The Rivals (29 page)

I laugh then. “Why’d you flirt with him at your party?”

“They didn’t just flirt!” Natalie says with a snort. “They made out in your boyfriend’s room the other night too.”

Then all the girls laugh, enjoying their power, the way they play people. “Sometimes you have to take one for the team, as they say,” Anjali says. “So when your boyfriend and Sandeep were watching football the night before the trial, I spent a little one-on-one time with the boy whose job I should have gotten. God, he was so easy! First he practically announces Maia’s under investigation that day after English class. Then he tells me at my chess party that he’s keeping the evidence in his room! He made it so easy to go back and get the evidence.”

I grit my teeth, wishing there’d never been a third board member at all. Because it was Parker’s faux pas that tipped off Anjali to Maia being under investigation in the first place. That’s probably why they coached Beat to claim Maia was the mastermind.

“So you made out with him just to take the evidence from his room?”

Anjali nods proudly. I imagine her with hidden fangs, standing outside a doorway, waiting patiently to be invited in, like a vampire. Once inside, she sinks her teeth into Parker, the weak link as always. He turns away, a look of rapture on his skinny face as she grabs the evidence she planted in the first place. “Though the evidence was ours to start with.”

“Since you planted it in Jamie’s room.”

“And lo and behold, Calvin walked right into our little trap, the one you helped me set up with those posters,” Anjali says, smacking her palms together to emphasize her point. “Of course, I’m not surprised, since I knew he’d fall for it.”

“That’s what you were doing when you were investigating for us,” I say. “You were just scoping out who actually had enough morals and decency to turn in a dealer.”

Anjali rolls her eyes. “You guys are so self-righteous.”

McKenna sits up on the couch, like those words from Anjali are her call to action. “My point exactly. You’re always trying to force your choices on the whole school. Because that’s what this is all about. Choices. Personal choices. Because you know what? I never cheated. I never forced pills down anyone’s throat. I don’t drink, I don’t use, I don’t smoke, and I don’t cheat. Anjali doesn’t. Natalie doesn’t. It’s not that hard to do the right thing. You just make smart decisions. You resist temptation.”

“Do the right thing? You engineered a cheating ring! And you’re getting all over us for being too involved?”

McKenna arches a well-groomed eyebrow. “But sometimes the end justifies the means, doesn’t it, Alex? You can’t really come in here preaching your
do-the-right-thing
ways when you lied to Beat. He told us everything about your meeting in the Faculty Club.”

I slice my hand through the air. “Let’s not start acting like Beat Bosworth is some poor, meek soul I manipulated.”

She tilts her head to the side and gives me a fake smile. “Whether he’s defenseless or not is beside the point. You manipulated him. You entrapped him. And so we may have gotten our hands a little dirty too—”

I interrupt to scoff, “Euphemism.”

“—the point being that you had your goal when you lied to Beat, to prove Theo was the supplier. So you can’t really come around and accuse us of being manipulative too. You don’t have the moral high ground.”

“And you do?”

She nods. “We are doing this for the greater good too. Because if you’ve studied government as closely as I have, you would have recognized a common thread. And that is when there is too much power vested in too few hands, you have the makings for change, the seeds of a revolution perhaps. Some might even call it a coup.”

“A coup? Really? This is a coup? Your little group is a coup?”

Natalie marches forward and grabs my left wrist. “Little group?
Little
is a diminutive word, Alexandra Nicole Patrick.” She yanks my arm behind my back, twisting my wrist so my shoulder lurches forward and my hand torques up. Her cold brown eyes bore into mine, and I stare right back, my steely blankness matching hers each time she twists harder. All those muscles in her body are spectacularly powerful, and she’s hurting me like she’s a paid professional. But I will not show an ounce of pain in front of Natalie, in front of this girl who ripped me apart last year and who’s hitting where it hurts most right now.

My hands.

“It’d be really hard to play the piano with one hand broken, wouldn’t it?”

I grin wickedly then, unable to resist smirking at her error. How could she know after all that I can play one-handed? But I say nothing. Because what happens between the piano and me is still mine. It’s still separate from the Mockingbirds and therefore separate from these three. It is the part of me they cannot know, the part that drives me, that gives me strength—I have years of training too; mine is on the bench.

Natalie doesn’t like my smile. She cocks her head to the side, narrows her eyes. “Something funny, Alex?”

She twists harder, her arm a corkscrew, cranking deeper, further than it needs to go, so far the cork starts to splinter. Each hand has nineteen bones, twenty-seven if you count the wrist too, and Natalie Moretti is using every single one of the hundreds of muscles in her sculpted, sinewy, track-star body to crush them all, maybe more. Maybe she’ll even shatter bones that don’t exist.

“Enough,” McKenna calls out lazily, and Natalie lets go just before she breaks anything.

I want to cradle my left hand, to touch it, stroke it, hide it. But I grit my teeth and hold tight, the pain shooting to my fingertips and back up to my shoulder.

“I mean, really. We want this to be a fair fight, don’t we?” McKenna says. Then to me, “But it doesn’t have to be a fight. We know, in a lot of ways, you didn’t really have a choice about becoming a Mockingbird. You were a victim, and you won your rape case, and all of a sudden you became a Mockingbird. So we’ll give you a choice. You can leave them. You can leave your past behind and we’ll just let you go. I’m sure you’ve had your doubts about the Mockingbirds just as we have.”

It’s kind of like when someone else insults your mom. You can say crap about your mom all you want, but it’s never okay for someone else to. Because while I have had more than my share of doubts about the Mockingbirds, a bolt of loyalty shoots through me, rooting me to the ground.

“I’m not leaving the Mockingbirds, McKenna. And if I were going to, I wouldn’t need your permission. And I don’t care if the whole school knows, because I’m not a victim. I’m a survivor. It’s part of me and so are the Mockingbirds.”

McKenna takes out an imaginary bow and plays a fake violin for a moment while Anjali and Natalie bestow exaggerated claps.

“Then if you’re going to exist, we’re going to exist,” McKenna says. “It’s sort of like that law of physics—for every force, there is an equal and opposite force. You were the only force for a while.” She holds up her palms like scales, the left one high, the right one low. Then the right one rises and they’re equal. “But science won’t allow that.” The right hand is above the left one now. “So we’re here.”

“Physics. Government. You’re mixing metaphors,” I say.

McKenna nods to Natalie, who understands the directive immediately. She grabs my other arm now, administering the same torture to the right one. She even adds a little spice to her routine, jerking my middle finger back. It’s perpendicular, then a little more.

“Apply consistent pressure,” McKenna says with glee, then claps her hand to her mouth. “Oh look! Now I’m mixing medical terms!”

Natalie’s eyes burn with delight. “Harder, Alex? Want it harder?”

I won’t respond. I can’t respond. I refuse to respond. I squeeze my eyes shut, taking the pain, sucking it in, not showing them I am breaking. Then I scream silently when she jacks the finger so far back, I hear it snap for real this time. “Please stop,” I whisper, but with the quickness that’s earned her victories on the field, she does the same to my ring finger, then my pinkie.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

She lets go, and I am hating them, hating the pain, hating their power.

“How does it feel to have the thing you love taken away?” McKenna asks, her words a final kick in the gut. They’re her encore, her last reminder of how she has undermined us once again.

“Did it hurt?” Natalie asks as I open my eyes.

“Yes.” It’s throbbing, to be precise. It’s burning up my freaking body.

“Good.”

“So now you understand us better, Alex,” McKenna says, and stands up for the first time, sweeping her hair back off her shoulders and padding over to me on those cat feet of hers. “We’re here to keep you in check. To keep the Mockingbirds in check. That’s why we’re the Watchdogs.”

If I had any energy left in me, I’d laugh at the name.

“Though you can really think of us like the Vigils,” Anjali adds.

I guess there is truth in fiction, after all.

I’d say something about life imitating art if my breathing wasn’t growing shallow and my vision wasn’t feeling blurry and the pain wasn’t radiating from my right hand in sharp stabs. I turn to leave, my left hand holding the right one as if it might fall off, because it feels like it might fall off, when McKenna speaks again. But she’s not talking to me.

“I told you Theo would blab in under a week now that he’s
seen the light
. He was such a pansy,” McKenna says. “So pay up, bitches, ’cause this bet is mine.”

I hear Natalie and Anjali reaching for their money when it hits me—McKenna has no idea it was her sister who sang.

I desperately want to see Jamie, call Jamie, text Jamie. I want to ask her if she’ll tell McKenna, and I want to ask her
not
to tell McKenna. But my hands feel like limp rags, my fingers like poison, so I find my way across the quad to Martin’s room. I want to see him—I want to fall into him, knowing he would let me, knowing he would take me back if I just ask—but I
need
to see his roommate.

I knock with some clumsy combination of elbow and forearm. Martin answers. Sandeep is there too, but Parker is gone.

“Are you okay?” Martin asks immediately.

I shake my head. “No. It’s my hand,” I say, my voice breaking for the first time. I still hold back the tears, but I no longer fake it, I no longer pretend this doesn’t kill me.

Sandeep springs to attention. “Let me see,” he says. He takes my right hand gently in his, then asks, “May I touch?” I suck in my breath, gasping as he touches the middle finger. “Does this hurt?”

“Yes,” I choke out.

He does the same to the ring finger, then the pinkie.

“Can you move them? Can you gently try moving them?”

I lift my fingers slightly, screwing up my eyes, grunting a bit as I try to move them. I look at Martin, his face wracked with worry. “What happened, Alex?”

“I’ll tell you later” is all I can manage to say.

“Who did this to you?” Martin says, and the worry vacates. The seeds of anger take its place.

I can’t answer yet. There is too much to say, too much to tell.

Sandeep looks at Martin. “She needs to see a doctor. Her fingers are fractured.”

“Can she go to the Health Center?” Martin asks, referring to the on-campus medical clinic.

“It’s after hours. Only a nurse is on duty. The nurse will have to call a doc to set her fingers.”

“Let’s go, then,” Martin says quickly, grabbing his keys, not bothering with a coat.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“You need to go to a hospital,” Sandeep states.

“No,” I say weakly as I lie back on Martin’s bed. Its familiarity is comforting. I know this bed. I’ve been in this bed. I can curl up here.

“You need to see a doctor,” Sandeep says clinically.

“Please don’t take me to the hospital,” I moan. “I’ll be fine.”

“You’re not fine,” Martin says insistently. “I will carry you there if I have to.”

I would wave them off if I could move my hands. I try to shift over to my side, away from them, away from everyone, calling out to sleep, to sweet slumber, to anything that’ll take the pain away right now. I close my eyes and feel Martin’s strong hand on my shoulder.

“Alex,” he says gently. “We need to get you seen.”

“How are we even going to get to the hospital?” I mumble as I consider counting sheep so I can float away and forget all this. But Sandeep is already calling a cab.

I tell Martin everything on the way to the ER. I even manage to come up with a cover-up too, so the doctor who evaluates me thinks I tripped on a patch of ice and broke the fall with my hands. He nods, saying that, after sports injuries, falls are the most common cause of broken fingers. I suppose that is a bit of serendipity. That, along with having a fall birthday. I’m eighteen now, so the hospital doesn’t have to tell my parents. I’ll tell them soon enough but not tonight.

“You have three fractured fingers,” the doctor informs me. But that’s really just a nicer way of saying broken fingers, because when it comes to hands,
broken
and
fractured
are the same.

Then he tells me I can’t play for four weeks. Four long weeks. Four long, miserable weeks. He says my fingers will be back to normal then. But will they? And what is normal in this doctor’s world may not be
normal
for me. I need my fingers to be more than normal. I need them to be extraordinary.

So I ask him, “Can I play the same?”

His answer: “You’ll be fine.”

But “fine” isn’t good enough. Theo can dance fine, and that’s not good enough.

Then I’m sipping orange juice and walking out of the emergency room, three fingers on my right hand in a splint.

“Now I really can play that Ravel piece the way it was meant to be played,” I joke to Martin. His arm is wrapped around me, and he manages a smile. I don’t know if his arm is wrapped around me because my hand is broken or because we are done being mad. But whatever the reason, I’ll take it. Because it’s the only thing that has felt good in hours. The immediate pain is gone, replaced now by an ache that is not dull but is, in fact, rather insistent. It occurs to me that the phrase
dull ache
may not be so apt after all. “Good thing I already sent in my CD, huh? The audition won’t be till January, if I get one.”