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The second go is when you introduce bigger stakes. The big score. This is the part my mother never has to worry about. As an emotion worker, she can make anyone trust her. But she still needs to go through the steps, so that later, when they think back on it, they don’t figure out she worked them.
After that there’s only the blow-off and the getaway.
Being a con artist means thinking that you’re smarter than everyone else and that you’ve thought of everything. That you can get away with anything. That you can con anyone.
I wish I could say that I don’t think about the con when I deal with people, but the difference between me and my mother is that I don’t con myself.
2
I ONLY HAVE ENOUGH time to pull on my uniform and run to French class; breakfast is long over. Wallingford television crackles to life as I dump my books onto my desk. Sadie Flores announces from the screen that during activities period the Latin club will be having a bake sale to support their building a small outdoor grotto, and that the rugby team will meet inside the gymnasium. I manage to stumble through my classes until I actually fall asleep during history. I wake abruptly with drool wetting the sleeve of my shirt and Mr. Lewis asking, “What year was the ban put into effect, Mr. Sharpe?”
“Nineteen twenty-nine,” I mumble. “Nine years after Prohibition started. Right before the stock market crashed.”
“Very good,” he says unhappily. “And can you tell me why the ban hasn’t been repealed like Prohibition?”
I wipe my mouth. My headache hasn’t gotten any better. “Uh, because the black market supplies people with curse work anyway?”
A couple of people laugh, but Mr. Lewis isn’t one of them. He points toward the board, where a jumble of chalk reasons are written. Something about economic initiatives and a trade agreement with the European Union. “Apparently you can do lots of things very nimbly while asleep, Mr. Sharpe, but attending my class does not seem to be one of them.”
He gets the bigger laugh. I stay awake for the rest of the period, although several times I have to jab myself with a pen to do it.
I go back to my dorm and sleep through the period when I should be getting help from teachers in classes where I’m struggling, through track practice, and through the debate team meeting. Waking up halfway through dinner, I feel the rhythm of my normal life receding, and I have no idea how to get it back.
* * *
Wallingford Preparatory is a lot like how I pictured it when my brother Barron brought home the brochure. The lawns are less green and the buildings are smaller, but the library is impressive enough and everyone wears jackets to dinner. Kids come to Wallingford for two very different reasons. Either private school is their ticket to a fancy university, or they got kicked out of public school and are using their parents’ money to avoid the school for juvenile delinquents that’s their only other option.
Wallingford isn’t exactly Choate or Deerfield Academy, but it was willing to take me, even with my ties to the Zacharovs. Barron thought the school would give me structure. No messy house. No chaos. I’ve done well too. Here, my inability to do curse work is actually an advantage—the first time that it’s been good for anything. And yet I see in myself a disturbing tendency to seek out all the trouble this new life should be missing. Like running the betting pool when I need money. I can’t seem to stop working the angles.
* * *
The dining hall is wood-paneled with a high, arched ceiling that makes our noise echo. The walls are hung with paintings of important heads-of-school and, of course, Wallingford himself. Colonel Wallingford, the founder of Wallingford Preparatory, killed by the bare-handed touch of a death worker a year before the ban went into effect, sneers down at me from his gold frame.
My shoes clack on the worn marble tiles, and I frown as the voices around me merge into a single buzzing that rings in my ears. Walking through to the kitchen, my hands feel damp, sweat soaking the cotton of my gloves as I push open the door.
I look around automatically to see if Audrey’s here. She’s not, but I shouldn’t have looked. I’ve got to ignore her just enough that she doesn’t think I care, but not too much. Too much will give me away as well.
Especially today, when I’m so disoriented.
“You’re late,” one of the food service ladies says without looking up from wiping the counter. She looks past retirement age—at least as old as my grandfather—and a few of her permed curls have tumbled out the side of her plastic cap. “Dinner’s over.”
“Yeah.” And then I mumble, “Sorry.”
“The food’s put away.” She looks up at me. She holds up her plastic-covered hands. “It’s going to be cold.”
“I like cold food.” I give her my best sheepish half smile.
She shakes her head. “I like boys with a good appetite. All of you look so skinny, and in the magazines they talk about you starving yourselves like girls.”
“Not me,” I say, and my stomach growls, which makes her laugh.
“Go outside and I’ll bring you a plate. Take a few cookies off the tray here too.” Now that she’s decided I’m a poor child in need of feeding, she seems happy to fuss.
Unlike in most school cafeterias, the food at Wallingford is good. The cookies are dark with molasses and spicy with ginger. The spaghetti, when she brings it, is lukewarm, but I can taste chorizo in the red sauce. As I sop up some of it with bread, Daneca Wasserman comes over to the table.
“Can I sit down?” she asks.
I glance up at the clock. “Study hall’s going to start soon.” Her tangle of brown curls looks unbrushed, pulled back with a sandalwood headband. I drop my gaze to the hemp bag at her hip, studded with buttons that read POWERED BY TOFU, DOWN ON PROP 2, and WORKER RIGHTS.
