Sam snorts. “The fat Sancho Panza to your delusional
Quixote.” Then he looks at Mina and his neck colors, as if he has realized that he just made both of us sound pretty bad.
“I really don’t think—,” Mina starts.
“Sam is completely trustworthy, if overly modest,” I say. “Anything you can tell me, you can tell him.”
She gives him a suspicious once-over. “Okay. But it’s happening tomorrow. We need to get the camera back before then or find some way to pay them or—”
“The
library
,” I say, reminding her.
“Okay.” Mina nods, looking relieved.
I grab a few pieces of fruit from the bowl near the card swipe and we cross the quad together. A few students are sitting at library tables, studying through lunch. I navigate through and head for the far back, picking a spot near the stacks marked
SOCIETIES, SECRET, BENEVOLENT, ETC.
and sit down on the carpet.
I pass out the apples and take a bite of mine. “Let’s start by going over the facts of the case one more time. This will get Sam up to speed and help us see the whole thing with fresh eyes.”
Sam is looking a bit bewildered, possibly because I am talking like we really are playing detective here.
Mina looks at Sam. “Someone’s blackmailing me. I’m supposed to pay that person five thousand dollars. Which I don’t have. And I’m supposed to give it to them tomorrow morning.” Then she looks back at me. “Please tell me that you know what I should do, Cassel.”
“What do they have on you?” Sam asks. “Did you cheat on a test or something?”
Mina hesitates.
“Pictures,” I say. “The naughty kind.”
She flashes me a hurt look.
“Hey,” Sam says. “Nothing to be ashamed of. We have all taken them. I mean, not me personally, but Cassel’s
grandmother
, you should really see—”
“Okay,” I say. “The point is, she had them on a camera. Then the camera got stolen. Mina, the more I think about it, the more I think that someone on your hall must have done it. One of the girls. Maybe she broke in to steal a packet of hot chocolate, saw the camera, and took it. Then a week later she started flipping through the images, found the naked pictures, and during one long night of giggling and eating too much junk food, she and her friends dreamed up a funny prank.”
“You said you would help me.” This time when she looks at me, her eyes are wet. She isn’t crying exactly, but tears cling to her lashes, making her look lush and terribly vulnerable. Her misery makes me doubt myself.
“I am trying to help you,” I say. “Honestly, it fits. But look, tomorrow morning Sam and I are going to get up early, go out to the baseball field, and watch. There’s no way whoever is setting you up like this is going to be able to resist seeing if you bought it.”
“You’re upsetting her,” Sam says.
Mina turns to him. “He doesn’t believe me.”
I sigh. I do think she’s hiding something, but since I don’t know what, it’s no help. Telling her that I don’t entirely believe her won’t be any help either. “Look, if the blackmailer shows to get the money, we’ll know who it is.”
“But what about the money?” Mina says. “I won’t have it.”
“Just bring a big enough bag that it looks possible for you to have the cash.”
Mina looks disconsolately out the window and takes a shaky breath.
“It’s going to be fine,” I tell her, curling my gloved hand around her arm in what I hope is a sympathetic way. She looks tired.
The bell rings, loud enough to startle us. Mina jumps up and brushes off her skirt. When she tosses her hair, it moves like a wave. It moves the way hair does only in movies.
No real hair moves like that.
I take another look at her as she pushes a lock of it behind her ear. “You seem really nice,” she tells Sam. “Thanks for trying to help.”
There are no split ends, I realize. And while her bangs make it hard to see, the part on top of her head shows a color that’s subtly different from the rest of her skin.
Sam nods, expression grave. “Anything I can do.”
“We’ll figure this out,” I say.
She gives me one of those almost-smiles that some girls seem to be able to summon up, the kind where her lip trembles and she looks so vulnerable that you find yourself desperate for a way to turn it into a real smile. Her lashes are still wet from tears that never fell. I wonder what it would feel like to wipe those tears with my thumb. I imagine the softness of her cheek against my bare skin. Then she picks up a messenger bag covered in pictures of
singing anthropomorphic strawberries and marches out of the library.
Her wig swings behind her.
The rest of the day is a blur of hastily composed texts that don’t get returned. Lila isn’t in the common room of her building, and I had to promise Sharone Nagel a copy of my statistics homework to get her to look. Lila’s car is not even in the lot. By the time I discover that she’s not at dinner, I am practically crawling out of my skin with my desire to find her.
Daneca doesn’t come to dinner either.
Sam at least is there, flipping through a catalog of masks, barely paying attention to the cooling mound of shepherd’s pie piled on his plate. “So,” he says, “are you going to tell me what this thing with Mina is really about?”
“Nothing to tell. We’re going to save a maiden in distress like old-timey knights. I just wish I knew exactly what distress we were saving her from. The whole thing is fishy.”
“You don’t believe what she said about the pictures?” he asks, pausing on a page with a rubbery werewolf snout that is supposed to be attached with spirit gum.
“I don’t know. All I’m sure of is that she’s lying about
something
. But maybe it’s nothing important. We all lie, right?”
That makes him snort. “So what’s the plan, Sir Bone-head?”
“Pretty much what I said. We see who shows up to blackmail Mina or who shows up to laugh at how gullible she is.”
I gaze across at where Mina is sitting with her friends, playing with a lock of her wig and drinking a diet soda. Even being nearly sure her hair isn’t real, I wonder at it. It
looks
real, better than real, rippling down her back in a glossy sheet.
Was she sick? If so, it must have been long enough ago that no one at Wallingford remembers her absence from school, but not so long ago that her hair has grown back. Or I guess it could be something else. Maybe she just likes the convenience of not worrying about styling it in the morning.
I wonder what would make someone want to blackmail a girl like her. Anyone could tell that her family isn’t flush if they just
looked
. Her watch is nice, but she always wears it. The leather band is worn. And her shoes are black ballet flats. Cute but cheap. It’s not that she can’t afford nice things. She has last year’s cell phone and a two-year-old laptop covered in pink crystals. That’s more than lots of people have. Plus she goes to Wallingford. It’s just that she wouldn’t be the person I’d target if I wanted to grift an easy five large. It has to be a prank.
Unless the blackmailer knows something I don’t.
After dinner I go back out to the parking lot, but Lila’s car still isn’t there. I consider that maybe she and Daneca are together, since neither of them were at dinner. Maybe Daneca listened to what I said about Barron, no matter what she pretended. Maybe she even started to doubt him. If she ran into Lila, then maybe that’s why Lila hasn’t called me back. Daneca’s house is close by; it would have been a small
thing to go there for dinner. I imagine them in Daneca’s kitchen, eating pizza and talking about what jerks those Sharpe boys are. I don’t mind the thought. It is, in fact, a huge relief, compared to all the other possibilities. I have a couple of hours before in-room check and no better ideas, so I decide to drive by Daneca’s house.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that it’s ironic that Barron, who’s wrong about so many things, is right about me being a stalker.
After parking on her leaf-lined street in Princeton, I walk down the block, past stately brick dwellings, each one with a manicured lawn, sculpted bushes, and a shining door knocker. Each yard is full of fall decorations—dried corn and gourds or planters with stacked pyramids of pumpkins, even the occasional leftover scarecrow.
As I walk up the path to her house, I realize that I figured wrong. Neither car is in the driveway, and I’ve just come this way for nothing.
I turn around and am about to walk away when the front door opens and the porch light flickers on.
“Hello?” Daneca’s mother calls into the darkness. She’s got a gloved hand up, shadowing her eyes. The porch light does the useless thing that porch lights often do, nearly blinding her and rendering me just a shadow.
I walk closer. “It’s me, Mrs. Wasserman. Cassel. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Cassel?” she says, as though she’s still nervous. Maybe more nervous. “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”
“I was looking for Daneca. We’re seniors, so we can
go off campus as long as we’re back on time. But, yeah, I should probably be at Wallingford. I’m going back there right now.” I make a vague gesture in the direction of where I parked.
She’s quiet for a long moment. Then she says, “I think you’d better come inside.”
I walk over the worn marble threshold and step onto the gleaming wooden floors. I smell the remainder of whatever they had for dinner—something with tomato sauce—and hear the television from the living room. Daneca’s father and her sort-of brother, Chris, are sitting on the couches, staring at the screen. Chris turns to glance in my direction as I pass, eyes bright with reflected light.
Mrs. Wasserman beckons me toward the kitchen, and I follow her.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asks, walking to the stove and filling the kettle. It reminds me uncomfortably of my mother in Zacharov’s house.
“I’m okay.”
She points to a chair. “Sit down at least.”
“Thanks,” I say, sitting awkwardly. “Look, I’m really sorry to bother you—”
“Why is it that you thought Daneca would be here instead of at Wallingford?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know where she is. All I want to do is talk to her about her boyfriend. She’s dating my brother. If you met him, you’d understand why I am—”
“I have met him,” Mrs. Wasserman says. “He came to dinner.”
“Oh,” I say slowly, because I bet he told her something bad enough to explain her discomfort around me. “Barron came here? To dinner. Here?”
“I just want you to remember, Cassel, I know how hard things can be for worker kids. For every kid like Chris who finds a place to call home, there are lots of other kids who are kicked out onto the streets, taken in by crime families and then sold off to the rich—forced to endure continual blowback so that other people can line their pockets, or they’re forced to become criminals themselves. And it must be even worse to be raised to believe you had to do those things. I don’t know what you’ve done or what your brother’s done, but—”
“What is it you think we did?”
She glances at my face, like she’s searching for something. Finally she says, “I don’t know. Daneca called here earlier today. She said that you didn’t approve of her going out with your brother. I know you’re worried about Daneca. You’re Sam’s roommate, and I can see that you want to protect her. Maybe you want to protect both of them. But if you expect to be forgiven for what you’ve done, then you have to see that your brother deserves a second chance too.”
“What do you think I’ve done? What did he tell you that I did?”
“That’s not important,” she says. “It’s in the past. I am sure you want it to stay there.”
I open my mouth and close it again. Because I want to defend myself, but it’s true that I’ve done bad things. Things that I want to stay in the past. But I also want to
know what he told her, because I really doubt he told her the whole story.
The problem with people like Mrs. Wasserman is exactly this. She’s
kind
. She’s
good
. She wants to help people, even people that she shouldn’t. Like Barron. Like me. It’s easy to take advantage of her optimism, her faith in how the world should work.
I should know. I’ve already done it.
When I look into Mrs. Wasserman’s face, I know that she’s a born mark for this particular kind of con.
IF YOU ARE A CRAZY
person who needs to have clandestine meetings, then, just like in real estate, what matters most is location, location, location.
You want to control the situation, so you better control the terrain. No surprises. No buildings, no trees, no shadowy corners where your enemies can hide. You want only those hidden spots that will be occupied by your people. But the place can’t be
so
open that a passerby would have a clear sight line. Clandestine meetings have to stay clandestine.
The baseball field isn’t a terrible choice. Far from other buildings. A nearby wooded area is the only place to hide,
and it’s not
that
close by. The time’s good too. Six in the morning is too early for most students to be up, but there’s no rule against it. Mina won’t have to sneak out. And there’s enough time for an exchange of goods before classes start. The blackmailer could get the money, take their sweet time stashing it, and still make it to breakfast.
On the other hand, six in the morning seems way too early for girls pulling a prank to be anywhere but in bed. I figure they’ll be in their pajamas, leaning out of the windows of their dorm, jeering, when Mina returns from the baseball field after no one shows to the meeting. If I’m right, that’s what’s going to happen. Then the real negotiation starts, because I still have to somehow convince them to give up the camera and its contents. That’s when we’ll find out what’s really going on.
Sam’s alarm goes off like a siren at four thirty in the morning, an hour I hope I never see from this end again. I knock my phone onto the floor trying to turn it off, before I realize the sound is coming from a totally different part of the room.
“Get up,” I say, and throw a pillow in his direction.