Chasing Wishes (7 page)

"So, where are you from?" I ask Sarah, breaking the ice. She shoots me a cold glare and everything freezes over again.

"You’re not my friend. I’m only showing you around because Dr. Stevens told me to. After today, you’re on your own," she says bluntly, and then after a moment, she adds, "
Totally
on your own."

"Hey, I had to test into this school just like the rest of..."

"Sure you did," she interrupts me, rolling her eyes. "It’s not like your kind ever gets preferential treatment or anything."

I don’t know whether to be uearther topset or pissed off, and it’s all I can do not to either slap her or start crying. Is she out of her mind? Where the hell does she think I came from? I haven’t had a day of preferential treatment in my life!

"Alright, here’s your locker," she says, pointing at locker #1103. Its friendly, sky blue paint is the most welcoming thing I’ve seen all day.

"Well, thanks for the tour," I tell her, but she only scoffs at me and turns away.

"Get fucked, Nina. You’ll fail out soon enough," she hisses, and she abandons me in the hallway to find my own way back.

They hate me. They don’t even know me and they already hate me.

"Fail out, huh?" I whisper to myself. "Not
a chance. I’m not going anywhere."

I earned the opportunity to be here and they’re not getting rid of me so easily.

M
arcus practically has to drag me away from the sandwich counter once we receive our wraps. I want to stay there and talk to the girl behind the counter, but he’s insistent that we go sit down and eat. He’s right, as usual—not only are we holding up the line, but also the only reason I came over to Verta’s headquarters at all today was for the lunchtime meeting we scheduled that I'm already late for. I run a scientific consulting firm and do specialized research for any company with enough money to pay for my services, and right now, that company is Verta.

"You seriously need to stop leaning in when you talk to people, sir," Marcus says, breaking into my thoughts. "You always go in too far and get into people’s personal space. That woman was..."

"That woman was the same one from the library, wasn’t she?" I interrupt, gripping tightly to his elbow and following his movements across the cafeteria. I know she was, but I’d rather talk about her than my poor manners.

I can’t believe it was her! I knew I’d recognized that beautiful voice of hers. What’s she doing here? Why on earth is she working at the cafeteria, making sandwiches with an angelic voice like that? Why isn’t she singing opera or reading the evening news report or...

...or reading to children in the library, just like she was yesterday.

Jesus, that’s practically perfect. She has the perfect voice for children’s books. Hell, she has the perfect voice for
me
—the sound of her voice lingers in my mind and tantalizes me all the way across the cafeteria.

"Yes, sir," answers Marcus, a hint of irritation bleeding into his voice. "Your Rapunzel is indeed the sandwich girl, in case you haven’t already deduced it."

"I have indeed," I answer him with a sniff. "The big giveaway was when she handed me a sandwich."

"I still think she’s the sort of person you need as a personal assistant," he says, starting his usual lecture. "Someone young, someone with an imagination..."

"Right, and I expect you’re big on the part where she’s female too, huh?"

"Of course I am, Terrence," he answers with a sigh. "You’d like it too if you’d just give up on this ridiculous..."

"Drop it, Marcus," I snap, and he goes silent.e.

He always bugs me about how I don’t go out and is particularly opinionated about how I don’t date anyone. What does he think I’m going to do, though? It’s not like I can just get in the car and go meet people—I’m fucking blind. I even tried once, just to get him off my back, and the relationship blew up after two months. I don’t want to go through that again, and I don’t think I would date anymore even if I weren't blind. Not until I find Nina.

Oh, who am I kidding? I have no idea what she’s like now. I wonder if she’d still love me after so many years. Does she even remember me?

Probably not,
I think.
She’s probably moved on, married someone else. We were just teenagers, after all.

Even so, I want to know what happened to her and where she ended up. I need to know that she’s safe now.

I can feel the crowd around me and occasionally catch the flutter of someone’s arm against mine as we pass too close, but Marcus flawlessly guides me to our table as always. I can’t imagine doing this with a cane like I used to see in the movies; I’d be tripping people left and right, poking people in the shins, and left to my own devices, I’d probably still walk straight into the nearest wall.

"Good afternoon, Terrence. Nice of you to join us," says a smooth voice to my left as I sit down. It’s Chen, my laboratory manager. Marcus designs all the projects on a technical level, but Chen’s the guy back there in the lab with the other workers making all the pieces come together.

"Is it good? You’ll have to tell me."

"I
think
it’s good," he says. "I haven’t gotten the shark’s blessing yet, so I’ll wait until she gets here."

The shark is my lawyer Charlotte, of course. She arranged my company's contract with Verta and made sure we could get in here to do our research, and judging by the sudden silence at the table, she’s just arrived. The ear-grating sound of metal chair legs against cafeteria tile signals her arrival as she pulls her chair back from the table and takes a seat.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Berger," says Chen nervously.

"Terrence," she starts, completely ignoring Chen, "I haven’t received your plans to perform a review yet. When am I going to get them?"

"Chen brought them," I answer, and then hopefully facing toward him, I add, "If you would be so kind as to do the honors?"

The sound of blueprints rolling out onto the table indicates that I was right. Thank goodness—Charlotte would’ve eaten me alive for wasting her time. I still don’t get why she refuses to talk to Chen, but as long as she gets the job done, I can deal with it.

In my mind, Charlotte is a prudish schoolteacher. She has brown hair, piercing eyes, and a hawkish nose that could probably blind me if my genes hadn’t already taken care of that. She’s slender, dresses well, and has a bad habit of frowning.

Marcus has repeatedly told me that she’s a strawberry blonde and that apart from her constant frowns, I’m completely full of shit on all the other counts too. I still can’t change what I see, though. It’s always the same image when Charlotte speaks, just like how whenever I imagine the girl from the library, it’s always Rapunzel with a chef hat. It’s completely backward, Cly how wtoo—Marcus told me she was wearing a chef’s outfit and had a wig, but instead she’s dressed like a princess while wearing a tall chef hat in my mind.

My brain is starved for stimulus and doesn’t work so well these days.

"Okay, so here’s the deal," starts Chen. "I’ve worked out the implantation system based on of Verta’s..."

"Shh, not so loud," hisses Charlotte. "Everyone else in this cafeteria works for them, remember?"

"Sorry," whispers Chen. "I took apart one of Verta’s internal drug release systems, and the mounting and implantation system is just a combination of hydrophobic adhesives and border sutures..."

Marcus interrupts with a groan and then pushes back in his chair to leave. He’s surprisingly squeamish around stitches for someone who used to be a surgeon.

"Shit, so now what?" I ask. "How do we make it work without sutures? We can’t just glue it in place and hope for the best."

Charlotte laughs and the table wobbles as she leans in closer.

"Easy. The use of stitching is clearly prior art, so you just differentiate your process from the way they implemented it," she explains. "All they can do is claim the combination of pattern, material and usage. You just change the pattern and material and you’re safe. If they try anything, leave the patent defense to me. I could smack the judge with a cat and still win that case."

"Charlotte," I gush in exaggerated gratitude, "how would I ever steal inventions without you?"

"Anything for you, Terrence," she answers with a laugh—a mirthless, practiced and professional laugh—and the table shifts again as she stands up.

"If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to speak to my next client," she says. "Well, my law partner's next client, to be precise... this one's a civil suit in the making. I'll be right back."

"Oh? Who is it?"

"A Miss Irene Hartley from the sandwich counter, who I just watched get fired after retaliating against her manager’s sexual harassment," Charlotte answers with an air of delight so pronounced that I can actually feel it. She always sounds so smug and when she’s found her next goldmine.

"You mean the woman who was making sandwiches just now?"

"Yes. Now if you’ll—"

Anger burns inside me at the idea of someone harassing her, and it catches me by surprise with its intensity. The idea that anyone could possibly want to hurt her infuriates me for some reason, but I quickly quench the fire and get my temper back under control. Verta isn't my company and I'm in no position to start anything. It's a bad idea to pick fights you can't finish, and it's really hard to finish a fight when you're blind.

"Wait!" I call to Charlotte as the click of her heels announces her departure. "Do me a favor while you’re up there."

"Okay, but make it quick. Security’s escorting her out
right this second
," she snaps. Jesus, she’s practically champing at the bit to sue someone.

"Give her Marcus’ card," I say, retrieving one from my wallet and stubbing my pinky finger on someone’s lunch tray as I slide the card across the table. "Tell her to give us a call if she’s interested in a job."

"Seriously? Why on earth would you want to hire some trash like her?" asks Charlotte incredulously.

"So she's trash when I'm interested in hiring her, but not when you can use her to make money, huh?" I fire back. I
hate
when people act as if they're superior to someone just because they're wealthier. It's like I'm surrounded by my horrible family all over again.

"Oh whatever. I don't have time to deal with this—have it your way," she groans, a hint of bitterness seeping through into her tone. "Give me that card."

Maybe Marcus is right about the whole younger assistant thing. M
aybe this is a sign... or maybe I’m a total idiot and I’ll regret this in a week.

Either way, it’s too late now. I hope he’s right.

T
he stampede for food after the fourth period bell ends the same way it does every day: with me waiting impatiently behind two hundred other students just to get to the cafeteria door. I stand silently in line, shifting my weight from foot to foot as the swarm of students inches down the hall, through the cafeteria doors and then finally into the kitchen. My stomach growls at me more insistently with each passing minute, reminding me yet again that this will be my first meal since lunchtime yesterday. Mom says she just keeps forgetting to buy groceries, but what she really means, of course, is that the grocery money went to her dealer again. I can't even remember the last time I saw her eat anything, and it's starting to show.

Woodbridge Academy rents out most of its cafeteria to local restaurants and set up booths in the kitchen. The burger place from down the street is offering all its usual combos for ten percent off, as is the Mexican chain with its pathetic excuse for burritos. Today, though, everyone's making a mad dash for the special from the pizzeria—two slices and a soda for five bucks.

Students dart back and forth from stand to stand as they try to decide what they're going to eat today, and I quickly pick out Sarah in the crowd. It’s become second nature for me to identify her wherever I go just to make sure I can avoid her. She’s doing her usual routine of pretending to waffle over whether to eat a salad or splurge on pizza. She'll probably get both again—she always does. By the time she decides and waits in line, though, her twenty-minute lunch break will be almost over. Ah, the luxury of choice.

I don't have her problem—nobody's ever in line for the stand I order from.

I push through the milling throng of students, squeeze between the tacos and the mall-style Chinese food, and head straight to the tiny lunch counter nestled in the back near the sinks.

The bored-looking lunch-lady slumps behind a point of sale system that probably costs more than a year supply of the bland, unappetizing food it's about to ring up.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Harris," I greet the rotund woman behind the counter as I hand her my lunch card. She dips her hair-netted beehive respectfully in reply, punches my card and then slaps a plate of gray, runny stroganoff onto my plate alongside a poppy seed muffin left over from breakfast. She goes back to what looks to be a very lonely game of tic-tac-toe scribbled on a napkin next to the register.