging down the path to the library, I keep my head down. I’m pretty sure that if Northcutt or any of her lackeys see me, they’ll consider my roaming around campus a violation of my “medical leave.” I manage to avoid looking anyone in the eye or walking into anyone on the way to the library.
Lainhart Library is the ugliest building on campus, constructed with a musician’s donated funds in the eighties, when apparently people thought that a round building tilted at a weird angle was just the thing to update all the grand old brick edifices surrounding it. But as ugly as it is on the outside, the inside is couch-filled and comfortable. Bookshelves fan out from a central parlor with lots of seating and a massive globe that seniors try to steal year after year (a popular bet).
The librarian waves from behind her big oak desk. She’s just out of library school and has cat’s-eye glasses in every color of the rainbow. Several losers put down money on hooking up with her themselves. I felt bad when I told them the odds I’d assigned.
“Good to have you back, Cassel,” she says.
“Good to be back, Ms. Fiske.” Once spotted, I figure the best I can manage is not being conspicuous. Hopefully by the time she figures out I’m not back for real, I will be.
My working money—a total of three thousand dollars—is hidden between the pages of a big leather-bound onomasticon. I’ve kept it there for the last two years without incident. No one ever touches it but me. My only fear is that the book will be culled, since no one ever uses an onomasticon, but I think Wallingford keeps it because it looks expensive and obscure enough to reassure visiting parents that their kids are learning genius-type stuff.
I open the book and slide out six hundred dollars, poke around for a couple of minutes acting like I’m considering reading some Renaissance poetry, and then slink back to the dorm, where Sam’s supposed to meet me. As I step off the stairs and into the hall, Valerio walks out of his room. I dodge to the side, into the bathroom, and then close myself in a stall. Leaning against the wall while waiting for my heart to start beating normally, I try to remind myself that so long as no one sees you doing something embarrassing, there’s no reason to be humiliated. Valerio doesn’t follow. I text Sam.
He walks into the bathroom moments later, laughing. “What a clandestine spot for a meeting.”
I push open the stall door. “Laugh it up.” There’s no rancor in my voice, though. Just relief.
“The coast is clear,” he says. “The eagle has flown the coop. The cow stands alone.”
I can’t help smiling as I dig out the money from my pocket. “You are a master of deception.”
“Hey,” he says. “Can you teach me to calculate odds? Like, if there was something I wanted to take bets on? And what’s the deal with the point spreads on the games? How do you figure those? You aren’t doing it the way they say online.”
“It’s complicated,” I say, stalling. What I mean is: It’s fixed.
He leans against the sink. “Didn’t you hear? We Asians are all math geniuses.”
“Okay, genius. Maybe another time, though?”
“Sure,” he says, and I wonder if he’s already planning to cut me loose from my own business. I figure I can probably screw him somehow if he does, but the thought of having to plan it just makes me tired.
