Chapter 18. Ethan
We don't pack for break, as we don't have much to take. They technically let us have our clothes back to leave, but mine are four years old. I was a lot skinnier then, and I don’t see much difference between them and the uniform anyway, so I don’t change.
Neither does Liam. Jack changes into the clothes he came wearing last. His mom always buys him new clothes, so his actually fit.
It's a yellow shirt with a small cartoon character in sunglasses embroidered on his chest and baggy jeans.
The most Jack outfit ever. Harry is wearing a black henley, so prim and proper.
They also gave our phones back, but they're all dead. We'd have to charge them.
Liam is holding a single pair of clean briefs, which he holds up for my inspection.
"Think these'll work for the pool?" he asks, grinning.
"Only if you want Harry's dad to call the cops, baby," I say. He laughs.
I do a final sweep of the room. Bunks made, trash emptied, nothing left behind that could earn us a demerit. The room smells like Jack's deodorant, which he applies like he's trying to suffocate us all.
Then I look at Miles.
He's on his bunk, cross-legged, biology textbook open across his knees.
His eyes move across the page, ignoring us.
Liam notices it too. He stops bouncing, his face going through four expressions in two seconds: excitement, guilt, sympathy, and something that looks like physical pain.
He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again.
"Miles, I…" he starts.
Miles looks up. His blue eyes are… okay. No tremor, no panic, no sadness. "Go," he says, and his voice is calm. "I have plans with the library. Griff actually said he's going to give me some free time." He smiles. He never smiles, so all of this makes me think he's actually alright.
Jack freezes. Harry's hand stills on his glasses. Liam blinks, as if Miles has just performed a magic trick.
I meet Miles's eyes. He holds my gaze. I understand him, I think. He wants some peace and quiet, a room for himself. That, or I'm trying to convince myself he'll be alright.
"We'll bring you something back," Jack says, recovering. "A souvenir. Like a snow globe. They'll allow it once they see it's not a bomb."
Liam laughs. Miles shakes his head. I doubt Miles would have a use for a snow globe.
We all go out to the admin block, the same one everybody gets into the Academy through, the one we crossed when we first got here.
It's our only way out. Then we cross to the outside parking lot, where we can see the street outside.
There are a lot of kids, two thirds of the Academy at least, all waiting for the cars that will pick us up.
The outside fence is even open, so the cars can get in. Something we definitely never see.
"Holy shit," I hear a kid saying.
A vehicle pulls up that looks like it could climb mountains. It's a black Range Rover, no, larger, more arrogant than that. A Mercedes G-Class. The driver's door opens and out steps a man in a uniform. Dark suit, the whole deal. Harry gets in the front, and we follow. Everybody stares at us.
"That's Gerald," Harry says, as if naming a family pet.
"Mr. Westfield," Gerald says. "Shall we?"
Harry nods. Gerald turns to the rest of us and smiles. He opens the rear door. The interior is black leather. Liam slides in first. I follow, then Jack. Harry goes in the front. The door closes automatically.
Through the tinted window, I can see the building, the fence, the razor wire. Boys watching. The car pulls forward.
The world moves. Trees blur. Buildings pass. The road unreels beneath, and I sit there watching the facility shrink in the rearview mirror until it's just a smudge of gray brick and razor wire, no bigger than a thumbnail, and then it's gone.
This is obscene. The backseat of this car is wider than my bed. It hits me that Harry's dad must have really wanted to punish his son by sending him to Aspire.
Liam has his face against the window like a dog on a road trip. His nose is almost touching the glass, his breath fogging it.
"Look," he says, pointing, "a Taco Bell. A real Taco Bell! I would commit another felony for a Crunchwrap Supreme right now."
"You'd commit a felony for a stick of gum," Jack says. Liam turns to him and laughs. I pass my arm behind Liam's head, and he lies on my shoulder.
The facility is away from everything, and then we get to the run-down part of the city: crumbling storefronts with plywood over the windows, chain-link fences guarding empty lots, a gas station with half its letters burned out so it reads GA TATI N.
A group of men sit outside a laundromat on folding chairs.
Harry lounges in the front seat. He seems a little nervous.
"How did your dad get rich?" Jack asks. Jack likes asking uncomfortable questions that no one else dares to ask.
Harry shrugs. "My father's company, Westfield Capital, owns about thirty percent of the commercial real estate in the metro area. Office parks, mixed-use developments, a couple of those horrible luxury condo things. He started with strip malls in the nineties that he inherited from my grandfather."
"So, he's rich rich," Jack says. "Like, private jet rich?"
"Nah," Harry says. "He's not an animal. But we have a boat in the Hamptons."
Jack whistles, low and appreciative. "And you ended up at Aspire. With us. Eating mystery meat and sharing a toilet."
Harry chuckles. "Dad was sick of my bullshit."
"Clearly," Jack says. There's a silence after that. I catch Liam's eye in the reflection of the window, and we stare at each other.
The scenery changes. The chain-link fences disappear, replaced by wrought iron and stone walls softened with ivy.
Lawns appear. Driveways hold BMWs and Range Rovers.
Mailboxes are made of brick. There are no men on folding chairs here, no plywood windows, no burned-out letters.
The trees are taller, the sky somehow bluer, as if even the atmosphere knows which zip code it's in.
Jack presses his face to the windshield. "Is that a tennis court? In someone's front yard?"
"That's the Hendersons'," Harry says, not looking up. "They have three."
"Three tennis courts."
"They're very athletic people."
Jack snorts.
Liam has gone quiet. He looks down at himself, at the facility-issued sweats and the black t-shirt, and something crosses his face that I recognize: the sudden awareness that you don't belong.
That the world you're driving through was built for people who have never had to share a toilet or eat off a plastic tray or count days.
He catches me watching and tries to smile, but it doesn't land. I kiss his temple. A silent 'it's okay.'
Gerald turns onto a road that doesn't have a name, just a number posted on a discreet stone marker half-hidden by hydrangeas. The houses get farther apart, separated by acres instead of feet, until they're not really houses anymore but estates.
Then the gates.
They're wrought iron, ten feet tall at least. They swing open as we approach.
The driveway beyond is paved in dark stone, curving through immaculate landscaping.
Manicured hedges. Beds of white flowers arranged in geometric patterns.
An actual stone fountain gurgling softly at the center of a circular turnaround.
And beyond it, the house.
It's not a house. It's a fucking castle. Three stories of stone and a dark roof, large windows and wealth written all over it. The stone is the color of wet sand, smooth and expensive-looking.
Nobody speaks. Not Jack, not Liam, not me. We're too stunned.
Harry stares out the window at his own home, and for a moment his face is unreadable. Then he adjusts his glasses, straightens his shirt, and says, "Welcome to mi casa."
The car stops. Gerald opens the door. The summer air rushes in, warm and scented with cut grass.
There's a difference between seeing wealth through a window and standing inside it.
It feels like being inside a magazine. Harry walks ahead, hands in his pockets, narrating the tour with boredom like he's a museum guide on his nine thousandth loop.
"Living room," he says, gesturing at a space roughly the size of our entire dormitory.
White couches that look like they've never been sat on, a fireplace made of stacked gray stone, and a wall of windows overlooking the back garden.
"Kitchen's through there," he nods toward an archway that opens into a room of marble countertops and stainless steel that would make Lu weep with envy, "theater room downstairs, wine cellar next to it, but that's locked. Dad's paranoid. He's probably right."
Jack doesn't listen to a word. He's already off, running his fingers along the edge of a glass coffee table, picking up a small sculpture from a shelf, some kind of bronze figure, twisted and abstract, and turning it over in his hands like a kid with a new toy.
"Don't touch that," Harry says, not turning around. "It cost more than your sister's tattoo shop."
Jack sets it down carefully, then immediately picks up a different one.
Liam moves through the rooms like someone walking through a church, quietly, without that bouncing energy he usually has.
He pauses in front of a painting in the hallway, a massive canvas of nothing recognizable, just slashes of red and gold that look like someone had a very expensive tantrum, and stares at it, confused.
"That's a Richter," Harry says, over his shoulder. "My mother bought it before she left. Dad keeps it because it's worth more than the house."
Nobody asks about the mother. We all know better.
The guest wing is down a separate corridor, through a set of double doors that open onto a hallway with hardwood floors. Four bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, each decorated in shades of gray and white that feel less like a home and more like a hotel.
Harry stops at the second door, pushes it open, and looks at me with a grin. "You two," he says, jerking his thumb at Liam and me. "This one's yours. I figured you'd appreciate the privacy." He winks. "Just don't ruin the sheets. They're Egyptian cotton."
Liam's ears go red.
We spend the afternoon by the pool. Olympic-sized, Harry said, and he wasn't exaggerating.
The water is clear and blue, the kind of blue that doesn't exist in nature. Maybe it exists in places that cost money to maintain. I wouldn’t know.
The deck is ringed with lounge chairs in white canvas.
A tray of tiny sandwiches with the crusts removed has appeared on a side table, alongside fresh fruit and smoked salmon on crackers.
I don't know who put it there. The staff moves through this house like ghosts.
Jack cannonballs in immediately, fully clothed, sending a wave over the stone edge that soaks the nearest tray. A woman in a gray uniform appears within seconds, replaces the damaged food without a word, and disappears. Jack surfaces, grinning.
"I'm never going back," he announces.
Harry stretches out on a lounge chair, sunglasses on, looking more at ease than I've ever seen him. He catches a grape from the tray and tosses it in his mouth. This is Harry in his natural habitat, I realize. All the performance at Aspire, the card games and the charm and the constructed image are gone. He’s just happy.
Liam gets in slowly, testing the temperature at the steps, then stops and turns to look at me with enormous eyes.
"It's heated!" he exclaims, like he's reporting a miracle.
He pushes off and floats on his back in the shallow end, arms spread, face turned up to the sun.
His black hair spreads around his head in the water.
His eyes are closed. He looks completely, utterly still, which, for Liam, is so unusual it almost startles me.
He's always in motion, always bouncing on the balls of his feet or drumming his fingers or pulling at his sleeves. But here, now, he just floats.
I sit on the edge of the pool and watch him. The sun is heavy and warm. There's no bell about to ring. No guard about to do a sweep. No schedule.
I lower myself into the water. It's warm, the temperature of something that costs money to be that temperature. I wade to where Liam is floating. He opens one eye.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," I say.
He closes his eye again. I stay where I am, and for a while neither of us says anything.
"I could stay here forever," he says. Not sad, which I appreciate, because I don’t want him sad.
He reaches out underwater and finds my wrist, his fingers wrapping around it.
Jack, having dried off approximately zero percent, announces he's going to learn to do a backflip off the pool's edge.
His first attempt sends him sideways into the water in a shape that defies physics and probably violates several laws of motion.
His second attempt is worse. His third lands him so far off-center that Harry, from behind his sunglasses, says flatly, "You're going to crack your skull and then I have to explain to Griff why I killed you. "
"He’s right for once, Jack, please, stop," I say, sternly.
Jack attempts it a fourth time. He lands it. Barely. His feet slap the water at an angle that makes me wince, but he surfaces with his arms in the air and the expression of a man who has won a gold medal at the Olympics, and we give him the reaction he deserves, clapping and woohooing.
Harry orders Gerald to bring a speaker and music fills the air. Even I know the singer: Bad Bunny, the bass vibrating through the water and the stone and the deck chairs. Liam grins at me from across the pool, water dripping from his black hair.
It's twilight when the sound comes. A low rumble of an engine, tires on stone, the crunch of expensive gravel under expensive rubber.
Harry hears it before anyone else. He sits up, then stands.
"That's my father," he says.
Jack stops mid-sentence. Liam treads water, watching Harry. I know this transformation. I've seen it in every kid who's ever come through Aspire, the shape you take when someone with power over you walks into the room.
"Come," he says and moves toward the house. Liam pulls himself out of the pool and stands beside me, dripping, goosebumps rising on his arms. He doesn't say anything. His hand finds the crook of my elbow.
We wrap ourselves in towels and follow Harry inside, wet feet on marble, the air conditioning hitting our damp skin. Somewhere in the front of the house, a door opens and there are voices.
We all brace.