Perfect Lies (14 page)

“Yes.”

“I’m worried about her.”

“She should be here with us. I don’t like it.”

“I wish I could see something that would help us, help her.” I scowl, kicking my toes against the floor in frustration. “Maybe if I took a lower dosage.”

“That’s a stupid idea.”

“Don’t call me stupid!”

“I didn’t call you stupid, I called the idea stupid. Quit trying to mess up your brain. If you really want to see more, you should take better care of it, not worse.”

“What would you know about it?”

“Apparently more than you or Sarah!” He paces back and forth in front of me, footsteps louder than normal. “This is all pointless.”

“Look, obviously you’re miserable, so why don’t you leave? Find something more important to do than babysitting stupid, pathetic me!”

He stops. “Annie, that’s not—”

“Don’t pretend like that’s not how you feel. I’ve heard you say as much. You wanted me gone from the beginning. That’s fine. Whatever. Go with Sarah and Rafael and then you won’t have to deal with me and my stupid ideas.”

He puts a hand on my arm but I jerk it away, then leave the room. I lock my bedroom door behind me, so frustrated I don’t know what to do with myself. Sarah hates me. Cole hates me. Rafael obviously likes me but I can’t be with him, and I don’t know if I’d want to even if I could. Not if it meant we’d be more than flirty colleagues.

An hour later there’s a timid knock.

“What?”

“Can we come in?” Adam asks.

I unlock the door, but stand in the doorway with my arms crossed. “Well?”

“We have presents,” Adam says with a smile in his voice.

“Tea isn’t a present.” Though it does smell nice.

“Not just tea. We also have a yoga mat, and ginkgo biloba, and a CD called
Soothing White Noise
.”

“That was his idea,” Cole says. “And you’re going for long walks. And getting to bed at a decent hour.”

“Look, when I said you were babysitting me, I didn’t mean you should actually start. You know my parents are dead, right? Even when they were alive, they paid really crap rates for babysitters.”

“You want more visions?” Cole asks. “We’re going to help your brain, not damage it. Now drink your tea and put on your shoes. Three miles walking a day, minimum.”

I take the tea and sip at it, mumbling, “Taking drugs was a lot simpler.”

Only Adam laughs.

“You’re breathing wrong,” Adam says.

“Seriously? You’re critiquing my breathing?”

“No! I mean, the lady on the video, she’s doing it with her stomach, not her shoulders.”

I roll my eyes, but try to do what he says. The last few days have yielded no visions, but I’ll admit I have more energy. Cole’s been avoiding me, sending Adam on all the walks. Adam tries to talk about Fia. It’s not as “centering” as I think Cole thinks it ought to be.

I take a deep breath, then let it out, trying to clear my mind, to let all the stress and worry drain out of the hollow spaces between my bones. Fill the space with nothing, instead.

And then there’s a girl.

She’s tall and thin, baggy clothes covering every inch of skin, the hood of her gray sweatshirt pulled up over her head, with a few strands of brown hair escaping. She leans against a wall, eyes down, hands shoved in her pockets, as people—teenagers? in school? they have backpacks, but unlike her they’re all in shorts and short sleeves—swirl around her. A broadcast crackles through the hall. “Good morning, Hoover High Terriers! Don’t forget to buy your raffle tickets. Last day!”

As the crowd thins, a hand comes down on her shoulder and she jerks away as though burned. “Get to class, Sadie,” a woman says, not unkindly.

“Yeah,” the girl, Sadie, mutters. She walks away, shoulders hunched, and then—

A tired woman, frayed around the edges, looks over a stack of papers. “It’s been hard,” she says. “What with the criminal case against my husband—” She looks up, alarmed. “He’s innocent. We have no idea how he got implicated in this embezzlement scheme.”

James nods, all false sympathy.

“The lawyer fees are bleeding us dry. They’ve foreclosed on the house. When the school offered before, we thought it was best to keep her close to us. We tried to help her. I thought we could handle it, but she’s failing out. I don’t know what else to do. With everything going on, I can’t—we can’t—”

The front door opens and Sadie walks in, a heavy backpack dragging her shoulders down. She takes in the strangers with hooded eyes, then walks along the wall straight past everyone and out of the room.

Her mother’s shoulders shake and an arm comes around them. Eden offers her a tissue, her own eyes tearing up. She looks up at James and glares accusingly. He doesn’t react. Seeing her there breaks my heart a little. Because she doesn’t know—she can’t know that I’m alive. She has to think they let Fia kill me.

And she’s still helping them. Oh, Eden.

James continues. “This is the best thing for her, Mrs. Kavadellis. We have the resources to help her. Sadie is going to have a new life.”

The woman nods, wiping under her eyes.

There’s a knock at the door and the woman calls, “Come in.”

Fia walks in, dressed in the school uniform, looking young and sweet except for the tension in her eyes.

“Oh, here’s Sofia.” James smiles paternally at her. “She’s the girl I was telling you about. She was in Des Moines visiting relatives and so we thought she could stop by, talk with Sadie, answer any questions she has. It’ll be easier if Sadie has a familiar face at the school.”

“Sadie, can you come in here?”

Hands pulled into her sleeves, Sadie slouches in, immediately curling into a ball in the corner of the couch. Her mom signs the papers. James and Eden watch. Fia leans against the wall, staring out the window, then turns. Horror flashes across my sister’s face. Eden looks up sharply, but Fia smiles brightly, falsely, at the girl. She taps on her leg, tap tap taps, but no one notices. “You’re going to love the school,” Fia says.

Then the darkness is back. “… asleep?”

I shudder, the pain dull and familiar behind my eyes. “Get Cole. I need to go to Iowa. Right now.”

W
E SIT ON THE CURB A FEW LOTS DOWN FROM THE
house where Sadie is staying. Pixie stretches her skinny legs out into the street. Good thing she’s so short she’s safe from having them run over.

She kicks at my boot. “Are the short jokes funny in your head? Because they aren’t funny in mine.”

“Shut it, Shortie.” I dial James and wait for him to pick up. I am spinning out of control, I know I am, everything is spinning out of control and I don’t know if I can do enough to hold on to everything, to twist everything in the way I do, but I have to try I will try.

I thought New York would change things, make me even more focused, put me directly in line with our goals. But I feel further away than ever from my flames, my beautiful flames.

I’m cold.

“Fia,” James says, and I love the way he always answers the phone with my name: a statement, not a question.

“So, here’s the thing about Sadie.”

“Sadie?”

I slap my forehead, swear. “Did your father not tell you? I’m in Florida with the brain leech. We found Sadie.”

“He didn’t tell me.” There’s a pause, and I can feel his worry seeping across the miles and miles and miles of empty air between us. “But I haven’t talked to him yet today. I’m sure he would have mentioned it.”

“Mmm.” I lie back, the concrete of the sidewalk hard and baking hot through my T-shirt, but it’s not hot enough. I squeeze my eyes shut against the sun, let it burn my eyes through my eyelids. I once stared at the sun as long as I could, trying to go blind like Annie. Maybe if it had worked, we would still be together, be safe, be worthless to evil men and therefore free to just be.

James prods me. “Are you still there?”

“There’s something wrong. Sadie’s only a Seer, but …” But why is she special? Why was she so important? Seers aren’t super useful in general. There’s no reason she should keep popping up on the radar like this.

“Is … anyone else with her?”

He doesn’t say the name. He doesn’t know that Pixie knows that Annie isn’t dead. The tightrope I walk keeps stretching, with no end in view. Farther and farther from my goal.

“No. I’d know if she were here again.” I would. I would know that, I’d have to.

I tap tap tap tap. Tap tap tap tap. Tap tap tap tap. What is so important about Sadie? There is something I’m not realizing, some huge piece I’m failing to put together, and that failure scares me. I can’t fail. Sadie shouldn’t be dangerous, shouldn’t set off my warning bells. I bring all sorts of girls in. Sure, she has a history of triggering bloodshed (four, four taps, I hate them), but she’s just a Seer. Seers are lame. They can’t control what they see or when they see it.

“
Oh
.” It’s an exhalation, a curse and a prayer and a eulogy. Because I understand now. What she is. What she means. Seers can’t see me, none except Annie. I’m too slippery, I slide right out of their visions.

Sadie looked at Pixie’s hand and thought she didn’t want to see that future. She knew she would. There was no question.

“She touches you,” I whisper, “and she sees. That’s all she needs. She touches you. She touches
anyone
. She can control what she sees.”

“What is—” He stops and I know he’s made the same connection, the connection I can’t think about with Pixie next to me, the great new kink to all our not planning. Because if someone could force a vision, if someone could grab hold of your future and force it into her brain with a simple brush of her finger across your skin, nothing would be secret.

Nothing would be safe.

Nothing.

I can already feel all my secrets, the secrets from James, the secrets from his father, the secrets from everyone, spilling out in a torrent, gushing past my skin and into someone else, and I wouldn’t be able to stop them. There would be no dam for the flood, no way around it, no place to hide.

Sadie is my death warrant. James’s, too.

“Is Mae with you?” James asks.

“Yes.”

“Get away from her. Now.”

I stand. Pixie looks up, but I jab a finger at her and think
STAY
as hard as I can, then run the opposite direction. I don’t know what her range is, so I give us a couple of blocks.

“Okay,” I say. “I can think now.”

“My father can’t get Sadie.”

“I agree.”

“No, I mean, my father
cannot
get her. Absolutely cannot. Under no circumstances. She would destroy everything, Fia. We’d be ruined.”

I walk in tight circles, needing to move, needing to run, needing needing but never getting. “I know.
I know
.”

“What are we going to do?”

“It’ll be fine. I’ll tell him Sadie is a dead end, a Seer of so little talent she isn’t worth the hassle of taking. I’ll tell him Lerner already ditched her.”

“Mae knows what she can do.”

I kick a mailbox post, one two three four times. “I’ll talk to her. She’ll do what I ask.”

“She isn’t on our side.”

“She’s on
my
side. She’s my friend.”

“Fia, her job is to monitor you!”

“What? No.
My
job is to monitor
her
!”

His voice goes soft, gentle. “She’s doing exactly what my father wanted me to do. He keeps me busy and away from you, while she takes all your free time, goes out with you, listens to you. She got past your defenses. She’s working for him. He never doubted her. He doubted you.”

No. No no no no. I couldn’t be this wrong, not about someone. If I am this wrong about Pixie, what about James? “You did the same thing, you did everything he asked you to. Are you telling me you didn’t really like me? Don’t really love me?”

“Of course I love you!”

“Then why couldn’t she? Why is it so impossible that she’d be loyal to me, really be my friend?” I hang my head, ashamed of the hot tears sliding down my cheeks. She’s my friend. She is. I know she is. I would know if she weren’t. Wouldn’t I?

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“It is. And you’re right. No one who could hear my thoughts would want to be around me. Not even you.” She must hate me, she has to hate me. She’s one of them.

“Shh. Stop. I know you, Fia, and I love you.” His voice is fierce, and fierce James is my biggest comfort. “All I’m saying is, you have to be sure she won’t tell. Are you sure?”

I wipe my face, miserable and alone. So very alone. All I have is James. He’s the only one I can trust. “What did you find in North Dakota?” I ask, stalling.

His voice is dark and strained. “Another complication. I’ll tell you later when you’re free to think. You decide what to do about the Sadie situation. Fast. And then call me. Do not talk to my father or anyone from Keane until you’ve called me.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t kill Mae yet,” he says casually, like it’s an afterthought. “We can only get away with that so many times.”

“I—” The line is dead. I turn back toward where I left Pixie, the “yet” echoing in my skull.

I am not lost, I never get lost, my sense of direction is perfect, but oh, I am so very very lost. I drift back toward the sidewalk where I left Pixie. She’s sitting, legs tucked under her chin. She doesn’t look up as I sit next to her.