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“Which is a good thing,” Kristin rushed to add, “because you wouldn’t believe how bad things had gotten—‘me too’ kind of stuff, the old boys, it was horrible.”
“—but once you’ve got your president running a safari, it’s hard to keep the big cat sanctuary guy out.”
“Or the animal psychics,” Kristin said with a roll of her eyes.
Jem couldn’t help his own grin.
“And it doesn’t hurt that Rod has gobs of money, while the rest of us are scrabbling for grants,” Missy said. “Yes is the same way; she has oodles of it. She’s opening another park, you know. In Osage Beach.”
“Which means safe living space for animals who don’t have a natural habitat here,” Kristin said.
“Yes, thank you,” Missy said, “I remember that talking point from when Yes screamed it in my ear. It’s gross, that’s all. Turning them into a spectacle.”
Kristin opened her mouth to say something, and something flashed across her face. What she said instead was, “Oh my God, we’re going to be late. You’re sure you’re not coming?”
Jem waved for them to go. “I don’t want to crash the party.”
“Come!” Missy said. “I’ll have too much to drink, and I’ll ask wildly inappropriate questions. We’ll have fun.”
“Tean will be so embarrassed he might catch on fire,” Kristin said with a smirk.
With a laugh-track laugh, Jem shook his head, and a moment later, the two women were gone.
He turned the other direction, just in case. He wouldn’t want to bump into Tean and his friends by accident. He wouldn’t want to embarrass the doc. Which was silly, he told himself as he shuffled down the hall. The last panels of the day were letting out, the doors of multipurpose rooms swinging open, bodies pouring into the hall. It was silly because Tean loved him, and had never once been embarrassed by Jem, wouldn’t ever be embarrassed by him. Jem knew that. It was a fact. It was …this place. And these people. And a nagging part of him that wondered, had there been a tone? Had something slipped into Tean’s voice, something he hadn’t meant Jem to hear, when he said,It’ll be boring. I don’t want you to be bored.
He was still trying to pry apart that particular pretzel of craziness when a man emerged from the throng of bodies and grabbed Jem’s arm. Jem twisted free automatically. He bumped into a woman behind him, who let out a startled squawk. Jem mumbled an apology, but his gaze was fixed on the man who had grabbed him. He was short, with sandy-brown skin and a potbelly, and an ostrich feather earring dangled from one lobe. When he caught Jem’s eye, he said, “Zach?”
The part of Jem’s brain that was always alert, always processing, always ready to riff, launched into action. His subconscious had already put it together, and he was nodding before the connections made their way to his conscious mind: the two white guys, both of them wearing ’90s-era gaming t-shirts, in this particular hallway of the Santaland Resort and Convention Center. You should say no, a part of his brain said, even as Jem nodded. The doc would say no.
But this seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than moping while Tean went to dinner—I don’t want you to be bored—with his friends.
The man jerked his head, and Jem plunged through the river of bodies to follow him. They ended up in a vestibule, where a couple of vending machines made the air uncomfortably warm and full of the smell of corn chips. Bodies streamed past them in the hallway, but nobody seemed to be paying particular attention to them.
The man with the ostrich feather earring studied Jem. Then he said, “You’re shit at describing yourself, you know that?”
“Who are you?” Jem asked.
“Who the hell do you think I am?” A beat, and then, with a trace of outrage, “DeVoy?”
Jem still couldn’t blush on command, but he ducked his chin and mumbled, “I had to be sure.”
“Jesus Christ.” DeVoy patted himself down. A moment later, he produced an envelope, from which he drew out a photo. He passed it to Jem. The photo was a bad quality close-up of a bird. A pretty bird. Something tropical, Jem guessed. He didn’t mind birds, but his joke about the hawk and the owl hadn’t been far from the truth. After a few seconds, DeVoy said, “How about it, Mr. Zachary? We got a deal?”
“Well,” Jem said.
“Now come on. That’s the one you wanted. You said scarlet macaw, and that’s what you’re getting. And look, it’s a chick, so you’re going to have this guy for a long time. So, how about it?”
“I don’t know.” Riffing was one of the things Jem did best, when he could stop listening to the front of his brain and just…flow. It was like someone plugged him in, like all the parts of him that were normally dark lit up. And right now, he knew the role he was supposed to play. He’d been DeVoy plenty of times, and he knew what the other guy did, knew how it drove you crazy when you wanted to close the deal. “This is all weird,” Jem said. “I don’t feel good about this.”
“Man, what’s weird? Look, I’ve got this bird. You want this bird. That’s business. He’s going to a good home, right? That’s what I care about. That’s the important thing here.”
Jem hesitated. He shook his head. He was surprised the hairs on his arms weren’t standing up. He was surprised, too, by how much he’d missed this.
“You’re not going to get a better price. This is rock bottom. You’re going to pay twice this if you go to anybody else.”
The next part was the trickiest. The right duration of silence. Building in all the cues—the body language, the breathing, the microexpressions on his face—to suggest indecision, dismay, struggle.
“Ok,” Jem finally said.
