Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
KAI
Welp, I’m drunk and throwing rocks at a lake.
Because that’s a productive way to deal with your shit.
“Come on out, Vivian!” I yell, just loud enough that someone might overhear and send a rock sailing into the water’s glassy surface. “I’m right he-ere. Waiting. Don’tcha wanna come give me your little seal of approval?”
Nothing, of course.
Just the ripples spreading out on the surface of the water, reflecting the purple and pink of the early-afternoon sunset.
Growing up, I never believed in so much as the fucking Tooth Fairy. And now here I am, praying for forgiveness when I bash some poor bastard too hard in a bout, and crying to a magical dead girl in a lake when God won’t give me my way.
Cowards make the fiercest converts, I guess. Any port in a fucking storm.
I shiver.
It’s chilly and I’m not wearing a jacket because I’m a dipshit.
Just came right out from the salle with my hair still wet in my T-shirt.
Practice wasn’t enough. Drilling wasn’t enough.
Lifting wasn’t enough. A healthy swig from this bottle of Clase Azul wasn’t enough, although it certainly took the edge off.
So instead I’m here, dealing with problems the way my genetic forebears would, yelling at them and causing property damage.
I suck my teeth as the ripples abate, palm out my pack of cigarettes, and jam one between my teeth.
I’m restless, that’s the problem. Every muscle tense, even when I’ve tried to wear it to fatigue. Petulant and throwing rocks like I’m twelve years old again and trying to hit the Green Line as it chugged past 63rd Street.
“Kai?”
I almost jump out of my fucking skin at the voice—not just the sound of my own name, but coming from a familiar source.
Female. I flick my gaze up from where I’ve settled on the grass, and there she is, Gwenna, winding down the worn path, breathless, her cheeks pink from the cold. I cock my head.
“You get lost?” I ask. “Campus is that way.” I nod in the other direction.
“No, I just…” She trails off, hugging herself.
I don’t know who Kingston got to buy her an entirely new wardrobe, but they did a good job. Those sweaters might cover a lot of skin, but they still don’t leave too much to the imagination.
At least, if it’s an imagination like mine, anyway. I’m a very visual learner.
And I have memories, too.
Of her skin.
Of that scar.
“I just needed some air,” she finishes.
I sweep a hand in front of me. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Plenty out here.” My eye catches the smoky trail of my cigarette, and I stub it into the ground. “Er, sorry.” I fan it away hurriedly .
She laughs, and I’m surprised by how good it feels to hear that sound.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she says. “I’ll leave you alone.”
“Nah, nah, it’s fine,” I say, before my brain can acknowledge what I’m doing. Drunk Kai is nothing if not sociable. “Come on over, the water’s great.”
She balks. “You’re not swimming, are you?”
“Ha.” I run a finger through my damp hair. “No, this is from good old-fashioned indoor plumbing.” I jerk my head back at the walkout door to the salle. “Just got done practicing, and now I’m…”
What, berating a ghost girl to give me the right to leadership that she bestowed on my foster brother? I think. Yeah, even for a drunk guy, that sounds a little far-fetched.
Instead, I just shrug. “Drinking.” I hold up the decanter of Clase Azul. “You want?”
It’s half a joke, but she considers.
“You know what? Yes,” Gwenna says definitively. She settles into place next to me and I obligingly hand her the mezcal, which she lifts and drinks.
Drinks…a lot.
“Easy,” I say, snatching it away. “You trying to drink to forget or something? Because that’s an Alzheimer’s level dose.”
She laughs. “No. Just to…um.” She blinks. “Escape my mother.”
I jump like I’m startled. Look behind me in a comical overreaction. “Escape? Is she here?”
Gwenna laughs again. God, that sound is like pure dopamine. Heroin. I could drown in it.
“No, thank God,” she mutters. “But she might as well be. She’s watching me like a hawk. Or—correction,” she says, dipping her head in acknowledgement, “watching my student account, making sure I’m on top of everything and not…” she fiddles with the knee of her black jeans, “…you know, screwing up.”
I lean back onto my hands, tipping my head up to the darkening sky. “I know that feeling. Got you by the purse strings.”
“Yeah.” She leans forward, her chin on her knees, and we sit like that a while in silence. “She called me up, gave me the third degree about where I was living on campus now since apparently my room and board charges are on pause.”
I lift an eyebrow. “And?”
“I told her I was your new equipment manager.” Gwenna grimaces. “I hope that’s okay.”
Equipment manager? Sure. Why not. “Only if your mom bought it.”
She sucks her teeth. “Hard to say. I…promised her photo proof.”
“Eh, that can be arranged.” I wait a moment. “She’s a hard ass, huh?”
It strikes me that I don’t know much about Gwenna beyond the…obvious traumatic backstory that’s made its way across campus.
Gwenna purses her lips. “She’d probably describe herself as type A, but she’s…Yeah, that’s basically it. She and my dad had an ugly divorce, and that…” Her voice fades. “That kinda set everything in motion.”
“I see,” I say.
So she jumped straight from mommy issues to setting a church on fire? I don’t quite connect the dots, especially knowing that someone wanted to hurt her bad enough to leave a vicious cut on her body. There’s something missing.
But, then again, it’s not for me to say whether that’s logical. My own life narrative doesn’t make much more sense. Go from a hardscrabble kid on the South Side to a collegiate fencing star with a multi-millionaire foster father? I sound like Oliver fucking Twist.
“They call it…spiritual psychosis,” Gwenna says. Her eyes are resolute and forward, fixed on the far shore of the lake, but her tone is even and steady, like she’s deliberately doling out this information. “What happened…I just…” She shakes her head, sighing, just a little shakily.
I listen intently without changing my posture, riveted to her every word, even as my alcohol-infused blood is making everything just a little bit wavy.
“I think it was the divorce, I don’t know.
I got so obsessed with what I had done wrong, all this stuff about sinning and losing favor, and I was studying a lot—Catholic school, you know—and I started thinking…
I started to think I could change things, that I was hearing things, seeing things.
Only in church, though, which is the craziest fucking part.
We didn’t even go that much when I was growing up.
And then I started going all the time once I went to Catholic school.
Somehow I got this idea that, like, I was on this kind of divine quest. That I was gonna unlock the secrets of the universe by reading everything I could.
All the geeky medieval shit that I came here to study. ”
She laughs, but there’s no humor in it.
And my blood, alcohol or no, has gone cold.
“Like, what…kind of stuff?” I ask. Trying not to sound too curious. Too suspicious.
“Oh, you know. The secret to eternal life. A cure for all wounds.” She makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. “I…I thought I was this sort of vessel for, I don’t know, the redemption of the earth. Basically one step down from thinking I’m Jesus Christ reincarnated.”
I sneak a glance at her, and there’s a tear glimmering in the corner of her eye. It physically hurts to restrain myself from wiping it away .
“Fuck me,” I whisper.
“You got that right,” she says, laughing.
And this time there’s a little color to it, some humor, which makes me feel like I’ve won the lottery and punched Satan himself in the face.
Then she looks at me, and the feeling quadruples.
“God, what right do you have to be so nice and understanding, Kai?”
“Excuse me,” I say, in mock offense. “I am the very model of a sensitive, empathetic, modern gentleman.”
She blinks. “You’ve got three piercings, God knows how many tattoos, and mezcal on your breath,” she says.
More than three, I think, but I guess you only know about the visible ones. I catch my lip ring in my teeth for effect and grin at her. “Don’t you know it’s what’s on the inside that counts?”
She laughs. “Tell that to someone like my mother.” She sighs, but it ends on another little laugh.
“What?” I prompt.
“Nothing. It’s just…remember that night at Porter’s? When you tried to jump into my selfie?”
I squint, feigning recollection. Of course I remember. How could I fucking forget?
“I seem to recall,” I say.
“Imagine I took that picture.” She lifts an imaginary phone, tips her head, and grins. “Look, Mom, this is my new boyfriend. He’s tattooed, pierced, and smells like an ashtray. Don’t you love it?”
I laugh. Laugh because it’s funny. And laugh because…yeah, I don’t know. I’d love to be the bad boyfriend that makes her mom angry. Show up for dinner, scare the living daylight out of her old lady, and then drive home and fuck her till she can’t walk straight.
I chew my tongue to quell the need for another cigarette.
“It’d be a veritable laugh riot,” I murmur.
Gwenna sighs as the last of the sunlight fades behind the trees.
“Here.” I stand up, halfway crouch-walk over to where there’s a pile of good stones. “Take this. Chuck it in the water. You’ll feel better.”
She raises an eyebrow up at me, skeptical. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Come on.” I offer her a hand, which she takes. The brush of her fingers is electric.
“Like so.” I show her how to hook the rock in my index finger, snap my wrist back, and boom. It hits perfectly. Skips one, two, three across the surface. “You want a nice flat one,” I say, “like this.” I press it into her palm.
“All right.” Her brow knit in concentration, she shifts her weight back, withdraws her arm, and flings it wildly. It sinks like, well, like a stone.
I wince. “Yeah, you’re gonna need to practice. Gotta start somewhere.”
She licks her lips. Looks over at me. Well, up at me. Because as tall as she is, I’m still taller.
“Thanks, Kai.”
“Anytime,” I say.
“Thanks for…” Se blows out a hard breath, rolls her eyes, and blinks like she might cry again.
“Not judging me about…my whole delusions of grandeur incident. Unlocking the secrets of the universe and all that. Being favored by God.” She laughs a shaky laugh.
“I know that shit’s not real, for what it’s worth. ”
The coldness returns to my blood.
“Yeah, no,” I say, not able to meet her eyes anymore. “You’re certifiable, Wednesday.” I flash her a grin, even though it pains me. “But that’s par for the course at Camlann House.”
She laughs again—soft, trusting.
Except now the sound hurts.
Makes me feel like a thief. Like a fucking liar.
Because that’s what I am.
Because she doesn’t know the truth.