Chapter 19
The next afternoon, a new set of theater kids arrived in Non-Dramatic Improv: ordinaries, to put us in touch with the rest of the world.
They were freshman, confused about being dropped into an advanced class for two weeks. Uncle Wolfie’s command to make the improvs boring perplexed them even more.
As they were introduced, I heard a familiar name—Jayden Ryeo, one of the signatures on the memorial poster at Peter’s shrine.
I hadn’t talked to any of my dead cousin’s ordinary friends. They wouldn’t know anything about his Hefnd. But then I found myself onstage with Jayden, in a classic Uncle Wolfie improv: a mixer for employees of a tech firm.
Information is the key to any kill.
Jayden was in the corner of the stage, trying to escape the rest of us. I crossed to him, offering my hand.
“Anastasia.”
“Um, hi,” Jayden said. “I’m Joe.”
“You’re in Anderson’s group, yeah?”
“Yep,” he said. The first rule of No Drama was to say as little as possible. In-depth conversations were risky.
Which is why I kept going. “Do you code?”
“Sure. Um, you?”
“Of course. Python, Lisp, mostly.”
“Same, pretty much,” he managed. The ordinaries never did any research until their first humiliation at Uncle Wolfie’s hands. “Have you tried the dip? It’s awesome.”
We crossed to the table at the edge of the stage, where Divya Seth was flirting with another nervous freshman.
Jayden reached for an imaginary corn chip. That’s when I threw him to Uncle Wolfie.
“Is that a bomb?” I said under my breath.
He looked down at the imaginary bowl of dip, his eyes lighting up. At last, some drama.
“A bomb!” he cried, and turned to the room. “Does anybody know how to defuse a bomb?”
The legacies froze. A couple of ordinaries stepped forward, ready for action.
But before they could speak, Uncle Wolfie smacked his walking stick against the floor and climbed onto the stage.
“Young man. It is not a bomb. It is party snacks.”
“Um…” Jayden looked at me, hoping for backup.
He got none.
“Mr. Ryeo, is it? What was the improv prompt?”
“A party for new people, at an ordinary tech firm.”
“Is a bomb scare ordinary, Mr. Ryeo?”
“No. But I thought we could shake things up.”
“What is the name of this class, Mr. Ryeo?”
“Non-Dramatic Improv.”
“Is a bomb scare dramatic, Mr. Ryeo?”
“Yes, but I thought…” He looked at me, eyes wide.
“You thought what, Mr. Ryeo?”
“That ‘non-dramatic’ meant, like, comedy?”
“There is no comedy in this class, Mr. Ryeo. There is no drama. There is no bomb.” Uncle Wolfie rolled into a disquisition I’d heard three times.
“This is the hardest theater class you will ever take. In this class you will learn to transform yourself into another human being, without the crutches of drama or tension or climax.”
A few of the other freshmen tittered at that last word.
“Or humor!” Wolfie roared at them. “This is the primal theater class. You must strip yourself away until there is no ego, no thirst for the spotlight, no spotlight at all—only the craft. You, transformed into not-you, without artifice, without contrivance, without bombs.”
Jayden’s face was bright pink.
“Do you think you can manage that, Mr. Ryeo?”
Jayden blinked.
“Because if you can’t, if you must introduce bombs and drama and comedy,” Uncle Wolfie went on, pronouncing each noun as if it carried a disease, “you don’t belong in this class, you don’t belong in this department, you don’t belong in theater. Are we clear, Mr. Ryeo?”
Jayden nodded slowly, prey hypnotized by a predator’s gaze. It struck me that Peter would have enjoyed this class.
“Are we clear, everyone?”
“Yes, Professor Wolvaardt,” we legacies intoned.
“Continue the improv,” he said.
After class, I followed Jayden out. He walked with hands in pockets, head down, long strides.
Halfway across the Quad, I put a hand on his shoulder.
He startled a little. “Oh…you.”
“Hey. Sorry about that.”
“What the hell was that?”
“No idea. I just transferred in.” I slipped my glove off. “I’m supposed to be doing archery.”
“Oh.” He gazed at my stitched palm, his hostility fading a little. “Did you shoot yourself?”
“Something like that.”
“Gnarly.” He chuckled a little. “Still, you were probably safer at the archery range. That guy’s nuts.”
“Like he said, it’s all about the craft.”
Jayden laughed again, looser now. “What are we? Witches?”
“The magic of you, transformed into not-you. Thanks for taking the fall for my fuckup. You’ll be out of there in two weeks. I have to get a grade from that guy.”
“Right. Sure.” He gave me a genuine smile at last, looking me up and down. Ordinary boys are predictable. “No harm, no foul.”
“Let me buy you a drink.”
I took Jayden to Riley’s, a bar full of men who held on to their beer bottles between sips, as if wary of earthquakes.
No one looked at us as we went into the back room.
“Are they really gonna serve us?” Jayden whispered.
“Look around.”
The back room was awash with late afternoon light and Helshire relics—lacrosse sticks, an oar signed by some long-ago crew team, two croquet mallets crossed in a heraldic X.
“This was a Helshire bar,” I said. “Back when the drinking age was eighteen.”
“Wasn’t that a long time ago?”
“Forty years.” The other students glimpse us in passing—the town understands that we are eternal.
The bartender appeared, lurking nervously in the passage from the main room.
“What do you want?” I asked Jayden.
“Um, beer?”
The bartender went away.
As I’d suspected, Jayden was first-generation Helshire and knew nothing about legacy families. But after the bartender brought his beer, rank-smelling fizz from a tap, and my gentian-forward white Negroni, I learned a lot about him.
He was the only son of two real estate agents, taking a bland spread of Intros: Biology, Psych, Colonial Encounters, English Lit.
“Just realized,” he said halfway through our first drink, “I don’t even know your name.”
“Jessica.”
No recognition. Jayden didn’t know much about Peter. This was probably a waste of time. But I kept him prattling until, halfway through his third beer, his consonants began to slur.
“That was wild about that kid,” I said. “The one who fell.”
His eyes lit up. “Peter Morton, yeah! He was in my study group.”
“You knew him?”
A torrent flowed—they’d met in Orientation Week and had taken two science classes together. They’d aced a joint project with a spectrophotometer.
“That’s Chemistry?” I asked.
“Peter’s favorite. The labs, anyway. Not so much the book part.”
I remembered the rumors. “You think he was into drugs? Like, cooking meth in the Chem wing at night?”
Jayden laughed. “If Peter made anything in the lab, it’d be a flamethrower.”
“A flamethrower.”
“Yeah. One time he cooked up rocket candy. That’s potassium nitrate and sugar—homemade propellant. But that’s kid stuff. Once we made salts out of nitric acid and copper. Peter kept telling me how we were, like, three steps from TNT!”
Rockets. TNT. A spectacle.
“He sounds kind of unstable. Some people are saying he might have jumped.”
“No way. He wanted to do stuff.”
I put on an encouraging smile. “Like what?”
“Explore the world. Save the animals. Escape his family.”
Escape his family—the family he’d tried so hard to make proud on the parapet of Dewitt.
Jess, I have to come back up.
“Poor guy,” I said.
“I know the feeling. My sisters both got into Stanford.” Jayden raised his beer. “Families get crazy when you don’t meet their expectations.”
“Families,” I said.
“My sisters did the whole résumé thing—volunteer work, soccer. I was too busy with my band for that shit.”
It was almost time to leave. The sun was setting, and my night would be busy.
Somewhere on this campus was a spectacle in waiting. Some gaudy, unstable device—a rocket, a bomb—covered with Peter’s fingerprints and his very Morton DNA.
I felt a flash of annoyance at Sebastian, who would’ve started with Peter’s friends and classmates, all smiles and handshakes, and arrived here quicker. He’d let Peter drift into the Lindqvists’ orbit, but left the cleanup to me.
When Jayden tried to pay, I waved him off, putting it on the family tab.
“Um,” he said. “If I came here without you, you think they’d let me in?”
“Not a chance.”
“Yeah,” he said. No was the answer he was accustomed to.
This unimpressive boy had been close to Peter—a kinship between two misfits. In a small and repellent way, Jayden was his family’s version of Peter.
Which made me wonder. “Who’s your roommate?”
“A guy called Rishabh. Why?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Rishabh Seth—hopeless at archery, unstoppable at kabaddi, graceful at ballroom dancing. Jayden was marked for incorporation, just not by a Morton.
He and Peter had simply been…friends.