Reckless Hearts (16 page)

The Roderick School's
campus sprawled across fifty acres of wooded hills on the outskirts of Atlanta. Its brick colonial buildings, which reminded the students of the long tradition they were a part of and, theoretically, inspired a sense of pride and respect in them, were clustered around one corner of the estate. The rest of the land was there for strolling, daydreaming, pickup games of soccer and lacrosse, and, if you were Nathaniel, who knew every inch of the place, hiding out among the oaks and smoking cigarettes.

His favorite spot for this was a shady patch of dirt encircled by trees out past the track field. He and his friends had been coming here since freshman year.
They'd carted logs in to use as makeshift chairs. They'd found a squirrel hole in one of the gnarled old oaks in which to hide their cigarettes and their stashes of drugs.

And just because Nathaniel had been caught flouting the rules once—well, he'd been caught many more times than once, but he'd been suspended once—didn't mean he had any intention of giving up his vices.

As he explained to his friend and sometimes client in the Adderall trade, Alex, a stocky guy with dark preppy hair and permanently blushing cheeks, “What's the point of living if you aren't having fun while you do it?”

It the last day before the new semester would start, and they'd snuck out here to avoid the tedium of Sunday-morning chapel. They were sitting next to each other on one of the logs and as he spoke, Nathaniel poked idly at the dirt with a stick he'd picked up somewhere.

“I don't know, man,” Alex said. He had a weird way of holding his cigarette like a joint when he smoked, which made him look like a con man, always afraid the cops were around the corner. “I'd be worried that now that you've been kicked out once, they'll do something even worse next time they catch you.”

“Like what? Call the cops? They can't call the cops. They're too afraid of the bad publicity that would create. Anyway, Cameron gave them enough money to build a new campus on Mars if they wanted.”

“What about college? They could screw you there.”

“Not likely,” Nathaniel said, laughing scornfully. “I'm a Stanford legacy. There's a dorm there named after Cameron.” He pulled his flask out of the back pocket of his jeans and took a long pull. “Want some? It's Grey Goose.”

“It's ten in the morning,” said Alex skeptically.

Nathaniel shrugged and threw back another slug of vodka. He drew a face in the dirt and added shaggy hair to it so it would look vaguely like Jake.

Alex shook his head in wonder. “Must be nice,” he said. “I'd lose my scholarship in a second if I got caught doing half the shit you get away with.”

“Yeah, well, you know,” Nathaniel said. He lit another cigarette and took a long satisfying drag. “It's not all fun and games. Cameron's planning to torpedo my trust fund.”

“You're kidding.”

“Totally not kidding. His new wife's got this son who's, like . . . I guess Cameron pities the guy or something. Kid can do no wrong.”

“Dude,” said Alex. “What are you going to do?”

Nathaniel idly jabbed the sharp end of his stick at the face he'd drawn in the dirt, poking its eyes out, slashing at its mouth. Then he smiled a malevolent smile.

“I've already done it. Bro's in love with some chicky. A totally naïve, anime geek girl. I fucked her last week. Or let me rephrase that. A friend of mine, ‘Harlow'”—he
made air quotes with his fingers as he said the name—“fucked her. I catfished her. Man, you should have seen her. I'm telling you, it felt so good to take her away from him. The power of the penis, brother. She was putty in my hands.”

Alex chuckled cynically. “And?” he said.

“And Harlow's a real bad dude and since she's a naïve little geeky chicky, she's fallen totally in love with him. He's in serious trouble and she'll do anything to help him. She's going to annihilate the threat for me.”

“How?”

Nathaniel locked eyes with Alex.

“If I told you that I'd have to kill you.” For a second he held a dead-serious poker face, but then his expression cracked and the self-satisfied smirk that Jake had come to loathe so much spread across his face. “Let's just say he's allergic to bees.”

As Jake drove
his shiny new black Mini to school on Monday morning, he marveled again at the Mini's responsiveness. It seemed to know what he was going to do before he did. Tapping the brake at every stoplight, turning the wheel at every corner, he remembered how much effort the same action would have taken with the Rumbler.

He felt guilty liking the car so much, like he was betraying his father somehow, though he knew that was silly. When he'd mentioned his reservations about the Mini to his dad on the phone last night, the old man had laughed and said, “Jake, that old Jeep was a piece of
shit two years ago when I gave it to you. By now you must have to stick your feet through the rust holes beneath the driver's seat and drive it
Flintstones
style. It's sweet that you're so worried about my feelings, but take the gift. I would.”

It was like Jake had been released. Now that he had his dad's permission to like the Mini, all his sentimentality and weird fears that the Rumbler would feel bad if he abandoned it disappeared just like that.

Jake wasn't the kind of guy who generally drove around town with the stereo turned up so loud that the car shook with sound, but as he navigated the twists and turns of Shore Drive, with the beach on one side and the boutiques on the other, he couldn't help testing what his speakers could do. It was such a novelty—listening to his own music, streaming from his own phone via Bluetooth. Yes, he was listening to the Monsters of Folk rather than the salsa, or hip-hop, or classic rock that usually blared from decked-out speakers, but it still felt good to sing along and tap the beat on the slippery molded steering wheel.

He turned up Pelican and rolled along past the evenly spaced palm trees in the median.

He kept noticing more aspects of the experience.

For example, the soft leather driver's seat was so cozy. He'd worried that, given how the Mini was so small and
he was so tall, he'd have to fold himself like a fan to fit inside, but it turned out there was a lot more space than there appeared to be.

Or the old-school feel of the small, boxy mirrors.

And that smell. There was nothing quite like that new-car smell.

When his phone dinged with a new text message, the sound carried through the car stereo, such an upgrade over the old tape deck system of the Rumbler. He wondered if it was Elena, checking in like she used to do in the morning, wondered if they'd left the discord of Christmas break far enough behind to resume their old rituals.

Jake was a conscientious driver. Much as he might want to, he resisted checking to see who the text was from. There'd be time for that later, when he got to school. Right now he was too busy savoring how cool he felt driving a Mini Cooper around town, heading to school from the north, where the rich kids lived, rather than from the southwest, where people like him came from.

He could see Chris Columbus up ahead, the faded tan and blue buildings lined up like shoe boxes. The quads crawling with students searching for their friends. The hill and the glimmering theater complex sitting atop it like some sort of temple.

He turned onto the unnamed access road that
separated the parking lot from the school's campus, slowing to make way for the students traipsing across it. He peered through the throngs, hoping to see Elena somewhere, but all he saw were people he didn't know. As he waited for an opening in which he could turn into the lot, he couldn't help imagining them gawking at him sitting in his Mini. He felt conspicuous, notable, important in some new mysterious way.

He crawled through the parking lot looking for a space and finally found one way near the back in the northeast corner. And turning off the engine, he finally checked his text messages.

Sadly, no word from Elena, but second best, it was Arnold. Finally.

Jake did a quick survey of the Mini to see if it had accumulated any dirt in the fifteen minutes it had been on the road. A new car was like a new pair of sneakers—you dread the moment that it gets its first scratch. It looked good, though. Still pristine for now.

Then, hoofing it through the lot, Jake tapped through to see what Arnold had to say.

“I HAVE THE DROIDS YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.”

Oh, Arnold
, Jake thought,
if only we could all be as awkward as you
. He'd thought a lot about the plan he'd hatched with Arnold in the two days since he and Elena had met at the pier. Part of him had felt he should call Arnold off. Now that he and Elena had made up, he
didn't want to do anything that might push her away again. But if his suspicions were true and Harlow was really Nathaniel—God. He had to find out for his own sake as much as Elena's.

He wrote Arnold back.
“GREAT! MEET FOR LUNCH?”

“YES,”
Arnold responded. Then he added,
“YOU WILL BE PLEASED.”

Jake smiled. It took everything in his power to resist texting Elena right that second to tell her the bad-good news. But no. That would be jumping the gun. And it would upset her. He didn't want her to think he was back to obsessively prodding her about Harlow.

He put his phone away. He felt unstoppable. Like he was, at least momentarily, king of the world.

All morning, Elena
had tingled with anticipation, feeling weirdly jittery, as though she were the one in extreme danger.

She'd been extra-conscious of the larger, tougher Cuban dudes wandering around campus, sizing up each one and wondering if he might be the guy Harlow was worried about. It could be anyone. Maybe some little weasely guy like Matty. And the most unnerving thing was that everyone looked so normal. Nobody was wearing a sign above his head saying,
This one, he's a foot soldier for the Cuban mob
. And yet, every guy she walked past felt like a threat.

To calm her nerves, she tried to put a positive spin on
her fear. It might be a good omen. It meant that maybe nobody could tell what she was planning, either.

When the time came for her to cross the quad toward the parking lot during second period—her free period—Elena reminded herself to look normal.

Be casual
, she told herself.
Don't do anything to draw attention to yourself. All that spy stuff, that ducking and weaving and hiding behind bushes, will just make people wonder what you're doing. Act like you've forgotten something in your car. Don't be self-conscious. Walk tall. Take your time.

She couldn't help thinking that everyone was watching her, though. She had to hold her messenger bag in front of her, hugging it tight so that the jar in which she'd captured the ten bees wouldn't jostle too much. Talk about conspicuous.

Paying special attention to the balls of her feet, the way they hit the ground and rolled with each step she took, she regulated her gait and carved an even, straight path through the grass of the quad and across the road into the parking lot. As far as she could tell, nobody had noticed her so far, but knowing this did nothing to lessen her creeping paranoia.

There must have been four hundred cars in the lot. Standing on her tiptoes, Elena tried to survey the field, but she wasn't anywhere near tall enough to see over the
SUVs. She'd have to walk the aisles and hope that she got lucky.

She turned down one aisle, then another, and another and another and another, noting and crossing each car off.

No one was around but her, thank God, but time seemed to be moving very slowly, like each ticking second might expose her.

Another aisle and another. She began to wonder if the guy had skipped school today.

Then, finally, she saw it. A black Mini Cooper tucked away in the far northeast corner of the lot.

Her heart felt like it was trying to punch its way out of her chest. She sped her pace. She couldn't help it.

When she reached the Mini, she crouched next to the passenger-side door so that she was out of sight from the school. She flipped open the flap of her messenger bag. She put on the cracked old work gloves she'd stolen from her dad's toolbox.

Trying the door, she found that it was unlocked. Good old Chris Columbus. No one ever locked their doors.

Very carefully, she lifted the jar of bees out of the bag and placed it on the passenger's seat. Then, rooting around, she found the piece of cardboard she'd brought with her.

Tipping the jar lid down, she watched the bees react to having been jostled. They rose toward the top, like she'd thought they would. They flew repeatedly into the glass, bumping their heads against it like they thought they could break free. She unscrewed the lid and tilted it open slightly, just wide enough to slip the cardboard in, and then she edged the lid away until the only thing keeping the bees captive was her hand clamping the cardboard to the opening.

Then she set the jar open side down on the floor in front of the passenger-side seat and slid the cardboard away.

She shut the door gently and race-walked quickly back toward school.

By the time she got back to the quad, the tension that had been humming through her body was replaced by a rush of self-loathing.

What would happen next unfurled in front of her like a sick film. When the guy who owned the car drove it away, he'd take a hard turn and topple the jar. The bees would escape. They'd be angry. They'd buzz around the car. Even if the guy realized what was going on, even if he immediately rolled down the window, there was no way he'd be able to get them all out. They'd sting him. At least one of them would sting him. And then . . . best not to think about what would happen then.

What if this guy, whoever he was, had a bee allergy?
She'd seen how Jake seized up when a bee hovered near him. He'd told her that one sting might kill him. No matter how much she wanted to help Harlow send these guys a message, she didn't want to kill anyone.

But maybe she already had.