Emancipated (10 page)

Candace pouted. “True.”

“That's good thinking,” Paolo said.

Candace pulled a tight smile as she disappeared downstairs, saying, “Glad you agree.” She reappeared on the staircase after a couple of minutes. Grace thought she could detect a slight blush. Candace lowered her eyes and headed for the balcony. Paolo and Grace watched her approach, leaning on the stair rail.

Paolo turned to Grace. “Is it just me or did you get a little weird with me just now?”

Grace inhaled slowly, rolled her back along the concrete wall until she was facing the front of the balcony. She gazed out past the tall palms and to the ocean beyond. “Define ‘weird.'”

“It's like you don't approve of my plans to be a lawyer.”

Grace snorted. “More like I think you're bullshitting us.”

“What?! Why would I?”

“To get us to say something good about you to, oh, I don't know, maybe Lucy?”

Paolo looked genuinely stunned. “Is that what you think?”

Grace shrugged.

“It's not a lie,” he said, a little indignant.

“Not saying it is. Just that I know something about death row prisoners. Maybe it's given me an oversensitive BS detector.”

“What do you know?”

“I write letters to them,” she said.

“No shit.”

“I've been doing it for years.”

“Seriously?”

She nodded. “Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because. Someone needs to.”

“Why you?”

“I . . . I guess I don't like to talk about it much,” Grace said. “It can get stressy.”

“I'll bet. Like, when it gets right up to the date and you think one of them is gonna . . . you know.”

“What?”

“You know,” he said, making quotations marks with his fingers. “Get ‘iced'?”

Grace felt the familiar cold steel in her chest at his question. She wanted to brush it off but the weed had swept away the controls she'd constructed around the idea. He asked and all she could see in her mind for a few seconds was the one place in the world she never wanted to see—the viewing gallery of the execution chamber.

Paolo seemed momentarily stunned. “Grace,” he was saying, “are you okay?”

Grace watched his eyes travel from her face to the joint in her hand, which she was carefully extinguishing against the concrete wall. A cool wind blew in from the ocean. It rustled the palm fronds. It felt chilly against her bare legs.

She handed him the joint and tried to smile. “You take it. I think I've had enough.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

THIRD FLOOR, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28

Candace was the first to wake, but only because of her alarm. It set the cell phone under her pillow buzzing like a mosquito. Next to her, on the floor and arranged over three pillows, John-Michael gave a soft grunt and stirred.

“Goddamnit, Candace.”

“Shhhh—go back to sleep! Grace and the others still are.”

Impossible. Once awake, there was no going back to sleep. The room was already fairly light, even with the shutters closed. Those shutters weren't much of a barrier to the rising sun. He guessed that they were there mainly to stop people looking in than to keep the morning light out.

John-Michael squinted around at the general dishevelment. Behind Candace, Grace lay peacefully dozing on her side, having spent the night on her stepsister's bed. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a fully dressed boy-girl couple lay back-to-back on her bed, with the comforter twisted around their legs.

He couldn't even remember how he'd ended up in Candace and Lucy's room.

Now he remembered. He'd spent the last hour of the party evading a guy who he'd looked at for about a microsecond too long. Okay, maybe he'd been staring at him. But in truth, John-Michael had merely zoned out. Then he'd come to, pupils suddenly focusing on a guy with sandy hair and blue eyes, with a stubbly beard. The music had changed and the dude had begun to dance. Hideous, horrible dancing. Bad shoulder-shimmying, uncoordinated little kicks, and a huge cheesy grin on his face as he began to snake over to John-Michael. His heart had plummeted.

The next couple of hours hadn't been much fun. John-Michael was terrible at rejecting sweet guys who just didn't do it for him. He always talked to them for too long, to compensate for the fact that he wasn't into them. Then they ended up wondering why he wouldn't get with them. He knew the score, yet he didn't learn.

Eventually, John-Michael had sneaked out on a trip to the bathroom and snuggled down alongside a couple of stoners who'd fallen asleep on Lucy's bed. He'd heard his stalker opening the door to the bedroom and whisper his name very softly, breathily,
John-Mi-hi-chael
, like that.

And John-Michael had held his breath.

He cracked open an eye and looked at Grace. She shifted slowly, waking up. He didn't budge, playing dead. He heard Grace mutter, “Already?”

Candace took her earrings out and whispered back, “Weekend shoots, baby. The perks of being a schoolgirl TV star.” She disappeared through the bedroom door into the adjoining bathroom. He heard her turn on the shower.

The instant Candace was gone, Grace moved, not slowly and sleepily as she'd been doing up until that moment, but swiftly, with purpose. She slid across the double bed, neatly avoiding the need to land on the floor and disturb John-Michael. Within a second she was sitting at Lucy's desk. He peeked upward but the angle was all wrong—he couldn't see what Grace was doing, only that she was using Lucy's laptop. Whatever she was doing, it went on for a few minutes. Click, tap, click.

John-Michael closed his eyes until only a narrow slit remained. An electric sense told him that Grace didn't want to be observed. He was about to say something when Candace stepped back into the bedroom. Seeing her, Grace froze for a second. John-Michael took the opportunity to stir noisily. He
opened his eyes in time to see how hastily Grace clutched at two sheets of notepaper that were beside Lucy's open laptop.

Candace stared. “What the—? Are you looking through Lucy's letters?”

John-Michael sat up, pretending to be sleep-slow.

“What? Don't be an idiot,” Grace hissed. But her right hand continued to guard the notepaper.

Candace took one last look. Then, resolutely, she strode over to the desk. She glanced at the handwritten scrawl that covered much of the top sheet of paper. There was an awkward pause. “Oh,” she said flatly. “Right. I'm sorry.”

Grace snatched back the notepaper.

“Anyway,” Candace said in a more friendly tone. “Why are you writing to those prison losers in my room?”

John-Michael caught his breath. The sound of his slight gasp turned both girls' heads.

“‘Prison losers'?” He looked from Candace to Grace.

Grace frowned. “It's kind of a private conversation.”

“But it sounds so interesting.”

“Where did you come from anyway?” Candace asked. “Don't you have your own room?”

“I was hiding from someone.”

“Oh, that blond dancer I saw you with? Aww.” Candace pouted. “I had such hopes for the two of you.” She turned to Grace. “You shouldn't snoop on people.”

Irritated, Grace replied, “I was just using Lucy's computer to look up something, not that it's any of your business.”

Candace hesitated. “Is one of your guys up again for—you know?”

Grace shook her head. John-Michael stared in silent appreciation at the cold fury that blazed in her eyes. “No. Just that I'm awake now, I could write a letter before school. If you had the first clue what it means to him—what it means to
any
of these guys to get a letter from someone who actually gives a damn—ou'd understand why I do it.”

Candace gave her a long, hard look. “Grace. Tell me the truth. Do you have the hots for one of your death row guys?”

John-Michael's mouth fell open. “Did you say ‘death row'?”

Grace ignored him completely, screwed up her face in disgust. “God, is that what you think? That's messed up and you know it.”

“You wouldn't be the first girl to fall for one of them. They're lonely, misunderstood, and doomed. I'm just looking out for you. I don't want to see you get hurt. It's not worth it, just for a hobby.”

John-Michael blinked. “Could we get a time-out and you tell me what the hell you're talking about?”

“If it had anything to do with you, I might,” Grace said, flashing him an angry glare. Then she addressed Candace. “This isn't a
hobby
!”

“Okay,
college application
material, whatever.”

Grace stared at Candace with an expression of sheer disbelief. After a moment she rose to her feet, shaking her head. “Think what you like. I'm outta here.”

Candace watched her leave. “Hey, aren't you going to tell me to break a leg?”

“Yeah. Why don't you break
two
?”

With a final, furious glare, Grace left the room.

Candace put the palm of her hand to her chest.

John-Michael stared. “No way!”

“Such a dweeb. But I feel . . . amazing!”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Put your hand here.” Candace lifted John-Michael's right hand and placed his fingers close to her heart. “Feel that!” She sounded delighted. “Grace did that.”

He pulled his hand away. “What do you mean?”

“The way she looked at me. Did you see?”

“Not really. I was pretty caught up in the whole ‘prison losers' and ‘death row' thing. Candace, is Grace writing to guys on death row?”

“You shoulda seen it. Like real, passionate rage!”

“She was kinda bummed out,” he agreed.

“I gotta remember this feeling.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause this is exactly how I need to be in a scene I'm doing today.”

“Angry?”

“No—shaken. I need to be all rapid heartbeat and breathless.”

“Oh, that. Well, yeah. Get someone to yell at you first.”

Candace wasn't listening to him, though. She'd begun to focus on Lucy's laptop, which Grace had left open on the desk. He watched as she perched on the chair and clicked through the open windows on Lucy's desktop.

“Hey . . .”

“What?”

“Isn't this kinda what you told Grace not to do?”

“I didn't touch anything.”

“Well, yeah, you did.”

“I didn't touch anything that wasn't already open.”

“Kind of nosy,” he commented. But Candace was already lost in what she'd found on the screen. Reluctantly, John-Michael looked, too.

There were two open windows—Lucy's internet accounts, a Word document in which Lucy had been writing a term paper on Voltaire's
Candide
, and a second browser open to a YouTube channel belonging to LucyLong. Only one video had been uploaded. In the frame-captured still, Lucy was caught in a rather sweet grin, sitting on her bed holding an acoustic guitar. A rare moment of vulnerability for a girl who was mostly pretty chill. The song was a cover of one of Green Day's.

“Lucy's YouTube. Big deal—we've all seen it. Are you going to tell me about Grace and her prison losers?”

“Huh. Insensitive,” Candace murmured.

He gasped. “They're your words!”

“It's different. I'm her stepsister. I've seen what this has been doing to her.”

“Writing the letters?”

“She gets upset sometimes,” Candace pointed out. “I've seen her cry.”

“Sure, it's got to be upsetting. But also, a pretty cool thing to do. Good for Grace.”

“I guess.” Candace seemed distracted again.

“Shouldn't you be heading to the TV studio?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What's your problem? Are you seriously worried that Grace is spying on Lucy?”

“I guess not.”

“Then what?”

John-Michael leaned back as Candace stepped over him on her way back to the bathroom.

“I like to look out for my sis,” she said, speaking loud enough for him to hear her in the bathroom. “She doesn't tell me much about the guys she writes to. Sometimes I think she's going to leave clues on the computer. Browsing history, what she might have searched for. That kind of thing.”

John-Michael rose to his feet, dropping the fleece blanket he'd had wrapped around himself. He glanced at the couple in the bed. Incredibly, they were still sound asleep.

“These two would sleep through the sinking of a ship,” he said. Then louder he added, “You never found anything about who she's writing to?”

“No. She once said that she wouldn't search for them because the more searches, you know, the more their names would get a high ranking for stories about them in the papers. And that's not good. It could influence appeals, give the impression that there was ‘negative public interest.'”

“Oh. Good point. So you don't know what they did?”

“They're on death row, so I'm gonna take a wild guess that it's murder.”

John-Michael didn't say any more. Even hearing the word “murder” made him feel faintly queasy. It was odd, how he was reacting. Not what he'd expected—not by now.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

SECOND FLOOR, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28

He'd woken up when he heard the creak of the spiral staircase as Candace made her way out for her audition. But then he dozed for another hour. By then it was too bright to sleep. Blearily, he checked his watch. Eight o'clock and his room was already hazy with morning.