Chapter Twenty-One #2
“Shot away instead,” he corrects. “You pissed away our plans to end up where? Waiting to see if this guy shows up so you can make him the villain you need to be a part of this whole deeply fucking weird experiment Wizzard’s conducting on all of us?”
“I guess, man! I fucked up, I’m sorry. It sucks.”
“No, what sucks is you leaving me behind to put all of your energy into someone who doesn’t care if you get what you want. From day one, you put all of your chips on him and let him drag you around dancing to his tune.”
“That is one hell of a mixed metaphor.”
“I know. Know what else I know?”
That’s rhetorical, right?
“I know that if it were me with you all summer, you wouldn’t be waiting for me to show up today. I would be there, here. Whatever. I would have done anything to help you, but you made everything so much harder for yourself. Why, when we could have done it together?”
“Because you didn’t need me! All you have to do—all people, all boys like you have to do—is show up, get good, and nobody sees any problem with you!
You get to be standoffish and unapproachable, and I don’t have that luxury.
I have to bend and twist myself into the exact right shape or people are going to assume the worst while insisting it has nothing to do with what I look like.
Your default is belonging. Mine is proving.
Ivan understood that I didn’t make things hard for myself.
He knows I have to be anything and everything all of the time and it still might not work. ”
For a moment, Cassius is silent. Then, quietly, he speaks again. “It’s not like I asked for it to be like that. It’s not like that’s my fault.”
I stifle a yawn. Not because this is boring, but because doing something normal like sitting in a chair and arguing with Cassius reminds me of how few energy-sucking things I actually did with my time before I came to the academy.
It strikes me, for the first time today, that I am tired.
No, not just tired. I’m exhausted. Keeping this up, pretending with Ivan, getting betrayed, fueling this grudge …
it’s all so much more than Before Zora would have attempted to juggle.
This is the most normal I’ve felt in months, and like a marathon runner stopping halfway through the course, everything in front of me looks so much harder than if I’d not taken this time to sit and talk—I should have kept running.
Stopping is what hurts. Stopping and this conversation.
“I think, for me,” Cassius begins, sounding like he’s about to change the subject, “the hard part was seeing you with him all summer when you knew how I felt.”
“About what?”
Cassius levels his gaze at me, his eyes daring me to continue to treat him like he’s stupid. “You know,” he says.
He really is so honest, his feelings so straightforward.
Maybe that’s exactly why I never did anything even though I knew, and yes, I’m realizing now I definitely knew, that he liked me that way.
Of course I fell for Ivan instead of him.
I’m a winner, and I can’t win if there’s no game to play in the first place.
“I do know,” I admit. “And I know I said sorry before, but that was kind of flippant, so I’m sorry. For real this time. You deserved better from me, as a … friend.”
I let the word settle between us, imagining it trying to get cozy in the silence like a dog scratching at a blanket before lying down to sleep.
I take full responsibility for being a bad friend, but I won’t apologize for not wanting Cassius back.
God knows I have enough to apologize for besides that.
“Okay.” Cassius nods. “Thank you,” he adds. “I should go.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, though I think we’re both aware that I’m the last person he wants to talk to after I dropped the rejection bomb.
He nods instead of answering me. With a few leggy strides, he’s back at that too-small door, ducking under the frame to save the top inch of his skull. “Hey, Zora?” he asks before closing the door.
“Yeah?”
“Good luck today.”
“Thanks.”
“And for what it’s worth … I think he’s going to show up.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you would,” Cass says, cold and correct. “And you two are exactly the same.”
Ouch. I think he knew that would hurt me, but didn’t say it only to accomplish that. Cassius isn’t cruel, he’s honest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s right—am I just like Ivan? Would I show up today if the roles were reversed?
It’s an impossible question to answer. I would never have been in Ivan’s shoes in the first place.
I would never—what? Find an unorthodox way to get what I want and pursue it single-mindedly?
Trick strangers into liking me with lies?
Align myself with a soulless executive in exchange for a shortcut to the top?
Yes, I would! I absolutely, 100 percent would, and have, and Cassius is right once again.
Ivan and I are exactly alike, and that means he’s going to face me onstage today. And he’s going to be exactly as angry, driven, and focused as I am. I’m staking my future on boxing my own reflection, and I truly have no idea which one of us is going to win the match.
Knock. I briefly wonder if this is the Wizzard employee with the news I’ve been waiting for, but something about the confidence behind the knock makes me think maybe no. But who else would come to visit me today, here?
“Come in?”
Similarly tall, but otherwise different from Cassius in every way. Uncle Clive’s summer beard is gone, hiding the patches of premature gray that speckle his face and making him look as young as he is to my eyes, for once.
“Hey, little sis,” he says. It’s nothing he hasn’t called me before, but it hits especially hard today.
My mom was estranged from her family by the time she had me, so I never got a good look at what Clive looked like as a kid, but I imagine they looked alike when they were younger.
Which means he—and she—looked like me. We have the same narrow black eyes, the same squared-off chin.
Now that he’s beardless, I notice his ears are connected like mine, his bottom lip is dark like mine.
I’ve tried so hard to distance myself from whatever family connections I have, mostly because they don’t seem to last that long, but something about seeing Clive now, for the first time this summer, really reminds me that blood can cross any distance I attempt to make.
No matter where I go or what I do, I’m undeniably Clive’s family. And he’s mine.
Or something like that, I don’t know. I’m feeling mushy today.
Vulnerable. I blame Cassius, and I hope I can snap out of this before it’s time for the match.
But in the meanwhile … while I’m sitting here and Clive is staring at me from the doorway …
and while Cassius is mad at me and Ivan abandoned me and Trieu and Kavi both aren’t really supposed to talk to me right now and Brian is counting on me and I’m so, so close to being who I wanted to be all along but light-years away from being who I want to be when I get it …
I could really use a hug. From my family.
I don’t think Clive is surprised when I spring out of my chair and fling myself at him from across the room.
If anything, he anticipated it, seeing as I come in contact with a solid wall of uncle, with both feet planted on the ground, as unmovable as one of those rocks I imagined Cass clambering over in the park.
Bad knee or not, my uncle still has the rooted posture of a football player when he wants to.
“I know, baby girl. I know,” Clive says soothingly. He even rubs my back for good measure.
“You’re here!” I repeat, briefly too overwhelmed to thread more complex thoughts together. “Wait—how are you here? What do you know?”
“Whatever this one told me about your little summer stunt, which was wild. Even for you.”
Clive gestures toward the door. In my excitement over seeing him, I somehow did not notice Emilia Romero hovering right behind him. No Jake in sight, though, just the queen who needs no king.
“How—”
“Trieu called me,” Emilia says, “and we called Cass, Cass called Clive, and before you ask, yes. Your uncle is grounding you for the rest of your life, and I know exactly how you feel. God, it’s like looking into a mirror.
” Emilia does look into the mirror then, pausing to tap at the concealer under her cheek. “Or using a time machine.”
“What do you mean?” I’m still shocked that she’s even here, and extra shocked that the call Trieu said he’d make had such an immediate domino effect.
“You do remember you’re not the first person Ivan Hunt screwed over and left hanging, like, days before the biggest gaming event of her life, right?”
Of course she’s right. At least Ivan is consistent.
“Where is Ivan?” Clive interjects. “He needs somebody to kick his soul back up to God, and I’m ready.”
“Don’t.” I smile at his protective instincts anyway. “Your knee.”
“Fuck my knee; what else am I supposed to do when someone breaks your heart?”
I don’t have the energy to refute that Ivan broke my heart. Normally I would, but I have too much to think about today to add the weight of another lie that accomplishes nothing.
The not-so-excellent soundproofing in the dressing room strikes again when I hear an extra loud fanfare rising from the direction of the theater.
I can’t make out exactly what the announcers are saying—could be anything, at this rate—but the immediate commotion outside my dressing room makes it much clearer within a few moments.
“He’s where he’s supposed to be,” Emilia continues. “Walking to his dressing room on the other side of the stage.”
“He’s WHAT?”
“He’s here!” shouts a Wizzard intern as they speed past my open door down the hallway.
“VANE is in the building,” wheezes another, going the opposite direction.
Emilia is back to checking her makeup again, but this time there’s a telltale smirk tugging at her lips.
“How did you do it?” I half whisper, even though the only person who will know if she tells is Clive, who deserves to know a lot more about this summer. And to whom I am going to spend the next seventeen years of my life explaining my reasoning.
“Easy.” Emilia turns to me with her smirk still in place. “I told him the only way I was ever going to forgive him for sacrificing my reputation was if he sacrificed his for you. But for what it’s worth, I think he was going to do it anyway.”
“Poetic.” Clive nods. “Still gonna kick his ass.”
“Not if I kick it first.” I’ve imagined the moment I’d hear Ivan show up today a million times in my head.
I pictured myself strutting out onstage, staring straight past him, and taking my seat with every ounce of photogenic grace Kavi taught me this summer.
I wouldn’t let my hate lure me into saying anything; he doesn’t deserve to hear my words ever again.
Then I would destroy him and take what’s mine.
The acclaim. The title. The mentorship. The shortcut.
But now that it’s within my grasp, I don’t think that’s what I want anymore.
Another soaring acknowledgment from the crowd reverberates through the theater walls, signaling that Brian Juno has taken the stage.
That gives me about five minutes to get into place—he has a whole highlight reel with standout moments from the summer planned.
Payton and Paxton’s feud is in there, so are a bunch of Trieu’s makeup looks.
I asked Brian to put the pigeon video in so Ivan looked like a dork, but I haven’t watched to see if Brian listened.
Then, I hear the crowd laugh, which morphs into the telltale group-booing noise people make when the bad guy appears on-screen in a cult classic movie screening.
Guess Brian put the pigeons in after all.
I wonder if Ivan knows they’re laughing at him out there.
I wonder if he still cares what they think.
This is the guy who broke with Wizzard Games because they asked him to betray me.
To be clear, that was after he’d already betrayed me. And after I stabbed him in the back in January. And—
“I’m going to give you a few minutes with your uncle, Zora,” Emilia finally says. “Good luck out there.”
“Thank you, Emilia.” I think I could spend the rest of my life thanking her for a whole host of things, but looking out for me from the start of this summer is definitely the big one.
Emilia is halfway out the door when she stops herself—“Oh, wait. One more thing. Ivan asked me to tell you something before I left.”
“What was it?” Clive asks, fists clenched at his sides. I think my uncle might actually try to kill Ivan?
“He said, ‘Too many people and twice as many eyes.’” With that, she leaves, and something like a plan takes shape in my head.
Clive takes that in for a beat. “Your generation baffles me.”
“We baffle ourselves,” I agree. “But we’re trying our best.”
“I was too, you know,” Clive says, suddenly serious. “Are you really going to take that mentorship after this? After—”
“Hey, Unc.” I stand on my toes to give him a kiss on his newly shaven cheek. “I got this.”
For the first time this summer, I know exactly what’s going to happen when the cameras turn on.