Chapter 7
Quill
Pen of Truth
The One and Only
Chesney Hawkes
“And you're absolutely sure about that name?”
With a tingling sensation in my fingertips, I took the card from Thomas's hand, which would undoubtedly pass as a legitimate ID, and turned it over in the light.
He had taken the photo last winter after school in the boys' locker room, a month before Mama had died of alcohol poisoning and I had dropped out of school for good.
Quillon Veritas.
The corner of my mouth twitched upward.
“I think it's provocative. All those lawyers are going to look pretty dumbfounded.”
Besides, I wanted to avoid the drama that would come crashing down on me and my rotten family as soon as it came out that former top lawyer and chairman of the Maplecrests law faculty, Joseph Richter, had an illegitimate daughter who had enrolled in a private elite university without a high school diploma.
Of course, I wanted to see my father's kingdom crumble to dust. But first, I was going to have some fun.
Thomas looked up from another ID belonging to a young woman, placed the tweezers next to the embossing machine under the adjustable desk lamp with the homemade magnifying glass, turned down the volume on The One and Only by Chesney Hawkes, and pushed his glasses, which were always sliding down his nose, back up.
This was his method of scraping together money for his studies at Maplecrest's elite university as the son of a housewife and a mechanic.
Thomas Sanders was a math, physics, and computer science genius who, together with my best friend, had graduated with honors without really trying. Lara and I had expected him to leave the area and study science, but to our surprise, he had decided to study politics at Maplecrest.
Law, politics, economics, and journalism were the four branches of Maplecrest University, where young people were trained to become the elite of the United States of America.
Few wealthy families knew about this institution, and the authorities tried to keep it as secret as possible to avoid getting swamped with applicants from all social backgrounds.
The university itself selected the best candidates from high school graduation records, to which it had exclusive access through whatever connections – I suspected it had something to do with the secret service and the government department for education.
“Whatever your father did, I hope you know what you're getting yourself into.”
Thomas's green-blue knitted sweater hung crookedly over his white shirt, and I wondered how he wasn't overheating in it. I was already dying despite my navy-blue T-shirt, and automatically moved toward the spinning fan that made the front strands of Thomas's brown hair float up and down.
I let myself fall onto the couch between his desk and the aquarium, where the orange fish were already facing death in a green bog.
With my thoughts drifting away, I pulled my legs up, put them on the armrest, leaned back, and stared up at the ceiling.
“You should know me by now. Ninety percent of the time, I don't know what I'm doing myself.”
“You're living in the moment to escape your fears about the future and your sadness about the past. I get it.”
Unfortunately, that was the epitome of denial. It felt like it worked when I was writing, but as soon as I paused and was forced to participate in the reality of this life, I realized that I was digging my grave deeper and deeper.
Thomas concentrated on the fake ID that would hopefully bring him enough money.
I had offered to dip into my family's deep pockets, but he didn't want the Richter money. He preferred to use his intelligence for illegal small-time deals to keep himself and his family above water.
Whenever he put bundles of cash on the table, his parents thought he was selling parts of his comic book collection for a lot of money on the internet, but he would never give up one of his sacred relics.
He was a geek, and I loved him for that, because I could spend evenings with him watching science fiction movies and talking about books for hours.
“I met someone who has read Batteries of Ink.”
I Wanted to Leave
SYML
The smile that stole across my lips was accompanied by the same tingling sensation that had been coursing through my stomach all week since the gala evening, surprising me at all sorts of moments as a result of forbidden daydreams.
When I wasn't drifting off at the dinner table, imagining his fingers gliding over my skin while I lost myself in his eyes, I would snuggle up in his suit jacket at night and wake up from heated dreams in which I rode his fingers with no prospect of release while his other hand explored the rest of my body.
I was harboring desires that would never be fulfilled unless I happened to run into him again by chance.
Every day, a new hope blossomed in the overgrown garden of my mind, on the graves of old hopes. Among them, the hope that I would find him and give him the three pages I had written for him at his request.
Sensual lines that would never have come to life without his words, his touch, his lips on my throat.
God, what had I allowed to happen? And why did I want nothing more than to drown in his presence until our blue threads were completely intertwined?
All hope was lost, and I should lock myself in my room and write, write, write... until the memory of him faded like the ink on my hands. But how could I forget someone who had gotten under my skin so deeply that I could feel his fingerprints on the cracks in my heart?
Who was Davian?
I hadn't even wanted to run away, I had wanted to talk to him, I had even come back and spent the whole night in the library, but he hadn't shown up again.
And so, with this stupid hope in my turmoil-filled stomach, I had read half of The Age of Innocence.
My brother had almost caught us, and I didn't even want to imagine what would have happened if I hadn't slid down the cold gutter and he would have seen a man his age touching me in such an intimate, demanding way.
The long scar on my calf was a bittersweet reminder of what it meant to live... or rather, to have a gutter screw cut into your flesh.
Only now did I notice that Thomas was still focused on the ID in his hand, as if something about it didn't please him.
“Were you listening to me?”
He nodded. “Yes. You said you'd found new friends to replace Lara and me?”
I raised both eyebrows and looked at him with playful annoyance.
“Very dramatic, as always.”
The reason Thomas studied politics at Maplecrest was because he didn't want to be separated from Lara and me.
He often joked about it, but he had had trouble making friends his whole life and didn't like drastic changes, so it worked out well for him that Lara had decided to study journalism and I had committed to my doomed undercover plan.
“No,” I continued, closing my eyes to recall all the ways the dim light fell on his face. “A man.”
I wanted to see him in daylight, wanted to study the nuances of color that ran through his hair and eyes, needed to know how much gray was really hiding at his hairline.
“One of your bed warmers?”
Sighing, I opened my eyes and looked at my focused friend, who was smiling down at the card in front of him.
“I think I should stop fucking my way through the neighborhood.”
That was now a decision. Even though I doubted I would ever see him again, he had shown me with his bare fingers that meaningless sex was not what would satisfy this hunger inside me. And slowly, I began to believe that no man in this world would ever be able to touch me the way Davian had.
“How wise of you. Another lie?”
Block me out
Gracie Abrams
Thomas was the only one who had seen through me two years ago when we had first met.
I had practiced lying to all my teachers because, at sixteen, I had realized that it didn't really matter whether you told the truth or not, and that, when in doubt, a good lie could either get you out of a sticky situation or lead you into exciting new ones.
For a long time, I had pretended to my classmates that my father was an archaeologist in Ecuador and my mother was a fashion designer in Paris.
Not because I had wanted to be one of the cool kids, but because I had tried to fantasize my parents into people I could look up to.
I had wanted others to believe it so that maybe, someday, I would believe it too.
Thomas had been too smart. He had seen through me, but had never asked about my real parents. And so we had become friends.
I often envied Thomas for his intelligence and Lara for her perseverance in memorizing things. Neither of those qualities had been bestowed upon me at birth. And this, coupled with a moderate attention deficit disorder and a tendency to get bored easily, had led to my academic ruin.
But what did it matter? I was a lost writer who would muddle through from job to job until she eventually made it.
Or maybe not. I had reached a point where I simply existed and accepted who I was.
Only every now and then did I forget that it was okay to be a nobody.
Then I compared myself to my perfectionist, ambitious friends who somehow seemed to be able to put up with me.
“You know I couldn't lie to you even if I wanted to.”
I straightened up, rose from the couch, pulled the six-thousand-dollar bundle held together with a green rubber band out of my pocket, and placed it on the desk.
Thomas stared at the money, then looked up at me.
“Quill, I...”
“Thanks for the ID, the driver's license...” I began to count with my fingers, tapping my thumb against the fingers of my other hand. “...the birth certificate, that far too good high school diploma with honors and the matriculation certificate from Maplecrest.”
What he had done for me actually cost four times as much, but I couldn't let too much money disappear. It was enough that I had completely emptied the savings account Tony had set up for me to pay for my tuition. A damn half a million dollars.
Yep, I was crazy and should have spent the money on other things. But as soon as I dropped out, I'd get most of it back, so I tried not to think about that.
Thomas sighed and leaned back in his chair.
“You know I only want what's best for you.”
I smiled, fighting back a tear, because if I had jumped that night, Thomas would now have one less best friend.
I often wondered what value I added to his life, because I had often gotten him into trouble with my pranks on teachers, but he was damn important to me and I didn't want to leave him without at least leaving a letter for him.
“And now please tell me about your plan. I'd love to know how you think you're going to survive as a woman in a lecture hall full of competitive men without blowing your cover.”
My ink batteries are empty.
Every attempt to refill them only reminds
me of the gaping hole at the bottom.
– Leaking Batteries Diary