Croak (22 page)

“Which is what you really want, isn’t it?” Lex muttered under her breath.

Zara looked stung. “I’m going to ignore that.”

“Anything else?” Lex said, growing impatient.

“Yes.” Zara came closer and lowered her voice. “Is that really all Mort said? Or is there something else you’re not telling us?”

Lex noted the flash of jealousy in Zara’s eyes. Should she bring her in on this? There was no denying that her expertise had some worth, but Lex could easily imagine Zara taking all the credit, proudly declaring to Uncle Mort that she had figured out everything by herself. That simply couldn’t happen.

Plus,
Lex thought somewhere in the far reaches of her mind,
if someone really is going after criminals,
I
want to be the one to find them.

“No, that’s all,” Lex said.

Zara’s face morphed into the expression of someone who knows she’s being lied to. “Come on, Lex. Maybe I can help. And admit it—you owe me.”

Lex’s shoulders slumped as she remembered the secrets Zara had kept, the knowledge of Lex’s shocks and vengeful urges that she hadn’t spilled to the other Juniors—or even to Norwood. Lex really did owe her.

So she caved.

“That’s insane,” Zara said, her eyes worried, after Lex had told her everything about the criminals.

Lex chewed on the inside of her mouth, images of the girl with the teddy bear flashing across her mind. “Is it?” she said quietly, an angry fever burning up her neck.

“What do you mean?” Zara gave Lex a look. “You’re not still lunging at murderers out in the Field, are you?”

Lex narrowed her eyes and backed up against the stove, an empty pizza box digging into her back. She knew she shouldn’t push things any further, but the words just spilled out, growing louder and louder. “Is going after these monsters unethical? Yes, absolutely. Is it wrong?” Her face was red, her hands burning hot. “I’m not so sure.”

“We’re not supposed—”

“—to interfere. I know. But maybe we should!”

“But that’s against the Terms—”

“Screw the Terms!” Lex exploded, slamming her hand down.

It happened faster than either of them realized. They froze in horror, unable to move, staring at the pizza box that had burst into flame.

After a beat, they sprang into action. Zara flung open the refrigerator and grabbed a pitcher of water while Lex reached for a nearby spatula and began to bat at the box, trying to push it into the sink. Eventually their combined efforts succeeded and the flames were extinguished, the smoking, charred shell of the box giving off an acrid smell.

Zara looked at Lex with giant, scared eyes. “What was that?”

“I don’t know!” Lex cried, just as alarmed. She pointed at the stove. “I must have turned it on by accident!” They both looked at the burner knobs, all plainly in the off position. “And turned it off too, I guess?”

“Right. Yeah.” Zara studied her. “Has this happened before?”

“Has
what
happened before?” Lex shot back, Zara’s accusatory expression sparking her rage all over again. “A kitchen fire involving grease-soaked cardboard? Only about a billion times, probably!”

Zara gave her a dubious look and opened her mouth to say something more, but a loud cry from the other room made her stop. “We should go back—”

Lex didn’t know what made her do it, but she grabbed Zara’s arm. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Zara wrestled out of her grip. “Might want to get rid of that,” she said icily, nodding at the soggy box as she exited the kitchen.

Lex swallowed, then busied herself with destroying the evidence. As she shoved the box into a trash bag and started waving the fumes out the window, her mind churned. It was an accident, obviously. There was no other explanation.

Except . . . she had brought her hand down on the box, not the knob. She was sure of it. And why were her hands still scalding hot, her temper still flaring?

Stop it,
she told herself.
Accident. Nothing more.

As she shoved her hands into her pockets and made her way back into the living room, Lex was relieved to discover that both her absence and the fiery incident had gone unnoticed. Ferbus held his fists over his head in triumph as the others cheered (including Zara, who was acting as if nothing had happened), while Driggs looked dejectedly at his losing hippo.

“He cheated,” he complained to Lex as she sat down. “Distracted me with a Hershey bar.”

Ferbus rolled the dice and moved his top hat token forward. “And that would be a Connect Four.” He grinned. “I win.”

The group heaved a collective groan of defeat. Lex looked around in disbelief. “What?” she said, still fuming. “He
won?
”

“Geez, Ferbus.” Driggs sighed with a hint of admiration. “You ever gonna lose?”

“Of course not, he’s making it all up!” Lex yelled.

The group gasped.

Ferbus clucked his tongue. “You just insulted the Almighty Conqueror of the Universe,” he said, handing her a box. “Which means you have to clean up.”

***

Twenty full minutes of repacking later, Lex and Driggs headed home.

Lex decried the rules (or lack thereof) the whole way, focusing her anger on something real, something that made an iota of sense. “Marvin Gardens is a no-fly zone, my ass.”

“Only for thimbles,” Driggs said, climbing up onto the roof. “Hey, what did Zara want with you?”

“Oh—um, she just wanted to trade for a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

He frowned. “But she wasn’t in jail.”

“Would it have mattered?” she said peevishly.

Lex was, in a word, torn. She trusted Driggs, but the truth was just so damn tricky. The fire thing—well, she didn’t know what to make of that, and neither would he. All of this Zara business, the shocks they shared—it was too hard to explain. And she didn’t even want to think about what would happen if she told him that she’d gone and spilled the secret of the criminal pattern Uncle Mort had found. To Zara, of all people. He’d probably dropkick her off the roof.

So she said nothing.

“You sure know your way around a Jenga tower,” Driggs said.

“What?” Lex replied, distracted. “Oh. Thanks.”

“How’d you get so good at those games?”

“My family—we played them all the time. I could probably recite the Monopoly properties to you in my sleep.” A small smile appeared on her face. “I don’t know, I guess my parents thought they were educational.”

Driggs watched her. “You really think they’ll make you go back at the end of the summer?”

She sighed. “I don’t think. I know.”

“But you’re an adult. You should be able to do whatever you want.”

“Yeah, right.” Lex snorted. “Not in the real world. You have no idea what it’s like to have—”

“What? Devoted parents?” he said coldly, his eyes suddenly hard. “An endless supply of unconditional love? People who actually give a damn about where their kid is?”

Lex clenched her fists, the anger rising yet again. Seemed like it was on full blast tonight. And she was sick of backing down from the “woe is me, I’m an orphan” defense, anyway. It wasn’t her fault her home wasn’t broken.

“What happened to your parents, Driggs?” she said in a voice that was exceedingly frosty, even for her. But she was feeling reckless. “Why are you so secretive about them? Everyone else seems to love wallowing in their tales of misery and sorrow. Why not you?”

Driggs’s nostrils flared. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said in a low, distant voice. “Is that so hard to understand?” He leaned in. “Do you,
Lex,
find it so unfathomable that a person might want to keep a few secrets for himself?”

That hit a nerve. Lex returned his gaze, both of her black eyes drifting automatically to his sole blue one, which was reading her perfectly. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You tell me.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake.” She jumped to her feet. “Enough of this cagey, elusive crap that you people incessantly spout! Can’t you ever say anything of substance?”

“Why?” he exploded, leaping up as well. “So you can come back with something witty and sardonic that’ll make you seem all self-important and superior, even though it’s clearly a half-assed attempt to hide your own insecurities?”

“Oh, nice work there, Freud. At least I don’t have to boost my low self-esteem by inhaling fistfuls of Oreos, downing a keg of Yorick, and pretending to be a homicide detective.”

“Do you honestly think I can’t tell what sort of warped stuff you’ve been entertaining in that sick little mind of yours? You might be able to dupe the others, Lex, but not me.” Breathing heavily, he tapped her forehead. “There are a lot of malicious impulses rattling around in there, and it’s pretty clear that you’re in no hurry to get rid of them.”

She donned an expression of mock terror. “Oh, excuse me for not dropping dead with terror at the thought of breaching one of Croak’s beloved Terms.” She was inches from his face. “I wouldn’t want to end up as a scaaaaary exile!”

“Maybe you deserve it!”

“And maybe you should just go back to your sanctuary of spider friends and cry yourself to sleep!”

“At least they’re not abominations like you!”

“Coward!”

“Freak!”

It suddenly occurred to both Driggs and Lex, in that very same instant, that neither of them wanted anything more in the world than to tear off every single piece of each other’s clothes and make wild, passionate, messy adolescent love under the radiant glow of the full moon.

Their chests rose and fell. A few seconds passed.

“I’m going to sleep,” Driggs panted, clambering off the roof.

“Me too,” Lex huffed, right behind him.

And without another word they fled to their rooms, slammed the doors, and threw themselves into bed, where they both spent the next five hours dazedly contemplating their respective ceilings.

The next morning, things were awkward.

To say the least.

Fleeing the bathroom they shared, Driggs mumbled a hasty apology after accidentally knocking Lex’s toothbrush into the toilet. At the breakfast table, Lex poured orange juice into her cereal instead of milk.

“What’s with you two today?” Uncle Mort asked on his way out the door.

“ . . . not much sleep . . .” Driggs grumbled.

“ . . . that time of the month . . .” muttered Lex.

Their silent walk into town was eclipsed in unease only by their check-in at the Bank, which vastly paled in comparison to their shift. By the time they arrived back at the Ghost Gum and headed to the Morgue for lunch, Lex sensed that she was only seconds away from spontaneously combusting into a cloud of mist and thorny resentment.

It didn’t help that Kloo and Ayjay were the only ones there, and that they had decided to spend the majority of their lunch hour eating each other’s faces rather than their burgers. Lex and Driggs sat on either side of them, silently lamenting the discomfort of the situation. Lex examined the salt shaker. Driggs picked at a piece of gum.

Eventually the mortification of it all became too much to bear. “Wanna go?” Lex honked in a weird voice.

“Uh, sure.”

“Make up, you two,” Pandora said as they slunk out the door. “At this rate, you’ll never get into each other’s pants.”

***

At the Bank, Driggs handed Lex his scythe and bolted up the stairs. “You check in,” he said, undoubtedly in a rush to escape her. “Back down soon.”

“Wait—oh, fine,” she said bitterly. “Say hi to your wife Ferbus.”

Lex was majorly out of sorts. Not only had last night’s fight left her and Driggs’s already-muddled relationship in a full-blown state of emergency, but the whole fire thing was still really bugging her. So much so that she finally decided to simply stop thinking about it, to lock it in an abandoned part of her brain, far, far away from any important thoughts, in a space normally reserved for sports trivia and the preamble of the Constitution.

She scoured the hub. The only available Etcetera was Sofi. “Naturally,” she muttered to herself, approaching the desk.

“Hi, Lex,” said Sofi. “Checking in?”

Lex grimaced. Interacting with Sofi always made her want to jam a thumbtack into her eye. “Yeah.” She plugged in the scythes and slid onto the desk, knocking over a snow globe in the process. “Sorry.”

After it became clear to both of them that Lex wasn’t going to pick it up, Sofi sighed and did it herself. “Why don’t you like me, Lex?” she asked with a pout.

Lex decided to issue a denial. Sofi wasn’t exactly a shrewd individual; she could easily be duped. “Of course I like you,” she said, thinking up a way to change the subject. “In fact, I was wondering—what do
you
think the Loopholes are?”

Sofi looked pleased to be consulted, but she shrugged. “Like I’d know!” She leaned in. “Whatever they are, I bet they’re, like, Crazy McCrazyface. Why else would they get destroyed in the process?”

“Wait a minute,” Lex said, shocked that what she thought would be a ditzy filler conversation was actually going somewhere. “What do you mean?”

“That’s the only known part of them—that whatever the procedure is, the Loopholes themselves are involved in it and get used up or something.”

“So the number of Loopholes grows less and less each time one is found?”

“Yuppers. And because no one knows how many there were to begin with, no one knows how many are left. Since it’s been so long since the last one was found—in the early eighteen hundreds—some people think none.”

“Although judging by what’s going on now, that’s obviously not true,” Lex snapped.

Sofi raised an eyebrow. “Chica, you need to relax.” She reached into her desk and handed Lex a sparkly gel-filled stress ball. “Here.”

Lex gave the ball a squeeze. “I’m just—and this Loophole—it can’t have anything to do with the Smacks? There’s no way to override the system?” she asked.

“Not unless you turn into a jellyfish,” Sofi said. “They’re the only ones who can pick up the Gamma signals. They send them to us, and we send them out to you via the scythes, which are synchronized perfectly. They’ll always take you smack-dab to the middle of the death, at exactly the right time. You can’t scythe any other way. It just won’t work.”