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Greg stands up, wiping his mouth. “I saw your mother’s trial in the paper, Sharpe. I know you’re just like her.”
“If I was, I would make you beg to blow me,” I sneer.
“Get him outside,” someone says, and Rahul steers me toward the door. The swimmers look up when we march through. Several people sitting on chaises rise, like they’re hoping for a fight.
I try to pull my way out of the guys’ grip, and when they let me go, I don’t expect it. I drop onto the grass.
“What got into you?” Rahul says. He’s breathing hard.
I look up at the stars. “Sorry,” I say.
The other person holding me turned out to be Kevin Ford. He’s short but built. A wrestler. He’s watching me like he hopes I try something.
“Be chill,” Rahul says. “This isn’t like you, man.”
“I guess I forgot myself,” I say. I forgot that I didn’t belong, that I would never belong. That I had charmed my way into being their bookie but that I was never their friend. I forgot the delicate foundation my excuse for a social life was built on.
Kevin and Rahul walk back to the house. Kevin says something, too low for me to hear, and Rahul snickers.
I look up at the stars again. No one ever taught me the constellations, so to me they are all just bright dots. Chaos. No pattern at all. When I was a kid, I made up a constellation, but I couldn’t find it a second time.
Someone shuffles through the grass to loom over me, blotting out the chaotic stars. For a moment I think it might be Audrey. It’s Sam. “There you are,” he says.
I get up slowly as Sam turns, stumbles, and pukes in the hydrangea bush near the kitchen window. Some girls on lounge chairs start to laugh.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Sam says when he’s done, “but I think you better drive me home.”
* * *
I get him coffee at a drive-through fast-food place and mix in a lot of sugar. I figure it will help him sober up, but he vomits most of it onto the asphalt of the parking lot. He washes his mouth out with the rest.
I turn on the radio and we sit there listening to it as his stomach gurgles. Another song about being worked by love. Like it’s romantic to be brainwashed.
“I used to pretend I was a worker when I was a kid,” he says.
“Everyone does,” I tell him.
“Even you?”
“Especially me.” I offer him the other cup of coffee. It’s mine and I’ve left it black, but there might be more packets of sugar somewhere. He shakes his head.
“How does anyone find out they’re a worker? When did you know you weren’t?”
“I’m sure it was the same with you. Our parents told us not to mess around with working. My mom went so far as to tell us that kids who did work before they were grown-up could die from the blowback.”
“That’s not true?”
I shrug. “Only way it kills you outright is if you’re a very unlucky-with-blowback death worker, and even then it doesn’t matter how old you are. But my brothers knew when they were pretty young. Barron won stuff by other people losing, you know? And Philip was always doing too well in a fight.” I remember Mom getting called into the junior high when Philip had broken the legs of three guys much bigger than he was. The blowback made him sick for a month, but no one ever messed with him again. I don’t know how she managed it, but no one reported him to the law, either. I try to think of an example with Barron in it, but nothing comes to mind. That’s one good thing about working luck, I guess. “Once you find out you’re a worker, you learn secret stuff from other workers. I can’t tell you that part because I don’t know it.”
“Are you supposed to tell me any of that?”
“Nope,” I say, turning on the car. “But you’re so drunk that I’m pretty sure you won’t remember anyway.”
Somewhere between apologizing to Mrs. Yu for bringing Sam home so late, dumping him onto his bed, and backing out of the driveway of his huge brick colonial, I realize something.
I’ve been so focused on the possibility that Lila might be a cat that I’ve glossed over the ramification of there being a transformation worker, here in the United States. Working with Anton—or maybe Anton himself. Either way, that’s a big secret. The government would fall all over itself to hire that person. The crime families would be desperate to recruit them. That’s what Anton and Philip are conspiring about. That’s why they needed to scramble my memories.
They’ve got a real transformation worker.
