Chapter 51
Senior year began with forest fires.
They burned hundreds of miles away, in some remote corner of Canada, but covered our campus in a pall of smoke. The usual outdoor parties were canceled, and we wore masks walking between classes. Dead birds were found on the lawns and hockey fields. A rugby player fainted at practice.
“The world burns,” Sebastian told me on the fifth day of the blighted sky, “because we stoke the fires.”
I could see it now—our estates ran on renewables and rainwater, but the incorporated families traveled first class. We might float outside the law, but we maintained its systems of plunder with our strong hands, our sharp knives. We had the power to fix the world, and didn’t.
Care was the solution. Sebastian couldn’t tell me much more.
“How many of us are there?”
“More than you’d think. All legacies.”
“Who started it?”
“We Hellions. During the Cold War.”
Of course. With all four families sending their offspring here, the younger legacies had bonded and begun to question their elders.
“Is Hefnd part of it?”
Sebastian shook his head. “We don’t do random murders.”
So who did we kill? Corrupt politicians? Rampant industrialists?
What about our own elders? I’d gone from believing everything Elizabeth told me to wondering if the world would be better off without her. But slitting her throat was unimaginable.
Change of plan.
Sebastian wouldn’t tell me who our targets were, or who was in charge. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if Care was real, like he’d willed a revolution into existence as an excuse not to cull me. Or we’d invented it, a folie à deux, like everything that had unfolded since he’d seen me weep for Hiromi.
“When did you become careful?” I asked. It felt too dangerous to say the name aloud. Any word that contained those four letters would do.
Careworn, careen, caress.
“They recruited me in Albany. The epitome of a broken system.”
Had some relative sent him upstate to prepare him for enlistment? I didn’t ask—he wasn’t going to reveal names until I was initiated.
How and when that might happen, Sebastian didn’t know.
While I waited, I decided to keep my promise to Bellamy. But writing a letter to a sick child—a tiny act of care—was like archery with a wounded hand. Stitches snapped with every word.
Dear Bellamy, I managed. But then what? Can you walk more than a few steps? Will you ever go home and live with the slongers? Are you already dead?
I’d never written a letter. Only reports: Roommate is susceptible to flattery, has no discernment or alcohol resistance, spills secrets. Has never had a close friend. Cannot be sexually controlled because has low opinion of anyone who would sleep with her.
Bellamy! my fifth try began, this time in the Sun Parlor, thinking a change of location would help. It hadn’t.
I felt someone watching me—Frankie from my hall, in the corner reading a novel. She hurriedly looked away. She was the kind of girl who left notes on our doors, dotting her i’s with hearts.
“How do you write a letter to a child with cancer?” I asked.
Frankie stared back at me in shock.
The others on the hall had bonded as freshmen, becoming instant friends with the simple optimism of children.
But it soon became clear that I preferred not to be included in their meals, parties, outings.
Now the Lavernick girls kept a respectful distance, nodding at me in the bathroom, murmuring good morning, but nothing that would constitute a conversation.
“A letter?” she said. “You don’t even sign Get Well cards.”
“I was in a car crash. There was a kid on my ward.”
“Oh, no!” She lowered her voice. “We all thought you’d been in a fight.”
“She wants me to write her letters. What do I say?”
Finally Frankie met my eyes. “Um, how old?”
“I don’t know.” Nine, like Mary? Bellamy was shorter, but maybe cancer had stunted her growth.
“What does she like?”
“Octopuses. And talking.”
“If she’s stuck in the hospital she’s probably bored. Tell her about yourself.”
I stared at Frankie. Put things about myself in writing?
“Tell her about being in college,” she forged on. “All-night cram sessions with friends. What boys you like. Poker nights.”
“I don’t really do—”
“You could come to our poker night!” Frankie blurted. “It’s really fun.”
“In Aaliyah’s room?” The leader of the group, who told the others when their outfits were perfect.
“Yes. The same one we’ve invited you to, like, fifty times.”
“Okay,” I found myself saying, not knowing why.
“Monday at nine,” Frankie sputtered, and fled to share the news.
When I knocked on Aaliyah’s door two nights later, I found three of them already there.
Frankie looked triumphant at my arrival, as if the others hadn’t believed her. Nura, whose breakup playlist I knew too well, stared at me with unconcealed astonishment.
Only our host, Aaliyah, stayed cool, shuffling cards. “Do you know how to play?”
“My family loves poker,” I said.
“Interesting,” she said. We’d hooked up twice, sophomore year, once she’d given up on being my friend.
Twice had always been my number: more than an accident, less than a pattern. Threading the needle between messiness and tenderness.
I wondered what kind of pattern Hiromi and I would have fallen into, if I hadn’t been born a Morton. If I was someone without strategies. But in that world, who would’ve introduced us? How would I have known to pursue her? How did it all work, between ordinaries?
Maybe that was what I was at this table to find out.
It took two hours for Frankie to ask about my new nose.
“Did it hurt?”
“Not as bad as the broken ribs.” Or the hallucinations.
“Can I touch it?” Nura asked, already reaching. “It looks awesome.”
I didn’t back away. Her fingertips were cool against my scars.
“Does it make me look rakish?”
Nura pulled away, eyes dropping. “You were that already.”
Aaliyah laughed. “She used to be scared of you.”
“We all were,” Frankie said.
All this time I’d felt invisible at Helshire, blending in like a good Morton. But in my own way, I’d been as renowned as Sebastian. Disconnected was not the same as unseen.
“I’m still afraid of you,” Nura said. “You keep winning!”
“Because she’s sober and we’re not,” Aaliyah said, reaching for her fourth hard lemonade.
I hadn’t touched alcohol since Mary’s big day. My stomach could no longer be trusted—nor my tears. I didn’t even know how to play this shitty hand. After wearing a poker face my whole life, I couldn’t muster one for an actual game.
Then I remembered what Sebastian had whispered in my ear the night before—When the world needs breaking, chaos is a virtue—and pushed my tallest stack of quarters into the pot.
Frankie looked up from her cards. “You’re bluffing.”
The table went silent, her eyes locking with mine.
As I stared back at her, something familiar began to play on my skin. That connection I’d felt with Bellamy—the strings that made me feel her pain when she struggled across a room.
Frankie was trying to will something like that into being, to read my mind, to know me. Was this what life was like for ordinaries? Strings everywhere?
I tried to give Frankie my mother’s stare, but I couldn’t empty myself anymore. Instead, I felt her see me—my missing pieces, my nightmares. Everything I’d done in that small room in the Catskills.
She shivered a little, and folded.
Open or shut, we Mortons always take the money.
“Pair of fours,” I said.
“Now you’re showing off,” Aaliyah grumbled.
“Do you ever cheat?” Nura asked. “It seems like you do.”
I thought of Poker Genome Project: thirteen million playing cards splayed across the walls. Odds and patterns. Gods and mathematicians.
“I don’t have to. It’s math for me.”
“It’s math for everyone,” Aaliyah said.
“Plus anxiety, bravado, superstition. For me, it’s just the math.” It used to be, anyway. Now I worried about sick kids and cried about music.
Now I knew the world was alight, and my family did the accounting for the pyre. Letting these girls win wouldn’t make amends.
Nura began to gather the cards. “What else did your family teach you?”
“Ballroom dancing, climbing, archery. Lock picking, bomb defusing.”
Aaliyah snort-laughed at this, to assure the others that I was joking. Or maybe it was simply funny. My family’s truth was comical. I’d made Hiromi laugh so many times, always at my most honest with her.
“Your face just did a thing,” Nura said to me. “What are you thinking about?”
“My cousin Tom,” I lied. “He’s a freshman this year.”
“Tough time to start,” Aaliyah said. “No parties. Everyone in masks. He must be lonely.”
I shrugged. Tom was like me when I’d first arrived at Helshire—never lonely, already complete. Now, my bed felt too big to sleep in alone.
“Speaking of cousins,” Frankie said, “we haven’t seen Sebastian yet. Is the smoke keeping him away, or does he have a girlfriend these days?”
I smiled at her. “He doesn’t really do girlfriends.”
“Runs in the family,” Aaliyah muttered.
Frankie sighed. “He’s just waiting for the right girl.”
“No,” I said. He’d been waiting for me—a partner in carelessness, the only person in the world who could ever understand him.
But not the right girl.
“He’s being cruel,” Nura said, poking at Frankie’s arm. “Denying you his charms.”
“Sebastian’s not cruel,” I said. “Not on purpose.”
Frankie stared at me, waiting to hear about some saving grace, some hidden virtue of his that would absolve her fantasies.
But I was too busy absolving myself. “He’s just confused. He doesn’t fit in with the rest of our family.”
Aaliyah began to shuffle the cards. “Cross-racial adoption is hella problematic.”
“Yes.” Especially into a centuries-old crime family.
“Still, I’d bang him,” Frankie said. “A broken heart seems like a small price to pay.”
Nura touched my hand apologetically, as if to say, She’s got it bad.
But who was I to judge? A moment later, when my new burner phone vibrated in my pocket, I pushed all my quarters into the pot.
“This is my last hand, ladies,” I said. “If you want to get even, place your bets.”