Chapter Nine #2
“What are you celebrating?” I ask her.
“Celebrating,” she repeats, like she doesn’t understand the word. Then a slow smile lifts the corners of her mouth. “Life!”
I can’t even force a smile in return. My skin itches to be elsewhere. To be breaking into the animal shelter. To be doing something. The wait is the worst part of the con, the long stretch of hours before things start to happen. That’s when nerves get the best of people.
I walk inside, willing my nerves not to get the best of me.
The living room is lit with candles that have burned down, so that melting wax pools on furniture. Only a few kids are there, sitting on the floor and drinking beer. A sophomore says something, and they all look over at me.
It took two and a half years to get people to forget what was different about me, and only fifteen minutes to get them to remember. My puny and pathetic social life is about to get worse.
I give them a nod and wonder if Sam’s at least taking bets on the rumors about me. He’d better.
In the kitchen a bunch of seniors are gathered around Harvey Silverman, who’s downing a pyramid of shots. Outside, by the pool, I see most of the rest of the partygoers. It’s too cold to swim, but a couple of fully clothed people are anyway, their lips blue in the patio lights.
“Cassel Sharpe,” Audrey says, looping her arm through mine. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
Audrey’s eyes are glassy, her smile vague. She still looks lovely. She glances toward Greg Harmsford leaning against a bookshelf, talking with two girls from the field hockey team. I wonder if they came to the party together.
“Just like always,” she says, looking back at me. “Watching from the shadows. Observing everybody. Judging us.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I say. I don’t know how to explain how afraid I am of being judged.
“I liked when you were my boyfriend,” she says, and leans her head against my shoulder, maybe out of habit, maybe because she’s drunk. It’s enough like tenderness for me to pretend. “I liked you watching me.”
I resist the urge to promise her that if she tells me all the things I did right, I’ll do them again.
“Didn’t you like it when I was your girlfriend?” she asks, her voice gone so soft that it’s mostly breath.
“You’re the one who broke it off,” I tell her, but my voice has dropped low, and the words come out like a caress.
I don’t care about what I’m saying. I only care about keeping her here, talking with me.
She makes me feel like it’s possible to slip out of my old life and into hers, where everything is easy and honest.
“I’m not over you,” she says. “I don’t think.”
“Oh,” I say, and then I lean in and kiss her. I don’t think. Don’t think. I just mash my mouth against hers. She tastes like tequila. It’s an awful kiss, too full of grief and frustration and the knowledge that I am screwing everything up and don’t know how to do anything but screw things up worse.
She reaches up her hands and touches my shoulders gently. She doesn’t push me away. Her fingers curl against the nape of my neck, which tickles a little and makes me smile against her lips. I slow down. Better. She sighs into my mouth.
I let my fingers trace her collarbone, dip into the hollow of her neck. I want to kiss her there. I want to let my mouth and tongue follow the road map of freckles across her milky skin.
“Hey,” Greg says. “Get off her.”
Audrey stumbles back, nearly into Greg. I feel like I’ve come up out of such deep water that I have the bends. I forgot that we’re at a party.
“You’re drunk,” Greg tells her, and grabs hold of her upper arm. Audrey sways a little unsteadily.
My fingers curl into fists. I want to shove him against the wall. I want to break open my knuckles on his face. I look at Audrey for a signal. I tell myself that if she looks scared or even angry, I am going to hurt him.
She’s looking down, though, her face turned away from me. All that rage curdles into self-loathing.
“What are you even doing here?” Greg says. “I thought the dean finally figured out that you’re a criminal and kicked you out.”
“I didn’t think this was an official school-sponsored event,” I say.
“Nobody wants you around, working their girlfriends.” His smile is smug. “You and I both know that’s the only way you can get a date.”
I think of Maura, and my sight narrows. It’s like I’m looking at Greg through a tunnel of blackness.
My fists clench so tightly that I can feel my nails through the leather of my gloves.
I hit him, hard, sending him sprawling on the wooden floor.
My foot is digging into his ribs before Rahul Pathak grabs me around the waist and pulls me away from him.
“Chill out, Sharpe,” Rahul says, but I struggle against his hold. All I want to do is kick Greg again. Someone I can’t see grabs my wrist and twists it behind me.
Audrey’s gone.
Greg stands up, wiping his mouth. “I saw your mother’s trial in the paper, Sharpe. I know you’re just like her.”
“If I was, I would make you beg to blow me,” I sneer.
“Get him outside,” someone says, and Rahul steers me toward the door. The swimmers look up when we march through. Several people sitting on chaises rise, like they’re hoping for a fight.
I try to pull my way out of the guys’ grip, and when they let me go, I don’t expect it. I drop onto the grass.
“What got into you?” Rahul says. He’s breathing hard.
I look up at the stars. “Sorry,” I say.
The other person holding me turned out to be Kevin Ford. He’s short but built. A wrestler. He’s watching me like he hopes I try something.
“Be chill,” Rahul says. “This isn’t like you, man.”
“I guess I forgot myself,” I say. I forgot that I didn’t belong, that I would never belong. That I had charmed my way into being their bookie but that I was never their friend. I forgot the delicate foundation my excuse for a social life was built on.
Kevin and Rahul walk back to the house. Kevin says something, too low for me to hear, and Rahul snickers.
I look up at the stars again. No one ever taught me the constellations, so to me they are all just bright dots. Chaos. No pattern at all. When I was a kid, I made up a constellation, but I couldn’t find it a second time.
Someone shuffles through the grass to loom over me, blotting out the chaotic stars. For a moment I think it might be Audrey. It’s Sam. “There you are,” he says.
I get up slowly as Sam turns, stumbles, and pukes in the hydrangea bush near the kitchen window. Some girls on lounge chairs start to laugh.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Sam says when he’s done, “but I think you better drive me home.”
* * *
I get him coffee at a drive-through fast-food place and mix in a lot of sugar. I figure it will help him sober up, but he vomits most of it onto the asphalt of the parking lot. He washes his mouth out with the rest.
I turn on the radio and we sit there listening to it as his stomach gurgles. Another song about being worked by love. Like it’s romantic to be brainwashed.
“I used to pretend I was a worker when I was a kid,” he says.
“Everyone does,” I tell him.
“Even you?”
“Especially me.” I offer him the other cup of coffee. It’s mine and I’ve left it black, but there might be more packets of sugar somewhere. He shakes his head.
“How does anyone find out they’re a worker? When did you know you weren’t?”
“I’m sure it was the same with you. Our parents told us not to mess around with working. My mom went so far as to tell us that kids who did work before they were grown-up could die from the blowback.”
“That’s not true?”
I shrug. “Only way it kills you outright is if you’re a very unlucky-with-blowback death worker, and even then it doesn’t matter how old you are.
But my brothers knew when they were pretty young.
Barron won stuff by other people losing, you know?
And Philip was always doing too well in a fight.
” I remember Mom getting called into the junior high when Philip had broken the legs of three guys much bigger than he was.
The blowback made him sick for a month, but no one ever messed with him again.
I don’t know how she managed it, but no one reported him to the law, either.
I try to think of an example with Barron in it, but nothing comes to mind.
“Once you find out you’re a worker, you learn secret stuff from other workers.
I can’t tell you that part because I don’t know it. ”
“Are you supposed to tell me any of that?”
“Nope,” I say, turning on the car. “But you’re so drunk that I’m pretty sure you won’t remember anyway.”
Somewhere between apologizing to Mrs. Yu for bringing Sam home so late, dumping him onto his bed, and backing out of the driveway of his huge brick colonial, I realize something.
If Lila is a cat, then there’s a transformation worker here in the United States.
I knew that before, but I hadn’t really thought about what it meant.
The government would fall all over itself to hire him.
The crime families would be desperate to recruit her.
That’s what they’re conspiring about. If Philip knows who that person is, the memory work makes sense.
They’ve got a real transformation worker.
That’s something worth making me forget.