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They sat for a moment in silence. Malcolm tried to steady his shaky leg.

“God . . . ” He puffed out a nervous laugh. “That's, uh . . . that's a ballsy name for a dealer.”

God turned slowly and faced him dead-on. “You obviously haven't tried this stuff yet,” he said. He reached into his pocket and presented a blue cellophane package that fit in the palm of his hand. “Fifty gets you five. One for ten.”

“I need ten.”

“I thought you might.” God slid the package across the bench and Malcolm trapped it under his fingertips. There were ten small diamond-shaped yellow pills inside. Then he handed God the hundred bucks from inside his boot.

Thank you, rich NYU bitches.

“D-Does it . . . ?” Malcolm stammered. “Does it really work? I mean, if, like, some . . .
dude
and . . . his whole gang had been beating the crap out of me and my boys for a while, you know . . . messing with us in our own park . . . ? Would we be able to—?”

“That dude wouldn't stand a chance,” God said. “It wouldn't matter how big his gang was. You drop one of these, and you won't care if an armored tank is coming at you.”

“Sweet,” Malcolm said, trying for a moment to bond with God. But he didn't even need to see God's
eyes behind those blue shades. He knew he should shut up instantly. Shut up and go.

“Tell your people,” God said. “Tell them to come and pray while supplies last.”

“I will,” Malcolm said. “Totally.” He looked back at Devin, waved the package, and grinned.

Oh, this was going to be so beautiful.

The
dude.
What a joke. The “dude” with a “gang.” They all knew she was no dude and there was no gang. Just her. It was always just her. And even though not one of them would have ever said it out loud in a million years, Malcolm could at least admit it to himself. He'd been scared of her. They all had. Mal's cousin should have been; he just hadn't known any better. That's why they had all just started staying away from her.

But things were going to change now. No one was going to be scared of that bitch anymore. Now it was her turn to be scared.

Giddy Lovesick Child

EVERY NOW AND THEN GAIA MOORE
was convinced that she had stepped into an alternate universe. Some kind of bizarro world where black
was white and up was down and intensely stupid people were intelligent. Today Starbucks seemed to be that universe. That was the only possible explanation for what she was witnessing.

Chess. A swarm of the absolute dumbest, richest, shallowest party girls the Village School had to offer had all gathered en masse in a corner of Starbucks to watch two boys play
chess.
Actually, from what Gaia could tell, they had really only clumped around one of the boys. Granted, he was attractive enough to warrant a fair amount of attention—tall and slim, with close-cropped flaxen gold hair and the kind of perfectly sculpted features that you usually only see in painted portraits of aristocracy. But still, however attractive this regal boy might be, could that really be enough to make a slew of nitwit FOHs watch an entire chess match as though they were watching a Prada show? It was just a little too strange. And it was making Gaia wish that she had picked anywhere but here to meet Jake after school. But now, unfortunately, she was stuck here until Jake arrived.

She sat on one of the frayed vinyl couches behind a scratched table, a steaming black coffee in front of her, with her legs pulled up against her chest, thumbing through her battered paperback copy of
Crime and Punishment
and pretending she wasn't sneaking a glance, every ninety seconds, out the dirty sunlit windows.

Looking for Jake. Gaia's new favorite pastime.

The wall clock said 3:20.

She knew that Jake had math class and that he'd told her he'd come to Starbucks right after he got out. So where
was
he, anyway?

She kept trying to read her book, but she was finding it damn near impossible not to let her eyes drift back up toward the bizarre spectacle in the corner.

For one thing, what the hell was this boy doing playing chess at Starbucks? He must just completely suck. But the longer Gaia watched him play, the more she was forced to give up that theory. He was good. Actually, from what she could see from this distance, he was very good. He was using the king's gambit, for Christ's sake. That wasn't a maneuver for fake chess players. Who the hell was this kid?

Jesus, now I'm doing it.

Gaia suddenly realized that she was apparently no better than the worst of the FOHs. Now she, too, was staring shamelessly at the young chess prince. She shook it off and turned back down to her book. But it wasn't long before her eyes had popped back up and begun to stare.

Of course, there was another reason she probably found this image so compelling. Just how many perfectly sculpted young chess players were there in the world? Gaia had met only one other. And while this boy looked nothing like Sam Moon, how could she not be reminded of the very first time she'd laid eyes on Sam in the park?
Inhumanly good-looking and unexpectedly skilled on the board—it was an unusual combination to say the least. It wasn't that Gaia was attracted to the boy. Those kinds of feelings were now reserved entirely for Jake. But fascinated . . . she couldn't help but be a little fascinated. And neither, it seemed, could any of the rich girls at school.

“Wait,” Laura said, leaning down by the boy's ear in an act of shameless flirtation. “If you move your horse there, won't he—?”

The boy silenced Laura by simply placing his finger to his lips. He didn't turn his head or acknowledge her presence in any other way.

“Sorry,” Laura whispered earnestly, melting back into the crowd. Gaia couldn't help but smile a little at his total control over the bitchiest of girls and his utter disregard for one of the prettiest of the idiot crew. His priorities were clear. The game first. Doting ninnies later.

“Hey.”

And
finally,
there he was—right in front of her. Jake Montone had stepped in front of her view of the chess game, big as life, complete with his gleaming white teeth and smooth olive skin. Gaia looked up at him gratefully as he dropped his book bag and collapsed into the chair opposite her.

“Hey,” Gaia said, smiling at him. It was clearly time for her to make a smart-ass comment about him being
late. But that was so “old Gaia.”

“What—no clever put-down?” Jake said, as if he'd read her mind. He leaned forward and swatted at the book in her hands. “All this Russian literature's messing with your head.”

And then they were staring at each other again. Gaia's other new favorite pastime. This was happening all the time now—every time they met, it seemed. A few moments of awkwardly intense staring that continued to leave Gaia with an inexplicable rush of blood to the center of her chest. She always tried to pass it off as more of a staring
contest,
but she had a feeling that Jake could see past her competitive veneer.

“How freakin' weird is this?” he said with a subversive little smile.

“How weird is what?” Gaia asked, feeling an unexpected tinge of insecurity. Was he talking about them? Weird that they'd been making goo-goo eyes at each other? Weird that they were even hanging out like this at all? It
was
weird, wasn't it? It was so out of nowhere. But Gaia had thought it was
good
weird. Didn't Jake think it was good weird?

“This,” Jake said, shrugging. “Us. Here. Like this. Weird.”

“What's weird about it?” Gaia said, far too defensively. She felt her spine stiffen. “I don't see anything weird about it—we're just . . . I mean, whatever.
You're
weird. . . . ”

“Whoa.” Jake laughed, squeezing Gaia's hand. “I meant
good
weird.”

“Oh.” She started to relax again. Maybe she had been burned by this boy-girl thing one too many times. Maybe—

That thought was cut short by the sudden pang of complex emotions jabbing at her heart and pricking her spine. That was always the feeling she got upon spotting Ed Fargo.

Ed and Kai were sitting across from each other at one of the smaller tables in the back of Starbucks, and Gaia's eyes had just met Ed's by accident. It was the kind of moment she and Ed both worked very hard to avoid in school.

That was the standard now between Gaia and Ed. Distance. Distance and avoidance. Gaia still felt like such an extraterrestrial whenever she let herself think about it for too long. How could two people who had been so utterly and completely in love now be going out of their way to avoid anything more than a second's worth of eye contact? She did her best to dump the little pangs of jealousy she was feeling about Ed and Kai, because it was such a ridiculously unfair double standard. Here she was, rushing to Starbucks for another rendezvous with Jake, so what right did she have to be even the least bit resentful of Ed and Kai? None. She had no right whatsoever. Because this was the deal now. This was how things
worked. Ed and Kai over there and Gaia and Jake over here . . .

Gaia and Jake . . .
She ran the phrase through her head again.
Gaia and Jake . . . Is it “Gaia and Jake” now? Is that what we call it?

Gaia turned back to Jake and began to stare at him again, the rest of the world drifting off into space.

“What?” Jake asked defensively, looking at her again. “What's the problem?”

“No,” Gaia assured him. “No, nothing. I wasn't—”

“What was that look?”

“I was just . . . ” Gaia found her hands reaching behind her head and fiddling with her hair. She readjusted her ponytail, but it only made the hair fall farther into her face. “Nothing, just . . . It's not a
bad
look,” she explained. “I was . . . This is me
happy,
okay?” she announced. She practically slapped Jake in the face with the words, but at least she'd managed to get them out of her mouth. “I mean, this is what I look like when I'm . . . happy.”

A grin began to spread across Jake's face. A wide, pearly white, excessively hot, excessively confident grin.

“Stop it,” Gaia warned, trying to suppress the embarrassed smile that was about to pop up on her own face. This giddy lovesick child thing was going to give her a goddamn ulcer.

“Stop what?” Jake asked, his smile increasing as he tried to regain eye contact, which was difficult given
the fact that Gaia's hand was beginning to involuntarily mask her eyes.

“Stop it,”
she muttered between clenched teeth, “or I swear to God, I will mash your face against this table and that grin will be forever altered.” Gaia collected herself and tried to look back in Jake's eyes, but his smile had only grown larger.

“You have no
queen,
” the blond chess player taunted his opponent across the room. Now even some adults had come over to watch. The crowd around the table had grown. “You have no rooks, you have no queen . . . you have no chance, my friend.”

Jake leaned toward her. “We need to talk,” he announced. He locked his eyes so tightly and securely with hers that she didn't even try to avert his glance this time. It was almost like a mild form of hypnosis.

“About what?” Gaia uttered.

“Not now,” he said, looking over at the wall clock. “I've got to pick something up for my dad. But we're going to move your stuff over to that boardinghouse later, right?”

“Right . . . ”

“So I'll be done in about a half hour. Then we'll walk a little bit before we head uptown. And we'll talk.”

“About
what?
” Gaia repeated. But of course some part of her was smarter than that. She could see in his eyes what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to talk
about them. He wanted to talk about what was clearly happening between them and what was
going
to happen between them. He wanted to talk about when talking would not be what they spent most of their time doing. He wanted to talk about everything Gaia had been having a delightful time
not
talking about But exactly how long was she planning to avoid that talk? Old Gaia would have voted for as long as humanly possible, given how ridiculously burned she'd gotten with all this romantic stuff. But new Gaia . . . ? What would new Gaia do?

“Not here,” Jake said. “Later. We'll talk. You and me.”

Gaia looked deeper in his eyes. “Okay,” she heard herself answer.

“Okay,” he said. And before he'd even finished that one word, he'd pressed his large hands against the table, leaned his entire torso across, and kissed her. Short, sweet, and deep on the lips. In the middle of Starbucks. With everyone watching.

It was so unexpected. And yet it was so natural. As if it belonged. As if they'd been together for months. And for that one moment Gaia felt like they had been. She felt like everything was right. She felt undeniably normal. For one perfect moment, with Jake's lips pressed to hers, she felt like one of those real girls, complete with real girl tingles down the back of her neck and her real girl hands clasped tightly to her seat. And just as quickly Jake pulled away, backing himself out of Starbucks as he smiled at her.

Then he was out on the street and gone.

Star-Crossed lovers

A VOICE ECHOED THROUGH ED'S
head. Something about bands that would be playing that night around town. Something else about the movies at the Film Forum. Some part of his brain realized that the voice was Kai's—that she was talking a mile a minute, with her usual unbridled enthusiasm about their potential plans for the evening. But Ed really couldn't hear a word. He couldn't hear Kai, and he couldn't hear the commotion surrounding the nearby table where two boys were playing chess. He couldn't hear much of anything at the moment. All that seemed to matter right now was what he could see.