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“You weren’t at debate club,” she says.
“Yeah.” I feel bad about avoiding Daneca or giving her rude half answers, but I’ve been doing it since I started at Wallingford. Even though she’s one of Sam’s friends and living with him makes avoiding Daneca more difficult.
“My mother wants to talk with you. She says that what you did was a cry for help.”
“It was,” I say. “That’s why I was yelling ‘Heeeelp!’ I don’t really go in for subtlety.”
She makes an impatient noise. Daneca’s family are cofounders of HEX, the advocacy group that wants to make working legal again—basically so laws against more serious works can be better enforced. I’ve seen her mother on television, filmed sitting in the office of her brick house in Princeton, a blooming garden visible through the window behind her. Mrs. Wasserman talked about how, despite the laws, no one wanted to be without a luck worker at a wedding or a baptism, and that those kinds of works were beneficial. She talked about how it benefited crime families to prevent workers from finding ways to use their talents legally. She admitted to being a worker herself. It was an impressive speech. A dangerous speech.
“Mom deals with worker families all the time,” Daneca says. “The issues worker kids face.”
“I know that, Daneca. Look, I didn’t want to join your junior HEX club last year, and I don’t want to mess with that kind of stuff now. I’m not a worker, and I don’t care if you are. Find someone else to recruit or save or whatever it is you are trying to do. And I don’t want to meet your mother.”
She hesitates. “I’m not a worker. I’m not. Just because I want to—”
“Whatever. I said I don’t care.”
“You don’t care that workers are being rounded up and shot in North Korea? And here in the U.S. they’re being forced into what’s basically indentured servitude for crime families? You don’t care about any of it?”
“No, I don’t care.”
Across the hall Valerio is headed toward me. That’s enough to make Daneca decide she doesn’t want to risk a demerit for not being where she’s supposed to be. Hand on her bag, she walks off with a single glance back at me. The combination of disappointment and contempt in that last look hurts.
I put a big chunk of sauce-soaked bread in my mouth and stand.
“Congratulations. You’re going to be sleeping in your room tonight, Mr. Sharpe.”
I nod, chewing. Maybe if I make it through tonight, they’ll consider letting me stay.
“But I want you to know that I have Dean Wharton’s dog and she’s going to be sleeping in the hallway. That dog is going to bark like hell if you go on one of your midnight strolls. I better not see you out of your room, not even to go to the bathroom. Do you understand?”
I swallow. “Yes, sir.”
“Better get back and start on your homework.”
“Right,” I say. “Absolutely. Thank you, sir.”
I seldom walk back from the dining hall alone. Above the trees, their leaves the pale green of new buds, bats weave through the still-bright sky. The air is heavy with the smell of crushed grass, threaded through with smoke. Somewhere someone’s burning the wet, half-decomposed foliage of winter.
* * *
Sam sits at his desk, earbuds in, huge back to the door and head down as he doodles in the pages of his physics textbook. He barely looks up when I flop down on the bed. We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I’m not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam’s homework, but if it is, his physics teacher is awesome.
I pull out books from my backpack and start on trig problems, but as my pencil scrapes across the page of my notebook, I realize I don’t really remember class well enough to solve anything. Pushing those books toward my pillow, I decide to read the chapter we were assigned in mythology. It’s some more messed-up Olympian family stuff, starring Zeus. His pregnant girlfriend, Semele, gets tricked by his wife, Hera, into demanding to see Zeus in all his godly glory. Despite knowing this is going to kill Semele, he shows her the goods. A few minutes later he’s cutting baby Dionysus out of burned-up Semele’s womb and sewing him into his own leg. No wonder Dionysus drank all the time. I just get to the part where Dionysus is being raised as a girl (to keep him hidden from Hera, of course), when Kyle bangs against the door frame.
“What?” Sam says, pulling off one of his buds and turning in his chair.
“Phone for you,” Kyle says, looking in my direction.
I guess before everyone had a cell phone, the only way students could call home was to save up their quarters and feed them into the ancient pay phone at the end of every dorm hall. Despite the occasional midnight crank call, Wallingford has left those old phones where they were. People occasionally still use them; mostly parents calling someone whose cell battery died or who wasn’t returning messages. Or my mother, calling from jail.
I pick up the familiar heavy black receiver. “Hello?”
“I am very disappointed in you,” Mom says. “That school is making you soft in the head. What were you doing up on a roof?” Theoretically Mom shouldn’t be able to call another pay phone from the pay phone in prison, but she found a way around that. First she gets my sister-in-law to accept the charges, then Maura can three-way call me, or anyone else Mom needs. Lawyers. Philip. Barron.
Of course, Mom could three-way call my cell phone, but she’s sure that all cell phone conversations are being listened to by some shady peeping-Tom branch of the government, so she tries to avoid using them.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Thanks for checking in on me.” Her voice reminds me that Philip’s coming to pick me up in the morning. I have a brief fantasy of him never bothering to show up and the whole thing blowing over.
