Black Heart (4 page)

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam says.

He clearly watched the whole thing. I didn’t even hear him get up. I must be losing my touch.

“It’s not mine,” I say. “I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“How about
getting rid of it?
” he says, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “That’s a
gun
. A gun, Cassel. A guuuuuuuun.”

“Yeah.” I climb down, hopping off the box and landing with a thud. “I know. I will. I just didn’t have time. Tomorrow, I promise.”

“How much time does it take to throw a
gun
in a
dumpster
?”

“I really wish you would stop saying the word ‘gun,’” I say, low, flopping down onto my own bed and reaching for my laptop. “There’s nothing I can do about it now, unless I want to chuck it out the window. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

He groans and goes back to his side of the room, picking up his headphones. He looks annoyed, but nothing
worse. I guess he’s used to me acting like a criminal.

“Whose?” he asks finally, nodding toward the closet.

“Some guy. He dropped it.”

Sam frowns. “That sounds likely—and by ‘likely’ I mean
‘not at all likely
.’ And by the way, did you know that if someone found that thing in here, not only would you be thrown out of school, you would be, like, stricken from school memory. They would burn your face out of the Wallingford yearbooks. They would get a team of memory workers to come in and make it so that no one even recalled they’d ever gone to school with you. This is exactly the kind of thing they promise parents will never happen at Wallingford Preparatory.”

A shudder runs across my shoulders at the mention of memory workers. Barron is one. He used his power to make me forget a lot of things—that I am a transformation worker, that he pushed me into becoming a disturbingly efficient assassin, even that I transformed Lila into an animal and he kept her in a cage for years. My sociopathic big brother, who stole chunks of my life. The only brother I have left. The one who’s training me.

That’s family for you. Can’t live with them; can’t murder them. Unless Barron rats me out to Yulikova. Then I really might.

“Yeah,” I say, trying to regain the thread of the conversation. “I’ll get rid of it. I promise. No, wait, I already promised. How about I pinkie swear?”

“Unbelievable,” Sam says, but I can tell he’s not really mad. As I am busy determining this, watching the play of
emotions cross his face, I notice he’s got about a dozen pens piled on the navy blanket next to him and he’s marking a pad with each one.

“What are you doing over there?”

He grins. “I got these on eBay. A whole case of disappearing-ink pens. Nice, right? They were used by the KGB. These are serious spy tools.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Two choices, really. Awesome prank or potentially actually useful for our bookmaking operation.”

“Sam, we’ve already talked about this. It’s yours now, if you want it, but I’m out.” I’ve been the bookie for ridiculous school stuff for as long as I’ve been at Wallingford. If you wanted to put money down on the football game, you came to me. If you wanted to put down money on whether or not there was Salisbury steak for lunch three times a week or whether Headmistress Northcutt and Dean Wharton were having an affair or whether Harvey Silverman would die of alcohol poisoning before he graduated, you also came to me. I would calculate the odds, hold the cash, and charge a commission for my trouble. In a school with lots of bored rich kids, it was a good way to line my pockets. It was pretty harmless, until it wasn’t. Until kids started taking bets on which students were curse workers. Until those students were targets.

Then it felt a lot like I was taking blood money.

Sam sighs. “Well, there are still endless pranks we could pull. Imagine a whole room full of test takers, and then
nothing
on any of the tests twenty-four to forty-eight hours
later. Or what if you slipped one of these into a teacher’s grade book? Chaos.”

I grin. Chaos, beautiful chaos. “So, which one will you choose? My pickpocketing skills are at your service.”

He chucks a pen in my direction. “Be careful you don’t do your homework with that,” he says.

I snatch it out of the air a moment before it crashes into my lamp. “Hey!” I say, turning back to him. “Watch it. What’s with the wild pitch?”

He’s looking at me with a strange expression on his face. “Cassel.” His voice has gone low and earnest. “Do you think you could talk to Daneca for me?”

I hesitate, glancing down at the pen in my hands, turning it over in my gloved fingers, then looking back up at him. “About what?”

“I apologized,” he says. “I keep apologizing. I don’t know what she wants.”

“Did something happen?”

“We met up for coffee, but then it turned into the same old argument.” He shakes his head. “I don’t understand. She’s the one who lied. She’s the one who never told me she was a worker. She probably never would have told me either, if her brother hadn’t blurted it out. How come I’m the one who has to keep apologizing?”

In all relationships there’s a balance of power. Some relationships are a constant fight for the upper hand. In others one person is in charge—although not always the person who thinks they are. Then, I guess there are relationships so equal that no one has to think about it. I don’t
know anything about those. What I do know is that power can shift in a moment. Way back at the beginning of their relationship, Sam was always deferring to Daneca. But once he got mad, he couldn’t seem to stop being angry.

By the time he was ready to hear her apology, she no longer wanted to give it. And so they’ve somersaulted back and forth these past few weeks, neither one sorry enough to placate the other, neither of them sorry at the right time, both sure the other is in the wrong.

I can’t tell if that means they’re broken up or not. Neither can Sam.

“If you don’t know why you’re apologizing, your apology probably sucks,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I know. But I just want things to go back to the way they were.”

I know that feeling all too well. “What do you want me to say to her?”

“Just find out what I can do to fix things.”

There’s so much desperation in his voice that I agree. I’ll try. He’s got to know he’s already in a pretty bad way if he’s coming to me for help in matters of the heart. There’s no point rubbing it in.

In the morning I am crossing the quad, hoping the coffee I drank in the common room will kick in soon, when I pass my ex-girlfriend, Audrey Dolan, in a clump of her friends. Her copper hair gleams like a new penny in the sunlight, and her eyes follow me reproachfully. One of her friends says something just low enough for me not to hear, and the rest laugh.

“Hey, Cassel,” one of them calls, so that I have to turn around. “Still taking bets?”

“Nope,” I say.

See, I’m
trying
to go legit. I’m trying.

“Too bad,” the girl shouts, “because I want to put down a hundred bucks that you’ll die alone.”

Sometimes I don’t know why I am fighting so hard to stay here at Wallingford. My grades, always determinedly and consistently mediocre, have really taken a dive in the last year. It’s not like I’m going to college. I think about Yulikova and the training my brother is getting. All I would have to do is drop out. I’m just delaying the inevitable.

The girl laughs again, and Audrey and the others laugh with her.

I just keep walking.

In Developing World Ethics we talk a little bit about journalistic bias in reporting and how it influences what we think. When asked to give an example, Kevin Brown brings up an article about my mother. He thinks that too many reporters blame Patton for being an easy dupe.

“She’s a criminal,” says Kevin. “Why try to act like Governor Patton was supposed to be prepared for his girlfriend to try to curse him? It’s an obvious example of a reporter trying to discredit the victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if that Shandra Singer had gotten to him, too.”

Someone snickers.

I stare at my desk, focusing on the pen in my hand, and the sound of chalk scraping across the board as Mr. Lewis
quickly launches into an example from a recent news story about Bosnia. I feel that strange hyper-focus that occurs when everything narrows to the present. The past and the future fade away. There is only now and the ticking moments, until the bell rings and we hustle out into the hall.

“Kevin?” I say softly.

He turns, smirking. People rush around us, clutching bags and books. They look like streaks of color in my peripheral vision.

I hit Kevin’s jaw so hard that I feel the impact right down to my bones.

“Fight!” a couple of kids yell, but teachers come and drag me back from Kevin before he can get up.

I let them pull me away. I feel numb all over, the adrenaline still coursing through my veins, nerves sparking with the desire to do something more. To do something to someone.

They take me to the dean’s office and leave me with a slip of paper pressed into my hand. I crumple it up and throw it against the wall as I am shown inside.

Dean Wharton’s room is stacked with papers. He looks surprised to see me, getting up and lifting a pile of folders and crossword puzzles out of the chair in front of his desk and indicating that I should sit. Usually whatever trouble I’m in is so bad I get sent straight to the headmistress.

“Fighting?” he says, looking at the slip. “That’s two demerits if you’re the one who started it.”

I nod. I don’t trust myself to speak.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“Not really, sir,” I say. “I hit him. I just—I wasn’t thinking straight.”

He nods like he’s considering what I said. “Do you understand that if you get one more demerit for any reason, you’ll get expelled? You won’t graduate from high school, Mr. Sharpe.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Brown will be here in a moment. He’s going to be telling me his side of the story. Are you sure you don’t have anything more to say?”

“No, sir.”

“Fine,” Dean Wharton says, pushing up his glasses so that he can massage the bridge of his nose with brown-gloved fingers. “Go wait outside.”

I go and sit in one of the chairs in front of the school secretary. Kevin walks past me with a grunt, on his way into Wharton’s office. The skin along Kevin’s cheek is turning an interesting greenish color. He’s going to have a hell of a bruise.

He’s going to tell Wharton,
I don’t know what came over Cassel. He just went nuts. I didn’t provoke him.

A few minutes later Kevin leaves. He smirks at me as he walks out into the hall. I smirk right back.

“Mr. Sharpe, can you come in here, please?”

I do. I sit back in the chair, looking at the piles of paper. Just one push would send a stack crashing into all the others.

“You angry about something?” Dean Wharton asks me, as though he can read my thoughts.

I open my mouth to deny it, but I can’t. It’s like I have
been carrying this feeling around with me for so long that I didn’t even know what it was. Wharton, of all people, has put his finger on what’s wrong with me.

I’m
furious
.

I think of not knowing what compelled me to strike a gun out of the hand of a killer. Of how satisfying it was to hit Kevin. Of how I want to do it again and again, want to feel bones snap and blood smear. Of how it felt to stand over him, my skin on fire with rage.

“No, sir,” I manage to get out. I swallow hard because I don’t know when I became so distanced from myself. I knew Sam was angry when he talked about Daneca. How come I didn’t know that I was mad too?

Wharton clears his throat. “You’ve been through a lot, between the death of your brother Philip and your mother’s current . . . legal woes.”

Legal woes.
Nice. I nod.

“I don’t want to see you head down a path you can’t come back from, Cassel.”

“Understood,” I say. “Can I go back to class now?”

“Go on. But remember, you have two demerits and the year isn’t even half over. One more and you’re out. Dismissed.”

I get up, sling my backpack over my shoulder, and slink back to the Academic Center in time for the next bell. I don’t see Lila in the halls, although my gaze pauses on any blond-haired girl who passes me. I have no idea what I will say to her if I do see her.
So, I hear you ordered your first murder. How was that?
seems a little on the nose.

Besides, who says it was her first?

I duck into the bathroom, turn on the faucets, and splash my face with cold water.

It’s a shock, liquid streaming over my cheeks and collecting in the hollow of my throat, splashing my white shirt. Darkening my gloves. Stupidly, I forgot to take them off.

Wake up,
I tell myself.
Snap out of it.

Reflected in the mirror, my dark eyes look more shadowed than ever. My cheekbones stand out, like my skin is too tight.

Really fitting in,
I tell myself.
Dad would be so proud. You’re a real charmer, Cassel Sharpe.

I still make it to physics before Daneca does, which is good. Theoretically she and I are still friends, but she’s been avoiding me since she started fighting with Sam. If I want to talk to her, I’m going to have to corner her.

We don’t have assigned seats, which means it’s easy for me to find a desk near where Daneca usually sits and dump my stuff on the chair. Then I get up and talk to someone on the other side of the room. Willow Davis. She seems suspicious when I ask her a question about the homework, but answers without too much hesitation. She’s telling me something about how there are ten different dimensions of space and one of time, all curled around one another, when Daneca comes in.

“Understand?” Willow asks. “So there could be other versions of us living in other worlds—like maybe there’s a world where ghosts and monsters are real. Or where no one is hyperbathygammic. Or where we all have snake heads.”

I shake my head. “That can’t be real. That
cannot
be real science. It’s too awesome.”